The low key videoconferenced NFL draft last week had Dad thinking of his own humble origins for the Philadelphia 76ers. It’s what these times are doing to us…bringing us to our knees. And as we bow to the crown that now rules over all of us, we are given pause to re-imagine what it means to live simply.

The NFL draft led Dad to watch a rerun of the ESPN documentary: “The Book of Manning”. Archie Manning’s draft-day in 1971 for professional football looked a lot like Dad’s NBA draft day at the end of his senior year in college in 1966. Dad didn’t even know they were holding the draft or that the 76ers were even interested in him until he got a call on the house phone from a Philadelphia newspaper reporter congratulating him that he was drafted by the 76ers.

Meanwhile, the girls, Alex, and I eagerly awaited the next American Idol. We confess we’d been watching the 2020 season from the beginning.

We had gone to a family wedding at the end of February and I had a conversation about it with a family member who’s in the music business. “I know. I know. We had written it off, too, but there’s a lot of talent this season”, I said, “Just watch it. It’s not what it used to be.”

This season truly has lived up to that hype. They started filming at a time when we would have laughed in someone’s face if they told us we’d have to wear masks and mind social distancing etiquette, we had busy lives, after all. But then as society morphed, we crossed into new territory where we were trying to re-envision the past to fit it into the future we couldn’t see. Who knew American Idol would be the forerunners in all of this and that they’d figure out a way for the performers to sing from a make-shift stage in their homes? Ironically, it was the very place those artists started dreaming about the journey, they hoped so desperately to be more than the kid performing from their garage, only as the corona would have it, they are right back where they started.

Turns out the show has undergone the same humbling experience that we all have been going through. When you strip those performers (or those NFL draft picks) of everything but their homes, the edginess of practicing, having talent, playing for an audience, and putting on a good impression has made way for something far more genuine: now more than ever performers need just sing from their hearts. This is true love.

I used to put on shows for the love of it back in my home with my dear friend, Laura. Grandpa Childress kept the program that we had made along with a letter explaining the dance show (unfortunately there was singing, too) that we had when I was 10 years old with “popular and not-so-popular dances” (trust me, they were all not popular). We let my sister and our other neighbor friend have cameo appearances in this show and that excited them as we mostly just blew them off. We had an audience of about 8 or 9 women who we persuaded to come after their luncheon that they were having next door. Luckily, Grandpa saved it all just so I could embarrass myself today.

Would I get the eye-rolls from the kids if they had a look at this? There was no YouTube video or examples of other kids who did it better. As you can see, when we were kids, a do-it-from-home project was synonymous with horrible.

Just as I did what I loved as a child, Dad talks about the love he had for basketball. They didn’t play for fame or money, they had to have summer jobs, it was genuine love.

Whittling life back down to its essence, we return it to its simplicity. We know it now because it’s been thrust upon us. We’re getting to know our neighbors on our walks, kids are playing outside again, we’re playing board games with our teenagers who once wouldn’t even talk to us, reconnecting with long lost friends, and finding ways to help our community and thank our frontline workers.

But even as I write this, people are yearning to get a faster pace back. Cell phone tracking has shown that people are moving around more now. Everyone’s tired of being contained. That’s what it felt like in my childhood waiting for the mailman to come every day, except Sunday, and what a slow day that was.

I look at my in-laws living in Bolivia and their lockdown means that they are not allowed to leave their apartment until…now it’s May 10th, I think, but it doesn’t matter because that date keeps getting extended. Their health care system is incapable of handling any Covid-19 patients so the government has taken extreme measures to contain the virus.

Their refrigerator broke in the beginning of it all, not that it was very big, to begin with, and not like they had a way to stockpile anything even if they were so inclined because they buy food on a day-to-day basis. All we can do is rely on the woman who works for them. Only, she’s allowed to leave one time per week for a few hours. She typically lives with her family three hours away but now must live with my inlaws during the week so she can shop, prepare the meals, and support them. They had to provide her with a letter asking for her to be able to break the curfew hours so she could take the three-hour walk home and back to work two days later.

They are living simplistically, trying to follow the rules as best as they can, knowing they must break those rules to ensure their own survival.

These are real problems, but here we are living in the United States where we believe freedom must mean we can break whatever rules that don’t serve us. We’re going stir crazy after all.

Back in the day people weren’t commanding us to live simply (and there weren’t consequences to simplicity the way there is today). That’s what life was.

So maybe you could say we were humbled when the internet came around and we had to pay for one hour of use and if you misspelled something or didn’t use the ideal search words, you would get back “no search results”. You couldn’t get too many of those because your hour would be up and you wouldn’t have gotten what you had come there to do.

Our kids didn’t grow up with those fears. For the younger generations, there are no barriers when it comes to technology. It’s at their fingertips. For us, we had a before technology and an after, for them they have only had the after.

Our kids couldn’t understand why we were so far behind. Now I get it. All along, we’ve been shedding our old skin and still trying to grow new skin with the world whirling around us.

We were living at such a high pace that we couldn’t unwind.

Collectively, we are shedding old skin, we know that we are in the midst of a colossal change like continents shifting. This isn’t really about the coronavirus anymore. This isn’t really about whether we have to break the rules or don’t really need to break them. We are now bowing to that which is greater than any of us.

Whether we embraced technology or didn’t know the world without it, we are all chartering this new world together, just like Christopher Columbus. We are setting sail to discover the world within us. We have no idea what’s there. It can be scary. We can feel alone.

But we do know what was on the other side of the world before any of this started. Before technology, it was simplicity. Almost to the point of stupidity. I remember freezing every morning in the winter as a kid, waiting for the heat to kick in after it had been set so low during the night. I couldn’t figure out with all the inventions of the world why someone couldn’t just set the heater to go off like an alarm clock. But it was just a kid’s wishful thinking. If someone had known how to do that then they would have already done it.

Now I get why Dad never wanted to compare basketball in the day to today. It’s just like you can’t compare your children. But if ever we were to compare the sport, now would be the time to do it. We’ve all been humbled with a little simplicity.

So that brings us to Dad and how happy he was to hear a story like his contemporary, Archie Manning. Football, basketball, what did the sport matter? Now we understand the value of reconnecting to the good old days when no one even knew when the draft was. Sports players were grateful for the opportunity to play the sport they loved for a few more years.

I love this newspaper clipping on Archie Manning. It just sums up everything we’ve been talking about so succinctly.

Archie Manning wrote a book with his son Peyton Manning called, “Manning: A Father, His Sons and a Football Legend” He said, “In those days the draft wasn’t a televised event, and was much more low-key…For me, it was a short wait by a telephone in the SID’s desk in Oxford.”

Like Archie, Dad was in college while the draft occurred without him at the Plaza Hotel in NYC. The Philadelphia Daily News, May 7, 1966, clearly thought the setting was over the top. It was described as “a longshoreman shopping for shoes in Saks Fifth Avenue”. But the NY Knickerbockers wanted to lure Bill Bradley (the Oxford bound scholar who wouldn’t play for two years) to their team as their territorial pick.

What the heck is a territorial pick? It was when a team forfeited their first-round pick for a player from a nearby college. Dad explained that if Princeton had been closer to Philadelphia, the 76ers would have taken Bill Bradley instead of Dad. They were all about pleasing the fans who liked the players that were close to home.

Dad got a call on the house phone one college day towards the end of his senior year which so happened to be a Thursday, May 5th, and it was a reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer saying, “Congratulations, you just got drafted for the 76ers.” He hadn’t heard anything from the 76ers, they had never even seen him play.

There were only nine basketball leagues at the time and the 76ers didn’t even have a scout let alone an assistant coach. They had a trainer, but trainers didn’t travel with the team, so for a home game, the trainer was responsible for the home and away teams. So in this environment, it wasn’t surprising that the 76ers had never met Dad.

To pick Dad, the 76ers coach called up Coach Frank McGuire (remember he had recruited Dad to come to UNC-Chapel Hill and then left?). So they asked Frank McGuire who they should draft? And he spoke, “Bill Cunningham.”

It was as simple as that, word of mouth. McGuire’s recommendation mattered more than the territorial pick, which was so popular at the time.

Or at least that is how it was reported in the May 6, 1966 edition of The Philadelphia Inquirer. The 76ers “overlooked Villanova’s Jim Washington, winner of the Big Five outstanding player award, and made Billy Cunningham, North Carolina, their first choice.”

So that Thursday, Dad got the word that he’d been drafted. His picture wasn’t even in the Philadelphia newspapers.

Archie Manning at least got a picture. He wrote in his book, “After the phone call from the Saints, an AP photographer took a picture and I gathered up my books and went to class.” It really wasn’t a big deal for Dad, either, all they really wanted was to be given the opportunity to do what they loved.

And speaking of love, my inlaws celebrated their anniversary this week. Mamita is from Poland and Papito is from Bolivia and they met in France, where they married and had their firstborn son. Then they took sail to Bolivia. A bit like Christopher Columbus…Proving once again that the world is anything but flat.

Our neighborhood walks aren’t flat either. Now I can hear the distant drone of the cars again. For that brief window, I heard birds and silence. It was powerful to hear silence again, in those moments, it’s almost like the grass whispered again. Now that’s simplicity.

Life is returning to craziness, but it doesn’t have to be that way. It wasn’t that way once before, remember now? We’ve been given a window into the past or is it the future? No one really knows anymore. But I have faith. If American Idol and the NHL Draft can find a way to be humbled, to go back to what they are all about, with no pomp and circumstance, then we can, too.