by John Walters
During junior year of high school I worked as a member of a hot air balloon chase crew. My friend and I would wake up before dawn on a Saturday or Sunday morning, meet our balloon crew at the launch point, be given a pickup to drive, watch the balloon ascend and then follow these simple instructions: don’t lose the balloon.
Why do balloon chase crews exist? Because hot air balloons have no control over what direction they take. The pilot is able to control altitude via blasts of helium—he or she is like an anesthesiologist, in a sense‚—but wind and atmospheric conditions determine if the balloon heads north, south, east or west. Which is why you need a chase crew to follow it and meet it wherever it lands.
Then there are planes. And you know how those work. Engines, wing flaps, tail rudders. There’s no such thing as an airplane chase crew, not even for gliders. The pilot controls the direction and the destination.
Recently I spoke to my students about the distinction between hot air balloons and airplanes. And how they each have a choice as to which one they want to be as they continue in their careers. Because, as I have learned and maybe you have, too, far too many of us find ourselves being hot air balloons in our careers, in our lives, all of it. And the point I wanted to make to them is this:
That is on you.
We are all airplanes. If we become hot air balloons, that’s because we allowed it to be so.
When I was in my early 30s I was earning a very good salary, working at a magazine that was the zenith of distinction in my field: Sports Illustrated. Moreover, I had a byline in a regular column (“SI View”) every single week. SI View was profitable for my employers and it appealed to readers in that it was a harmless confection of puns, word play, the occasional pithy insight and some needed information.
But here’s the thing: it did not fulfill me. Not in the least. In a normal week I could write the entire column in one day and back in the late 1990s, there were very few outside writing options. I couldn’t freelance for someone else. My editors were loath to deploy me for other assignments because SI View was my mandate (and on its own it made the mag $8 million per year, at least). And, let’s be honest, no one really needed me to do more. It was Sports Illustrated. We were not hurting for writing talent. Rather, our writing talent was hurting for opportunities.
One day I came across a cartoon from The New Yorker. The illustration featured a headstone in a cemetery and the epitaph read simply, “We Watched Sports.” I smiled ruefully.
This, after all, was my job. To watch sports on TV and opine on it. But that was never why I’d wanted to work at Sports Illustrated. I wanted adventure. I wanted to tell interesting stories, hopefully in an artful and trenchant manner. I wanted to be more like Rick Reilly or Frank Deford, not more like Rudy Martzke.
For a sportswriter, I had a terrific salary. Working at the most respected publication out there. And, if I wanted, I had at least five days off per week. I could just show up at the office and read novels or learn a language, really. Nobody would’ve cared.
But I did not want a hot air balloon life. I wanted to fly, not float. My short-term solution was to move to Connecticut, while still writing the column, and report on a book that I’d write about the University of Connecticut women’s basketball team. I recall one day, early in my stay, at practice in Storrs. I attended most every practice. Anyway, associate head coach Chris Dailey, who’d had a burr in her butt about me almost from the day of my arrival because of where I’d gone to college (few people despise Notre Dame more than CD), called out to me. “I took a look at your column,” she said. “Is that all they have you do?”
It wasn’t a question; it was an accusation.
“That’s why I’m here,” I told her.
Piloting my own plane has led to more than a little turbulence over the past two decades. And a lot less income. I might’ve stayed at SI, writing SI View as the internet became a thing, and held onto the gig that Richard Deitsch eventually inherited and ran with. And RD does a great job with it. But I’d have no appetite for tracking Nielsen ratings or watching endless hours of sports television on the weekends (when the TV is on, I’m watching TCM, after all).
If there’s anything I’m proud of, it’s that I didn’t allow the prevailing currents to take me somewhere I never really intended to land at in the first place. I’m still flying. Many’s the day I feel like Ted Stryker, the buckets of sweat streaming down my face as I do combat with both the weather outside and the plane itself. But I’d rather be at the controls, actively, than passively floating against a horizon that I never longed to visit in the first place. Knowing that my only options are to remain in the gondola or to jump.
Are you a hot air balloon?
Are you an airplane?
It’s up to you.
Every day.
