My Dog in the Hunt. I was this guy. You can’t see the eyes that made it work when I was the Best Living Consultant. On the road, all the time, on the Mission every minute. Until he threw away all the big paydays to become the Greatest Living Writer. (My wife never knew about the white-shirt-gray tie-charcoal suit version of him. Saw him only just before and long after. Missed all the hunkering and fuming in airports. All the cooling of heels in the anterooms of the great, who were taking credit for work they hadn’t done themselves and advancing their own careers enormously thereby.) She rejected this post for InstaPunk Returns.

Tried to watch this movie that Netflix promised would be fun, Brampton’s Own. Here’s the trailer:

Here are representative reviews for the 5.2⭐critics ratings:

Now I have to tell you how much it sucked. Why I stopped watching halfway through even though the trailer(s) had already told me how it would end. My wife can affirm I predicted the turning point of the movie was the pool game between the washed up minor leaguer and the smarmy, successful dentist. The ballplayer was going to lose and go on to win her back, or win and go on back to win everything else too. Either way, not the pool game played by corporate ronin.

What’s our way? No, we won’t be comparing ourselves to big city cops, firemen, and ER workers. But we are comparing ourselves to thousands of people, men and women both, who leave the state, the hometown of their birth, and move after the right amount of schooling to where the jobs are. Minor league ball players fall into this category too, just so you know this isn’t a grad school snob thing.

Who are we? We’re the ones with hopes of families, schools, communities riding on them. We were raised if not born to be successes in very specific lines of endeavor. To work for the firms and corporations and many other kinds of institutions that rule the world. We are aimed at acquiring the disciplines which make you NOT the fighters — for firms, companies, teams, disciplines, and other competitive environments where if you fail at the fighting, you are just the scrap left behind.

It’s not put to us this way, of course, not in so many words. Like in Brampton. Don’t make it seem to be the town’s major league hope for immortality, don’t ever come back. That’s it’s own kind of ultimatum, the kind the movie thinks is mildly funny, proof of immaturity, the sin that needs to be appeased. The girl who recounts the style of her house, number of children, life expectancy, and final hobbies is itemizing the bill of indictment for those who carry other people’s dreams and drop them along the way.

What’s wrong with Brampton? He is accountable to them. He excels at a sport, a talent, a discipline most people are simply also-rans at best at. It takes him away from home for years, from family and loved ones for thousands of hours, he is expected to apply maximum focus, all his practice time, and a continuously ingenious level of talent to accomplish what? For doing what all the bystanders back home can’t.

What’s that? Going where he’s needed, where the fight is, bringing home the win, the sale, the verdict, the settlement, the contract, the statistics, the headlines, the partnership, the nomination, the championship, the awards, the fame, the eternal vindication, the immortality, for all the ones who were counting on them to do that in their place.

Here’s how it’s actually done for the most part. By people who have spent enough time away at school or training camps, in the minors, on the road, on planes, surrounded by relentless driven ones much like themselves, until chance, as it will so often have it, forces a once-in-a-lifetime moment of decision in which one may win a little something — if he can remember what it is — and more than one will lose everything. Such people are rarely entreated home by their mothers. Here’s how that actually looks when it’s done by someone who does remember exactly what it looks like, what he wanted in the first place, no matter how much it cost:

The guy in the movie was always a loser. But more importantly, he should have known he wasn’t going to kill any kind of “lunger” to save anyone from anything. He had too many people rooting for him. Very few All-American boys win the particular kinds of competition we’re talking about. They generally (always) do have backup plans. They have no need to go crawling back home. It’s still, always been, home to them. The movie a fundamental lie in this respect.

For the truth is, there is no home among the usual suspects. Friends will envy and despise, family will resent them, the institutions to which they gave fealty will ignore them. Why they’re so waspish as to say, “I’m your huckleberry.”

They know they ARE the huckleberry. Why they have to be. After all, there are the ronin who finally, ultimately, aren’t fast or accurate enough on the draw.

You see, this also happens, but never at the hometown pool game. It happens on the road, after a couple of ordinary lifetimes of grief, penury, pain, and loss.

And this happens too.

To whom? The ones who insist on being carried, all their treachery and backstabbing notwithstanding. Those ones get what they actually all wanted. Part of the prize they do nothing to earn.

There is mercy. But only for the ones who know how many miles have been traveled and how little value is attached to it by the ones who grant it.