Weekly Roundup: Today In Naples Edition

BO KNOWS. If you are a man of, shall we say, a certain age, you most likely recall the Nike ad campaign from 1989 that suggested Bo Jackson wasn't just a sui generis athlete with professional-level talent in both football and baseball, but that he was brilliant at a variety of other sports, such as road cycling, hockey, and surfing. The irony of the campaign is that the sporting press crucified Jackson for being a two-sport superstar quite a bit more often than they lionized him for it. "Pick one or the other," they'd screech, with the common opinion being that Jackson should focus on baseball since it paid better and rarely crippled its participants. After a career-ending football injury, Jackson spent four more years playing baseball before retiring at the age of thirty-two.

Jackson was neither the first nor the last casualty of our collective national unwillingness to allow the famous or talented to escape their pigeonholes. Be an NFL player or a major league slugger --- but under no circumstances should you be both. We like to freeze people at the moment they enter the national imagination. Any attempt to deviate from that results in opprobrium at best and obscurity at worst. Ask Bob Dylan or Joni Mitchell... or Marcus Mumford. On exceptionally rare occasions, we will permit a move from rapping to acting (cf. Ice Cube, Ice-T) but attempts to move in the other direction are treated as comic relief.

Kenny Gorelick, aka Kenny G, made a name for himself as a smooth-jazz superstar, earning a sharp diss track from Pat Metheny in the process. At the age of forty-two, he decided to veer back towards the "real jazz" that he played in his youth. No such luck. So he returned to the smooth jazz, with a roundly ridiculed detour into investment management. Today, he's back out there playing the music people want to hear, which is the music he recorded a quarter-century ago.

It makes me wonder: what does it take to have a successful second act? How do you convince an adoring (or despising) public that you're not the same person you were five, or ten, or twenty-five years ago? How do you go about securing permission to be, in Thoreau's words, the new wine in the old bottle? At what point will people stop asking Kenny G to play that one song? I can't say that I have the answer, but I have a few ideas. More on that to come.

This week I talked to IMSA racer Dion von Moltke and had him criticize my wife's driving.