My senior year of high school, every runner in Miami was chasing after this guy named Luiz Prestes. Luiz was an oddly shaped little fellow — kind of short, vaguely trapezoidal like a gymnast or something — who quickly pulled so far away from the rest of us we couldn’t even see his bright right Miami Beach uniform. He turned out sub-15:00 performances effortlessly, and by the time the Dade County championship race came around, he got so tired of beating all our asses that he frequently left town in search of better, national-caliber competition, leaving the rest of us mere mortals to compete for a somewhat undermined local title.

And by the time we got to the final mile of that county race, Roy Vargas of Southridge candidly wheezed to my coach as he passed him, “He’s got me, coach.” Twenty yards ahead of me, Coach Pietsch’s eyes bugged out, magnified by his thick glasses, and he started jumping up and down, pointing wildly at the guy who was about to give up the lead, hissing, “He says you’ve got him!” I had no semblance of a “kick” whatsoever, and anyone I hadn’t broken by the third mile was likely to whoosh past me in the final hundred yards; but I had also practiced this course enough times to know where the harder patches of packed sand were in the killer beach-like valley of death, just four hundred yards before the finish. I got him.

As I spoke to Miami Herald sports reporter Mike Phillips afterwards, I had a number of quotable gems for him. I told him very honestly what we all knew: that I wasn’t really the county champion, because there was no way any of us could ever beat Prestes in a fair meet. “I’m just grateful to him for giving the rest of us a chance at the trophy,” I said. I also confided that this was an fantastic way to end a high school athletic career that almost got replaced by joining the golf team, of all things, after a lackluster first year on JV.

And then, when I thought the interview was basically over, I casually mentioned that I had to rush home and hit the books, because all of my teachers had really piled on the assignments during this critical cross-country week. “This’ll show ‘em,” I joked, “I oughta bring them the trophy and be like, ‘See what I did in spite of your papers? Here, this one’s for you.’” I also mentioned that I wished my dad wasn’t in the middle of a case so he could have seen the win in person.

“I won this race for my teachers and for my father,” was how the quote came out in the paper. I got roughly 2.5 metric tons of shit for it on campus the next day. Dork factor 9.7.

Thursday before last, an AJC reporter came out to the Young Democrats of Atlanta happy hour, and spent about three hours there talking at length to several of our officers and one lucky ex-officer, yours truly. He killed almost half an hour with me, long past the point when I had told him everything he needed to know about our podcast, the almost-was relationship with Air Atlanta, the different categories of internet video we put up, and where we were going with all this web 2.0 crap. When he asked how it felt to be so solidly the minority party in this red state of ours, I told him I actually relished the role of the underdog and ended up comparing it in quite esoteric terms to Knute Rockne’s development of the Fighting Irish into the underdog heroes of the Catholic working class.

It turns out this reporter was more interested in what I was drinking. As I took a sip of my Guinness to wet my throat in the middle of the interview, his eyes bugged out like Coach Pietsch’s: “What is THAT?” You’d think he’d never seen a stout before, and I really think he hadn’t, strangely enough for a guy named Duffy. “It’s so DARK!” I told him it was just a Guinness, and it was hard not to take a liking to if you’ve ever been to Ireland.

One week later, Guinness and Ireland were my primary defining characteristics:

The video was the creation of Shelby Highsmith, 32, a graduate student at Georgia Tech. He’s a Notre Dame University alum who’s backpacked in Ireland, drinks Guinness and says about recruiting Young Dems, “We just need to identify those Knute Rocknes” — passionate people who won’t accept defeat.

Aside from its profound irrelevance, I’m not sure whether he was painting me as a dark beer-swilling Irishman (despite my English name and German-Polish blood), or an effete fancy beer-drinking liberal elitist. And if you didn’t already know this, saying we’re from “Notre Dame University” is like calling us the “Democrat Party.” It’s just wrong, and it gets under our skin.

The reporter also consulted the state chairman of the Young Republicans, who proceeded to mislead the crap out of him to try and make us look bad; I called him on his crap over here.

Another one of our officers also learned a tough lesson about the press this week: you have to say “off the record” before you say something off the record; an afterthought of “don’t print that” doesn’t work.

Manica calls the state’s Republican leadership “the Christian supremacist Taliban.”

Sure enough, that was the sound bite I heard about at the office. Oh well; two steps forward, one step back.



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