Passing the Haters

As Kevin Smith is getting ready for the big basketball game against their rival university, he puts on his headphones to relax, not knowing that he is about to have the worst game of his career at the college level at home. He goes out there and plays almost the whole game and only scores 7 points on 1 of 17 from three and 3 of 28 from the field. The team loses by over 20 points to a team they beat on the road just weeks ago. Everyone in the crowd is yelling and booing at his poor performance and he is deeply saddened by this. The next day he still has to get up and walk through campus to go to class.

As he is walking to class, he can tell that people are staring at him and mumbling under their breath.

Someone from across campus yells, “You suck, Kevin, you might as well just transfer.”

He turns and looks, but cannot see who it was. As he turns back around some guy bumps into him saying, “Thanks for losing us the game. You could not have played worse.”

One student even purposefully bumps into Kevin so that his coffee would spill all over him as he was walking by. Now he is pissed off and his shirt is covered in coffee.

He does not think it can get worse, but then his Twitter starts blowing up. Everyone is tweeting at him, talking trash, telling him that he is horrible and that he had the worst shooting night in school history.

Angry and frustrated by all the fans, he needs to do something to block it all out and focus on the next game.

He stops, remembering he had his Bluetooth headphones somewhere in his backpack. After digging and searching, he finally finds them and puts them on. He plays Above the Noise by McFly. He chose this song because of the Beats by Dre commercial he saw the other day where Tom Brady was proving all the doubters wrong.

He also turns off all his Twitter notifications and put his phone on do not disturb so that he can walk to class in peace with just his music playing.

Now he can walk through campus and block out all the doubters and haters and focus on the next game.

The next game comes around and he plays the same song right before warm-ups and has the best game of his career dropping 45 points and picking up 9 rebounds and 5 assists. All of the fans are chanting “Kevin!” It is like that previous game never happened.

In the press conference after the game, one of the reporters asks him how he can go from 3 of 28 shooting to 45 points on 50% shooting the very next game. He tells the reporter that, “Sometimes you just got to block everyone else out so you can focus on what’s important.” And he walks out with his headphones on playing Above the Noise by McFly, blocking out all the reporters.

Bibliography: Odyssey: The Sirens, Scylla, and Charybdis translated to English by Tony Kline (2004)

Author's note: I took the Odyssey: Passing the Sirens story and instead of it going back to the ancient times, I turned it into what athletes are facing every day on social media and when walking through campus. In the Passing of the Sirens, the sirens have such beautiful voices that attract the warriors to come to their island where they would kill them. All of the warriors had to put wax in their ears so that they would not hear them and remain safe. However, Odysseus wanted to hear the sirens so he tied himself to the mast and did not put any wax in his ears. He was trying to get his crew to let him go with the sirens, but they couldn’t hear him because they had wax in their ears.

In my story, the athlete does not want to hear the trash talk and did not want to read Twitter. That is where the story differs from the Passing the Sirens. The sirens' song was beautiful and alluring, but the haters are just the opposite! The athlete needs to block out all the haters just as Odysseus’s crew needs to block out the sirens to make it home safely . He does not take in what all the haters say as Odysseus took in the sirens' song. He completely blocked them out and even turns off his notifications so that he can focus on what was really important and that was the next game.