Pick Me Up On Your Way Down (Harlan Howard)
Pick me up on your way down,
When you’re blue and all alone,
When their glamour starts to bore you,
Come on back where you belong.
When you learn these things are true,
I’ll be waitin’ here for you,
When you tumble to the ground,
Pick me up on your way down.
What Goes Up….
In late November of 2009, Eldrick Tont “Tiger” Woods, then the world’s leading golfer by a landslide, fled from his Florida estate, closely followed by an angry wife with a nine iron. Elin Nordegren had just discovered one of Tiger’s dozen or so liaisons with other women and was taking issue. Woods may briefly have considered pointing out that his transgressions were minor in comparison to athletes like, say, Magic Johnson, who had bedded hundreds or Wilt Chamberlain (thousands, by his count), but the safest bet was to hie to his nearby vehicle and leave Dodge. Unfortunately for him, a fire hydrant, then a tree got in the way, not only messing up his pretty Escalade but giving Elin another shot at him. By the time cops arrived, the back window of the Cadillac was busted to smithereens and the golfer had “facial lacerations,” requiring a trip to the hospital, if just to escape Nordegren.
That night was a watershed in Tiger Woods’ career. Once thought to be a cinch to overtake golf icon Jack Nicklaus’ 18 wins in the four major tournaments (The Masters, PGA, U.S. Open and British Open)—Tiger had 14 at the time—Woods has yet to win another. An endless series of physical ailments has nagged him, requiring significant time on the sidelines. He has changed caddies, coaches and his swing. He has had good days on the course, almost immediately followed by terrible days. He has missed the cuts in several tournaments, an unheard of embarrassment for a player of his eminence. Whether it’s physical or mental, Eldrick Tont Woods appears finished, perhaps struck down by his own perfidy. It is an unimaginable stumble but not one unheard of. In the golf world alone, David Duval, a 1999 Sports Illustrated cover boy dropped from the world’s Number One golfer to obscurity almost overnight and he didn’t even have an Elin to blame it on. Duval’s superior game just disappeared—poof!—like Chris Christie’s presidential chances after Bridgegate. In these two cases, it’s the ultimate example of When you’re hot you’re hot; when you’re not, you’re not. You go to sleep in the Penthouse; you wake up in the outhouse. Happens to the best of us. Ask Pee-wee Herman.
Wha’ Hoppen???
It’s difficult, of course, for anyone to feel the limelight for a long period, then have it abruptly taken away. Professional boxers are famous—in real life and in movies—for returning to the ring time and time again in failed attempts to retrieve old glory. Muhammad Ali, otherwise a fairly smart guy, returned at 38 to fight Larry Holmes, barely landing a punch in 11 rounds and still went on to fight Trevor Berbick, another embarrassing defeat. Broadway Joe Namath, hero of Super Bowl III, returned to New York on bad knees years later, hoping to revive his career. He rode the bench most of the time, ending up with more sacks and interceptions than touchdown passes. Johnny Unitas, one of the greatest quarterbacks in NFL history with the Baltimore Colts, was fading fast when he was traded to San Diego. Many friends advised him to hang it up but Johnny U. was not dissuaded. On the Left Coast, he lost his starting job after five games during which he was sacked fourteen times and threw only three TDs. Basketball superstar Shaquille O’Neal, a monster with Orlando, Los Angeles and Miami who won four NBA Championships, wouldn’t believe what his body was trying to tell him, roving around the league like a gypsy to Phoenix, Cleveland and Boston in quest of a fifth title, eventually physically breaking down completely. Baseball legend Willie Mays was 41 when the Giants traded him back to New York, the site of his greatest fame, retiring only after falling down in the outfield during a game. It’s hard to give up the bright lights. For some, no adequate replacement is findable. Depression and even suicide sometimes follow the descent into anonymity. Sometimes Fame kills.
….Might Come Down
Now, your average Joe or Joanie Sixpack may not ascend peaks familiar to Tiger Woods or Muhammad Ali; not even the mountains scaled by yachtsmen financiers, now jailed for gross corruption, drug dealers forced to abandon their Bentleys or forgotten politicians who forsook their upward mobility for a romp in the hay. Remember Gary Hart, who might have been president? Probably not. His momentum was jarred by media discovery of his tryst with cutiepie Donna Rice on an appropriately-named vessel called Monkey Business. Gary quickly discovered the Door To Oblivion. Sometimes, it just takes one quick slipup, as many of us are aware. Or Just bad fortune, like that of Mr. Magoo, who owned the typewriter store. “What the hell happened?” wonders Mr. Magoo, and likewise his brethren, who once owned Rick’s Records and then Rick’s Tapes and then Rick’s CDs and now Rick’s nuthin’.
Remember all the homey little bookstores managed by entrepreneurs who could name every tome in the place and give you their exact locations? They ordered stuff they liked, not just the Top Fifty sellers and they made their shops unique. One day, boom, just like that they were gone, swallowed up by the giant maws of Barnes & Noble and Books-A-Million. The owners were devastated. The Big Book Boxes were invincible. Until Amazon and the like came along, drastically undercut their prices and wiped out most of them. Bright enough people, the corporations who owned these places never saw that locomotive headed their way until it was too late to get off the tracks. Sometimes, the future races in on The Express while most of us are expecting The Limited.
How many people do you know who were riding high and got their legs shot out from under them? Could have been Bad Luck, could have been Carelessness, could have been Unfortunate Timing. Now, suddenly, they are back at GO and they haven’t even collected their two hundred dollars. Some people, seemingly well-fortified, develop a grave illness and go broke. Exalted marriages suddenly disintegrate after years of success and one or both of the partners are financially devastated. Apparently secure real estate or stock deals crumble. Life is a minefield and most of us don’t have those little robots that scout out the landscape. I’ve had friends whose businesses were on cruise control until they ran smack into the back of a semi. Oh-oh. What are we going to do NOW? That’s the question then, isn’t it?
F. Scott Fitzgerald Was Wrong
So here you are, the victim of a calamity, either personal, financial, physical or other. Your psyche is damaged, perhaps along with your bank account, your body and your prospects. You have made a grave mistake, which has ruined your confidence or you have been unduly deceived, which has ruined your confidence or you have been the victim of damnably bad luck, which has ruined your confidence. Success is fragile, no matter how great. One day Saddam Hussein is entertaining dancing girls in the Golden Palace, next thing you know he’s hiding in a hole in the ground. Life can be governed, as Bob Dylan famously told us, by “a simple twist of fate.” But all is not necessarily lost. Fitzgerald proclaimed “There are no second acts in American Life,” but if that were true how does one explain Richard Nixon? Or Cleveland? I speak from experience here.
For twenty years, I had no worries. The success of the Subterranean Circus, beginning in 1967, led to the establishment of a sister-store next door called Silver City, an ace in the hole for the day society rose up against hippiedom. They might ban paraphernalia but odds were they’d never ban contemporary clothing, although those transparent angel dresses might be iffy. Not only did the Circus develop a booming retail trade but wannabes in other towns seeking to duplicate her success came by to pick up wholesale items, adding to the coffers. With some of the profits, I bought forty acres in nearby Orange Lake on which to set up a thoroughbred horse farm. Additional stores were established in Tallahassee, Orlando, Georgetown (D.C.) and Denton, Texas, of all places. The money just kept on rollin’ in, some of it used to purchase the two buildings housing the Gainesville stores and another on the corner which we rented out to an ex-Florida Gator lineman named Dan Iannarelli, who opened a beverage mart, the beverage in question being beer. Dan’s rent and that from Ted Hansen’s Acme Records, located at the rear of the Circus, took care of the mortgage payments. Finally, I bought the two-story house next door, a fading edifice born around 1904, and moved in. I may not have dwelt in the Golden Palace but I was a long way from a hole in the ground.
Meanwhile, Siobhan Ellison was earning three degrees at the University of Florida, culminating with her veterinary medicine parchment. After a short stint working under the auspices of equine vet John Langois, she decided to establish her own practice, roaming to the borders of and beyond Marion County to cultivate enough business to prosper. She might have been the first female mobile equine veterinarian in the county and, as such, not especially popular with the Good Ole Boy network of farm managers who hired vets at the bigger farms. Nonetheless, she found enough work with smaller breeders to persevere. Siobhan soon built herself a small house on five acres in tiny Fairfield and bought a couple of broodmares. There was no reason to expect anything but gradual expansion and “blue skies smiling at me.” Nothin’ but blue skies did we see.
Bad Day At Black Rock
One day, sitting in what seemed like an endless succession of airports as I traveled from one store to another, I asked myself if I really wanted to do all this. Myself answered resoundingly in the negative and I gradually handed off the other shops to the people who were running them. These places were reasonably profitable but the total net from all of them barely equaled what the Circus made by itself and I preferred the extra time I’d have to the money.
After many years in which the profits from Silver City outstripped those of the Circus, the clothing manufacturers who developed Cossack and Nehru shirts, velvet tie-dyes, multicolored bellbottoms and the other colorful garb of the sixties and seventies gradually eased back into conventional apparel, leaving Silver City and boutiques like it with a decision to make: find another direction or become one of fifty or sixty shops selling the same things. We went upscale with Karen Tepper dresses and Betsey Johnson clothes, even shoes from London and leathers from Guadalajara which were almost the equal of Italian and Spanish goods. The decision worked well for awhile but when the economy takes a hit, stores selling high-priced items are the first to feel the blow.
In the middle eighties, two significant disasters brought the palace tumbling down. First, a new Gainesville Police Chief named Wayland Clifton decided to enforce the state’s paraphernalia laws. Several of us were arrested and I was put on probation for one year. Much of the inventory was confiscated. Further arrests could bring jail time and continued merchandise seizures would be enormously expensive. We proceeded on with a vastly reduced inventory and fewer employees. Not to mention slender profits.
At the same time, Ronald Reagan signed into law an IRS plumb which devastated the horse business. Until 1986, entrepreneurs who had made a profit in one business or another were allowed to invest it in thoroughbreds without problem. A lot of wealthy folks thought they’d as soon buy a horse as send the money to the government and the industry was in its halcyon days. One year later, it was almost in the toilet. The IRS decided that horse investors must show a profit a reasonable amount of the time or their efforts would be considered “a hobby.” Almost instantly, a thoroughbred’s value was cut in half. FOR SALE signs arose in front of half the horse farms in Marion County.
This, of course, affected Siobhan Ellison, as well. Already fighting for every bit of business she could finagle, she could barely make ends meet. When we joined forces in 1986, those forces were meager. Not long before, we’re sailing along, enjoying the ride through the frothy waves. Now, we’re looking over the brink of the precipice. In 1990, the Subterranean Circus closed, Silver City having fallen by the wayside a few years earlier. The Gainesville properties were sold to support the farm and eventually the Orange Lake acreage was sold to pay the bills. The horses, which once numbered fifty, were down to less than half that and moved to rented property. A couple of years later, less than a dozen moved to Siobhan’s place, now ten acres but still too small. You wake up in the morning wondering what hit you….and when the next tornado was blowing through. Then, a funny thing happened on the way to the poorhouse.
The Empire Strikes Back
In 1995, the horse business finally came to the rescue. A filly named Vaunted Vamp, bred from a mare given to us and mated with a stallion who had no stud fee, began winning in Miami. And she didn’t stop for the next four years, winning 21 races and just under $450,000 through 1999. Siobhan was able to go back to UF, gain her PhD in three years and begin work on the disease Equine Protozoal Myeloencephalitis, eventually performing studies for Bayer and Schering-Plough before developing her own drug for EPM and starting her now-booming business, Pathogenes, Inc.
In 2001, another homebred, Juggernaut, won two $100,000 stakes races at Calder and piled up $225,000 in the space of two years. Next, a filly named Silver Stage ran a close third in the Tropical Park Derby and was sold to California trainer Vladimir Cerin for a cheery $450,000. We subsequently bought a flawed colt in a yearling sale at OBS for $5500 when Siobhan decided his blemishes were superficial and few buyers agreed. He became stakes-placed and Cerin took him off our hands for $240,000. Wow! You gotta love Momentum.
Just in case I might be thinking of becoming a smart ass about all this, the Health Gods decided to intervene in 2005 (propitiously waiting for Medicare to kick in, at least). No matter how high a mountain you construct for yourself and no matter how secure the financial underpinnings, these guys are immune to it all. They decided it would be a good time to assign a heart attack, that the result of medication I was taking to forestall prostate cancer. I ended up with both and tumbled into yet another unexpected pit. “OKAY! I GET it. You’ve made your point!” I announced to those in charge, dusting myself off and climbing out of the abyss. I promised to never again take anything for granted. Surprisingly, this may have worked. Fingers crossed, they’ve pretty much been leaving me alone lately. I’m dangerously close to optimistic. And I do know one thing. I’m a lot better off than that guy with the typewriter store.
That’s all, folks….
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