I Did It My Way
By Cam Landis
When people at Penn ask me where I am from, for the sake of brevity I almost always just say Cleveland, Ohio. The truth is, I am not from Cleveland. I come from a small town about an hour east on the south shore of Lake Erie called Madison. Madison is similar to many small towns in the Midwest; it has a quaint little downtown, a 1:1 ratio of used car lots to auto parts stores, and some good folks that love football. Where I am from, football has religious connotations. Entire communities will pack a grandstand every autumn Friday night in all sorts of extremes in weather. Youth tackle football leagues begin at age 7, and flag football leagues even earlier. As kids, our celebrities are not professional athletes, musicians, or movie stars; they are local high school football players. At this point, it’s probably pretty easy to see how I fell in love with the sport at such a young age.
I am so grateful that my parents were unreservedly supportive of my many interests in athletics. I played 8 organized sports from age 5 through high school, but a common theme seemed to always emerge. I always identified as a “football player that played or competed in (insert sport).” Football always came first even to the occasional detriment of my other athletic interests. It really was not until my freshman year of high school that I discovered the sport that truly complimented my dedication to football. As I grew bigger and moved to playing offensive line in football, the throwing events in track and field emerged as an easy way to stay busy in the spring and cross train.
Track and field -- especially the throwing events -- is not the most glamorous sport. For those that have been to a track meet, you may have had to walk about half a mile just to find the throwing circles. Truthfully, the sport garners the attention that football gets on a weekly basis in the fall only once every 4 years during the Olympics. Yet there remains a level of purity that is hard to come by in football. The simple objectivity of stop watches and tape measures made this sport such an exhilarating but mentally taxing challenge. I had to reconcile that if I ever fouled a throw or underperformed, it was no one’s fault but my own. There was no other lineman next to me to bail me out, only the chance at another throw.
Throughout high school, I really began to settle into both sports, but my unwavering goal was to play collegiate football. It’s precisely why I came to Penn. It is a university that I dreamt of attending with a rich history in football. As is the case for many freshmen, my first season was arduous. It was the first time in my life that I struggled in articulating my love for football. I played in half of the games that season, but I continued to find increasingly less meaning in calling myself a “football player” — the very title I could not live without growing up. The obvious outlet for my athletic passion was track and field. During my freshman year, an Ivy League silver medal, a throw within 20 centimeters of the Penn record, and a number two all-time ranking at Penn, cemented my commitment to the sport.
I quickly became infected with the same passion I once had for football. I found myself spending hours of free time just watching world class throwers on YouTube. I became so excited about my future in track and field that I made the difficult decision to leave football later that year. These days, throwing is what keeps me going. There is so much monotony in online learning and living at home, but each day I get the chance to leave it all behind for a few hours and train. The excitement does not totally stem from throwing a heavy iron ball; it’s about self improvement and the opportunity to be better.
…and although our experiences may not define us forever, they can always provide us with substantive meaning in our lives.
I am tremendously fortunate to be in the position I am as a Penn track and field athlete. But really, this is less a story about my love for athletics — it is more a story about self identity. Much of what I’ve come to believe about my own self identity comes from Dr. Viktor Frankel’s magnum opus, Man’s Search for Meaning. For those that haven’t read this, Frankel couples his expertise as a psychologist with his abhorrent experiences during the Holocaust to develop his theory of Logotherapy. Briefly, this theory proposes that an individual’s primary motivation is to find a meaning in life that they can feel positive about. For me, and I assume many of the readers, our meaning is intensely tied to a specific sport. I am here to tell you that when our sporting days end, there will be meaning in life. Maybe it will come in the form of another sport like it did for me. It might just be a career, a service initiative, a family, or a religious faith. Athletics have equipped us with a special set of tools to be productive members of the world, and although our experiences may not define us forever, they can always provide us with substantive meaning in our lives. So yes, I am undoubtedly a thrower now, and deep down I suppose I will always be a “football player” too.