The Arena Without Spectators.
Its late⦠or early as the case may be and as you lay in the bunkroom listening to the firefighter next to you snore his fervent life away, the alarm goes off for a working dwelling fire with reports of people trapped. Getting out of bed to quickly dress, another chief and an extra engine company are added to the box as you hear dispatch transmit âreceiving several callsâ. Now you know its work and your heart rate starts to rapidly climb in sync with your pumping adrenalin. Unconsciously, your size up begins as you talk to the brothers about what part of the city the box is located in, the best way to get there, which direction the street runs and the type of buildings that lie in wait for you while you make your way to the dormant apparatus. Turning out of quarters flashing lights reflect off anything and everything, lighting up the wee hours of the morning as exhaust spews a vapor trail down the street. The air horn sounds violently as the first intersection is approached and passed en route to your playing field. Turning the corner onto the block in question, a heavy fire condition is seen venting from the first floor front door and windows. The air brake sets, the tell tale sound likened to a pistol fired at a track meet, telling you its time to depart your ride. Breaking out of your starting gate you go about the business of fulfilling your assigned tasks and functions for whatever type of company youâre assigned to. People on the gritty potholed street are screaming at you that there are people trapped on the second floor. You realize the bitter cold has made your hand numb with pain as you struggle to get a grip on the knob to turn on your bottle. It is 3am in February. Wide-awake but half asleep, or eyes wide shut, you start to quickly register and calculate a great deal of information as you approach the burning dwelling. The Engine is stretching lines. You see child restraint bars in several upper floor windows. The building next door is boarded up with HUD windows, so on and so forth. A ladder has been selected and beam-raised out of the way of some precariously low hanging wires as furiously venting fire impinges upon them. You ascend the ladder to your destiny. Once on the porch roof you steady the ladder for your counterpart and as he safely boards the roof deck you start breaking out windows, cleaning out the sash, all the glass and the restraint bars. Taking a knee, you don your mask, pull on your hood, strap on your helmet and proceed to lean into the window checking for limp victims through the heavily charged black smoke. Finding nothing you slither into the dark intense heat and flip the flashlights switch to the on position. You can hear the engine companies line knocking down fire as you move into the middle bedroom. Performing your primary, you locate two victims limp with death creeping at their souls. Screaming out to your partner who bypassed the middle bedroom for you to search, he hears your distant call just as heâs decided heâs found nothing in the rear bedroom and teams up with you while your transmitting to the IC on your radio that you have a positive on the trapped victims and your bringing them out via the ladder you came in on. Relying on training, experience, adrenaline and a spirit to succeed that all firefighters have, you work together to make the removals happen as fast as possible. Both trapped occupants luckily survive and thanks to you and your coworkers they return to normal lives, some scars from burns notwithstanding. Youâre body was cold, stiff and anything but limber or warmed up. Your muscles tense, eyes dilated⦠the stress, fear and pain subside and it comes as no surprise to you as your endorphin level drops that you sprained your shoulder and pulled your groin a bit. You are not as fit as you used to be. Your fire department has recently been cut to bare minimum staffing levels. Never mind if you were prepared to go out and play, you were going to be playing regardless of if you wanted to or not. If you hadnât noticed, you are the guy wearing the gear⦠the thing with the guy in the place so to speak.
Conversely, consider the following scenario: The bell goes off for the same aforementioned fire call. However, this time, you get out of bed and stop to see the trainer on your way out to the rig. As you approach the locker room you get inline behind the rest of the men who will eventually be getting on the apparatus with you to respond to the call for help. After all, we get called to go and rectify someone elseâs problems right? Now then, itâs finally your turn to see the trainer and he helps put you thru some stretching movements akin to what you see on a baseball field or basketball court before the game begins. He also calls the doctor into the room to discuss giving you a shot of cortisone in that ailing knee of yours. As you see the chiropractor for an adjustment, the Captain gets attention from the massage guy to work out a knot in his neck achieved while sleeping in an awkward position. After that itâs off to go sit in the whirlpool for both of you while the rest of the company sits in the film room watching highlights of your last job, discussing tactics with the Battalion Chief. Finally you get into your uniform and climb onto the rig, ready to go try your best to save life and property in the city you work in. Itâs been more than an hour since the box came in and the house in question is a total loss to say the least. The exposures are ripping fire throughout on either side of the original building reported. Multiple people are dead and dying. The neighboring folk are out in the street getting sun burnt, looking at you like you shit the bed.
Can you imagine this? We as firefighters are not entitled to all the loveliness and perks lauded upon professional athletes are we? Parallels can certainly be drawn to professional sports athletes in many ways though, cant they? Why do athletes play and firefighters work? As firefighters, we are never going to be treated like athletes, but we are indeed just that. We are never going to get the million dollar contracts (although we feel like we should). We will never draw the sell out crowds since we work the arena without spectators and we will surely not be signing autographs in the firehouse parking lot on our way into quarters. The only folks coming to our arena to see our matches are the people directly affected by the trouble we came to solve. Perhaps the neighbors will watch too but only to see if we can make the stop. These spectators will be highly critical, just as if they were watching their hometown sports team play. In a way, they are doing just that are they not? Maybe if the game goes on long enough, the local news channel will show up to give a report or conduct a post game interview. Firefighters will never be as idolized as the stud centerfielder or the all star quarterback. We are athletes in a sport that is routinely overlooked, under funded, constantly being downsized, recognized little and in this day and age scrutinized harder than ever before for mistakes and bad plays. The few spectators of our sport will also be at a disadvantage because they are not as well versed as to our operations like they are the local baseball or football team. Just watch a working fire recorded by a civilian on you tube from any city and you will hear how ignorant the spectators are as to what âplaysâ were running. Our teams will never acquire the lavish shoe or clothing endorsements. There is no equipment manager on our teamâs payroll handling issues with our tools. We are responsible to do that our selves and to be proficient with what we have. As it stands, our health coverage and conditioning will never equate to the state of the art conditions that other professional athletes are accustom to, and we all know that the nations politicians are moving to lessen what we have now. Our locker rooms will never be anything like the 5 star hotels or plush clubhouses of todayâs star athletes. To the contrary, they will often times be taken care of by the athletes themselves. Cleaned by them, fixed by them, lived in by them and cursed by them. We are surely not a spoiled bunch by any means. Our departments do not enlist the help of genius dieticians planning meals designed to keep our bodies lean, fit and strong. Our diets are not stellar or always appropriate. The meals we eat are prepared by us, for us. If we begin to think more like the athletes that we are wouldnât we collectively start to take our health more seriously? There will be no training guru cracking the whip on you to get you into the weight room for a high intensity workout preparing your heart for the rigors of fire duty. It is on us as firefighters to stay as tip top as possible. These days, we work in an environment where most firefighters know more about the plays on a football field then the plays on our fire ground. I think it is safe to say that if we put as much time and energy into OUR pro sport as we do the ones we enjoy watching on the TV it would tremendously help us perform our tasks and functions on the fire ground. That being the case, one can deduce that when our games are played we would be that much better at them, would we not? Instead of taking the position for granted, it behooves us to own our job. Own our âsportâ if you will and attack it like the athletes we are. Especially now, as we see firefighters nationwide becoming statistics of layoffs, ask yourself this; are you the guy that shows up with his x-box in hand looking to play video games in quarters all day or are you the guy looking to earn his position on the rig, begging to hit he street and drill. Are you the batboy or the leadoff hitter? Are you a varsity starter or are you the guy that gets picked dead last during a pick up game of kickball? Do you operate around the firehouse with a sense of selfish entitlement or do you turn off the television to read books about the sport you signed up to play, trying to do it to the best of your ability. Understanding that all of our levels of dexterity and agility are not quite the same, the simple fact is that we need to be our own referees, our own play-by-play commentators and our own judges. Putting people into positions to achieve their greatest potential. We need to maintain and schedule our own practice. We need to handle our business and take care of one another because no one else is being paid to do so. If firefighting were part of the wide world of sports, Howard Cosell himself could have told you that itâs our responsibility to ensure our playing field has the fittest, most properly trained athletes being sent to our matches. We do not have an off-season. We play our games year round. There are no time-outs to call if a firefighter goes down. Play does not stop while the trainer comes into the fire building and treats you. A Rapid Intervention Crew cannot stop the clock. There are no fouls being called on our opponent, if you get burned, disoriented, take a feed or get buried in a collapse, play is going to continue. There are certainly no intermissions or halftimes to take advantage of during our matches. If we need to regroup and change our game plan it has to be done seamlessly, while our game is still being played just like a line change on the hockey rink. Unlike professional sports athletes, and what sets us apart from them, we enter our games unknowingly. That is not to say disadvantaged mind you, but sports teams know which opponent they are playing next and at what time and at what given place. They are aware of the given conditions and circumstances of their sports arena. They have the luxury of playing on the same size fields, rinks, courts or diamonds repeatedly. The measurements and conditions are the same, time and time again. Firefighters on the other hand have no real idea as to what awaits us on ours. This makes you no less an athlete, but even more so. We are the masters of adaptation. Our playing field is fluid and ever changing. Aside from having to know the opposition, we also have to plan for where it is and what it can do to the field it has chosen to play us on. The variables are many, and the fairness is nonexistent as our opponent begins the game without us and is playing all the while, sometimes for long intervals before we even get to the arena. While there are many similarities between professional sports and professional firefighting, there are always going to be serious differences as well. In our profession the stakes are much higher but make no mistake, you are an athlete and you should take that into consideration before your next match. In professional sports, a losing game may get you scrutiny from fans and media. In professional firefighting, losing a game may get you, your fans and the people inadvertently playing the game seriously injured or killed. Having said that, you will surely get all that scrutiny in the world thrust upon you and then some, or perhaps even legal action may await you afterwards. Fair it is not but we are athletes all the same. Have you watched the âfilmâ on your opponent so to speak? Have you been studying the playbook? Treat your profession with all your might so as to help win every game you and your teammates take part in. Consider your starting lineup. Think about how well you are practicing. Is your equipment up to task and ready to be engaged in the game we play? Are you physically and mentally prepared to handle whatever our opponent throws at us? Keep in mind the only booth review we can make is going to be made when the games over, not during it. These reviews and reports are often times harsh and place the blame directly back on the very people who showed up to help win the game. Unlike the police who are able to blame crimes on perpetrators, there is no one to blame but ourselves when a fire goes bad. You cant lock-up a chemical reaction now can you? Fixing our mistakes is up to us. We are surely athletes but you must know there will never be a huge Nike contract waiting for you at the end of your game if you win. A championship trophy is not what we are trying to win in our league. Bragging rights perhaps... pride and self-respect for a job well done comes to those who were ready to play and winning games goes along way in the eyes of the other athletes your playing with. Keep the athlete in you ready to break out in sport, it can happen at any time and this could be the night.
Conversely, consider the following scenario: The bell goes off for the same aforementioned fire call. However, this time, you get out of bed and stop to see the trainer on your way out to the rig. As you approach the locker room you get inline behind the rest of the men who will eventually be getting on the apparatus with you to respond to the call for help. After all, we get called to go and rectify someone elseâs problems right? Now then, itâs finally your turn to see the trainer and he helps put you thru some stretching movements akin to what you see on a baseball field or basketball court before the game begins. He also calls the doctor into the room to discuss giving you a shot of cortisone in that ailing knee of yours. As you see the chiropractor for an adjustment, the Captain gets attention from the massage guy to work out a knot in his neck achieved while sleeping in an awkward position. After that itâs off to go sit in the whirlpool for both of you while the rest of the company sits in the film room watching highlights of your last job, discussing tactics with the Battalion Chief. Finally you get into your uniform and climb onto the rig, ready to go try your best to save life and property in the city you work in. Itâs been more than an hour since the box came in and the house in question is a total loss to say the least. The exposures are ripping fire throughout on either side of the original building reported. Multiple people are dead and dying. The neighboring folk are out in the street getting sun burnt, looking at you like you shit the bed.
Can you imagine this? We as firefighters are not entitled to all the loveliness and perks lauded upon professional athletes are we? Parallels can certainly be drawn to professional sports athletes in many ways though, cant they? Why do athletes play and firefighters work? As firefighters, we are never going to be treated like athletes, but we are indeed just that. We are never going to get the million dollar contracts (although we feel like we should). We will never draw the sell out crowds since we work the arena without spectators and we will surely not be signing autographs in the firehouse parking lot on our way into quarters. The only folks coming to our arena to see our matches are the people directly affected by the trouble we came to solve. Perhaps the neighbors will watch too but only to see if we can make the stop. These spectators will be highly critical, just as if they were watching their hometown sports team play. In a way, they are doing just that are they not? Maybe if the game goes on long enough, the local news channel will show up to give a report or conduct a post game interview. Firefighters will never be as idolized as the stud centerfielder or the all star quarterback. We are athletes in a sport that is routinely overlooked, under funded, constantly being downsized, recognized little and in this day and age scrutinized harder than ever before for mistakes and bad plays. The few spectators of our sport will also be at a disadvantage because they are not as well versed as to our operations like they are the local baseball or football team. Just watch a working fire recorded by a civilian on you tube from any city and you will hear how ignorant the spectators are as to what âplaysâ were running. Our teams will never acquire the lavish shoe or clothing endorsements. There is no equipment manager on our teamâs payroll handling issues with our tools. We are responsible to do that our selves and to be proficient with what we have. As it stands, our health coverage and conditioning will never equate to the state of the art conditions that other professional athletes are accustom to, and we all know that the nations politicians are moving to lessen what we have now. Our locker rooms will never be anything like the 5 star hotels or plush clubhouses of todayâs star athletes. To the contrary, they will often times be taken care of by the athletes themselves. Cleaned by them, fixed by them, lived in by them and cursed by them. We are surely not a spoiled bunch by any means. Our departments do not enlist the help of genius dieticians planning meals designed to keep our bodies lean, fit and strong. Our diets are not stellar or always appropriate. The meals we eat are prepared by us, for us. If we begin to think more like the athletes that we are wouldnât we collectively start to take our health more seriously? There will be no training guru cracking the whip on you to get you into the weight room for a high intensity workout preparing your heart for the rigors of fire duty. It is on us as firefighters to stay as tip top as possible. These days, we work in an environment where most firefighters know more about the plays on a football field then the plays on our fire ground. I think it is safe to say that if we put as much time and energy into OUR pro sport as we do the ones we enjoy watching on the TV it would tremendously help us perform our tasks and functions on the fire ground. That being the case, one can deduce that when our games are played we would be that much better at them, would we not? Instead of taking the position for granted, it behooves us to own our job. Own our âsportâ if you will and attack it like the athletes we are. Especially now, as we see firefighters nationwide becoming statistics of layoffs, ask yourself this; are you the guy that shows up with his x-box in hand looking to play video games in quarters all day or are you the guy looking to earn his position on the rig, begging to hit he street and drill. Are you the batboy or the leadoff hitter? Are you a varsity starter or are you the guy that gets picked dead last during a pick up game of kickball? Do you operate around the firehouse with a sense of selfish entitlement or do you turn off the television to read books about the sport you signed up to play, trying to do it to the best of your ability. Understanding that all of our levels of dexterity and agility are not quite the same, the simple fact is that we need to be our own referees, our own play-by-play commentators and our own judges. Putting people into positions to achieve their greatest potential. We need to maintain and schedule our own practice. We need to handle our business and take care of one another because no one else is being paid to do so. If firefighting were part of the wide world of sports, Howard Cosell himself could have told you that itâs our responsibility to ensure our playing field has the fittest, most properly trained athletes being sent to our matches. We do not have an off-season. We play our games year round. There are no time-outs to call if a firefighter goes down. Play does not stop while the trainer comes into the fire building and treats you. A Rapid Intervention Crew cannot stop the clock. There are no fouls being called on our opponent, if you get burned, disoriented, take a feed or get buried in a collapse, play is going to continue. There are certainly no intermissions or halftimes to take advantage of during our matches. If we need to regroup and change our game plan it has to be done seamlessly, while our game is still being played just like a line change on the hockey rink. Unlike professional sports athletes, and what sets us apart from them, we enter our games unknowingly. That is not to say disadvantaged mind you, but sports teams know which opponent they are playing next and at what time and at what given place. They are aware of the given conditions and circumstances of their sports arena. They have the luxury of playing on the same size fields, rinks, courts or diamonds repeatedly. The measurements and conditions are the same, time and time again. Firefighters on the other hand have no real idea as to what awaits us on ours. This makes you no less an athlete, but even more so. We are the masters of adaptation. Our playing field is fluid and ever changing. Aside from having to know the opposition, we also have to plan for where it is and what it can do to the field it has chosen to play us on. The variables are many, and the fairness is nonexistent as our opponent begins the game without us and is playing all the while, sometimes for long intervals before we even get to the arena. While there are many similarities between professional sports and professional firefighting, there are always going to be serious differences as well. In our profession the stakes are much higher but make no mistake, you are an athlete and you should take that into consideration before your next match. In professional sports, a losing game may get you scrutiny from fans and media. In professional firefighting, losing a game may get you, your fans and the people inadvertently playing the game seriously injured or killed. Having said that, you will surely get all that scrutiny in the world thrust upon you and then some, or perhaps even legal action may await you afterwards. Fair it is not but we are athletes all the same. Have you watched the âfilmâ on your opponent so to speak? Have you been studying the playbook? Treat your profession with all your might so as to help win every game you and your teammates take part in. Consider your starting lineup. Think about how well you are practicing. Is your equipment up to task and ready to be engaged in the game we play? Are you physically and mentally prepared to handle whatever our opponent throws at us? Keep in mind the only booth review we can make is going to be made when the games over, not during it. These reviews and reports are often times harsh and place the blame directly back on the very people who showed up to help win the game. Unlike the police who are able to blame crimes on perpetrators, there is no one to blame but ourselves when a fire goes bad. You cant lock-up a chemical reaction now can you? Fixing our mistakes is up to us. We are surely athletes but you must know there will never be a huge Nike contract waiting for you at the end of your game if you win. A championship trophy is not what we are trying to win in our league. Bragging rights perhaps... pride and self-respect for a job well done comes to those who were ready to play and winning games goes along way in the eyes of the other athletes your playing with. Keep the athlete in you ready to break out in sport, it can happen at any time and this could be the night.
