Tracy Flick Can't Win (Tracy Flick #2) (6)

Okay, I know, I’m probably romanticizing it a bit. I do that sometimes. My wife certainly thought so, but Los Gatos wasn’t working for her, either, and she was willing to make the change once I agreed to let her design our new house with the architect of her choice (she went with Althea Gruenbaum of Gruenbaum & Vishnu; they had a mind meld in the first five minutes and that was that). The result is bigger and more eye-catching than I would have chosen on my own, but sometimes being in a relationship means making compromises. And I do love the roof deck—it’s just me and the treetops and my hot tub up there.

I’m not going to sugarcoat it, though—there was some culture shock. The town looked pretty much the same as it used to, but it felt different. Older. Less vital. More pessimistic about the future. The event that really crystallized it for me was the referendum to finance construction of a new high school. It should have been a no-brainer. The current building was a dump back when I was a kid, and now it’s an ancient dump with a leaky roof. The computer lab alone should make every adult in Green Meadow hang their heads in shame. And the gym—it’s like that Tenement Museum in Lower Manhattan, where you get to relive the squalor of the past; you can smell adolescent body odor from 1972 hanging in the air. So it was a bitter wake-up call when the votes got tallied and a majority of my fellow citizens said, Our kids can go to hell. We’re fine the way we are.

Marissa and I thought about moving again, but where would we go? We liked our new house, and the boys were thriving, making friends, riding their bikes all over town, just like I did (except they had better bikes). The only solution that made sense was to stay and fight.

“Tracy,” I said. “Have you ever been to Cooperstown?”

“I don’t even know where that is.”

“Upstate New York. Home of the Baseball Hall of Fame. You should go if you ever get a chance.”

She wrinkled her nose. “Not really a fan.”

“Me neither,” I said. “That’s the funny part.”

It’s my boys who love baseball—they’re fierce little jocks, which is a source of constant bemusement to the two computer scientists who created them—and they were the ones who wanted to go. Turns out it’s a really cool place. There’s this one big room, a literal Hall of Fame, with commemorative plaques celebrating the giants of the game—guys with names like Enos Slaughter and Honus Wagner and Cool Papa Bell—and lots of smaller exhibits displaying the tools of their trade: bats, jerseys, helmets, catchers’ masks, whatever. The sacred relics. You can watch videos of the most amazing plays of all time and listen to the voices of dead heroes. You feel yourself in the presence of greatness, and you know what? It makes you want to be great yourself, or at least better than you currently are.

I’d been President of the School Board for eight months at that point, and it had turned out to be a supremely frustrating job. There’s so much inertia in public education, so much resistance to change and creative disruption. All my plans for improving things kept receding into the distance, and it was starting to drive me a little crazy.

I was especially worried about the high school. Our test scores were declining; our sports teams sucked; the spring musicals were unwatchable (trust me on this). We’d suffered a handful of overdose deaths in the past decade and at least two suicides. There was a pall of mediocrity and depression hanging over the place. You could see it in the faces of the students, the way they carried themselves. That feeling of pride I’d taken for granted as a teenager—the knowledge that I was a special person growing up in a special place—was gone. What I’d been searching for, without fully realizing it, was a way to bring that back.

The vision came to me, fully formed, while I was standing in front of the Hank Aaron exhibit, contemplating his Gold Glove. I could see it all so clearly. I closed my eyes, let the details imprint themselves on my memory. And then I said it out loud, more to myself than my family.

“We should do this at the high school.”





Tracy Flick


We needed a lot of things at GMHS. A new roof. Merit pay for outstanding instructors. Better textbooks. Smarter test prep. Water fountains you can actually drink from. Less meddling from the teachers’ union. The list went on and on.

Did we need a Hall of Fame? Not really. Did I say that to Kyle? No, I did not. Why would I? I wasn’t an idiot. I knew I’d need his support when I took over as Principal, and it made no sense to alienate him before I even had the job. In fact, I suspected that if I disagreed with him in our first face-to-face meeting, I might not even get the job. So yes, I let him talk. I nodded and looked interested and muttered a few harmless words of encouragement.

In my defense, it wasn’t a completely crazy idea. Lots of schools have a Hall of Fame. Usually the people who get honored are athletes, which only reinforces the existing (very unfair) social hierarchy and excludes a lot of exceptional people who are far more deserving of recognition. I actually liked that part of Kyle’s pitch—he said he wanted to focus on “a broad spectrum of excellence,” celebrating our former students not just for their athletic prowess, but for their intellectual and artistic achievements, their business acumen, their community service, even their parenting skills.

“We could totally honor someone for being an outstanding stay-at-home mom,” he told me, though he didn’t articulate the criteria for selecting one stay-at-home mom over another. “I have no problem with that.”