Being the Best (and Very Lucky), 1986 Style

In 1986, I was a young 35-year-old who had been singing barbershop music for a year and a half.  I was living in Marshall, Virginia, a little village in Fauquier County that was a broad postal-defined area in the rural foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, nowhere near anything.  It wasn't the end of the world, but you could see it from there.  So the group I was singing with was small and not very good on pretty much any scale.

Late in 1985, though, my consulting work had me commuting every day all the way to Alexandria, Virginia, close to Washington DC, 63 miles each way.  I was getting home too late to attend the rehearsals of the group in Fauquier County, but I was enjoying the singing and there was a group in Alexandria I could head to right after work and get there in time, a mile or so from my consulting gig.

Sure enough, I decided to change membership, but it wasn't the most altruistic thing, either.  The Alexandria group was much, much larger, and just 5-6 years earlier had been the second-ranked barbershop chorus in the world for two years.  I thought, young singer that I was, that I could learn a lot more about the art form and become a better performer with them.  Plus, quartets formed out of choruses like that, and I was really interested in the bigger pool of good performers as candidates.

When I joined, Alexandria had just qualified for the international championship contest, to be held the following July in Salt Lake City.  I would have to learn the competition songs and choreography -- oh, yeah, those guys moved, too -- and qualify individually to be part of the group.

I want to convey that I was a novice and these guys were world-class competitors though, to be accurate, the group was far more than the sum of its parts.  Not that many of the 120 performers were very good singers, you see.  The skill of the director is to make a great deal more than what the individuals bring.  But I didn't quite get that.  I was in awe of what was around me.

There was a lot of effort and practice that went into the preparation for international.  I had no idea how good we were, since I had no experience with higher-level competition and could only respond to what our coaches were telling us along the way.

The convention began on a Tuesday, and my Best Girl and I flew out to enjoy it with no idea what to expect, though we'd attended one before it was as an audience only.  The contest itself would be on Friday (the intervening days were for quartets to compete), and I was really getting nervous about it.  We rehearsed hard, and I didn't want to screw up the precision of the group.

But here is the point of all this.

On Friday, we walked -- 120 of us -- from our hotel to the convention center where we would compete an hour or so later that day.  I was anxious and really a bit unprepared for what to expect.  I knew my part and all, but it was the experience of competing that was a blank for me.

As I walked, another gentleman from the group, ten years my senior but far more experienced, must have seen something.  He strode over to where I was walking, put his arm on my shoulder (he was much taller, not that that's an accomplishment), and said, "You know, you're going to have the chance today to be the best in the world at something.  You're lucky, hardly anyone gets an opportunity to do that."

That did it for me.  I was able to smile and appreciate the opportunity and embrace it, rather than fearing it.  Those simple words put things in perspective and  helped get it together for me, a dumb ol' kid from a tiny town in Virginia.  I went out there on stage with the rest of the guys and did my thing, calm enough to get through it and without making any serious mistakes, at least as far as I recall.  It did go quickly.

Later that day, the medals were called off, from five down to one.  By the time the judging chairman had read through the second-place silver medals (they would go to a suburban Chicago group, after the bronze medals had gone to Raleigh, Toronto and Cincinnati) without our group being called, we were an emotionally wrecked bunch of guys.  Sixth place?  Seventh?  First?

Then ... "Ladies and gentlemen, your 1986 international gold-medal chorus champions, the Alexandria Harmonizers!"

Not only had I -- we -- had an opportunity to be the "best in the world at something", we had actually become it.  For decades thereafter, through many more competitions and three more world championships, I never took for granted the good fortune I had to be in the right place at the right time.

I do not take for granted the good fortune I have had, and continue to do.  I live in the USA, the best place on earth to be.  I'm free to write this and the 700 preceding essays.  Many things have happened, not all good, over the years, as these pages can attest.  But I have had opportunities to experience what much of the world cannot, and I'm a lucky, lucky guy.

Cheers for the weekend.

Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
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