For all the Gray-Haired Guys and Soon-to-Be-Gray-Haired Guys in Tango Colorado

From Better Nutrition Magazine

No Guts, No Glory
By John Monahan

The vibrant man on our cover this month is 65-year-old Murray Moore, a prostate cancer survivor we’ve chosen to represent men of good health.

You’ll notice that Murray still has his shirt on. We’ve abandoned the convention maintained by virtually all men’s health and muscle magazines that the cover hero must, at the very least, bare his washboard abs. We’ve also dispensed with the admiring busty blonde.

I know from personal experience that it’s easy to define yourself as a man solely by the definition of your muscles. But as a man ages—and his beard turns gray, like Murray’s—he understands that manhood is not vanity. Nor is manhood begrudgingly feminine.

As Joe Lewandowski writes (“Just Do It,” p. 34), men today are awash in ideas about who they should be, without much anchor to who they truly are. Indeed, the very words “male bonding” are now the stuff of insipid sitcoms where men are portrayed as frightened dimwits, even as women are encouraged to run with wolves.

Something is very wrong when a man’s personal power comes from the gun in his hand or the money he’s amassed or the cant he expounds.

The most powerful men I know have become that way through suffering for a purpose other than themselves. The pains of life they’ve endured have dampened their narcissism and steeled their inner strength—and this, rightly so, has allowed them to express genuine moments of joy.

It turns out that the cliché that high school football coaches used to spout—“No guts, no glory”—is true. Except the glory isn’t in trouncing an opponent—including oneself—but in self-disinterested knowledge and the compassion that results, otherwise called love.

Love like this knows no gender—nor bounds, for that matter. And it’s that wisdom you can see in the face of Murray and other old guys who, though they may have lost their hair, have found their spirit.