But you can’t make him dink.

“She’s gotten more aggressive since I last saw her play,” I said to my daughter-in-law, Becca, as we watched my granddaughter take command at her 6th-grade basketball game.

“The extra coaching she’s gotten has really helped her,” Becca said, before continuing, “She’s very coachable.”

“Coachable,” I said. “That is one thing that I am not.”

It’s true. “Coachable” is not a word anyone has ever used to describe me. I don’t take well to that kind of instruction!

Of course, it is most noticeable in athletics and body mechanics. I lack the capacity to hear the instructions from a coach, a pro, or a trainer, and turn those instructions into actionable items for my body.

Those golf lessons our kids gave me as a retirement present? I dutifully signed up with the lead instructor at the local driving range, practiced with him for hours, and then went out onto the course and ignored nearly everything he had tried to teach me. Instead, I have to do things my way, the way that feels most natural, even if it is completely wrong. Of course, the results have been predictable—lost balls and frustration.

My friend Marty has given himself the mission of coaching up my bowling scores. “Follow through,” is his mantra, and I hear it in my head every time I take my approach. Occasionally, I will follow through, but it’s more accidental than anything I consciously control. My muscle memory, like my general 70-year-old memory, is too intermittent and spotty to permanently instill Marty’s instructions.

Later in my courtside conversation with Becca, she told me how much she was enjoying pickleball lessons and how much she was learning from them. Becca, who had been a star high school athlete, is a very coachable person. I, on the other hand, have resisted taking pickleball lessons. And I have a hard time incorporating whispered on-court tips from my partners into actionable items. The neural pathway from my ears to my brain to the rest of my body just short-circuits when it should be firing on all cylinders.

I admit that my inability to benefit from all those lessons is probably a combination of a whole lot of stubbornness mixed with a tinge of laziness.

I’m just a mule lying down for my afternoon nap. That’s one thing I don’t need coaching for!

My friends help me learn a lesson.

Earlier this week, I texted my baseball buddies to wish them a happy new year and to offer condolences to the Cub fans among us on the reported death of Billy Williams, the Hall of Fame, sweet-swinging outfielder from the 1960s.

The replies arrived almost immediately.

“I just looked him up. Wikipedia says he’s alive.”
“Are you sure you don’t mean Billy Dee Williams? Or Billy Wilder?”

Soon the conversation wandered, as our conversations often do, but the message behind the teasing was unmistakable: I had probably gotten this one wrong.

So I went back to the source, a Facebook post I had taken at face value. There was no satire label, no obvious punchline, no reason to doubt it. And yet, there it was: false, simple as that. The mistake was not in the story. The mistake was in my response to it.

“Trust, but verify” has long been one of my guiding principles. When something sounds implausible or a little too dramatic, I normally check it against a reputable source before sharing the story or writing about it. Most of the time, that habit serves me well.

But this time I did not pause. I did not verify. I passed the story along. Not out of carelessness, exactly, but out of familiarity. A known name, a nostalgic figure, a post that felt believable. Sometimes the things that feel the most plausible are the ones we question the least.

That is what unsettled me.

This was not satire or parody, and it was not a scam angling for clicks or money. It was a small, needless distortion of reality, the kind that drifts quietly across social feeds, gathering momentum simply because no one stops it soon enough.

And in that moment, I helped it along.

We live in a world where truth has become something we negotiate rather than assume. AI-generated voices, fabricated images, convincing imitations, all of these blur the line between what appears real and what is real. The challenge is not that we cannot know the truth, but that knowing now requires effort, patience, and a willingness to slow down.

In that sense, the lesson for me was not about technology or deception. It was about discipline.

Verification is not a slogan. It is a habit we have to practice, even, and perhaps especially, when the story feels harmless, familiar, or emotionally resonant. I did not meet that standard this time, and I owe my friends, and myself, better judgment than that.

I write because I want to tell stories grounded in honesty and respect for the people who read them. When I fall short of that, I am reminded how easy it is to be swept along by the currents of everything we see, hear, and forward without thinking.

So I will keep the motto, but with a quieter, deeper awareness behind it.

Trust, verify, and when in doubt, take one more breath before pressing “send.”