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A good boy

OllieDoor

It is coming on six years that Ollie and I have been together.

So I guess he really is about 10 now. The pups don’t come with papers from the humane society. They took a guesstimate of about 4. Sounded good enough for me.

We should take more pains to remind people what we think of them. The same applies to pets, of course. So I scratch Ollie’s ears and tell him I don’t know how I’d have gotten through the last six years without him.

I don’t know that he understands. I like to think he does, and that it’s not just all about the cookies.

I realize Ollie, my first dog, has been the one constant in a long period of change — flux? — that continues still. Departures have left the house quiet. Life arcs have altered completely. New relationships have sprung through the fallen leaves like rogue bulbs, promising all can and will be well.

Ollie holds steady. He wants to walk and sniff and chase the ball through the field. He wants to rough-and-tumble in the den. He wants to nudge me awake because it’s time to eat, and let’s go already! He wants to meet me at the front door every night. He wants to curl on the rug and listen to my guitar or warm his 10-year-old bones by the gas fire.

These things I know are true. These things I know are a welcome anchor. These things I could not do without. These things I thank him for every day, because it’s what you do when you call roll of the blessings in your life.

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Talkin’ (more) baseball . . .

Just to continue the Chase Utley dirty-slide, no-dirty-slide discussion a bit longer before Game 3 of Dodgers-Mets tonight, here’s an interesting counterpoint from SportsIllustrated.com to my thought that the Dodgers’ Utley did what players have done in baseball forever — with baseball’s tacit endorsement, despite take-out slides actually being contrary to the letter of the law.

 

MLB right to suspend Utley, now must ensure play never happens again

The umpires got it wrong on Saturday night. On Sunday, Major League Baseball got it right.

With its precedent-setting suspension of Dodgers second baseman Chase Utley for Games 3 and 4 of the NLDS against the Mets, the commissioner’s office all but admitted that the umps erred by not ruling Utley out for his overly aggressive takeout slide in NLDS Game 2 that ultimately resulted in the tying run scoring and left New York shortstop Ruben Tejada with a broken right fibula.

In the very first words of its statement announcing the suspension, MLB calls Utley’s slide “illegal.” Joe Torre, MLB’s Chief Baseball Officer said, “After thoroughly reviewing the play from all conceivable angles, I have concluded that Mr. Utley’s action warrants discipline. While I sincerely believe that Mr. Utley had no intention of injuring Ruben Tejada, and was attempting to help his club in a critical situation, I believe his slide was in violation of Official Baseball Rule 5.09 (a)(13), which is designed to protect fielders from precisely this type of rolling block that occurs away from the base.”

Read the rest here.

 

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Hard, fast and unfortunate

sliding

What happened to Mets shortstop Ruben Tejada via a hard, late takeout slide by the Dodgers Chase Utley in Saturday’s National League playoff game is every middle infielder’s greatest fear.

Catching a throw at second base, touching the base, gripping and throwing the ball to first and jumping up or out of the way before an elite, 200-pound athlete with a running start, metal cleats on his shoes and angry intent on his mind barrels into your lower body and knocks you into left field, as they say, is not easy nor for the faint of body or will.

Tejada was lined up, vulnerable — and wiped out.

Utley, a second baseman, slid straight into Tejada’s legs as the shortstop, after catching a flip from his second baseman at an awkward angle, tried to jump-spin at the bag and throw to first. Instead, Utley flipped Tejada up and over, breaking the shortstop’s fibula.

He was carted off, his leg in an air cast, Utley was ruled safe via a replay challenge, and the Dodgers rallied past the Mets to even their five-game series at 1-1.

You can find ample pages out there dissecting the play, focused on whether Utley was “dirty” or within the rules drilling Tejada as he did. I didn’t see the play live, but I’ve watched it numerous times this morning.

My humble take:

Utley was not dirty. Hyper-aggressive, yes, dirty, no. He employed a legal tactic, albeit from baseball’s Neanderthal days.

Tejada was unfortunate.

And it is all Major League Baseball’s fault.

Like it or not, Utley did what baseball’s interpretive rules give him freedom to do, slide hard into the second-base pivot man. It is interpretive because the rules leave it to the umpires to judge whether or not a runner clearly goes out of his way to interfere with a fielder making a play.

In this case, the issue is whether Utley abandoned all thought of reaching second safely and went directly for Tejada.

Of course, he went after Tejada — because baseball has allowed runners to go after middle infielders for more than a century.

Almost even with the bag, i.e. dangerously late, Utley slid to the right, never touching the base as he undercut Tejada. The irony is Tejada also never touched the bag after he caught the flip.

And it was all made worse for the Mets when Tejada’s failure to touch second was detected on replay and Utley was ruled safe — even though he left the field still without having touched second. And even though umps — wink, wink — routinely allow fielders to simply be “in the neighborhood” of second base, rather than actually touching the base, to record an out before throwing.

It is a mash-up of anger, hypocrisy, bruised egos and bodies that will reach through the rest of this series – that is, beanballs and one or more bench-clearing “brawls” are coming.

And it is one that I believe, thanks to the postseason spotlight thrown on this play and the severity of Tejada’s injury, will resonate through baseball with an overdue rules change.

I believe Utley when he says he didn’t mean to hurt Tejada, only to prevent him from turning a key double play. But I also believe the collision proves the arcane folly of keeping a play like this tacitly within the rules.

The takeout slide has been legislated out of high school and college baseball, to no loss of competitive intensity. As well, MLB a couple years ago banned the ability of base-runners charging to home plate — a la Pete Rose decades ago in the all-star game — to drop their head and shoulders like a linebacker and blast a catcher to prevent a tag or dislodge the ball.

The impetus was the knee that Giants’ star catcher Buster Posey had shredded on such a play. MLB adopted the high school/college rule; catchers can’t block the plate without the ball, and runners must slide into home.

That rule has saved needless injuries at the plate, just as the amateur rule that makes runners slide directly into second — and not detour to either side as Utley did — has prevented broken fibulas throughout the game. It’s also made the controversial “neighborhood” judgment no longer necessary.

It seems to me all that is good, and an obvious overdue adjustment needed at the top level of a sport where seven-, eight- and nine-figure athletes are the brilliant lifeblood.

Gamblin’ Pete Rose won’t understand. That is something we’ll just have to live with.

 

 

 

 

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A Hampton Boulevard Companion

This was fun.

I’d seen Garrison Keillor “perform” before, but this was a casual reading at the Old Dominion Literary Fest.FullSizeRender (1)

As everybody hoped — everybody being about 700 people in the Big Blue Room at the Constant Convocation Center — Keillor rambled and ad-libbed and during it all seamlessly worked in readings of favorite poems and sonnets and memoirs, all delivered in the homespun deadpan fans of his radio show “A Prairie Home Companion” have admired since 1974.

Keillor, 73, is retiring from the show next summer, he says. Letterman. Stewart. Keillor. Giants leaving the broadcast industry within the general proximity. It was great to sit in the front row and listen to Keillor be Keillor, because you never know how long  he’s going to do that now for public consumption.

I wrote the following brief review for the ODU news website I help populate every day. It doesn’t include some of Keillor’s bawdier bits, although none included the “F” word. He is incapable of uttering it, he said., due to his upbringing and sense of propriety. That was clear Minnesota truth, don’t ya know, on another night on which Keillor told tall, sardonic and very funny tales.

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Author, humorist and radio host Garrison Keillor regaled an appreciative audience with sonnets, limericks, and passages from his in-progress memoir – as well as winsome tales from Lake Wobegone – on Monday during his appearance at Old Dominion University’s 38th Annual Literary Festival.

“I don’t go to my Episcopal church anymore,” Keillor told the crowd of 700 in the Big Blue Room at the Constant Convocation Center. “They got a new rector who thinks he is the emcee of a variety show. As the emcee of a variety show, I don’t see it that way.”

Keillor, 73, will retire next summer as host of “A Prairie Home Companion,” the popular National Public Radio program he has hosted since 1974.

“I’ll try to tie up the loose ends from Lake Wobegone, and in the fall there will be a new host,” Keillor said at the close of his hour-long appearance. “Then I’ll look forward to listening to the show.”

In his trademark deadpan speaking style, Keillor shared passages from the memoir he is writing: “I have discovered I had a really happy childhood, which I had not known before.”

To applause, he rattled off the “87 counties of Minnesota,” which Keillor said he memorized in 5th grade and raced through recently for doctors to prove his acuity after a health scare.

He also recited what he called the perfect, and only, limerick on the word Syracuse:

“There was an old singer of Syracuse

Who was startled to hear his old dear accuse

Him of rushing and slurring

And thereby obscuring

The words that the writers of lyric use.”

“That’s a monumental piece of work,” Keillor said. “What good does it accomplish, I don’t know.”

Keillor also shared a few of his favorite sonnets, noting: “I have an obligation to write sonnets because I am an English major.”

But on a more serious note, Keillor described his love for composing sonnets like “Supper,” which reads in part:

“It was beautiful, the candles, the linen and silver,

The sun shining down on our northern street,

Me with my hand on your leg. You, my lover,

In your jeans and green T-shirt and beautiful bare feet.

How simple life is. We buy a fish. We are fed.

We sit close to each other, we talk and then we go to bed.”

“To make one’s imagination live within 14 lines of iambic pentameter, with a certain rhyme scheme, is a challenge worthy of an English major,” Keillor said. “To take ordinary things and put them into a form that Shakespeare would recognize is a worthy way to spend an afternoon.”

 

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Happy Birthday, Coach

I just found out today is Marty Schottenheimer’s birthday. He is 72.  marty

Knowing this makes me happy, because I got to cover Marty, a football coach who presided over 200 NFL victories, as a local sports writer a few years ago when he worked in Virginia Beach. I liked him a lot.

I didn’t come to my interaction with him, as coach of the dearly departed Virginia Destroyers of the now-defunct United Football League, with the bias of fans burned by ill-fated games during his head coaching tenures in Cleveland, Kansas City, Washington or San Diego.

In a put-up or shut-up world, his legacy isn’t the best because Marty never coached a team to the Super Bowl, which is why he is the only coach with 200 victories who isn’t in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. I just went in with the idea that it could be really cool to deal with a coach of such renown – hey, that’s Marty Damn Schottenheimer – and talk football.

I was right.

I was interested to learn why he was slumming in a startup pro football league destined to fold. Misting up, he told me a story about wanting his young grandchildren to see him do what he was famous for doing — coach football players.

Damn, Marty.

He didn’t tell me he’d signed a million-dollar contract that later wound up in court for non-payment. Business is business, sure, and I of course knew he was cashing in on a league desperate to create buzz. But once he was here, it truly seemed much more than that for Marty. He and his staff coached ‘em up hard. The Destroyers won the championship the only year he coached here, his only title as a pro coach. He connected to his players, all of them many decades younger, with old-school appeals to their pride and team spirit.

It was fascinating.

Anyway, my point is Marty was as genuine as any authority figure I covered over three decades. It wasn’t faux sincerity, either. He is the real deal, salt-of-the-earth from near Pittsburgh. Bill Cowher the ex-Steelers coach swears by him. And more than once, he told me to please stop in to see him and his wife. Pat, whenever I was in Charlotte, where they live.

That hasn’t happened. But I don’t doubt he meant it, nor that these years later, he would welcome me with a man’s-man handshake and happily reminisce about his one curious year in Virginia Beach.

I hope Marty had a happy birthday.

 

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Smile (somebody)

Smile (somebody)“Venus Flytrap” — or perhaps you know actor Tim Reid as “Ray Campbell” — evidently not amused by the questioning of the latest member of the Hollywood press corps …

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Good stories are good stories

I get to do all sorts of stories now as a writer for Old Dominion, stories I would have never thought of doing or believed I could do with any degree of competency back in the day.

Stuff on nuclear physics, I kid you not. Biologists working with bees and spiny lobsters, photographers headlining exhibits at the Chrysler Museum, filmmakers, novelists and musicians creating their next ambitious piece of work.

Sometimes, though, sports will cross my path, which is a treat, considering my professional background. ODU has its own sports information office that distributes news and features mostly on current athletes, so the stuff handed to me usually involves alumni.

A story got passed my way recently and I finally got to write it amid all the semester-opening writerly demands. It’s about a former ODU women’s soccer player, who transferred in from community college but wound up playing only one season, who despite raising her young son as a single mother, graduated in computer science, works in hush-hush information security, and has labored nine years in the women’s tackle football league you didn’t know existed, the Women’s Football Alliance.

Two broken legs later, and one gold medal playing for a Team USA you also didn’t know exists, Okiima “Sweet Feet” Pickett soldiers on as a fullback for the league-champion Washington, D.C. Divas.

Soccer was her life growing up in Charlottesville, but then other parts of life started happening. We talked about it all for an hour on the phone one day. We laughed a lot. Okiima is delightful. And then I got to revisit, in a way, the featury sports column I used to like to write so much that maybe could draw in non-sports readers. Those were always my favorites.

It’s a short story (posted at ODU news and minimally tweaked here), but I like it.

Meet Okiima Pickett.

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After Okiima Pickett broke her right leg twice in nine months playing tackle football, she had one thought: how soon till I can play again?

“It was a very traumatizing experience,” said Pickett, a 2003 graduate of Old Dominion University in computer science. “But I didn’t want to be known as the player who broke her leg and quit.”

Pickett, who played women’s soccer at ODU, is far from quitting the Washington D.C. Divas of the Women’s Football Alliance, even though she is 35 years old, has a titanium rod in her shin and screws in her knee and ankle.

A running back nicknamed “Sweet Feet,” Pickett is one of the Divas’ most experienced veterans with nine seasons under her shoulder pads. And in August, she captured her first championship of the 41-team league when the Divas defeated the Dallas Elite 30-26 in the title game in Los Angeles.

Her presence on the roster in 2015 seemed doubtful when Pickett’s leg was broken by a tackle during a game late in the ‘12 season, and then broken again in the first game of ’13, by the same opponents from Boston.

“Coming back from injuries like that, you have no idea what to expect,” said Pickett, who works as an information security engineer. “I was thinking my career might be over, wondering if I’d ever have my game back. So for me to be able to play again and contribute to a championship is an awesome feeling.”

Pickett did quit once; she stopped playing co-ed soccer near her Maryland home when teammates suggested she take her on-the-pitch aggressiveness to the Divas.

The idea intrigued Pickett, who said she asked to try out for her high school football team in Charlottesville but was denied by the coach, a family friend who worried about her.

“He said he didn’t want me to get hurt,” Pickett said. “I said, ‘But they won’t be able to catch me.”’

Pickett got pregnant and couldn’t accept the soccer scholarship she said ODU offered her out of high school. She wound up attending community college for two years and was recruited again for ODU’s soccer team. But with a challenging academic load, as well as her young son to care for, Pickett played just one season before she graduated in the summer of 2003.

Her son is 16 now, and Pickett said she is gratified he’s been able to witness the sweat and dedication she’s put into her comeback.

“Okiima is the ultimate D.C. Diva,” said teammate Kenyetta Grigsby, the team’s tailback who runs behind Pickett, a 5-foot-4, 140-pound fullback. “I didn’t think she’d let the leg injury stop her. She loves football and she loves the Divas, so I knew she’d be back.”

Pickett played for Team USA five years ago in the first International Federation of American Football women’s world championship – the U.S. won the gold — and said she hopes to make the 2017 national team at age 37, so retirement isn’t yet in the conversation.

“My leg can predict the weather,” she joked. “It still aches and stuff, and I also had mental hurdles to overcome this year. I needed to get my confidence back. In my mind, I feel like I limp when I run, although on film you see that I don’t.”

Grigsby said “Sweet Feet” should not fret.

“She had her leg so wrapped up at the beginning of the season, we called her ‘Peg Leg,’ ” Grigsby, a police officer in Northern Virginia, said with a laugh. “But she got her name back by the end.”

 

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Mute, is all

On another evil, hateful, murderous day in America I want more than ever to come home and snuzzle my dog. Text my kids how much I love them. Go for a swim. Have a big glass of wine. Ponder fleeting existence, purpose and grace. Question God. Once again.

I’m not incisive enough to know what the hell is going on. To understand what it is, not just here but around the world, with the unchained hate, the smoldering vile, the wanton and soulless ability to take aim at other human beings and propel killing orbs of hot steel and lead into their flesh and vital organs.

I despair over the numbness that gradually takes root one bombing after the next gunning after the next ambush after the next drive-by. I rue the snake-infested swamp that has become of public discourse, steroid-fueled by digital anonymity and vapor dreams of narcissistic grandeur, the dark cloud of doom and cynicism that grows distended even as I try to ignore it.

I cry for my daughter moved now to look two, three and four ways before venturing out in her new city, an adventure that should be filled with delight,  but in many ways induces dread. On both coasts.

These are universal and eternal questions, but I can only join the Greek chorus of endless, unresolvable rhetoric: I don’t know what God wants. I don’t know what the sacrifice of innocents is supposed to mean. I don’t know why whatever I did today for money is supposed to matter. I don’t know what to tell my kids. I hate not knowing what to tell my kids.

Fuck you, gutless Roanoke coward. Fuck you, Charleston pissant.  Fuck you, suicidal ghoul. Fuck you, pirate, monger, terrorist, zombie. Rage and beat the air, the recognition of birth and beauty is overwhelmed with infused poison, time-released with spiraling blades and smithereens of shrapnel for maximum wretchedness.

The reconciling teases, the reasoning defies. Rest in peace, tragic passengers.

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Trumped.

Really far afield here . . . because what I know and usually care about politics is like this (PowerPoint slide of hands held verrrrry close together) … but here’s my thought on explaining the Donald Trump phenomenon:

He is the magnetic, but half-crazy coach you always wanted to play for, no matter the sport. Right? Could be soccer, could be baseball, football, whatever. Remember when you were a wide-eyed kid trying to make that high school team, or hang on to your tenuous roster spot? You didn’t know or care how much your coach knew about the game, or what was really going on behind the curtain, as in who among the assistant coaches was really creating the game plan week to week. (Most do, you know . . . )

You just knew you liked your head coach, you liked his aggressive personality, his bubbling-over confidence, how great he made you feel at kickoff with his pre-game oratory,  how you didn’t want to disappoint him — ”We can DO this. We are the BEST. Are you ready!?”

“Hell, yeah we are ready!!”

That’s what I see in Trump as a presidential candidate. He has conspicuously not answered — and very possibly cannot answer since he is a businessman concentrated on making bank these last 40 years — a single substantive, traditional question (other than how he legally worked the system as a builder) about domestic or foreign policy. Yes, he would build a wall or “bomb the hell”out of the Iraqi oil fields to defeat ISIS. What? Really? What?

But it seems there is an amazing multitude of people who don’t particularly care about specific and traditional domestic or foreign policy answers right now, but who instead are at the point where they just want to feel good about themselves and their country and god damn it, China is NOT gonna beat us again! — whatever that actually means.

And so we have Trump, the Charles Barkley of presidential politics, who can say anything — seriously, he can say anything — and get the Teflon “that’s just Donald being Donald” explain-away. You’re the Man, Donald!” (Cue multiple swooning Trump-o-philes shouting “Trump, Trump, Trump. . . .”

That’s what I think this is, pretty much. Those who run for national office are rare among us. But Trump has the gene (if not the world-leader intellect or strategery  aptitude) to run without proving substantiveness other than he won’t get beat on deals. The expectation, then, is that he would hire competent (at the very least) cabinet members — and then get out of the way, like the best top executives.

That’s why I suspect Trump – thanks, too, to his mega-money — could be the one historic outlier who sticks this time. Who doesn’t run out of cash, or interest, etc. but who toughs it out through the hard pending winter of America’s venomous discontent.

For sure, based on the restaurant patrons I saw Thursday night who spontaneously shussed everybody around them and gathered near the TV when it came time for Trump to speak, the blustery, bombastic Man is a force with which to be reckoned. Now, and on into the grinding months of Election Season.

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Nose in a book

Somewhere along the way I became much more a magazine reader than a book reader.

It seemed to better fit my life, I guess. I wrote sports columns and features, some long-form but mostly quicker-hit, short-story stuff. So it was natural I’d be drawn to read, and be inspired by, similar reporting and non-fiction in places like The New Yorker, Esquire and Sports Illustrated.

(I tried Vanity Fair years ago, too, for a little while. But the cloying “famous actor said while spearing a piece of seared tuna drizzled with ginger marinade from his lunch plate” BS in the Vanity Fair celebrity puff wore me out.)

Anyway, I morphed into reading only a couple of books a year, maybe. A presidential biography; Lincoln, Jefferson, Truman. The mysteries of dogs. Golf psychology. A bit of fiction; “Life of Pi.” “The Kite Runner.” Stuff like that.

So I am proud to report — if only to myself on this blog for intellectual affirmation and behavioral reinforcement — that I have reacquainted myself with the delicious adrenaline of picking up a book I cannot put down, of carving out blocks of time to keep the pages turning and my imagination ignited.

It is “All The Light We Cannot See,” a masterful World War II novel by Anthony Doerr that won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. The characters are simply but sharply drawn in short, pulsating chapters, most only two or three pages. His multi-tentacled, richly woven story drips with visceral description, dialogue and emotion.

I got it from the Old Dominion library, grabbing it as an afterthought – lured by the Pulitzer note next to it on the shelf — on my way out after picking up the book of essays I actually walked in for.

I waited to start it but have raced to the final 100 pages, waking up early, putting off household chores, losing myself again (as it should be) in literature, ending this post (in a second) . . . to dive back in.

I hope to be again like my daughter and certain friends who have the next one — and the one after that — waiting even as their current pages flip and fly by, ink on bound paper, the wonderful melody of elegantly arranged words leaping forth to enrich my life and inform my own writing, such as it is.

It is so easy to drift. But I like myself more when I realize my lapse, even in this case if it has taken longer than it should have to right the course, back to the savoring of art and toward the land of the better read.