Month: April 2004 (Page 2 of 2)

Catching Up, Part One

Trying to organize my thoughts from recent trips while watching the national championship game. I think it’s safe so say I’m one million times less tense tonight than I was a year ago tonight (or April 7 I guess). I don’t recall a time when I was wound as tightly as I was leading up to the KU-Syracuse game. Even if we had won, I don’t know if I could have enjoyed it as tense as I was that night. Tonight, I can just sit back and watch. One of the benefits of your team losing when there are still games to play.

Good grief, are there really only two seniors starting in this game? Not to mention the fact Tech lost freshman Chris Bosh a year ago. I need to start looking for tickets to the Tech-KU rematch in Lawrence next year; there’s going to be a ton of talent on the court that night. I think Paul Hewitt is my favorite young coach in the college game. Obviously, he’s a heck of a recruiter, he’s proving his a very good coach, and I love his demeanor off the court. Seems like a very solid guy.

I’m working away this afternoon with MLB Gamecast or Gamecenter or whatever they call it pulled up, following the Royals – White Sox game (not realizing until tonight the game was on WGN and I could have been watching). It gets to be 7-2 White Sox and I shut it down to concentrate on some other projects. For grins I check the score around 5:00. Heavens to Betsy! What a comeback! I think the decibel record which had to have been set on opening day in 1999 when Mike Sweeney launched that absolute bomb off of Minnesota had to have been broken when Beltran went deep today. Nice little starts for Juan Gone and Benito Santiago.

First bad call of the game, Tech called for a foul on what looked like a clean block. Bang-bang, so by itself not a bad call. But the ref waited until the shot was missed to blow the whistle rather than calling it immediately. One of my officiating pet peeves. And now we have our first 12-30 reference. Thanks, Jim Nantz, thanks a lot for ruining my night. Four more free throws…

As you may recall, a week ago I spent the evening just a couple miles from the house we lived in during our year in the Bay Area. Being the reflective cat I am, I reminisced a little as we pulled into San Leandro that night. While it was very strange to fly over our home in Indianapolis last month, it was equally as strange to look down during our final descent into Oakland and see the golf course I worked at, the court I played basketball on almost every afternoon, and the street we lived on in ’86-87. When you leave someplace and return later in life, there’s always a time machine quality to your experience. During a trip to the Bay Area last spring, I actually drove over to our old neighborhood, cruised by the house, the golf course, and a couple other landmarks. Things seemed the same in some ways, like I hadn’t left in others, though I realized my memories were probably vague enough that things that simply seemed familiar were probably quite different. What really blew my mind was when I realized it had been 17 years since we lived there! I had been gone long enough to finish high school, go to college (for a long, long time), live through my 20s, get married, and move another 500 miles further east. The year we spent there was such a big part of my development that it always seems more recent than it really was. Was it really almost two decades ago that I spent my afternoons hooping on the eight foot goal at the elementary school, hoping I would get invited over to the real games by the older guys from Oakland who ran the big court? (Not that I ever became a great player, or even a consistently good one, but I swear, each time I got recruited to the A league games, I always, always knocked down a couple jumpers early so everyone thought I could play. I made sure I passed a lot after that so I didn’t ruin the image. Those of you who have played with me in my 20s probably wished I continued to stop shooting so much.) Was it that long ago that I spent my evenings bundled up, driving the cart that picked golf balls off the driving range, listening to LL Cool J and the LA Dream Team on my Walkman?

Make it two bad calls against Georgia Tech. I’m really torn. Billy Packer will obviously always side with the ACC teams. So do I agree with him in these situations, or call him an idiot?

With the gender of Little Girlfriend established, I’m noticing more and more songs that can be used as a soundtrack for raising a daughter. I mentioned Stevie Wonder’s “Isn’t She Lovely” last week. On a recent flight, while shuffling through the MP3 player, I found another. Although written more as an ode to a woman who wears the pants in the family, Neil Finn’s “She Will Have Her Way” seems like an appropriate way of summing up how little girls wrap themselves around their daddy’s fingers (or is it the other way around?). Neil adds an excellent coda to the song on his Seven Worlds Collide live album. “There’s something about that face when you wake up that makes everything, everything alright. Yeah, she will have her way.” I’m already turning into a big softie.

More later (including now out of sequence thoughts on the Tech-UConn game)…

 

Opening Day

Big day. Huge day. Important day. Opening Day in baseball. As should always be the case, the NCAA championship game is tonight as well. You may recall my suggested sports calendar last fall required baseball beginning the day college basketball ended. And just for the cultural reference freaks out there, it’s the 10th anniversary of Kurt Cobain’s death. I’ve got a lot to work through here, without even touching what I’ve compiled over the last two weeks. Here goes.

Opening Day just ain’t what it used to be. Games in Japan, Sunday night ESPN openers. Maybe it’s living in a non-MLB city, but I didn’t wake up thinking, “Wow, it’s opening day!” this morning. Still, even if your favorite sport isn’t baseball, there’s something special about MLB opening day that’s unlike any other sport. It’s the symbolic beginning of spring, the gateway to summer nights sitting in front of a radio listening to the scores coming in from the West Coast. In the sport that is the least generous with postseason opportunities, Opening Day is the single time when fans of every team can hope for October glory. Now that I’m into my 30s, Opening Day is the slightest bit bittersweet. Instead of appreciating the amazing level of play, unequaled quality of ballparks, or unrivaled access to games for the casual fan, I look back longingly on the glory days of my youth in the late 70s and early 80s when I knew almost every player on every roster. My summers were spent carefully allotting time to reading the box scores, sorting my baseball cards, playing Coleco Head-to-Head baseball, playing any number of backyard versions of baseball, then watching/listening to games that night. The game seemed simpler, more pure, more romantic then. It’s always easy to forget that in addition to all the changes in the game, it’s really the massive changes in my life since I was 10 that make the game different.

Two suggestions to baseball: A) With the exception of teams that play in completely closed domes or the states of Florida, Georgia, Texas, Arizona, and Southern California, all games the first two weeks of April should be played during the day. No one goes to the games after opening day anyway, why not give the players and the 2,000 people who come out a break and play in the daylight hours to avoid wind chills in the teens? Just a thought. B) The alternate jersey thing is completely out of control. I demand a rule that only one team should wear their alternate jersey in a given game. Last week, the Orioles and Mets played a preseason game and each squad wore orange jerseys. Isn’t the whole point of jerseys so you can quickly tell which team is in the field and which team is batting? I had no idea who was doing what when I saw highlights of the game. Home team should have first call on jerseys, and if they wear something dark, the visiting team should have to wear their light tops.

I’m really concerned that so many of the Royals’ hopes rely on Juan Gonzalez’s health and happiness. In the last year of the Carlos Beltran era, this could be the last opportunity for the Royals to play in October for a few years. I hope Juan doesn’t start pouting in July or strain some muscle none of us have ever heard of in August and derail the Royals’ pennant run.

I like UConn tonight, not because I harbor any ill will towards Georgia Tech for beating KU, but because I don’t think Tech will be able to control Emeka Okufor. And yes, I puked when I read the article last week saying Okufor’s father had called the KU coaching staff two times to request they scout young Emeka when he was in high school and Roy Williams never responded. I know you can’t just plug Emeka in and keep everything else that happened the last three years exactly the same, but imagine for a minute him in the same rotation as Drew Gooden, Nick Collison, and Wayne Simien over those seasons. All that desire to win the national championship that Roy has in his little finger might have been quenched.

Cobain killed himself ten years ago today, but it wasn’t until April 8 that his body was found. I remember getting home from work on April 8, 1994, laying on my bed reading a book about the ills of college basketball recruiting, and noticing my radio, which I could barely hear, seemed to have an endless stream of talk and very little music. I leaned over, turned it up, and heard the news. I can’t say I was devastated or even shocked. In fact, initially, I’m embarrassed that I was excited because now our generation had our musical martyr. I wasn’t a huge fan of Nirvana at the time, leaning more towards the more accessible songs of Pearl Jam from the beginning. I wasn’t some angst ridden kid who never felt comfortable outside my insulated group of friends who experienced similar pains. I had a pretty good life. Cobain’s pain always seemed first person, which was uncomfortable to someone who hadn’t endured anything worse than a couple bad breakups in 23 years of living. Eddie Vedder’s pain always seemed third person and fictional, something I could listen to and understand from afar. It wasn’t until much later that I appreciated what Cobain was singing about, not because of any personal experiences, but more from the maturity that allowed me to take in the perspectives of others. As I grew to appreciate Cobain’s influences, his music made more and more sense to me. Now, I think he was a genius, at least with a guitar and a notebook. The 90s alternative rock revolution was a truly great time for music, and no one reached the heights that Cobain and Nirvana reached. I don’t think things would have been different if he had lived. Perhaps Nirvana would have released another great album or two, but nothing that would have altered the musical landscape. They did it once, the movement had been unleashed, and regardless of their future success, it was destined to die out right around the time it did fade away in 1996-7.

How to handle a time change properly: We drove to St. Louis Saturday for a wedding and gained an hour. We drove home Sunday and made no changes to our watches. Not bad. I will complain, though, about having to revamp my life again. I’m back to starting work at the same time as my compatriots in Kansas City. That extra hour in the morning was kind of nice. The sun is hitting our windows at 6:20 AM or so. All my meetings that are scheduled weekly are suddenly an hour earlier. Sigh.

The little girlfriend has been going nuts. Saturday night, S. described the movements as “flips” and when I put my hand on her stomach, there was some serious activity going on. Last night, we decided to follow the guide books and listen to some classical music to stimulate the math part of her little brain. Immediately, her level of activity increased greatly. So she’s either going to be very good at math, or she really wanted me to switch back to the Old School Rap channel I had been parked on earlier.

 

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