That was the week that was....

OK, so we have a little catching up to do. Random observations from a week in the life.

Monday 9/18: The old saying that two things you don't want to see being made are sausage and legislation never was more true. Took my Advanced News Reporting class to the Union County Commissioners meeting for the first of several "real life" reporting assignments. And as in real life, some things of great significance can also be tedious to observe. Commissioners spent 2 hours and 45 minutes thrashing out the details of an Adequate Public Facilities Ordinance (APFO) for one of the state's fastest growing counties. We won't be there when the ordinance has an up-or-down vote on Oct. 2, but we will be at the following night's Union County School Board meeting where whatever happens will certainly be a topic of discussion.

Tuesday 9/19: Congratulations from Jayne and me to our good friend Jenny Cecil, who's soon going to work for one of our favorite journalism stops in our peripatetic careers, the Pensacola News Journal (http://www.pensacolanewsjournal.com) in Florida. She's a fine young photgrapher whom we got to know well last summer and here's hoping her career will take off in the home of U.S. naval aviation.

Wednesday 9/20: First issue of the year for Wingate University's The Weekly Triangle, soon also to be back up and running online at at http://www.theweeklytriangle.com. We have some work to do, but just getting the first one out is an accomplishment in itself.

Friday, 9/22: Spent the evening doing what I've done most fall Friday nights for the past 30 years -- covered a high school football game. Saw Indpendence High of Mint Hill extend its winning streak to 97 games, longest in the nation, beating Weddington, 44-0. More interesting than the score indicated. Weddington, which was competitive in both a regular season and a playoff game against Independence last year, spent nearly half the second quarter on a potential game-tying touchdown drive, only to fumble the ball away. Independence returned it 80 yards for a touchdown and was never threatened after that.

The winning streak has to come to an end eventually, but it doesn't look like it will happen any time soon.

Saturday, 9/23: Visited with my brother in South Carolina and we watched Clemson rout North Carolina 52-7. For a Clemson graduate living in Charlotte, college football doesn't get much better. Makes up for a long Homecoming afternoon at Clemson in 2001 when I suffered through a 38-3 Homecoming loss to the Heels along with a couple of friends of mine.

Today: A Sunday at the Southern Women's Show at the Merchandise Mart in Charlotte is becoming a fall tradition for Jayne and me. Jayne's an independent sales director for The Pampered Chef (http://www.pamperedchef.biz/jaynecannon) and she's been in charge of the Pampered Chef booth at the show for the past several years. I always lend whatever muscle I can muster to the packing up and tearing down part of things.

The show is pretty much a full-out tribute to the power of American commerce, and it's always amazing to see the variety of products and services offered, from brooms to sunrooms. But for me, the biggest attraction is a focused blitz of the booths offering free samples of food. Favorites: Mayfield (See http://www.thedairyblog.com) ice cream and Margaret Holmes (http://www.margaretholmes.com) canned Southern classic foods (squash with Vidalia onions this year), usually washed down with a little Cheerwine (http://www.cheerwine.com) Unfortunately, had to settle for Diet 7-Up this year.

Is this a great country or what?

Separation Saturday

In the interest of ethical blogging, I'll start with a disclaimer. The following post is a re-enactment of events which occurred earlier today. Portions of the day have been edited for length.

It's a college football Saturday, and big challenges lie ahead. On TV, they're giving today's games the (to me) awkward title of "Separation Saturday." Separation, I suppose, of the pretenders from the contenders for the national championship in big games such as Michigan-Notre Dame, LSU-Auburn, Florida-Tennessee and the University of Southern California (where I grew up, USC is in Columbia and nicknamed the Gamecocks) vs. Nebraska.

My agenda will be mostly different today. As I explained a little in my last entry, my pursuit of higher education took me to Clemson (Alma Mater No. 1), the University of Florida (No. 2) and almost a decade later to Texas A&M University (No. 3). I follow all three, with the most emotional investment in Nos. 1 and 2, which I attended when the world was much younger.

The scheduling gods have decided that this week they should all play at night. Clemson at Florida State, kicking off at 7:45 (ESPN), Florida-Tennessee in Knoxville at 8 (CBS) and finally Texas A&M vs. Army in San Antonio (ESPN2), a 9:15 p.m. start. A test of mental agility and of physical proficiency with the remote.

It begins easily enough. I get to focus complete attention on Clemson-FSU for 15 minutes and UF-Tennessee begins just as Clemson's kicking game melts down -- a blocked extra point returned for two points and a blocked field goal for a touchdown and FSU up 9-6.

From that point we toggle between the ACC and the SEC game. Halftime of the Clemson game coincides roughly with the kickoff of the A&M-Army game so we can delay the start of the three-way remote shuffle for a little while yet.

Trifurcation begins between 9:30 and 9:45 and it soon becomes apparent that I can't handle it. Clemson, up as much as 20-9, appears to be on the ropes late in the third quarter, as FSU has tied the game. Florida loses an early lead and trails 17-7 in the third. A&M is losing early to a scrappy Army team. Army is coached by Bobby Ross, a former NFL and Georgia Tech coach, whom I encountered early in my reporting career when he was at The Citadel in the late Seventies. (Funny how much older he looks now. I haven't changed.)

I'm forced to make some decisions, so I lead with the heart. Stay with Clemson to the finish. The Tigers win on a James Davis 1-yard touchdown run with eight seconds left in the game. Clemson coach Tommy Bowden wasn't kidding when he told the sideline reporter at the half that he wasn't going to kick it again.

Turning over to the game at Rocky Top, I just miss Florida's go-ahead touchdown with 6:30 left in the game to take a 21-20 lead over the Vols, but get to watch them hang on and celebrate.

The day finally ends at 12:39 a.m. with Texas A&M surviving a foohardy call by Head Coach Dennnis Franchione and holding off an inspired Army team, 28-24. A&M went for it and failed on a fourth and 1 at its own 28 with less than three minutes left, and Army drove to the Aggies 2 before the clock ran out.

In other games, I think that Notre Dame lost to Michigan, that Oregon-Oklahoma was a one-point game, and that Southern Cal beat Nebraska, but I'm not sure. Just know I'm 3-0 in the ones that mattered.

Call it Satisfying Saturday and off to bed.

Thursday night football

I'm watching Maryland and West Virginia play college football on ESPN tonight, mostly beacause it's college football and I'm an American male. It isn't a very good game, even though the announcers are trying to will it to be so.

There's something that isn't quite right about college football on Thursday night, and those Tuesday and Friday night games that are televised from time to time these days are even more of an abomination. Maybe it's just the power of tradition -- my college student experience was all at Division I schools in the so-called power conferences and so I've been convinced for years that all college football games should be played on Saturday afternoon. (Just on what I've heard, I would exempt the LSU Tigers from that, as would anyone who has ever seen a game in Baton Rouge on a Saturday night.)

But beyond just being "old school," I think my objections to weekday college football also come from my experience working in academe.

A couple of years ago, I attended a game at Clemson (Alma Mater No. 1) with a couple of friends. A Saturday football afternoon at Death Valley is worth another post, which will come a little later this fall.

I picked up a copy of The Tiger (http://www.thetigernews.com), Clemson's student newspaper, of which I'm a proud former staffer. Among the stories in that issue was an account of campus preparation for the next game, coming up the following Thursday against N.C. State on ESPN.
It was a classic case of the tail wagging the dog. University employees were encouraged to leave work by 2 p.m. to free up parking for the fans coming in from out of town. Instructors who taught Thursday evening classes were free to make their own decision as to whether to cancel class, but the subtext was that they weren't going to be discouraged from doing so. Don't want to interfere with the big event.

I've covered big-time college sports enough to know that TV money drives these decisions and that fan (and in this case student/faculty/staff) needs are secondary. Remember when you knew at the beginning of the season what the kickoff time would be for a game in November?

Not anymore. Let's see what ABC/ESPN/Lincoln Financial say first and if there are no TV takers, the game may just start at 1 p.m. like God intended.

Drive-by sighting

Sign for a church on N.C. Highway 218: "If you feel yourself sliding, touch base with the Savior."

9/11 Revisited

Sept. 11, 2001..Like everyone old enough to remember, I can recall where I was when my wife, Jayne called and said, "Can you get to a television?"

A plane had just crashed into one of the World Trade Center Towers in New York City, she said. I wondered whether it was a small plane gone dreadfully off course. Then I rushed from my office to the nearby studios of the Wingate University TV station in time to see on CNN the second plane crashing into the other tower.

After that, it's mostly just impressions and emotions. Fear: You mean they've crashed a plane into The Pentagon, too? Anger: Who are these monsters who want to kill Americans? Confusion: Why did this happen and what happens next? Jayne and I sitting in front of the television crying at one-heart rending story after another about loss and grief.

I also have a small memory of the week post 9/11 that came back as I drove past our football stadium to campus this morning. And in some ways it's more instructive than the big, overwhelming ones.

We had a home football game that Saturday, and an area high school band was playing the pre-game show and an ROTC unit from that school presented the colors. The mood was somber and no one talked over "The Star Spangled Banner" as it was played with gusto by the high-schoolers.

In our modest little stadium the fan experience is much more intimate under normal circumstances than what you get at the larger Division I temples of the game. But the anthem that day was especially meaningful, Francis Scott Key's words about searching for the symbol of our country flying amidst the chaos of battle having some resonance. For the first time in a long
time, I paid attention.

Some context is necessary here. It's not an exaggeration to say that I've heard the national anthem a few thousand times in my lifetime, as many sports events as I've covered. And I believe I've heard it sung every way humanly possible -- close-harmonized by a female barbershop quartet, belted out by a 5-year-old boy who made up in volume what he lacked in knowledge of the words, delivered by singers channeling everyone from Marvin Gaye and Mariah Carey to Pavarotti and Tim McGraw.

The good, bad, on-key and off-tune, until it was easy to take for granted. And I had come to believe that such frequent repetition devalued the song, welcoming the inclusion of "God Bless America" and "America the Beautiful" at sports events as more relevant to our time and the state of the nation.

Five years on, I have to say I believe that again. I've reverted to my pre-9/11 stance of standing respectfully and every once in a while singing along, but not really thinking about it.

That's sort of what's happened to the rest of the country, recent polls tell us. Many of us have lost that surge of patriotism and the sense of all being in this together as one nation. Not counting those who serve or have served or who have loved ones in Iraq or Afghanistan, we haven't been called on to sacrifice much or to turn our ideals into action. (Bill Maher's line comes to mind: "Fly a flag from your SUV. It's literally the least you can do.")

It's easy to display a glib and facile patriotism and I've always been uncomfortable with the way the sports world sometimes encourages that. (In fairness, sports organizations honor our country with some real moments too, as on Sunday when the Carolina Panthers used their satellite facilities to allow families of service men and women in Iraq to talk to their loved ones here.)

The mythology of love of country and sports values of teamwork, fair play, etc., however, often hide a more complicated reality. See Gary Smith's article in the most recent issue of Sports Illustrated, recounting the death of NFL player turned Army Ranger Pat Tillman in a firefight in Afghanistan in 2002.

The free-spirited Tillman was at best an unconventional patriot, but he was moved to action by the events of Sept. 11, enlisting to serve with his brother. And the first accounts of his death in combat was the perfect account of American heroism -- until the U.S. Army's reluctant investigations revealed that he died needlessly from friendly fire.

That's the way a lot of things are in he world after the 9/11 attacks -- filled with ambiguities and uncertainties that we should have the freedom to work out for ourselves. The American people should always remember this day and honor those who were lost. But no one should be told how they have to do that.

Let's get it started....

First, I should explain the title of this blog -- completely and totally stolen, and if you're a baseball fan of a certain age you'll know it.

"The Old Perfessor" was the nickname that sports writers hung on Casey Stengel, the legendary manager first of great New York Yankees teams (1949-1960) and then of the equally legendarily bad early New York Mets.

After a bunch of lame false starts, I settled on it because it just fit. I am, after all, a professor of journalism and public relations at Wingate University, a private university near Charlotte.

Old? Well, not so much, but I am old enough to remember Clemson-South Carolina football games played on Thanskgiving Day, the Carolina Cougars, the NFL on TV in black and white, and Pat Conroy, the writer, as a scrappy little guard for awful basketball teams from The Citadel playing in the Southern Conference tournament at the original Charlotte Coliseum. (And most of those are really early memories, by the way.)

So this blog will be about sports, but it will also be open to other topics. And I can only hope to be as shrewdly insightful as Old Case, owner of one of the brightest and most subtle minds ever to reside under a baseball cap. But I do hope that I'll be a little more straightforward with my use of the written English language than he was with the spoken one.

The other thought that propels the start of this blog is that you should never say "never." I see myself as an unlikely blogger. With all due respect to friends of mine who have blogs, I've been slow to embrace them, much less to do one. Mostly it's because I think that opinions are so easy to come by in cyberspace, many of them of little value, that I would just be adding to information overload. But in the interest of trying something new, here goes.

As I tell my students, if I don't think I have something valuable to say, I won't come to class. (That almost never happens...) I'll treat this blog the same way.

Finally, I'm starting this on the first Sunday of the NFL regular season. Today I covered the Carolina Panthers-Atlanta Falcons game at Bank of America Stadium here in Charlotte. Actually, I covered Panthers' rookie DeAngelo Williams, Carolina's No. 1 draft choice out of the University of Memphis, for the Memphis Commercial Appeal (http://www.commercialappeal.com)

Williams, a quietly confident young man, didn't play a huge role in the game, which meant that he was one of the few Panthers that didn't make a mistake in a 20-6 loss. Atlanta QB Michael Vick wasn't spectacular, but he was smart enough to realize early on that the Falcons would be able to run on the Panthers at will. And the Atlanta defense got inside the head of Carolina QB Jake Delhomme, an emotional player, but one who usually plays under control. And when you can frustrate Delhomme, you can usually beat the Panthers. A big win for Atlanta, and a loss that will test how much resiliency the Panthers have.

"You remember the year they operated on Whitey Ford? For weeks you thought you had bone chips in your elbow." -- Doris Day to hypochondriac Rock Hudson in "Send Me No Flowers," which my wife, Jayne, has on the DVD player right now. It's absolutely hilarious.