I am ready for some football

It’s been a year since Jayne and I left to spend the fall semester 2008 in London with our great group of Wingate students.

As wonderful as that experience was, I couldn’t help but miss the things that were uniquely American. One of the biggest was football. American football, that is. I watched or listened to a few games on the Internet, and Jayne and I went to an expatriate bar in Chelsea one Saturday to watch some college football via satellite TV. And the NFL brought a regular season game to London’s Wembley Stadium, an entertaining matchup between the New Orleans Saints and the San Diego Chargers that we caught a little of at a restaurant called The Big Easy. But otherwise it was a lost season until we returned in time for the bowl games.

That’s why I’m particularly excited about covering my first high school football game of the season tonight. (For those of you who are local, it’s Vance at East Meck, which should be a pretty good game.)

Since 1976, I’ve spent most Friday nights in the fall in a press box at a high school football stadium somewhere in this great country of ours. That covers both Carolinas, Florida, Alabama, Texas and Pennsylvania. (And I count last fall, as I made it a point to cover a game on opening weekend, just a few days before we left, to keep the consecutive seasons streak alive. )

To put it in context, when I started, I wasn’t that much older than the players I was watching, and now I could be a VERY young grandfather of one of them. I’ve written about the grassroots appeal of high school football before, and how, especially in small towns, going to a game can give you the flavor of a community. That’s the kind of thing I think about at the start of each season – and about the places and people I’ve encountered in previous seasons.

I couldn’t name the great majority of players I’ve seen, of course, but a few that I’ve covered on a regular basis ended up in the NFL – Derrick Brooks (Pensacola, Fla., High), released this spring after 15 seasons with the Tampa Bay Bucs comes to mind, as does linebacker LaVar Arrington, who played seven seasons with the Washington Redskins and New York Giants. I remember him as a precocious 9th grader starting for the 1993 Pennsylvania 4A state champion North Hills Indians in Pittsburgh.

But what I remember most about the games is the atmosphere and how much it all meant to the people who were there. National Public Radio is exploring this with a series of reports called "Friday Night Lives" – the title is almost certainly a play on Buzz Bissinger’s marvelous book about Texas high school football called Friday Night Lights." Oh yeah, there’s also that TV show.

Two NPR reporters will do stories from across the country during this season to relate to listeners what it’s like to play and coach the game and what its place is in the community. That should be fun to listen to. I’m looking forward to it, and to taking yet another journey of my own through this territory in American sport and culture. I am glad to be back.

UPDATE: East Mecklenburg 18, Vance 7 tonight. Freshman place kicker David Marvin drilled three field goals to help East Meck hang on for the win. Let's see, when he was born I had been covering high school football for...never mind, it'll just depress me.

Late innings

Somebody up there must know that I don’t have a lot of baseball left to cover this season, because I got an extra helping last night.

The first five innings of the Charlotte Knights’ game against the Gwinnett Braves last night at Knights Stadium were nothing extraordinary and went by in a little over an hour. Then baseball happened.

By the end of six innings, the game was tied 6-6 and then, after nearly 3-1/2 hours of play, went to extra innings tied 7-7. Thankfully, because I had to meet a 9:30 class this morning, it didn’t last much longer.

The Knights’ Tyler Flowers, a 23-year-old catcher who played in the Atlanta Braves’ organization last season, ended the game close to 11:30 p.m. with a two-out, three-run homer in the bottom of the 11th, giving Charlotte a 10-7 victory. Time of game, 4 hours and 4 minutes.

That makes it tough on a deadline but I did have time enough to talk with Flowers after the game. I should have been paying more attention to the game notes, as I missed the "guy beats the organization that traded him" angle. But it did come out in, I think, a more interesting way than usual.

Flowers hit his home run off a former teammate in the Braves minor league system, pitcher Juan Perez.

"I had caught him before, so I knew he had a good breaking ball and I didn't want him to beat me with it," Flowers said. "I wanted to get in the position to get a fastball."

He got one on a one-ball, no-strike pitch and slammed it to right center field to end one of the International League's longest games of the season.

In addition to describing this game, the title of tonight's post, completely and totally stolen from one of the many wonderful books about baseball by Roger Angell of The New Yorker, is appropriate for this part of the season.

After tonight the Knights (62-69 after Wednesday night's win) have just 12 games left and only four more home games. They're practically, if not quite mathematically, eliminated from playoff contention. So how does a player give meaning to the last string of meaningless games?

"There's plenty to play for," Knights manager Chris Chambliss said after the game. "These guys are trying to position themselves well for next season, whether it's with this organization or another one. And we play the contenders, so the schedule gives us a lot to say about who will get in the playoffs from our division."

I'm not sure I've ever believed that a non-contending team gets a lot of satisfaction out of playing that "spoiler" role, unless the "spoilee" is a hated rival.

But to paraphrase John Lennon, whatever gets you through the last long nights of the season, it's all right. It's all right.

Remembering Robert Novak

I couldn't help but think back a few years after reading about the recent death of conservative newspaper columnist and former CNN "Crossfire" co-host Robert Novak at age 78.

The journalist known as "The Prince of Darkness" came to Wingate in 1997, one of many prominent figures brought to our campus by the school's most prominent former student, U.S. Senator Jesse Helms, R-N.C., over the years.

The guest list, as you might imagine, usually skewed to the political right -- then Vice-Presidential candidate Bob Dole, ex-Vice President Dan Quayle, former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, as examples. But the names also included the Dalai Lama and then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, so the speakers helped accomplish what a good university should do -- expose students to a variety of viewpoints, including ones they won't agree with. It's called education.

But back to Novak. On that visit to Wingate, the Senator graciously gave some of our Communication Studies majors some time with him before his lecture that evening.

Novak took his nickname from a combative public persona and, he said in his memoir, his "unsmiling pessimism about the prospects for America and Western Civilization." His appearances on the CNN shows like "Crossfire" and "The Capital Gang" were great theater. He once said he gave politicians the choice between being a source or a target. Not every reporter can make that work for them.

But the man who spoke to my students couldn't have been nicer. He spent nearly an hour talking with them about politics, the state of journalism and -- with the young man who was our student newspaper's sports editor -- University of Maryland basketball. Turns out he was an avid fan of the Terrapins.

I remember asking him a question related to something I had heard him discussing a few days earlier with his fellow panelists on the most recent edition of "The Capital Gang." Someone was kidding him about his being registered to vote as a Democrat. Knowing his background, that didn't seem likely, and I wondered if it was all a joke.

Turns out it wasn't. Novak resided in the District of Columbia, where at the time you didn't have much choice if you wanted to vote in local elections. With little significant Republican opposition, the candidates who won the Democratic primary generally were elected. And if issues that affected his home and family were going to be left to liberals, Novak said, he at least wanted to have some say in choosing them.

In his last years, Novak made the news in a way that he would have preferred not to. In 2003, he wrote a column which outed a woman named Valerie Plame as a CIA agent. Plame was married to former diplomat Joseph Wilson, who had accused the Bush administration of twisting intelligence information to exaggerate the threat posed by Iraq in the months before the U.S. invasion.

The investigation to determine who leaked the information to Novak resulted in the perjury and obstruction of justice conviction of then-Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, Richard "Scooter" Libby.

"I had a terrific time fulfilling all my youthful dreams and at the same time making life miserable for hypocritical, posturing politicians and, I hope, performing a service for my country," Novak wrote in his memoir, "The Prince of Darkness: 50 Years Reporting in Washington."

Whether or not you agreed with his politics, he was a presence. You could also say that about the recently-departed Walter Cronkite and another influential journalist who died this week, "60 Minutes" creator and producer Don Hewitt.

All three were larger-than-life journalistic figures -- a breed which, sadly, is disappearing.

Cruising into a new global school year

School started back for me yesterday with the first faculty meeting of the new school year. I'm helping out with freshman orientation this time and they arrive on campus on Friday, so summer's pretty much over.

But even on the vacation Jayne and I just finished -- about which more in a moment -- there were reminders of the new year ahead. My school, Wingate University, is beginning its first year of a revised core curriculum which will focus on the student's place in today's global community -- these days you're a citizen of the world whether you want to be or not. So many of our core courses will now deal with "global perspectives" on literature, religion, history, fine arts and economics.

I took two books with me on our week-long vacation, a cruise down the Mexican Riviera on the Carnival Splendor. It's a long plane ride from Charlotte to Los Angeles and then there's a lot of leisure time, which is the point of a cruise. (I think I saw more people sitting and reading in one place on the cruise ship's deck than I've probably seen at most libraries in recent years.)

One of the books was "Monique and the Mango Rains: Two Years with a Midwife in Mali," by Kris Holloway, in which a former Peace Corps volunteeer recalls her two years in a small village in that West African country assisting the title character in a "birthing house." It's a readable and touching memoir which -- like the best books do -- gives the reader a window onto a world they might never otherwise experience.

It's required reading for incoming freshmen and we'll discuss it during the orientation class they're required to take during their first semester. The author will come to campus to talk about her experiences this fall. I hope one of the lessons the new students will get from this is how it feels to be in a place where everyone's different in some significant way from you, and yours is the foreign culture and language -- something many 18-year-olds haven't necessarily experienced.

The other book I brought along, which would be good required reading somewhere in this curriculum, is "The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization," by New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. Published in 2000, it's already a little dated by events, but it's a prescient and understandable guide to today's economic world.

And we saw it in action in a memorable kind of way, when our ship pulled into the port at Puerto Vallarta. One of the first things we saw on a major shopping street a ways from the port area was: Wal-Mart. And we actually went there, needing a few items that we hadn't brought along or that we thought too expensive to get on the ship. Purchases that would have cost us nearly $20 in the U.S. were about 90 pesos ($7), an indication of the country's continuing economic struggles.

Getting off the ship required running a gauntlet of tacky tourist-trap shops selling souvenirs, jewelry and watches (I could have had a "Rolex" for $20, darn it). But we also saw beautiful white sandy beaches and blue water there and at our other two stops, Mazatlan and Cabo San Lucas.

But what Jayne and I like the most about cruises is actually staying on the ship (don't call it a "boat" to a staff member), which has everything one needs for a vacation -- a place to sleep, plenty of food and a variety of choices of entertainment.

"It's not a hotel, it's a city," said Miguel Fernandes, a good-humored South African native who was one of two senior maitre d's on the cruise. He's in charge of the dining service on the ship, and he took me on a tour of the galley (that's nautical talk for the kitchen), which was fascinating.
"It's like banqueting, only on an enormously large scale," he said, walking me down long aisles where food was being prepared on stainless steel tables to be cooked in stainless steel ovens. The scale of the food preparation is massive -- about 6,300 shrimp cocktails for a seven-night cruise. (Jayne had one every night.)

Carnival's signature dessert is called a warm chocolate melting cake -- a ramekin of chocolate cake with a gooey chocolate center with vanilla ice cream served alongside. (We took Miguel's suggestion and tried it with butter pecan ice cream -- the nuts gave it a neat crunchy texture.) Guests consume about 900 of these just on the first night, I was told.

At the end of our cruise, we had a day to kill in Los Angeles before boarding a "red-eye' flight just before midnight Sunday to go home. Jayne and I are a good match in many ways, and a significant one played itself out as we figured out how to while away the time. We're both pop culture junkies so L.A. has a lot to offer us. But one of our stops might have been considered strange to a less understanding spouse.

We spent about an hour at Hillside Cemetery in Culver City, not that far from the aiport. It's the final resting place of one of our all-time favorite entertainers, comedian Jack Benny (1894-1974), and the first thing we saw was the white marble sarcophagus of Aaron Spelling, noted TV producer ("Charlie's Angels, "Beverly Hills 90210" and "Melrose Place") and father of Tori.
It's also where other Jewish stars in the entertainment industry are buried, including comedian Eddie Cantor, singers Al Jolson and Dinah Shore, and actors David Janssen and Michael Landon. And we saw the tombs of Hank Greenberg, the Hall of Famer who was one of the first Major League Baseball players to self-identify as Jewish, and blues guitarist Mike Bloomfield.

It was an oddly moving experience, a beautiful place which seemed more restful and conducive to contemplation that most cemeteries we've ever visited.

Our last meal before returning home was at a seemingly unlikely spot for Southern "soul food," a little restaurant called Aunt Kizzy's in a strip shopping center in tony Marina del Rey. I enjoyed some smothered pork chops, rice and gravy and exquisite collard greens and Jayne feasted on chicken fried steak, "spicy broccoli" and mashed potatoes and gravy. We understand that Eddie Murphy was a part owner of this place when it opened back in the mid-1990s, but not sure that's the case anymore.

The rest was routine -- return the rental car, shuttle back to the airport two hours before flight departure -- we needed every minute to get through check-in and security -- and on the plane taking us to real life. As Jimmy Buffet once sang, "It's been a lovely cruise." Now back to work.