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Auburn / football / Friday — Comments Off
17
Jan 14

The first football game

Just one thing today, a terrific artifact from 1892. This is a newspaper that covered the famous Auburn-Georgia game at Piedmont Park. It was the first ever football game in the Deep South. If you’d like to actually read the copy, which spans more than four columns, you can see a larger version here.

It seems more than the game has changed. The paper notes the average heights of both teams were around 5-foot-6. The average weights were in the 150s and 160s.

Auburn’s senior punter this year, Steven Clark, is listed as 6-5 and 230 pounds. Kicker Cody Parkey is an even six feet and 190 pounds. Auburn listed two wide receivers weighing in the 160s.

football / friends / links / things to read / Thursday / video — Comments Off
16
Jan 14

Mouth fist! Fist line!

We bought our first Girl Scout cookies of the year. Our friend Jeremy’s daughter is a Girl Scout. This is her first year. So he called and asked if they could drive over. This is good timing because we are usually visited by the most entrepreneurial young lady in the troop. She goes around selling to restaurants and dessert places.

Sadie, Jeremy’s daughter, beat her to us. We’d also promised to buy from another girl. So we’re buying a lot of cookies, but this is a good experience for the kids. Plus, cookies.

I turned on the exterior lights. A bit later Sadie rang the doorbell. Jeremy has stayed in his car. We discuss the cookies. It was in the 30s, so I invited her in, because we are friends. Sadie, who has the most ironic sense of humor you’ve ever seen on a child her age, says “Let me go ask my dad. For ‘safety.'”

She made the air quotes, which made my day.

So I filled out the forms. We had a good chat about why I invited her inside, why people shouldn’t invite her in, why she should stay at the door and why asking her dad was a very good thing. I’m sure they discuss that when they hand out the Girl Scout sashes, but you can never hear the safety lectures from too many different people.

We sent her across the way to sell cookies. Since they had cookies in the back of their car we collected ours and then removed the rest. They almost drove off without their supplies, until mock guilt at our pretend theft got the better of us.

But we were thiiiis close to establishing a black market for cookies.

Tonight we watched an episode of the seventh season of the Cosby Show. It guest starred Red Buttons, a comedian and composer. Buttons played the local hardware store owner. He was all worked up about a traffic accident that happened a decade prior. Turns out Buttons’ daughter wanted to marry the son of the other guy in that old car wreck, whom Buttons’ character is still mad at. That role was played by the great E.G. Marshall. If you let that scene play out, below, it is rather touching, with Cosby just sitting back watching two old masters work.

Buttons first movie was in 1944. He was still on TV in 2005, before dying in 2009. Marshall got his start in 1945 and worked until his death in 1998.

They first worked on the same project in 1947. This episode of the Cosby Show was shot in 1991. Fifty-four years in between. Of course, almost 23 years have passed since this episode aired …

Things to read … from this decade.

Goal Post kicker going home with family:

The fate of the animated, neon placekicker who welcomed generations of Anniston residents to Goal Post Bar-B-Q had been uncertain since the place closed in September. But this week the Calhoun County icon found a new home — just 2 miles down Quintard Avenue — with the family that established the famed restaurant in the 1960s.

If you like iconic neon, this story is great news. It is quite a shame that the old barbecue joint shut down, but at least the sign will live on.

Tornado impact minimal in north Alabama in 2013; second-fewest twisters in last 6 years:

Tornadoes in 2013 had a minimal impact in north Alabama and for the second straight year, there were no deaths attributed to tornadoes, according to the National Weather Service office in Huntsville.

The weather service today released its 2013 statistical review of tornadoes, which reflected that north Alabama saw its second-fewest number of twisters since 2007.

It was, the story notes, the second year in a row that the area had only two of what are considered “strong” tornadoes.

NSA collects 200 million text messages daily in untargeted sweep, British paper reports:

The program code named “Dishfire” collects data, including communications from people not suspected of illegal activity, and conducts an automated analysis. Among the data collected: Missed call alerts, details of border crossings derived from network roaming alerts, names and images from electronic business cards, financial transactions and travel details.

And, finally, something more amusing than all of that from across the Atlantic, bad British football commentary:

No doubt this will be a hit at Alabama, where they think their team might probably should be in the Super Bowl.

Auburn / football / links / running / things to read / Thursday / video — Comments Off
9
Jan 14

When your legs ache, it is all about your legs

It made it up to 48 degrees today, so spring is on the way! It was overcast, so spring will never show up! It rained, so spring is on the way! It was only mist and drizzle, and who knows what that means?

I ran in that today. Got in just under six miles. I have developed this pain on the outside of each of my calves. It wraps over the shins and then goes just into the instep of my foot. No obvious stretch fixes it. The pain in my left leg is aggravated when I go downhill. The pain in my right leg says you aren’t running up a hill no way, no how.

So I’m devastating on the flats, at least.

Weirdly, at about mile four or so the things stretched themselves out, or the nerves gave up or something. You know that brief moment when the absence of pain is a pleasurable feeling? I was flying at that moment.

I also went to the grocery store today, because I decided to make extra lean turkey spaghetti. Lean turkey is about two bucks cheaper, but this extra lean stuff, when surrounded by pasta and drowned in basil sauce, tastes exactly the same! What a world.

I did not go to the store while running, because I didn’t want the meat to go bad. Sure, we live a half mile from the store, but I run slow. Also, I didn’t want to cause a sweaty scene on aisle four.

Things to read … because there are things, and some of them are worth reading.

Gone in 79 seconds: Auburn at the BCS Championship is a pretty great piece for football fans.

Close to one-third of Americans were in poverty during economic downturn says Census data. We’re at about 16 percent, even now.

Watched this video today. Mike Ditka was slated to speak to the Texas Public Policy Foundation, but he had to cancel. So the group invited Texas state representative Scott Turner, a former NFL player, who gives a pretty good speech:

How Google Glass captured two very different communities talks about putting the glasses on the people of Crown Heights in Brooklyn, which is an interesting documentary concept.

If someone gave me Google Glass and asked me to tell my own story I’d borrow a shopping cart from the grocery story, sit inside, have someone push and take long tracking shots of everything.

It would keep my calves from hurting.

Auburn / football / iPhone / photo / Tuesday / video — Comments Off
7
Jan 14

The Reverse Tiger Walk

The often copied, and originally Auburn tradition of Tiger Walk — where the plays walk from the athletic department to the football stadium a few hours before they play — now has a companion tradition. When the team travels there is a Reverse Tiger Walk when they get back home.

This is the walk from earlier tonight, when Auburn’s team returned, tired from a cross country flight and a bus ride across half the state to make it back home. They found hundreds of fans waiting to welcome them, to congratulate them, to thank them:

They lined up diagonally across the length of the indoor practice facility. They were two and three and four and five deep on either side of the path the players would take. The team, fresh off a plane and then a bus, walked through the crowd, looking a bit tired, but there was plenty of enthusiasm in the air.

Athletics director Jay Jacobs greeted the hundreds in attendance and told the players in front of him, saying “This is truly what the Auburn Family means.”

To the fans, he noted, in case anyone lost count, “In the last 10 years no one has won more SEC championships than the Auburn football program.”

Head coach Gus Malzahn spoke to the crowd:

Senior running back Jay Prosch briefly greeted the crowd:

And so did senior defensive back, and Iron Bowl legend, Chris Davis:

Here is some video:

And that wraps up the football season, and the last real football thing I’ll write about here for a while.

Good thing we’re getting back in the pool tomorrow.

Auburn / football / Monday — 1 Comment
6
Jan 14

Every team has a story

Update: This piece has been picked up and syndicated at The War Eagle Reader.

This Auburn team, like every successful team, was built on hard work. The media and fans, though, missed the real story.

This was a team of second chances.

Take a bunch of guys that run fast and hit hard and are strong enough to block out pain and give them the opportunity to play football and get an education. A lot of those guys would have been in school somewhere and doing just fine if they’d never put on pads. Some are in school because of what they can do to impress us on Saturdays and what they do to themselves the rest of the week. They’re able to, perhaps, capitalize on that in their own way. They have skills that allow them to earn an education and make the leap of improving one’s quality of life just a bit easier.

Some of them are probably working their way through school with ease. Others have to work through it more diligently. But, then, they’re used to grinding. This is a chance, after all. That’s what college football is.

Consider some of the players on this team.

You’ve heard Nick Marshall’s story every time Auburn has been on television this year. Second chances.

All of America got a little closer to Jay Prosch if they watched the excellent pregame package on ESPN. He wasn’t recruited locally and made his way to Illinois. The schemes at Auburn changed, he got a waiver from the NCAA and, most importantly of all, got to come home to spend more precious time with his mother. Second chances.

Think about what Quan Bray endured as a high school senior. Try and grasp that, if you can. Where could life have taken that young man? Second chances.

Trovon Reed declared for Auburn on his mother’s birthday, just eight months after she died of cancer. He talked about family. We talk about family. The university markets family. This high school senior had just lost a big chunk of his and, suddenly, he was an Auburn man. What might otherwise happen to an 18-year-old young man in a different circumstance? Second chances.

Think about Chris Davis, who graduated in December. Here’s a young man raised by his mother and grandmother in a tough part of town who never knew his father, killed when he was a baby. The tale of his recruitment is fairly well known; there wasn’t a lot of it. Where would life have taken him without the right phone calls in high school? Once again he was able to show a skillset that, somehow, so often, gets overlooked. Where would he sit without landing on the kick return unit? Second chances.

Remember Shon Coleman. All he did was stoically pancake leukemia. Prime of his athletic life, already a budding star, and a doctor gives him that cruel diagnosis. Did I say stoic? Read the Yahoo! piece. He kept it to himself, shielding even his parents from the hardest parts. Through it all he found, perhaps, a calling to help others. Shon Coleman is taking his own second chance.

Some players are working for their third position coach or coordinator. Three classes have gone through the 3-9 season, an empty stadium, blowouts and the move from Gene Chizik to Gus Malzahn, however those things impact a young football player is something most of us can only analogize.

Much of this team knew Ladarious Phillips and Ed Christian who were killed, and Eric Mack, who was wounded on that terrible night in 2012.

Every man on the team has some story, or has been the shoulder a teammate leaned on during something most of us have difficulty comprehending. Remember that when players and coaches use the word “adversity,” for this team knows it, individually and collectively.

Think about what these guys have endured. Think about what these guys have accomplished, given the chance. Football is easy. Going 12-2, breaking records and hearts and stirring the very center of the souls of Auburn fans and staring down top-ranked Florida State? Not a problem.

At the end of it all, this wasn’t a team of destiny. They aren’t a team of luck. They didn’t succeed on the strength of a gimmick offense. They didn’t get all the right calls. The ball didn’t always bounce their way. Superman wasn’t in the locker room. Chris Davis wasn’t out of bounds.

This was one of the most entertaining teams you’ve ever seen. These are young men who learned to never quit, learned to recognize the opportunities life gives and learned to seize control of those moments for their own. This is a team of second chances, a team of champions.

They’ve proven, time and again now, that they are young men we should never doubt. I am proud and grateful that they gave us the most amazing run we may ever see and some of the greatest sporting joy we will ever feel. I am more proud and most grateful for what they have learned at Auburn.

Thanks and War Eagle. War Eagle forever.