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football

Mondays need better titles, I know

Almost football time. People here are counting the days. I won’t go on and on about it. I’m tired of that to be perfectly honest. I do enjoy it, the drama and the emotion and the collegial cheering. I’ve come to be more interested in the business and the personal. Especially the personal.

Like these stories. I really want to see Shon just blast someone into the dirt, stand over them and say “CANCER!” He deserves that. With playing time in sights, cancer survivor Shon Coleman trying to ‘get better every day’:

The cancer went into remission just weeks after starting chemotherapy treatments in April 2010, and he continued to receive weekly injections following that diagnosis to ensure it wouldn’t return. It never did.

His return to the field came much later, though, as Coleman was finally cleared to practice with the Tigers in April 2012, working back into form ever since.

It’s the versatility and natural ability he showed during his high school career that has him on the verge of breaking into Auburn’s two-deep depth chart, likely the first in line to play whenever starting left tackle Greg Robinson needs a breather this fall.

“I feel comfortable on both sides, really,” he said. “I pretty much got so used to both sides that I can switch up and have everything down pat.”

Another young man, a similar story. Samford long snapper Perry Beasley living college football dream again after beating cancer 3 years ago:

On Aug. 30, he’ll get the chance to run on the field as a college football player when Samford travels to Georgia State. The Georgia Dome is minutes from his home, so family, friends, even nurses who helped treat him, will be in attendance.

And while Samford’s goals are high, Beasley’s shining moment will be realized when he takes the field with his teammates.

“For me, it’s already set — that I’m doing what I love again,” Beasley said. “I definitely think that whenever we run out on the tunnel on Aug. 30, something will come over me that will be really powerful.”

You want guys like that to have that big triumphal moment, check that off the list and move on to big things, knowing they can and they will.

A feel good story of another sort. A WWII POW traded his prized gold ring for some food. Now, 70 years later, the ring has come home:

Last week, about a dozen family members and friends gathered in the living room of David C. Cox Jr.’s Raleigh home and watched as he slit open a small yellow parcel from Germany. The 67-year-old son dug through the crinkly packing material and carefully removed a little plastic box.

“And here it is,” he said with a long sigh as he pulled out the ring. “Oh, my goodness. … I never thought it would ever happen. I thought it was gone. We all thought it was gone.

“He thought it was gone,” he said of his late father.

The story of how the ring made it back to the Cox family is a testament to a former enemy’s generosity, the reach of the Internet and the healing power of time.

Mowed the lawn this evening. Then changed sweaty clothes for workout clothes and got in a little ride. I deemed it a take-it-easy ride, so I only touched 39.1 on the big hill. I did, though, set a new 10-minute distance best for Red Route 2. This is a segment that has a determined starting point where you just go for as hard as you can, for as long as you can, for 10 minutes. It is one of the many nonsensical challenges I’ve created for myself on my bike. This is the first time I’ve broken the first distance mark on this challenge, too. The speed wouldn’t be impressive to you, because I am slow, but I am apparently getting a tiny bit faster. In my first ride after a race, taking it easy on a home 20-mile course.

I will never understand how I get chain grease on the outside of my left calf when the chain is on the right side of my bike.

I’ll probably never understand nutrition the correct way either. We decided that I’m at a negative calorie amount for the day so I was able to eat three dinners. We went out for pizza with a friend. He’s a runner, so it was all miles per minute this, and playlists and marathons that. We’ve become these people. I had two slices of pizza.

Meanwhile, in London, the government stormed The Guardian’s offices to destroy data. Think about that:

I explained to the man from Whitehall about the nature of international collaborations and the way in which, these days, media organisations could take advantage of the most permissive legal environments. Bluntly, we did not have to do our reporting from London. Already most of the NSA stories were being reported and edited out of New York. And had it occurred to him that Greenwald lived in Brazil?

The man was unmoved. And so one of the more bizarre moments in the Guardian’s long history occurred – with two GCHQ security experts overseeing the destruction of hard drives in the Guardian’s basement just to make sure there was nothing in the mangled bits of metal which could possibly be of any interest to passing Chinese agents… Whitehall was satisfied, but it felt like a peculiarly pointless piece of symbolism that understood nothing about the digital age.

England is lost. Hope they’re not the canary in the coal mine.

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2
Aug 13

Things to read

You may all relax. Congress has gotten their reprieve from the paradoxically named Affordable Healthcare Act:

The problem was rooted in the original text of the Affordable Care Act. Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) inserted a provision which said members of Congress and their aides must be covered by plans “created” by the law or “offered through an exchange.” Until now, OPM had not said if the Federal Employee Health Benefits Program could contribute premium payments toward plans on the exchange. If payments stopped, lawmakers and aides would have faced thousands of dollars in additional premium payments each year. Under the old system, the government contributed nearly 75 percent of premium payments.

Obama’s involvement in solving this impasse was unusual, to say the least. But it came after serious griping from both sides of the aisle about the potential of a “brain drain.” The fear, as told by sources in both parties, was that aides would head for more lucrative jobs, spooked by the potential for spiking health premiums.

Meanwhile, over at the IRS:

The head of the agency tasked with enforcing ObamaCare said Thursday that he’d rather not get his own health insurance from the system created by the health care overhaul.

“I would prefer to stay with the current policy that I’m pleased with rather than go through a change if I don’t need to go through that change,” said acting IRS chief Danny Werfel, during a House Ways and Means Committee hearing.

Well now that’s odd.

Meanwhile, in Georgia:

GEORGIANS WHO will be forced to buy health insurance under Obamacare later this year should be prepared to dig deeply into their wallets — then hold on for dear life.

That’s because of heart attack-inducing sticker shock.

The premiums for the five health insurers that will be offering policies in Georgia’s federally run insurance exchange are “massive,” according to Georgia Insurance Commissioner Ralph Hudgens.

“Insurance companies in Georgia have filed rate plans increasing health insurance rates up to 198 percent for some individuals,” Mr. Hudgens wrote in a July 29 letter to Kathleen Sebelius, secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the president’s point person on Obamacare.

I couldn’t afford a 198 percent increase of anything. Then there’s the question of work hours:

Admittedly, it takes a little detective work, but if we systematically review the available empirical evidence in an even-handed fashion, the conclusion seems inescapable: Obamacare is accelerating a disturbing trend towards “a nation of part-timers.” This is not good news for America.

None of that looks good, does it? Hyper-partisan Sen. Richard Shelby calls it all a failure:

“I find it deeply troubling that perhaps the best thing President Obama has done for American business during his time in office is to provide a brief reprieve from his own signature achievement,” Shelby said during the 17-minute speech.

“I welcome any relief from ObamaCare for anyone. But why should such relief not apply to individuals and families as well? If the administration hasn’t gotten its act together by now, what leads us to believe that it ever will?”

In other unhappy news The Cleveland Plain Dealer cut a third of their staff. Gannett canned more than 200 across their company this week, with more expected next week. They’ve cut more than 40 percent of their employees in the last eight years.

Senators? They’re not sure what or who journalists are just now. There’s going to be a lot to that story in the near future.

Happier news, then. Google killed their RSS reader, to the chagrin of pretty much everyone who used it. And that unfortunate death has actually opened up the RSS market. Why? There is a demand. Google didn’t see it, or didn’t need it, but there are people who use RSS, may it always thrive.

Digital media use will outpace television consumption this year, according to eMarketer. I am vaguely listening to the television in the background as I type this. Also, my phone is frequently distracting me. So, yeah.

Remembering Skylab, the first space station was an Alabama idea:

NASA is pausing today to remember Skylab, the orbiting 1970s laboratory that paved the way for the International Space Station. The laboratory, built from a Saturn V rocket third stage, was conceived in Huntsville and saved by quick-thinking engineers and brave astronauts after things went very wrong on launch day 40 years ago.

You can see some photographs from the mission here. Everything was from the 1970s.

Finally, Quan Bray is one of those young men you can’t help but to cheer for:

Bray has rarely talked about his mother’s death since arriving at Auburn, granting only a single interview to Columbus-based TV station WLTZ in his two seasons with the Tigers.

“For me to talk about it with y’all right now is really crazy,” Bray told reporters during Auburn’s reporting day Thursday. “I don’t mind talking about it now. Talking about it relieves me a lot.”

Back on July 3, 2011, Bray was out of town in Atlanta and missed a call from his mother while sleeping, only to call back and get no answer. When he got back to LaGrange, he told the TV station last February, he went to his grandmother’s house and saw his mom’s car in the middle of the road.

Bray did not go into the rest of the details during Thursday’s interview, but the Georgia courts have pieced together what happened.

On that day, Jeffrey Jones – Quan’s father – sent a string of threatening text messages to Tonya Bray, then chased her as she drove down Ragland Street in LaGrange and shot her several times.

That young man basically lost both parents in the same moment and all he’s done is excel in school, help raise his younger brother and become a leader of others. Tough kid and he deserves some success.

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20
Apr 13

Toomer’s Corner

It took almost three years, but ol’ Harvey Updyke proved the only thing he’s ever been capable of proving, that spirit goes beyond a football game, that a place is more than a jersey, and heart is more than a scoreboard.

Saturday was the big day, the last roll of the old Toomer’s Corner oaks. It was orchestrated and planned and monumentally huge. (The Auburn equestrian team, which just won a national championship of their own, will get the final honor.)

Thousands upon thousands of people were there. They stood chest to back and shoulder to shoulder and that crowd jammed the corner and the four roads. Everyone had a great time, coming away with that old familiar feeling: this is a family reunion.

For some people it was a refutation of a malignancy of misguided fandom. For others it was an excuse to have a party. For all, it was an opportunity to hear what comes next. Now that the old oaks are coming out of that spot, ending a run of about 75 years, there is plenty to look ahead to.

But Toomer’s Corner always taught me to look back. You didn’t get too many rolls dropped on the back of your head as a freshman before you learn to always be on the lookout. In a way, this too was an opportunity to look back at the fine spirit of something we’ve long enjoyed.

I’ve written about this for The War Eagle Reader and for the Smithsonian and a few other places. I’m always trying to capture this feeling, share the sense so that those who aren’t lucky enough to be there can find their place in it too.

The problem is that whenever you do this, it always comes off as hokey and cheesy. How do you explain this small town thing? This silly little thing that amuses us, that we look forward to, that we’ve lately lamented and, Saturday, celebrated beyond comparison?

The best way to understand a culture is to figure out why the important things are important and why the small things are important. To ask yourself why these things are so is to find all of the silly answers. In this case, it is the celebration of a victory, which started either to emulate the old telegram system that used to send home news of games from far away, or a spontaneous celebration of the joy of having too much toilet paper. There are several theories and apocryphal stories about how and why this began, but let’s be honest, it is just fun. The tradition started out as rolling the trees after big road wins. Today this is a way to continue the game, the event, the championship and the celebration of a moment after the moment is gone.

It is the place where we say “Meet me at Toomer’s Corner,” which means a whole lot more than ‘See you there.’ Town and campus come together here, the corner where everything meets, where we make the 400 yard march from the stadium to the place where we celebrate some more. You see old friends, make new ones and take pictures in one of the happier, more laid back places you can be. This is where the chants and cheers don’t stop, where the players come to join their classmates, alumni and fans.

Toomer’s Corner also taught me to look down. My favorite thing about rolling Toomer’s has always been watching the tiniest Tigers. College students often yield to children in this place where parents let their little ones actually play in the street. They have the run of the place. They’re flinging rolls, they’re turning themselves into Charmin mummies. They’re climbing on the gates, up the surrounding trees and receiving the gift of extra rolls from the big kids.

The picture above was from the 2010 national championship. That was the last time I rolled the corner; that was a memory, a fine one to end on. We make our memories, but we make them for others too, that’s what is happening when Toomer’s gets rolled. These days I catch rolls to give to children, the younger the better. It is more important to me to build their memories.

I like to take visitors, because if you can’t write about Toomer’s Corner and make sense of it, you surely can’t tell someone about it. You simply need the experience. I taught my wife how to throw a roll of toilet paper. She figured it out just in time for the 2010 SEC championship.

I’ve had the good fortune to take my mother a few times. She gets in to it despite herself. A few years ago we treated my step-father to his first football game and his first trip to the corner.

My in-laws came down for their first game in 2010, a quiet non-conference game which was unlike anything they’d ever seen up north. Rolling Toomer’s is unlike anything you see most anywhere, too.

Family, friends, everyone comes away impressed, and that’s after those cream puff games. “You have to remember,” I solemnly tell them “that the degree of rolling Toomer’s Corner is directly proportional to the importance of the win.” They imagine and wish they were here on those nights when covering great distancesyou can find the toilet paper covering great distances

One night I popped a flash on my camera as people rolled the corner and I could see the tiny cotton particulates of celebration floating in the air around me, two blocks away from the trees. That’s a fervor.

Toomer’s taught us to look forward, too. This is just the tip of the experience, but all of Auburn has a way of growing into you. The farther away you get, the more deeply it ties itself to you. The longer you’ve been away the closer you hold it. You’re just starting something here, but you’ll carry the place forever.

Below are the gates. The men that put them in place were staring down a world war, and some of them would go off and find themselves fighting it in the next year. But first they had to finish things up here, and the class of 1917 had to build that entryway. (The eagles came later.)

Saturday we learned that, in the new plan for Toomer’s Corner, the gates will stay in place. And that’s maybe the best news of all. For all that Auburn can be it is important that we always remember who she was before us.

Here’s why: what she was defines who she’ll be. What we become is dictated in some way by what we were. I think of Auburn as an instrument of potential, but as Toomer’s Corner regularly demonstrates, it is also about spirit and heart.

I wrote, two years ago, the day we learned this day was coming, “Auburn and her family are stronger than oak and more sturdy than history. We’re going to say “Meet me at Toomer’s” for generations yet. The power of dixieland is going to be just fine.”

Saturday went a long way toward proving that right, but it is no prophecy. The clues are all around.

We’re all little dots in the immediately famous helicopter shot. We are all the central players in the more narrow perspectives we hold on from the ground. We’re all in those moments from years ago, frozen in other people’s photographs. I always study those pictures with wonder. Where is that woman now? What does that guy do these days? We’re all in the photographs yet to come, too.

There will be more trees. There will be more times when police officers playfully stand there and let the kids roll them, more times where people watch and dance from the windows across the street. Someone is always going to be willing to shimmy up the poles that hold the traffic lights in place. There will be more parents and college students and guests all delighting in the fun silliness of the thing.

At the biggest moment any of us could imagine, I was fortunate to stand under the old trees with my beautiful, talented wife — who I turned into an Auburn woman in the course of a single tailgate, who later joined the faculty — and celebrated a national championship with thousands of friends:

That’s a great memory, but not hardly the best. And Saturday, we were reminded once again, that this has never been about the trees, but about all of those people, our people.

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6
Apr 13

Go Jack, go!

Today we went for a bike ride. I am on the cusp of going from the high-end of a slow rider to the low-end of a medium rider and I don’t understand this degree of progress whatsoever. So I am not very good, but I hold my own when riding with The Yankee, who is now an amateur racer.

There’s a 13 mile circle of bypass road around the town proper and we did that today. I just stayed on her back wheel for the first half. There are two “big” hills on that route. (It is coastal-plains-flat here so I qualify our hills.) When the second hill game I bent to the left and passed her.

I am good on this one hill, because I have figured out a way that I can essentially keep my pace or accelerate all the way up it. It involves closing my eyes, counting out pedal strokes and shifting to an easier gear all the way “up.”

So today I shifted down, start counting, shift up, start counting. Normally I go through about 10 strokes per gear on that hill and it keeps everything working pretty well. Only today I overcounted my pedal strokes and that just killed everything on that hill. I counted to 20 in the second gear and that was too much so then there’s the lactic acid build up and so on. I got greedy.

In cycling, commentators could say “Bang. Dropped him just like that.” Which is to say you left the other person standing still as you accelerated away from them. I was trying to do that, but I could not because I got greedy. So I pulled away from her modestly, but I was really trying to assert my control of that particular hill.

So I let her catch up to me at the next light and we rode on the rest of our route.

She stopped when she got to the distance of her first upcoming race and looked on her computer at the pace she was setting and she was very pleased. She said “I’m going to ride hard the rest of the way home to try to boost my average pace.”

I just happened to be in front of her right there, so I started off, standing up and generating more power so that I can get out of her way since she wants to go hard and she’d stopped on this little incline. She goes right by me.

Bang. She dropped me.

Nice day for Auburn sports and technology. We listened to the baseball game on the iPhone app as the Tigers beat Texas A&M at College Station. They finally found the string of at bats they’ve been struggling to put together and it paid off on the scoreboard, felling the Aggies 10-5.

Three home runs contributed to a 9-0 lead in the fourth inning, and then the usually solid pitching simply had to hold things together which, happily, was exactly how it went.

Later in the evening we watched the regional gymnastics meet. Twelfth-ranked Auburn notched a school record regional score of 196.700. That put them third in Gainesville tonight. The top two of each region move on to nationals. That score in any other region would have advanced, but instead they were third behind Florida and Minnesota.

Sophomore Bri Guy and freshman Caitlin Atkinson both advance to the NCAA Gymnastics championships, so, the future is very bright for the gymnastics team.

Finally, I share this video to make you cry. On fourth-and-one the running back breaks a 69-yard touchdown run that cleared the benches in celebration. It is the best of sports and youth and humanity and perseverance and this little guy can run:

More about Team Jack.

And his big run:

Asked what he was thinking when he ran onto the field, Jack said, “Scoring a touchdown.”

And when he broke free and scored? “It felt awesome.” And the crowd reaction? “Really awesome.”

[…]

Jack was diagnosed with cancer in April 2011 and has had two surgeries. He’s now on a two-week break from a 60-week chemotherapy regimen.

Andy said Jack is “doing great” and that an MRI at Children’s Hospital in Boston showed that the tumor has shrunk substantially in the past year.

The official Team Jack shirt.

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19
Feb 13

Anyone notice the weather today? Not me.

A long day in the office. There was reading and recruiting and renting a van and finishing the last plans for a trip and grading. lots and lots of grading.

I’m not even sure that I left the building until dinner time.

ComScore says if you aren’t mobile you aren’t anywhere:

(T)he effects of a movement toward mobile are everywhere, from shopping to media to search. According to the report, “2013 could spell a very rocky economic transition,” and businesses will have to scramble to stay ahead of consumers’ changing behavior.

Here are a few interesting tidbits from the 48-page report.

The mobile transition is happening astonishingly quickly. Last year, smartphone penetration crossed 50 percent for the first time, led by Android phones. People spend 63 percent of their time online on desktop computers and 37 percent on mobile devices, including smartphones and tablets, according to comScore.

[…]

As mobile continues to take share from desktop, some industries have been particularly affected, and they are seeing significant declines in desktop use of their products as a result. They are newspapers, search engines, maps, weather, comparison shopping, directories and instant messenger services.

Oh, and this is a hint about what is going to happen to television in the next year or two:

There has also been a turning point for video ads. They cost more than typical ads, and have always lagged behind viewership. But in 2012, 23 percent of videos were accompanied by an ad, up from 14 percent the year before. More TV ad dollars are coming to online video, comScore concluded.

From the Student Press Law Center: Journalism groups express frustration with NCAA policies affecting media.

Ten media organizations sent a letter to the National Collegiate Athletic Association last week expressing its frustration with the athletic group’s unwillingness to discuss journalists’ concerns about credentialing and other issues.

“The undersigned organizations are writing to express our profound disappointment with the NCAA’s recent actions affecting journalists’ ability to cover your member institutions’ activities,” reads the letter, which was signed by representatives from the American Society of Newspaper Editors, the Society of Professional Journalists the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and the Student Press Law Center, among others.

“In short, our concerns and frustrations are mounting, with a long period of unproductive interaction leading to this follow up letter.”

Restrictions placed on media credentials is the main concern raised in the letter, a situation that has become more onerous in recent years, said Kevin Goldberg, an attorney who represents ASNE.

The letter cites instances where reporters have been faced with “unduly restrictive credentialing conditions” with regard to social media use and other coverage efforts.

More and more you see programs doing more and more of their own media, in inventive and more direct ways than the media outlets are providing. They are going directly to their audience with an effective aspect of branded journalism. Programs are going around the media filter, utilizing their hyper-control of their access to the on-field product and speaking directly to their fanbases.

This is a big deal for the media outlets, of course, who are presently getting edged out. They’ll need to find a way to deliver a new and compelling aspect or version of the product to the wider audience to compensate.

In some respects this is not unlike what is happening with political reporters. Poynter reports: White House press complain about access to president.

President Obama’s staff “often finds Washington reporters whiny, needy and too enamored with trivial matters or their own self-importance,” Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen write in Politico. So they limit the president’s availability to the White House press corps, hand out photos and do document dumps on Friday afternoons. “Media across the ideological spectrum are left scrambling for access,” VandeHei and Allen write.

Bo knows Samford! He’ll be doing a little fund raising in April:

The Samford Athletics Department will hold its fourth-annual Bulldog Bash dinner and silent auction, presented by BB&T, April 25 at the Pete Hanna Center on Samford’s campus. Heisman Trophy winner and former National Football League and Major League Baseball star Bo Jackson will be the featured speaker at this year’s event.

The Bulldog Bash is a silent auction event hosted by Samford University to raise money for the athletics department and its 17 teams. Tables can be purchased for $1,500, with each table seating eight people. Individual seats are also available for $250. A limited number of premium tables which included a private meet and greet with Bo Jackson are available for $3,000.

I bet fellow Auburn alum and Heisman trophy winner Pat Sullivan, the football coach at Samford, helped make this good news happen. Pretty cool stuff.

On the other blog I linked to a nice piece from Prof. Mindy McAdams. It is about learning code. You should check it out.

Tomorrow: We take a field trip to AMG in the Birmingham News building. Should be fun.