football « Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

football

Just current events

If I may wrap my head around the journalism of our big shooting story — and this is my site, so I say that I can — I’ll recall something I said to The Yankee on Sunday. She was driving as we headed home from our rafting excursion. I was reading aloud the emerging news on the Saturday night shooting.

“They might stumble at first, but The Plainsman staff will do a great job of covering this story.”

I said that with pride, knowing they might struggle a bit because they are, after all, students. But I know what they are capable of because I was a part of that staff once. And it has been a great paper for decades. And I was right. They did a great job covering the story. You can see their continuing coverage here.

If you are interested in how the sausage is made Dr. John Carvalho wrote a piece for The War Eagle Reader on the subject.

Covering that first big story is always hard, but they’ve done very well so far. I’m proud for them. Shame they had to have a story like this, but it shows their promise, demonstrates their hard work and will, hopefully, give them confidence to go with the sudden attention they are receiving.

(Update: WHNT-19, the Huntsville, Ala. CBS affiliate did a story on The Plainsman’s newsgathering. See it here.

There was another press conference today, though there was not much new to say. The suspect is still at large. Desmonte Leonard, authorities believe, was at the house they targeted last night. The thought is that he was able to move on before the Montgomery police, Auburn police, FBI, state troopers, U.S. Marshals and four other agencies arrived on the scene.

The only other news was that the reward for information leading to his arrest now sits at $30,000. And law enforcement is openly telling the public they’re tired of being misled. They’re offering Class C felonies to anyone who gets in the way.

I dislike that that this has become a football story. It is hard not to, though. Two former players were killed. One, Ladarious Phillips, was transferring to Jacksonville State (The heartbreaking version of his story is that his new coach, Jack Crowe, had expected him at JSU much early this summer. He was, apparently, having a tough time making that change, though, and so the wrong-place-at-the-wrong-time motif has even greater significance. Phillips everybody loved. He was 290 pounds and could do a backflip flat-footed with a big smile. The stories people tell of him in his hometown of nearby Roanoke, Ala., about being a father figure to young children, even when he apparently didn’t have one around himself, are sad and uplifting and heartbreaking. The other, Ed Christian, retired because of a back injury. He was still a student, though, a Georgia boy who, by all accounts I’ve read, also had a fine reputation.

Another current player, Eric Mack, was injured, but is expected to make a complete recovery. Whether he’ll play football again, Auburn coach Gene Chizik said, is right now immaterial.

But there were others, too, not affiliated with the football program. DeMario Pitts was a local boy, and he is dead at 20, leaving behind a son and daughter. Xavier D. Moss was killed at 19. John Robertson is in critical condition at a Birmingham hospital. The 20-year-old was shot in the head.

This is clearly beyond the scope of a football program, or an athletic department or even a university.

But, still, Chizik stood before the media today. Still shaken, exhausted and determined, he stood before this sign and said he wasn’t thinking about football at all. He was thinking about his players, and those families:

I noticed that sign in the spring, when I had the pleasure of hearing a presentation of a much happier sort in that same meeting room. But that sign means something even more profound this week than when it is normally read by football players thinking of Xs and Os.

And so this is a football story, though it shouldn’t be. But maybe it had to be, because that’s one of the things we do best. So let’s make this a football story, and Chizik the reluctant healer.

While no coach wants this kind of added work in their job, I’m sure most would do quiet well in these terrible circumstances. But Gene Chizik will be great. I think he’s a pretty good coach, but I’ve long thought he was a better man.

Oh, and the other big news: The Advance layoff meetings start today. In Huntsville, Birmingham and Mobile newspaper staffers are going into one-on-one meetings and being told whether they’ll have a future with the new company. Scary times for all those people.

I have friends in those newsrooms and have read the bylines or seen the efforts of others’ anonymous work for years, decades. No one wants to be a situation like this personally, but the future is here, says the company, and they’re changing for their future. Tough for everyone. Some 400 people are said to lose their jobs.

Later: Desmonte Leonard is in custody. He turned himself in to the U.S. Marshals in Montgomery this evening. Apparently he’d been negotiating with them for a good part of the day. Happily he’s been arrested without anyone else being hurt. And now the legal process can begin.

I mentioned this on Twitter, and I don’t want to overstate the point or anything, but we were at Mellow Mushroom when the news of his arrest was announced. You could fellow the atmosphere in the room change just a bit. Now, maybe, all of those families can begin to copy a tiny bit with their grief.

Auburn / cycling / football / history / iPhone / music / photo / Tuesday / video — Comments Off
29
May 12

More hodges to podge over

We rode around the city yesterday morning. The Yankee was doing another brick, a training exercise designed to simulate an upcoming duathlon. She swam and biked. I don’t swim in laps, so I waited until she was done and followed her around town.

It was warm, but still morning, so the air was filled with this crisp feeling of not-too-warm which, really, is just the way we internalize the I-hope-it-doesn’t-get-too-hot feeling.

We rode the city’s bypass and then cruised around the outside of the airport, by a new church that is going up and then that long, last, slow, supple hill before home. Just as we pulled into the neighborhood I reached this on my odometer:

That’s for the season. I’m a few hundred miles behind where I want to be. But I’ll catch up.

Sunday afternoon I got out for an afternoon, heat of the day ride.

“Couldn’t you have ridden later?” my lovely bride asked. I think she was concerned about my health and well being in the way that people that care about you have. It was sweet, but halting. Is this really sensible?

Well, yes. Because, you see, I was gassed the other day when I went out for a ride on the first real warm day of the season. And that shouldn’t be happening to me. There are plenty of times when I don’t have the legs or the form or the fitness. I’ll accept those shortcomings as physiology or just the bad day of a bad cyclist. But I live in heat and humidity. This stuff shouldn’t bother me like it did that day, and so, yes, I will ride in the heat, because that can be overcome.

Also I drink a lot of fluids.

So I rode in 96-degree temperatures on Sunday, and I was pleased with that. When the mercury really spikes, I’ll be riding then, too. But you have to survive the 90s first.

My gloves, as of today, now have 2,100 miles on them:

I wonder what the lifespan of gloves should be. These feel like they are getting up there in age.

Watched Austin City Limits tonight. Usually, when I catch it, I’ll have it on as background noise to feel good about my thin appreciation of the arts. “Musicians I’m not entirely familiar with!” Sometimes, though, you get good pop tunes. And sometimes there’s a bit of international flavor:

Watch Mumford & Sons / Flogging Molly on PBS. See more from Austin City Limits.

Flogging Molly played the second set. Their second or third song they started like this: “This next song celebrates the life of over 100,000 Irish people shipped to Barbados as slaves. Let’s dance in their honor.”

Well, yeah, naturally.

I trimmed the hedges today. Some of them. It was the high point of the day’s heat, and so naturally I was outside sculpting away and fussing with garbage bags full of leaf leavings. I trimmed and cleaned a dozen. That’s not half the property.

The back and the side will just have to wait. There’s only so much you can feel like doing in one day.

A few doors down someone had their lawn guys hard at work. They wrapped up whatever they were doing as I struggled along, thinking, I’d hire someone to do it, but there are no artisan hedge trimmers in town.

And you need an artist for this job. We’re not doing sculptures, mind you, but there’s a lot going on. On one side they have to stay below a retaining wall. In the flower bed they have to be kept just so, seeing that they don’t dominate the roses and hydrangeas. The flowering shrubs need to be worked in such a way as to leave the flowers still showing vibrantly.

The two bushes that frame the garage present special problems. One is over a perennial flower bed and trying to remove clipped leaves from the ground there would be madness. The other one needs an extra curve to accommodate the side mirror of the car as it enters and exits the garage. The two shrubs that stand sentry at the end of the drive need to be kept close, allowing for a good turning radius. One of those is swallowing up the mailbox. I’d let it grow over and frame the thing, but I doubt the nice lady who delivers our bills and junk mail would approve. There are another series of shrubs that conceal all the utility boxes, and that sits on the property line. I want to help my neighbor, but not cut back his shrubs so much that he dislikes my efforts.

And that doesn’t get us around the side where someone, at some point, thought “You know, shrubs of varying sizes. That’s what this long wall needs.”

I’d like to meet that person. I’d like to shake their hand and tell them how wrong they were about that.

Anyone watch Sherlock? I finished the second series last night and I’m trying to figure out the big season-ending cliffhanger. Want to help? Here’s the entire final segment, including the brilliant work of Andrew Scott who treats Moriarty like a manic personality with great results:

Watch Sherlock: The Reichenbach Fall on PBS. See more from Masterpiece.

Good stuff, no?

The Guardian is writing about it, quoting the writer that everyone is missing a big clue. They are writing quite a bit about it. There are hundreds of fan theories.

Someone taped a thoughtful six minute video detailing the Holmes conspiracy:

That’s not the only one of those such videos, by the way, but that one is particular well thought out. The truck with the garbage bags is key. I’ve watched this scene three or four times now — it is especially tense and moving — and the last of it in slow motion a bit too. That truck seems almost like a continuity error, though.

Time warp: Old Auburn football pictures from The Anniston Star can be found here. There are lots of great images form the 70s, 80s and early 90s in there.

Auburn / cycling / football / memories / Twitter / video / weekend — Comments Off
26
May 12

A podge of hodges

I want to tell you that my family is full of good cooks. My mother, when we were young could invent dishes out of random extra things that would make your mouth water. When she has the proper ingredients she’s quite incredible. She may not have a green thumb, but if you grow something and put it in her kitchen she well make you one of the better meals you’ve had in a good long while.

One of my grandmothers is also a good cook. My grandparents raised a large garden that was essentially subsistence farming. Only, when I was young, I got tired of all those vegetables of course. Now I’d love to see that farm back in action for some creamed corn and various other things we pulled out of the ground.

My other grandmother is not a bad cook, either. People disagree on this, but I think she’s a fine cook. But that could be the grandmother, oldest-grandchild thing. (I’m her favorite. Just ask.)

All of this leads me to one of those curious things in life that we never think about until it is forced upon us. What if something you’ve always eaten is not so very good? For instance, God bless the fine cooks in my family, but they will bake a turkey dry as a dusty road at Thanksgiving.

I never knew what turkey was supposed to taste like until The Yankee cooked one the first fall we dated. Sometime after that her father was telling the story of how, as a boy, he didn’t know what a hamburger was supposed to be like. His mother burned them and then cooked them some more. It took eating at a friend’s to learn what he’d been missing.

It is a good tale, and the full version of that story is great, but that seemed silly to me until I considered the turkey example of my own culinary experiences.

Similar to my family’s apparent hatred of delicate turkey meat, there’s also a big bias against pork chops. I’m not sure what it is, maybe my grandmothers thought you needed to cook them at lunch and again at dinner, just to be sure any germs were dead. Perhaps we distracted them too much in the kitchen. Could have been anything, but even as a kid I knew that my lovely, saintly, giving and patient grandmothers respective pork chops didn’t taste good. I think I was in my mid-20s before I had a good one.

All of the above to say, if you’re not grilling your pork chops, friend, your missing out.

Had a too-hot ride yesterday. Last weekend we reversed a route we occasionally take and I found it grueling in the sense that I wanted to do it again. I thought I could easily improve my time on the trip. Only it was much, much warmer and I found myself questioning the wisdom of all of this within about 10 miles.

I struggled through it though, happy to see a gas station about four miles from home. I stopped for a drink, and this must be regular enough now that they don’t even think twice about bikes being walked into the store.

They have a picnic area to one side of the story and a porch swing on the other side. I sat in the swing for a few minutes to have a drink and top off my bottles. I was only four miles from home, but this was the first truly hot riding of the year.

A man walked out of the store and playfully chastised me for stopping. He had the easy, friendly face that makes you think you’ve seen him before. Maybe you’re supposed to know that guy.

“You aren’t supposed to be taking a break,” he said.

“No” I smiled, “but it is warm out here.”

“Yes it is. You’ll fall out!”

The heat index was about 95 at the time. It was not a strain to believe it, either.

So I came home, dropped the last few miles I had in mind because, as I came up the big hill I realized there were no cars behind me. I could move to the center and then duck into the neighborhood without a problem. And that thought made me so happy I leaned on my handlebars and took the 90 degree turn.

It was only 18 miles, but it was hot. But still, I thought, 18 miles.

And then I read this:

Tamae Watanabe, 73, beat her own age record for an Everest climb by a woman set 10 years ago. She also recovered from an accident in 2005 in which she broke her back and feared she would never climb again.

“It was much more difficult for me this time,” Watanabe told reporters Friday after returning to Nepal’s capital, Katmandu, from the mountain. “I felt I was weaker and had less power. This time it was certainly different. I felt that I had gotten old.”

She reached Everest’s summit from the Tibetan side on May 19, at the age of 73 years and 180 days.

That was properly deflating.

Things here are just fine. We’ve finally had to shut the windows and turn the air conditioning on. We’re to the point of the season where you have to start thinking strategically about when you want to do things like, work in the yard, heavy exertion or breathing.

Grilled tonight, watched the second game of the 2010 Auburn football season on DVD. I received the complete championship season as a Christmas gift and they’re becoming regular summer weekend viewing. I hope the Tigers win.

I thought I should take notes to see if and how and when the announcers started trying to talk differently about Cam Newton. So far, after two games against lesser opponents (sorry, State fans) they’ve been properly deferential. The in-game tone may not change, but if you’ll think back the commentary overall got very nasty.

It is great to see this team play though, and as I said tonight, to do so without having to worry about the outcome. There were a few points that season where they were almost defeated. There were moments when you just thought it was all going to come undone because that’s just the way of it. But, knowing they kept it together and defeated everyone, knowing they survived the biggest smear job this side of the classic 1960s Bryant-Butts piece, the feel of it is altogether different.

Watching Cam Newton play in retrospect, I wrote on Twitter, is like knowing the end to the world’s best sonnet.

What I’m saying is that the guy was like poetry. He was pure, violent, graceful poetry. Pure, violent, graceful, championship poetry.

One of the things I have to do this weekend is eat an entire watermelon. We’ll be out of space in the fridge, otherwise. It is ridiculously good, the first of the season and seedless — despite the presence of seeds. I ate a big portion of it last night and the middle of it today.

Still plenty left, if anyone is interested.

Auburn / football / iPhone / photo / weekend — Comments Off
22
Apr 12

Catching up

This is the post with the pictures that couldn’t find a home elsewhere this week.

Found these grits at one of the places where we buy our local vegetables — we have three places. We don’t buy grits there, though. We don’t buy grits.

You’d make fun of the way cats sleep, and then you wonder: What do I look like when I sleep? And that ends that.

Auburn still produces phonebooks. They put 1,800 on each pallet. There were 10,000 or so sitting on this sidewalk. They’ve been there for months:

Graffiti has no point. Some has even less:

Haley Center has seen better days. It almost feels as if they’ve stopped trying. Note the guy hanging on:

This is the heel of the Bo Jackson statue outside Jordan-Hare Stadium. (Yes, a statue honoring a living person is odd.) This is what defenders so most often:

This is the heel of the Cam Newton statue outside Jordan-Hare Stadium. No idea why they are different:

The best view possible of Parker Hall:

Lovely daises:

We attended the memorial ceremony honoring three Auburn students that have died in the last year. Two of natural causes and one in a car crash. Very sad:

Auburn / football / history / iPhone / links / photo / video / weekend — Comments Off
21
Apr 12

The three Heisman statues

Finally got to see these today. They’re quite impressive. And at a reported $100,000, they better be.

(A statue of a living person is unfortunate, but we’ve already crossed that bridge.)

The unveiling, last weekend, with Pat Sullivan, Bo Jackson and Cam Newton all in attendance:

Wish they’d used an Auburn sculptor — remember what Shug said — but the Ken Bjorge from Montana did fine work. (Here he is working on the Heisman bust which is a bit of disembodied creepiness.)

Maybe the best part is the strategic positioning, with the official Heisman portrait of each man looking over the statue. Nice touch.