It’s difficult to put a full day of racing, and the many weeks of training beforehand, into less than 60 seconds that you shot on a phone. So I won’t try. But this, nevertheless, was Saturday, a half Iron. That’s a 1.2-mile swim, a 56-mile ride and a 13.1-mile run to you and me:
The Yankee won her age group, cause she’s awesome:
Her goggles broke in the water, so she swam with one eye, and was the fifth woman out of the water. Her knee was aggravating her on the run so she wisely took it easy. What we’re saying here is that she can go faster if she needs to.
There’s not much more that can be said, which hasn’t been said today, or in any of the 18 anniversaries or days in between. Most, not all, but most of, the memory essays now feel out of tune. The focus of the stories I wrote in the days after 9/11 — “How to talk to your children” pablum meant to fill time until the next Pentagon soundbite, they seemed like — they’re all adults now. Some of them are students I work with today. But the underclass students have no living memory of that day at all. It’s history to them. And next month we’ll mark the 18th anniversary of the war in Afghanistan, meaning we’re just a few months from having a young adult serving there who wasn’t alive on September 11th. That has also been noted.
Today was a day for the purple shirt. That means a purple or black tie. The purple shirt also has french cuffs. And I wore black cufflinks yesterday. So a purple tie. Which still leaves the cufflinks question. I went with these nice shiny numbers.
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My mom gave them to me. Pretty nice, no?
No idea what the engraving was meant to be, but the gears move!
Today we had the ribbon cutting for a new center, an investigative journalism program, in our school. It’ll start operations next spring. We had a day of panelists! And there was an actual ribbon that was actually cut!
The keynote was the terrific Scott Pelley. You might have heard of him from CBS or 60 Minutes. You might have heard of those from television.
Don’t pretend like you don’t know what a television is. You aren’t that hip. And people that do that aren’t hip, either. Pelley did a great job. I had student crews recording the keynote. You can click the image below to see his speech:
There were four other panels, as well, which we produced as two live videos. This one includes “Investigative Sports Journalism in a Multimedia World,” and then “Investigative Journalism’s New Golden Age? The Rise of the Nonprofits.”
Perhaps you’d prefer a variation on that last theme, and a panel on professional skill development. You can see those panels right here:
I also had a night in the television studio, as well. It was a long, busy day. And we managed to get everything in, as well.
It is the rare day indeed, this year, that I get out in front of The Yankee. The closer I got to the end of yesterday’s ride, the more I felt like this:
I just knew she would pip me before the end, and so I pushed and pushed as hard as I could, and somehow I managed to stay away, but only just.
And if you’re here for a different sort of video, this is the funniest one of the weekend:
The @IndianaFootball intro video includes the late, great, George Taliaferro, who led the Hoosiers to their only undefeated season, became the first African-American drafted by the NFL, and spent a lifetime lifting up others. That's top class. https://t.co/YIqJQrzhJOpic.twitter.com/ADKZxGp8Jn
George Taliaferro’s story defies excerpting, but let’s try:
As the first day of school approached, Taliaferro asked the football coaches when he was going to be moved on campus. He was told black students didn’t live in dorms.
“I called my father and told him I didn’t want to be in a place where I couldn’t live on campus, where I couldn’t swim in the pool and where I couldn’t sit in the bottom section of the movie theater,” Taliaferro said. “My father told me there were other reasons I was there, and then he hung up the phone on me. I was never so hurt because I thought the one person who could understand being discriminated against was him.”
That tough love stemmed from two things his parents, neither of whom went past sixth grade, told him every day as he grew up. “They’d say, ‘We love you,'” he recalled. “And, ‘You must be educated.'”
He played seven seasons of pro football, six in the NFL with New York, Dallas, Baltimore and Philadelphia, three times making the Pro Bowl. He became a volunteer with Big Brothers Big Sisters of Baltimore, advised prisoners adjusting to society upon their release, got his master’s in social work at Howard University, taught at Maryland, was dean of students at Morgan State, returned to Indiana as a professor and special assistant to IU president John Ryan, and helped start Big Brothers Big Sisters of South Central Indiana in Bloomington.
You can’t put that in a gif or a football video, but you certainly oughta try.
Here’s the other show the sports guys produced last night. It’s a talk show, and this episode follows the traditional format, but I hear things may be getting changed as we progress through the year. There’s a new host and new producers eager to stretch their legs.
The guy that hosted that show for the better part of the last two years graduated this spring and just started working as a sports reporter for a television station down on the Gulf of Mexico. Everyone that comes through our little station gets hired. For good reason, too. If you stick around these parts for too long, this is bound to happen:
Just sang aloud in the stairwell which I thought was empty. It was not empty.
But I hit the notes. It was that silly boy band tune from the AT&T campaign that's everywhere.
Now the other person in the stairwell is thinking "I can NOT get away from that song, but he can sing."
For the last several years, I’ve been trying to find ways to pay less attention to football. It’s grown less important, the older I get. And yet, where I’m from, there are heavy duty cultural implications. Of course, I’m not there anymore, sadly, so that helps. But there’s plenty on television. And it’s good television.
There’s also the safety aspect. It’s become more difficult to enjoy watching people do these things that could potentially be so self-detrimental. But, I’ll watch. Because it is fun. And it isn’t all bad. Way up and way out and all that. Tribal joys
Plus, the ethos. Look at the guys from this school in Indianapolis doing all the right things:
How can you not be romantic about football? How could you not want to be a Marian Knight?
