My epic sports memories are a very mixed bag, tending toward more mediocrity, to put it mildly.
At age 3 or 4, I recall hitting a ball a country mile in Canton, Mississippi. The ball may have been plastic or rubber or a real baseball. I don't recall. I just know that it flew way over my Uncle Sweet Pea's head in this my first, glorious moment of athletic prowess! That felt good !
Later, in Missouri, I recall tackling the great Udell Chambers in a game of sandlot football up at James Milton Turner Elementary School. I was in 5th grade. He was in 8th grade. I got a big knot on my forehead from his pumping elbow as compensation during that effort! Rather than risk another 'payment' from that strong, brutal boy, me and my hicky ran straight home!
My next sports memory was my coming off the bench to score 9 points in the last 1:42 of the 4th quarter at Steger Jr. High School. We lost anyway by 24 four points!
But my glory brought adoring hugs from our lovely cheerleaders, who were my white classmates, and a flurry of telephone calls from two black community girls in the 7th grade, who I spurned as too young!
The follow-up to my basketball glory came in intramural wrestling. I was paired with our school 's "bad boy," Eddie Jefferson, in gym class. He carried a vaunted reputation of having kicked many behinds with abandonment. I knew who he was, but had not grown up with him. Nor had I ever had any encounter with him, unsavory or otherwise, until that memorable mat moment. As we grappled, I sensed that he could not pen me. I was too strong. I also sensed that I could pen him, if I was so inclined. He knew this too! But. If I penned the school 's tough guy, even in gym class, the notorious act would require some measure of public recompense by him or others, in the streets! So, I was content to accede to a draw!
In the 11th grade, I broke my ankle in a tackling drill, while competing for the quarterback position on our Webster Groves High School varsity football team in 1968. That fractured fibula ended my active, organized athletic career, finally.
Along the way, I was Sports Editor for The Steger Jr. High "Spotlight" and Editor in Chief of "The Dark Side," the newspaper we blacks published in high school to adore and communicate with each other given a predominantly white situs.
Friday, May 6, 2016
MY EPIC SPORTS MEMORIES
MY SPORTS MEMORIES
My epic sports memories are a very mixed bag, tending toward more mediocrity, to put it mildly.
At age 3 or 4, I recall hitting a ball a country mile in Canton, Mississippi. The ball may have been plastic or rubber or a real baseball. I don't recall. I just know that it flew way over my Uncle Sweet Pea's head in this my first, glorious moment of athletic prowess! That felt good !
Later, in Missouri, I recall tackling the great Udell Chambers in a game of sandlot football up at James Milton Turner Elementary School. I was in 5th grade. He was in 8th grade. I got a big knot on my forehead from his pumping elbow as compensation during that effort! Rather than risk another 'payment' from that strong, brutal boy, me and my hicky ran straight home!
My next sports memory was my coming off the bench to score 9 points in the last 1:42 of the 4th quarter at Steger Jr. High School. We lost anyway by 24 four points!
But my glory brought adoring hugs from our lovely cheerleaders, who were my white classmates, and a flurry of telephone calls from two black community girls in the 7th grade, who I spurned as too young!
The follow-up to my basketball glory came in intramural wrestling. I was paired with our school 's "bad boy," Eddie Jefferson, in gym class. He carried a vaunted reputation of having kicked many behinds with abandonment. I knew who he was, but had not grown up with him. Nor had I ever had any encounter with him, unsavory or otherwise, until that memorable mat moment. As we grappled, I sensed that he could not pen me. I was too strong. I also sensed that I could pen him, if I was so inclined. He knew this too! But. If I penned the school 's tough guy, even in gym class, the notorious act would require some measure of public recompense by him or others, in the streets! So, I was content to accede to a draw!
In the 11th grade, I broke my ankle in a tackling drill, while competing for the quarterback position on our Webster Groves High School varsity football team in 1968. That fractured fibula ended my active, organized athletic career, finally.
Along the way, I was Sports Editor for The Steger Jr. High "Spotlight" and Editor in Chief of "The Dark Side," the newspaper we blacks published in high school to adore and communicate with each other given a predominantly white situs.
My epic sports memories are a very mixed bag, tending toward more mediocrity, to put it mildly.
At age 3 or 4, I recall hitting a ball a country mile in Canton, Mississippi. The ball may have been plastic or rubber or a real baseball. I don't recall. I just know that it flew way over my Uncle Sweet Pea's head in this my first, glorious moment of athletic prowess! That felt good !
Later, in Missouri, I recall tackling the great Udell Chambers in a game of sandlot football up at James Milton Turner Elementary School. I was in 5th grade. He was in 8th grade. I got a big knot on my forehead from his pumping elbow as compensation during that effort! Rather than risk another 'payment' from that strong, brutal boy, me and my hicky ran straight home!
My next sports memory was my coming off the bench to score 9 points in the last 1:42 of the 4th quarter at Steger Jr. High School. We lost anyway by 24 four points!
But my glory brought adoring hugs from our lovely cheerleaders, who were my white classmates, and a flurry of telephone calls from two black community girls in the 7th grade, who I spurned as too young!
The follow-up to my basketball glory came in intramural wrestling. I was paired with our school 's "bad boy," Eddie Jefferson, in gym class. He carried a vaunted reputation of having kicked many behinds with abandonment. I knew who he was, but had not grown up with him. Nor had I ever had any encounter with him, unsavory or otherwise, until that memorable mat moment. As we grappled, I sensed that he could not pen me. I was too strong. I also sensed that I could pen him, if I was so inclined. He knew this too! But. If I penned the school 's tough guy, even in gym class, the notorious act would require some measure of public recompense by him or others, in the streets! So, I was content to accede to a draw!
In the 11th grade, I broke my ankle in a tackling drill, while competing for the quarterback position on our Webster Groves High School varsity football team in 1968. That fractured fibula ended my active, organized athletic career, finally.
Along the way, I was Sports Editor for The Steger Jr. High "Spotlight" and Editor in Chief of "The Dark Side," the newspaper we blacks published in high school to adore and communicate with each other given a predominantly white situs.
Thursday, May 5, 2016
PATTERNS
Patterns permeate our persons, our planet, our private, our public places in plenitude, in possibilities, in probabilities, in ponderous platitudes, in promiscuous prolixity.
Patterns may indeed permeate into the poetic, prosaic perambulations of prayerfully prostrate, profligate, peroration in pristine perpetuity.
Even imperfect parameters like Phi and Pi are patterns providing proof of problems by prehensile portents.
Yet, even as perhaps, Phi and Pi must sit, must sigh, "sine die;" so may we surely; perfectly patterning all predecessors' planar pilgrimage.
Wednesday, May 4, 2016
OUTCOME DETERMINATIVE
The substance acted upon is as determinative to the outcome as the nature of the force acting upon it.
FIRST CAUSE AND EFFECT
FIRST CAUSE AND EFFECT
'Cause and effect' is an idiom that summarizes, elides its constituent co-elements. It glides over them, as though they were not, when in truth, they are critical components, without which the idiom can not be.
Cause, for example, like effect, are each products of what lies below, of that which precedes their being.
Take fire, for example.
A lit match applied to dry paper indoors makes fire. Of course, a match is of more recent invention than paper which dates back eons. Both match & paper are caused by human "invention." So too may be an indoors space where fire was lit.
So human interaction is implicit in the idiom known as cause & effect. Human interaction is a very critical component of anything it touches.
Of course human interaction itself rests upon incalculable precedents, going way back to the origination of mankind, whose origins nobody knows, but that many speculate on.
The very same origination issues pertaining to man may be said for each chemical that went into the match's or the paper's make-up, including processes of production.
Going all the way back one might say that cause and effect are just illusions, as everything is ordained by God. Or one might say "not so!"
Whatsoever one might say, we are all on this revolving, rotating planet, orbiting around our remote sun, in the air, with trillions of other suns, and their intergalactic coteries, yet do not know first cause nor effect !
If we do not know the first cause or effect, how can we know the later?
'Cause and effect' is an idiom that summarizes, elides its constituent co-elements. It glides over them, as though they were not, when in truth, they are critical components, without which the idiom can not be.
Cause, for example, like effect, are each products of what lies below, of that which precedes their being.
Take fire, for example.
A lit match applied to dry paper indoors makes fire. Of course, a match is of more recent invention than paper which dates back eons. Both match & paper are caused by human "invention." So too may be an indoors space where fire was lit.
So human interaction is implicit in the idiom known as cause & effect. Human interaction is a very critical component of anything it touches.
Of course human interaction itself rests upon incalculable precedents, going way back to the origination of mankind, whose origins nobody knows, but that many speculate on.
The very same origination issues pertaining to man may be said for each chemical that went into the match's or the paper's make-up, including processes of production.
Going all the way back one might say that cause and effect are just illusions, as everything is ordained by God. Or one might say "not so!"
Whatsoever one might say, we are all on this revolving, rotating planet, orbiting around our remote sun, in the air, with trillions of other suns, and their intergalactic coteries, yet do not know first cause nor effect !
If we do not know the first cause or effect, how can we know the later?
Tuesday, May 3, 2016
NO NEED TO FEAR THE TRUTH
NONE NEED FEAR THE TRUTH
There were, and are, so many white heroes who have assisted runaway slaves, and later freed blacks, that there is no need for whites to fear accurate portrayals of themselves, nor for blacks to be nervous about these portrayals!
One such account is in "Chased by Wolves," in the book, FORBIDDEN FRUIT LOVE STORIES FROM THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD by Betty DeRamus (2006), that I am now reading!
DeRamus writes of Frances Gordon 's flight from Kentucky with her entire passel of paternally bequeathed slaves, and their families, in her canvas-covered wagon, with the help of a white preacher companion, while defeating her wolfish, slave-stealing brothers possessory actions in court twice, through Missouri to Keokuk, Iowa, in the 1850s, and the many amazing escapes and adventures attendant thereto!
No less remarkable than"Mistress" Frances Gordon was Mrs. Charlotta Pyles, the enslaved mother, her free husband, Harry Pyles, their 11 children and 5 grandchildren, who not only made the journey, but who --thanks to mother Charlotta's travels to the East Coast to speak to Antislavery audiences--raised $3,000 in 6 months to buy the freedom of their two sons-in-law who were left behind in Kentucky on another plantation!
Facts trump fiction as history trumps mythology! Truth is a marvelous thing!
And all of that's just the beginning!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)