Afriend of mine has no children. She hears about it all the time."Why not?" they ask."How could you not want them?""Is there something wrong between you and your husband?"Another friend has three children. She also hears about it all the time."Don't you want a career?" they ask."Are you really taking those kids into that restaurant?"Once upon a time, having children was a given. Those who didn't couldn't. They were to be pitied.
A few weeks ago, Rick Carlisle was in the delivery room, witnessing the birth of his first child. The doctor liked to hear music while he worked, and the song playing as the baby girl emerged was "Rocket Man" by Elton John, which includes the line, "It's lonely out in space."
Good news, Curt. This year, in deference to the grueling presidential election we just endured, I will not engage in the politics of personal destruction -- even though you personally have been referred to as a Swinging Chad.No, sir. I will not tell people that your Super Bowl predictions are normally as reliable as airport soup.Or that your idea of research during Super Bowl week is seeing just how carefully that "six-foot" rule is enforced in Tampa.
Take your sign down.Pull up the stakes. Rip up the cardboard. Throw the whole thing in the trash.We are no longer Bush or Kerry this morning, we are no longer right or left. Our reds and blues need to be united now, by the pure and neutral white that completes the American flag. We have the next president, somewhere in the numbers, and his biggest challenge, when he is sworn in, will be getting this entire country behind him.And our biggest challenge will be allowing that to happen.This is now the question: Will we be led?
COACHING IS dead.The whistle is buried. The chalkboard is blank. The days when a coach spoke and a player listened?Those days are gone.There is no coaching anymore -- not in the NBA, anyhow, where $100-million players are a way of life.Coaching there has been replaced by "managing." Managing means keeping a player happy. Managing means keeping an ego in check. Managing is what Paul Westphal tried unsuccessfully to do in Seattle, with sulking multimillionaires like Gary Payton and Vin Baker.
Take a kid. A skinny, mixed-up kid. A kid who feels picked on, persecuted, bullied -- a kid who vows revenge.Now add a gun. A gun kept in his house, by his father, in a glass case. One morning, when whatever crazy, unloved portion of that kid's brain fires the wrong synapse, he takes that gun to school and opens fire, killing two classmates.Now take that same kid. But subtract the gun. He gets up that same morning and something snaps. But there is no firearm at hand. What does he do? Maybe he takes a knife? Or a brick? Or a can of spray paint?
Am I my brother's keeper? Well, yes, out there on the pitcher's mound, calming Matthew down, getting him to throw strikes, Mark Lestan was, for all those years, from Little League to senior high, his brother's keeper.
Getting kicked out of kindergarten isn't easy. A child would have to do something truly awful, right?Not necessarily. A 5-year-old girl last week didn't have to do a thing. Her mother did it for her.Or rather, her mother's job did it. Christina Silvas, a 24-year-old single mom, works as an adult dancer in Sacramento, Calif. She does it for the money.She takes a chunk of that money and pays the $400-a-month tuition for her daughter, Abigail, to attend the Capital Christian School.
Remember that kid in "The Sixth Sense"? He saw dead people? America, based on the election, has become that kid. Only we see enemies. Wherever we look.And they frighten us.Straight people see gays and fear they will turn their boys into sissies and their girls into Ellen DeGeneres.Gay people see straights and fear they want to "change them back" or legislate them out of existence.The religious fear those less faithful will smash the Ten Commandments.The nonreligious fear those more faithful want to shove the Ten Commandments down their throats.
Their engine, Jerry Stackhouse, was sputtering badly, so the Pistons tried everything under the hood. They jumped the battery, they tweaked the carburetor, they threw the fuses. Finally, they got out and pushed. There is more than one way to win a playoff series, and when pretty doesn't work, go ugly if you have to, but get there.
He saw the planes coming and he thought they were ours. He saw them drop torpedoes and he thought they were dummies. He saw the explosions and still he thought, at first, even as the fires rose, that this was some kind of drill, some kind of exercise, and that someone had made a really dumb mistake and was using live ammunition."Then this tremendous explosion blew us across the ship," he recalls. "We were covered in oil and soaking wet. I said to my buddy, 'Oh, boy, somebody's going to catch heck for this.' "
You know White Castle, right? The hamburger place? Sells those good, greasy "sliders," which are really mini-burgers, small enough to fit in the palm of your hand?Does anyone eat just one of those? No. People buy four. Six. Twelve. Whatever. They eat until they're beyond full. In some cases, they eat more than they would if the burgers were large, because it feels as if you're eating less when the portions are shrunk.
