I had been looking for just the right column to pen before Election Day. I think I may have found it.It's the story of Marilyn Mock.You wouldn't know her. She's not running for president. She is 50 years old and has a rock yard business in Texas, which she runs with her three kids. Last weekend, she went to a foreclosure auction with her son to see him bid on a house.While he was signing the papers, she wandered back to the auction area and sat down on the floor next to a woman named Tracy Orr. Being friendly, Mock asked if Orr was bidding on a house.
He wears long pants, his socks are dark, his shoes have heels and he's not even allowed on the court. He doesn't shoot. He doesn't dribble. He doesn't rebound, post-up or block a single shot. He doesn't even have a number. Yet Flip Saunders - of everyone in the Pistons' organization - is the one on the hot seat? Well, Sports Illustrated thinks so. ESPN thinks so. Stephen A. Smith, the NBA analyst, said Wednesday that if the Pistons didn't make the NBA Finals this season, Saunders was gone, no doubt about it.
Ten years ago, I sat with a literary agent and wondered whether a little book called "Tuesdays With Morrie" was going to hurt my sportswriting career."What do you mean hurt'?" he said."Well," I said, "it's about a dying professor and the meaning of life. What if I go into locker rooms now and athletes start making fun of me, calling me soft?"He thought for a second then waved a dismissive hand. "Don't worry," he said, "nobody's gonna read it."Ten years ago. I was a sportswriter then. I am a sportswriter now. But everything else has changed.
When did adults start dressing for Halloween? Last thing I knew, Halloween was for kids and it was mostly about candy. Check that. It was all about candy. I honestly didn't care if I went as a pirate, Scooby-Doo or a bedsheet, as long as my bag was filled with Milky Ways.As for my parents? Their job was not to dress up. Their job was to go through our candy like airport security and remove all apples, marshmallows, anything that might have a razor blade in it or anything that might have been cooked by this weird woman up the street who never came out of her house.
The game was about over, the Lions had won, and here came the ice water, over Rod Marinelli's neck and shoulders."How many times," someone asked him after the game, "have you had one of those buckets dumped on you?""This was the first one," he said.
This should make you angrier than you have been over almost anything since Sept. 11 - and that includes the war in Iraq.A recent report showed that 75% of fake bombs or bomb parts got past Transportation Security Administration security at Los Angeles International Airport and 60% got past TSA screeners at Chicago's O'Hare.Those are two of the busiest airports in the world. Those are two of the juiciest targets a terrorist could desire.
They hook their fingers and start to run, arms swaying in unison, feet thumping stride for stride. A short black man named Michael Holmes, a tall lanky white man named Bill Guisinger. They run inches apart, all but breathing on each other.The funny thing is, Michael has never seen Bill. Wouldn't know him if walked right past. Michael is blind. His world went dark in 1978, when he was in his early 20s, the result of cataracts and glaucoma.
Mitch Albom writes about running an orphanage in impoverished Port-au-Prince, Haiti, his kids, their hardships, laughs and challenges, and the life lessons he’s learned there every day.
