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is no coaching anymore -- not in the NBA, anyhow, where $100-million players are a way of life.Coaching there has been replaced by "managing."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.
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.
