The Lions play their last game of the season tonight, and then we find out just how much Christmas spirit Wayne Fontes can count on.Fontes and owner William Clay Ford have always had a good relationship, but a season like 1996 could make Romeo and Juliet sleep in separate bedrooms.So perhaps Wayne is looking to tweak Mr. Ford's holiday cheer. Why, I can just envision their meeting Christmas Eve, when Wayne will suggest -- before they do anything rash -- that they share a few Christmas carols.Christmas carols?
Since you can't bring up a racial issue in this country without whites running to one side and blacks running to the other, let me try a different angle on this Ebonics idea.If I were black, I'd be insulted.
Deshawn Chatman was tired of watching his mother do crack, tired of the smell, the little white pellets, the way she lit up from the four-burner stove in their kitchen. He was tired of finding her incoherent on the couch, her eyes glassed over, too high even to speak to him. So one day last spring he quit the thing he loved the most, the Cooley High basketball team, and he walked the few blocks to his small, decaying, red brick house on the northwest side of Detroit.
The ball came down from the lights the way a pitchfork might come down from the lights, the way a live grenade might come down from the lights, you could watch its frightening descent and know exactly the terrible thing that was about to happen and there was nothing, absolutely nothing, you could do about it.There. I've just summed up a day in the life of the Lions' secondary.
He entered the room in a three-piece suit, sat down and began scanning an information sheet about me. I was interviewing him, but in many ways, like a good lawyer, Johnnie Cochran was preparing for me."I know you're on a tight schedule," I said, "so I'll get right down to it.""OK, great," he replied, his gaze never coming off the page. I watched his eyes dart back and forth beneath his glasses. I kept picturing a judge hanging over us, saying, "Are you ready to begin, Mr. Cochran?"
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.
