I held my father's hand as we walked into the stadium. I wore a cap. I carried a glove. I ate a hot dog. I clapped constantly. When one of our players struck out, I said, "That's OK," mimicking my father, who added, "We'll get 'em next time."I remember every vivid detail of my first sporting event, from the seat colors to the greasy food. What I don't remember is if our team won.I guess it didn't matter.
She was born in the Depression and she was raised in Brooklyn, in a small apartment above a drugstore named Berg's. Her father worked in a post office. Her mother stuffed $3 a week in an envelope for food money. They had no phone. They had no car. She and her school friends would hang out on the fire escapes.
For all the mothers whose sons did not kill.For all the mothers whose sons did not steal.For all the mothers whose sons did not plant pipe bombs.For all the mothers whose sons did not rape.For all the mothers whose sons did not poison.For all the mothers whose sons did not abuse.For all the mothers whose sons did not create Internet viruses.For all the mothers whose sons did not need guns.
'We are more alike than different." My old professor, Morrie Schwartz, told me that.We were sitting in his home, watching the TV news, Morrie under a blanket, dying from ALS, his body already decayed beyond hope.The fighting then was in Bosnia. We saw awful images, death and destruction. Morrie began to cry."What's wrong?" I asked."This is so terrible," he whispered."Well, of course," I said, embarrassed, "but you don't know any of those people. Why are you crying?"
As reporters go, Seymour Hersh is not only famous but also pretty darn reliable. He won a Pulitzer Prize during the Vietnam War. He broke the story of the My Lai massacre. When he writes, people listen.Recently, he and I were on a radio show together. I asked him about his latest piece for the New Yorker in which he reported that the first real U.S. commando effort in Afghanistan had gone badly and that the Taliban -- thanks partly to an ill-advised, overly noisy U.S. effort -- had fired upon a dozen of our elite soldiers, seriously wounding several of them.
One night. One town. One bullet. One kid.The kid was Justin Mello, barely 16 years old, a popular soccer player at Anchor Bay High School with a melting smile, a tall, athletic frame, a freshly minted driver's license, and a dream of buying his father's GMC truck with the money earned working at a pizza shop.
Last in a series on the heartbreaks and hopes of unsung Detroit area athletes.A thin drizzle fell that night, giving the streets an oily sheen under the lights. It was just past midnight, Monday turning to Tuesday, and a teenager named Tim Doil was driving through Troy with two friends, coming home from a high school graduation party. It was warm. Early June. They had Puff Daddy on the radio, singing "I'll Be Missing You." They were heading east.
To me, life is a song. That's the kind of fella I am. I see the sky, I sing "Here comes the sun." I see a hockey game, I sing "All I want for Christmas is my two front teeth." I see Marge Schott, I sing "If I only had a brain."
He entered the ballroom and walked briskly to his seat. The crowd applauded as strobe lights flashed and photographers lifted their cameras that made whirring and clicking sounds. He smiled and sat down, an arm's length away, and I thought maybe, just maybe, I am sitting next to the next president of the United States.
