Dinner with my Guidance Counselor

             Many years ago I was required to meet with my high school’s guidance counselor. I don’t recall his name now and this blog is not about him. In a round about way, this is about my mother. It is also about how things can work when they go well.

            I began my high school matriculation with a low opinion of anything ending with the word ‘school.’ School meant rules and dogma and lots of people bossing me around. But my first high school class of my first semester was a ten-week class called Guidance. We took a lot of tests in that class and wrote stuff about our interests. My primary interest then was sports. That hasn’t changed. And while reviewing my score on a stanine test (I got an 8 out of a possible 9 for having a big mouth and the willingness to use it), I saw a list of occupations that might be fitting.

            One of the suggestions was ‘Broadcasting.’ I instantly transposed the word ‘Sportscasting.’

            Boom. My future was determined. I would someday become the radio play-by-play man for the Los Angeles Rams. The remainder of my high school matriculation was nothing but the marking of time. History classes? Pointless because I already knew the history of the Rams. Math? Unneeded because I could already determine average yards per rush and pass completion stats. Biology? I already knew that knees, elbows and shoulders are made up of bone, ligaments and cartilage. English? One of my high school teachers told me that it was clear that I had no talent, so it was hard to have much faith in that individual. Hell, broadcasters talk more than they write anyway.

            Okay, fine. I did my time. Finally, on that day three years later, I went to the office and saw the counselor. His job, I think, was to point students toward a college with good programs for their interests or perhaps reliable training programs for the trades. He asked what I wanted to do and I said I was going to be a sportscaster.

            “Forget it,” he told me. “You’ll need to know every statistic about every player and team.”

            I looked at the idiot (yep, I still carry the grudge) and I said, “I already do.”

            At dinner that night, I told my mother about the encounter with the counselor. I told her what he said and what I said. And my mother slowly raised her eyes to meet mine. That usually meant I was in trouble. A lot of trouble. The more slowly she raised her eyes, the deeper the trouble I was in.

            But what my mother said this time was, “You’re right, Lee. You already do.”

            My mom never stopped believing in me. She asked me to run through my decision-making process once in a while, but she never stopped supporting my choices. And she was perfectly happy with my desire to become a broadcast journalist.

This month I’ll observe the first month of August I’ve ever gone through without my mom. It hurts. But what I carry with me is the memory of the words from the dinner table that night all that time ago. They gave me the freedom to chase my life’s desire. Those words started me on the path I followed for the next five decades.

“You’re right, Lee. You already do.”

Thanks mom.

 

                I write to recommend Joe Zagorski’s book, The 2003-Yard Odyssey: The Juice, The Electric Company, and an Epic Run For a Record. This book tells a story that had to be told but hadn’t been until now. It tells the story of Buffalo Bills running back O.J. Simpson’s run to a record during the 1973 NFL season.

            Any book about Simpson faces scrutiny. The controversial nature of Simpson’s post-football years can’t be – frankly should not be – erased from public memory. Zagorski addresses that issue, briefly, early in the book. “This is a football book, first and foremost,” Zagorski wrote, “And it should be kept in that vein of thought.”

            Joe Zagorski is a fellow member of the Professional Football Researchers Association and an author of several books. He has been awarded the PFRA’s Ralph Hay Award for Lifetime Achievement for Pro Football Research and Historiography. A respected researcher, Zagorski is currently working on a biography of Pro Football Hall of Fame lineman Larry Little.

            For Odyssey, Zagorski delved deeply into how the Bills and Simpson generated the first-ever 2,000-plus yard season for a running back. In 1973, NFL teams played 14-game regular seasons. The Bills did not reach the playoffs that season.

Using a wide assortment of first-person recollections and contemporary accounts, Zagorski uses the words of the players to bring the reader to understand how it all happened. Prince among the interviews was Zagorski’s 2022 conversation with Simpson. That alone ensures that Odyssey will be a prime source for researchers in the future. The reader will see that Simpson discussed a variety of football topics, including the effort the other members of the Buffalo offense had to make for Simpson to surpass the 2,000-yard barrier. Yes, Simpson was a controversial interview subject. But the story could not have been so effectively told without his participation and, as noted above, Zagorski checks an historic box.

            Odyssey is well constructed, and the research is top-notch. Zagorski devotes a chapter to each offensive position group; the line’s center and guards, the tackles and tight ends, the receivers, quarterbacks and running backs. Zagorski even includes a chapter about Buffalo’s defense. Each game is reviewed and each one of Simpson’s 332 carries are noted by down, distance, yard line, the type of play and the result. Those statistics are not stuck in the back of the book. They are included in the chapter which reviews each game, making this an easier book to read. Too often in today’s world, important information is noted at the end of books. That makes it unlikely that some readers will ever see the data. In this book, those stats are right where the reader is. When Zagorski wrote that this is a football book, he was exactly correct. Even the hard-core fan will gain a better understanding of what happened in each game, rush by rush.

            It is a tribute to Zagorski that Marv Levy, a Buffalo Bills legend who was not involved with the Bills in 1973, wrote the forward for this book. Levy wrote, “I mean, where else would you rather be, than right here, right now, reading this great book about Buffalo’s great past?”

            That’s how I feel about this book. I remember watching the highlight shows in 1973 to see how Simpson did each week as his yardage piled up. I wondered at that time how any back and any team could run the ball so well against NFL defenses every week. I’ve read Odyssey and now I know the answer.

I recommend that you do the same.

 

Lee Elder

Executive Director

Professional Football Researchers Association

 

WE HAVE LOST THE COMMISSIONER

 

One week, years ago, when I was the Sports Editor of a newspaper, I devoted my weekly column to the proposition that my mother should be named the Commissioner of Major League Baseball.

          My pal and sometimes co-worker Mickey Dale liked the column. In fact, when we speak nowadays, he’ll ask my about mom. But what he’ll say is, “How is The Commissioner?”

          Mom, I wrote, was an uncompromising disciplinarian. As a retired second grade teacher, she had the right training to handle the modern athlete. I wrote about a theoretical meeting with a player appealing a suspension. The player would get no sympathy from ME, I want you to know. I’ve been with The Commissioner when she was riled up. In my column, that make-believe player served his COMPLETE suspension.

And friends, my mother knew baseball. Do you understand the Infield Fly Rule? Mom did. She explained it frequently to anyone who didn’t know the rule. Too bad the umpires didn’t listen. With mom on their side, they’d have won more arguments.

          Do you remember when the Dodgers moved to LA? Mom did. She was in the Coliseum for Roy Campanella Night. She said Campy was the best catcher the Dodgers ever had. Want to argue? It’s a little late now but you had no chance of winning anyway.

          In my column, I wrote that the then Commissioner was little more than a fund-raising yes man for the owners. That’s pretty much what they have now, come to think of it. But mom would have run the show. Judge Kennesaw ‘Mountain’ Landis served as commissioner from 1920 through his death in 1944. Landis was a stern overseer of the game. He did the game a great service during his tenure. But Landis would have seemed like a baby kitten compared to my mom. Leo Durocher once won an argument with Landis. Leo would have stood no chance against mom.

          None.

          Well, we lost The Commissioner this week. She was 92. I harbored a small hope that she might be game for one more season with the Dodgers, one more shot at winning the World Series. That was not to be. She may have watched as last year’s bunch floundered around and lost in the first round of the playoffs again. Mom may have said, “The heck with this.”

          Mom is with her ancestors now and I envy all of them, even as I grieve. They are joyously together. But I don’t envy Judge Landis. Sooner or later mom will track him down. She’ll chew the Judge up one side and down the other for not seeing to it that MLB was integrated before the end of World War II. She’s right, he was wrong and he’s going to hear about it.

          And then my mother will sit down and prepare her 5 X 8 index cards so that she can keep score of the next Dodgers game. Where mom is now, the Angels are the home team, but I’m sure she’ll find a way to watch out-of-market games.

          “At this level,” mom will say, “I’m sure I can watch my Dodgers.”

          The Big Cable Guy in the Sky had better get that squared away before the season starts. The Commissioner will be waiting impatiently.

 

2023 Speedyleeway Awards

The 2023 Speedyleeway Awards, as determined by Speedylee and a cast of many others. This year’s awards are late. So what?

 

NEWS MAKER OF THE YEAR AWARD: To Mad Vlad Putin for his failed invasion of the Ukraine.

THEY’LL BAN HUMANS NEXT AWARD: To the state of California, which has banned just about everything else.

WE WELCOME EVERYONE AWARD: To the state of Georgia for generously allowing Texas resident Hershel Walker to run for elected office in the Peach state.

THE WALL GANG AWARD: To NASCAR driver Ross Chastain for his last-lap, all or nothing charge at Bristol Motor Speedway. This award is named in honor of the famous Sit On the Wall Gang of Santa Monica, California.

THE FOLLOW THE ELDERS AWARD: To USC and UCLA for leaving the Pacific 12 Conference. The schools become the 15^th and 16^th members of the Big 10 Conference.

THE DON’T HIRE ENGINEERS FROM THIS CONFERENCE AWARD: To the 16-member Big 10 Conference.

RETURN ON INVESTMENT AWARD: To the Cleveland Browns for their very expensive contract with quarterback DeShon Watson.

BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD: Coach George Allen: A Football Life. Published by McFarland & Company Publishers.

TEAM OF THE YEAR AWARD: The 2022 Super Bowl champion Los Angeles Rams.

WAIT, THERE’S MORE TO DO? AWARD: The 2022 Los Angeles Dodgers.

THE REHASH IT ALL OVER AGAIN AWARD: To China for its end of the year outbreak of the COVID-19 virus.

SCHOOL SPIRIT AWARD: To Natalie Davis and Callie Ramsey of Wewoka (Oklahoma) High School. Their school’s football team ran low on players, so these two young women stepped up and helped out. Both women played in the game. Davis punted and kicked off. She recorded a tackle on her kickoff.

PROMOTER OF THE YEAR AWARD: To Ventura (California) Raceway’s Jim Naylor for the tremendous trophies he builds for the annual Turkey Night Grand Prix USAC midget race.

TALK SHOW OF THE YEAR AWARD: To Paul Finebaum for his show on the SEC Network.

AWARD OF THE YEAR AWARD: To the Professional Football Researchers Association for its annual Hall of Very Good Awards.

THE LET’S GET OUT OF HERE AWARD: To the officiating crew of the Michigan-TCU national semi-final game for its failure to continue officiating in the final seconds.

A story of panels and plug-ins

 

          This is what is going to happen.

          Energy is the single most important question facing our planet and its residents. Finding effective sources of energy without harming the planet is the most difficult and controversial question before us. Combating the impact each energy source has on the planet is our greatest challenge.

          Generating electricity is a dirty process. The big push toward electric automobiles in the name of clean energy is laughable for that reason. We are not helping the planet.

          In order for electricity to effectively power cars, it must be stored in onboard batteries. The same is true in order to power homes. Want to power your own home? You’ll have to be able to store the juice somewhere.

          Therefore, the single most important thing we can do is to learn how to safely repurpose batteries. All batteries fail and they are environmentally filthy. If we look ahead, building batteries for safe and clean reuse is a science that will be very important. The resulting industry will be highly profitable.

          But how can we make generating electricity a clean industry? The answer, of course, is solar power. The science exists now to generate solar energy at your home. Put solar panels on your roof. The industry is constantly developing better and better panels. But creating enough energy to power both homes and automobiles in a home application will take a while. It will be expensive. It will probably have to be accomplished by private industry.

          Eventually, every family home will have solar panels on the roof. We’ll almost certainly go through an era where homes are powered by both traditional sources (read that to say ‘oil’) and solar. Generation and storage capacity will take a while to match need. But we’ll eventually reach the point where single-family homes are energy independent.

          We’ll also need to put solar panels on the roofs of every school, factory, governmental building and parking lot cover, that contribute to the power grid. Churches will need to have solar panels if they want to continue their tax-exempt status. Airport parking lots will start covering every spot in order to place solar panels on those covers. Southern California’s deserts will become solar farms and the landowners will rake in tremendous profits. Cities like El Centro and Brawley will become technical hubs.

          Sooner or later, someone is going to figure out how to infuse into windows the ability to generate and store solar energy.

          And the thing driving all of this will be science. Universities have drifted away from the engineering sciences in the last four decades. That will have to stop. Electrical and mechanical engineers are needed now to begin the research that will drive the development. That means math and the sciences will have to be emphasized in schools, starting with the primary grades. And that means teachers will need to get more training in the basics of those fields, which means more effort from the universities. Yes, I said effort from universities.

          The trades will play a significant role is all of this. When something goes wrong with your solar equipment, the local university won’t send a professor over to re-wire something. Electricians are going to be pretty important in this new solar society. Someone is going to have to install, maintain and repair all this equipment. Architects will have to design buildings that support panels on the roofs and can handle the increased electrical activity. The construction trades will have to adjust as well. Junior colleges used to be havens for developing tradesmen. That’s going to have to happen again.

          Yeah, yeah, you say. That’s in the future. Who cares now?

          Well, in order to make this stuff happen in the future, we’ll have to start now. We need a culture change. We need to think about building the future. That will not happen just by developing machines capable of running on electricity. It will happen by building an entire energy structure.

          Yeah, that means effort, lots of it. Industry, education and the trades will eventually take positions of leadership and drag us, kicking and screaming, into the future. But the first to make the needed advancement in each field figures to rake in the dough. As Steve Martin once said in a film, it’s a profit deal.

Americans usually respond to that.

 

 

         

Follow the Elders! We lead the way!

 

It is amazing what trend setters my wife and I have become. What is there to say? The last person to leave Los Angeles should turn off the lights, if there is any electricity left in the state of California by then.

          When we left my native land, we did so with the idea of achieving financial stability. It is cheaper to live in the Midwest after retirement than it is in Southern California and we knew that. My wife and I frequently brag that we sometimes to go the bank just to visit our money. What the heck, we don’t have much of a social life. Might as well visit all those dead presidents.

          Well, the world was paying attention. At least the sporting world was. Two institutions of higher learning followed the Elders. The University of Southern California and the University of California at Los Angeles both noticed the financial pitfalls of living in California. The schools recently announced that their athletic departments would follow the Elders and begin playing their road games in the Midwest and even in New Jersey.

          Brilliant. The two Los Angeles schools obviously considered their surroundings and bailed. Bordered by the wastelands of Beverly Hills, Santa Monica and Hollywood, they felt hindered by the greater Los Angeles area business climate. The schools were hopelessly limited in their ability to raise funds. Forced to compete with the limitless funding available at schools in Oregon, Washington, Utah, Arizona and Colorado, the SoCal schools bolted for the pot at the end of the rainbow in the Midwest. Those two bastions of business education will send their teams east for the same reason we went: Money.

          The Bruins and Trojans can send their golf, tennis, track/field and beach volleyball teams to venture off into the splendor of New Jersey, where each can play against Rutgers. Imagine beach volleyball along the shores of the Atlantic in the bracing air of the northeastern United States. They’ll play tennis on ice skates and rake in all that money. It will be easy to judge the shot putting competition; all the judges have to do is look for where the shot went through the ice.

          And think of how inclusive home games will become for USC and UCLA! All the Midwesterners who have moved west will be able to attend and root, root, root for the visiting team. It’ll sound like a Rams game. If that isn’t inclusion, there isn’t any such thing in today’s world.

          Yes, my wife and I are proud we were able to show the way. We’re happy that the geniuses who guide those two proud schools followed our lead and headed east. That’s where the money is.

        Thanks for reading.

Tua Tagovailoa deserved better

 

                The images are disturbing. Miami Dolphins quarterback Tua Tagovailoa suffered injuries in consecutive games played four days apart. Your Loyal Blogger was not the doctor on scene at either game. In fact, YLB is not a doctor at all. There is no point to pontificating about Tagovailoa’s physical condition before, during or after either game because we really don’t know what his condition was.

            Still, there are points to be made.

1.      It is time for the National Football League to face up to the reality that its players should not be playing on four days rest. Thursday games, including Thanksgiving Day games, should be stricken from the schedule.

2.      Tagovailoa’s first injury came on a late hit, a deliberate foul by Buffalo Bills linebacker Matt Milano. That player was not fined. His team was slapped with a 15-yard penalty but there was no ejection nor post-game penalty issued by the National Football League. The National Football League Players Association also said nothing.

3.      Tagovailoa’s second injury, while vicious, came at the end of a perfectly legal tackle.

4.      It must be fairly stated that Tagovailoa’s first injury incident happened just before halftime. He only missed three plays but that was with the halftime interval included.

5.      Tagovailoa’s second injury, during a Thursday Night Football game, was suffered on artificial turf. While strides have been made with fake turf in terms of the potential for cutting the odds of suffering certain types of injuries, we wonder whether studies have been done regarding the fake stuff and head injuries.

6.      Tagovailoa’s injuries have allowed the NFL to give itself a terrible black eye. A star player received an apparent injury but was allowed to complete the game. Four days later, he suffered another dangerous injury in a league game. Much of the country did not see Thursday’s game. It was not on network television due to slipping television ratings. The game was carried a streaming service of some kind. But the video images of Tagovailoa’s two injuries will be with football fans for years to come. The league failed this player.

Thanks for reading.