i wrote this at the end of my degree chasing at Middle Tennessee. It was certainly inspired by, if not homage to e.e. cummings.

tired.
shot all to hell
like a riddled card
against the tree
attacked
by Wild Bill’s six-shooter;
weather abates:
sultry heat,
hazy skies
demand rain.
but when will it fall
down
in pellets,
which riddle
the lawn like that gunshot
penetrated
pasteboard?

Yesterday was e.e. cummings’ 101st birthday. i learned that from yesterday’s “Writer’s Almanac” and checked a quote from him on the “Brooklyn Arden” website. i discovered his poem “Buffalo Bill” in a literature class at Middle Tennessee. i have admired his work ever since and read his poems frequently for inspiration. The quote i checked is below. i think i like him even more having read this:

The poems to come are for you and for me and are not for mostpeople—it’s no use trying to pretend that mostpeople and ourselves are alike. . . . You and I are human beings; mostpeople are snobs. – e.e. cummings

…and that poem:

This is a continuation of my lead up to a sports commentary, which i may never finish. My time at The Watertown (NY) Daily Times was a wonderful snapshot of my strengths. I was a very good sports editor and writer. I think i can still be good, but very, very different from what is mostly out there now when it comes to sports commentary. That job interviewee in 1972 solidified my belief in what i thought sports journalism should and shouldn’t be.

I should add that my decision to return to the Navy was mostly financial, but i loved my 15 years at sea, and the shore tours, NROTC Unit at Texas &M and Director of leadership, management and equal opportunity programs for the West Coast and Pacific Rim (with offices at the Naval Amphibious School, Coronado) were pretty good as well.

I love both the sea and sports writing. I made my decisions based on what i thought was right for my family and me at the time. I do not regret those decisions at all.

The background information continues:

As the sports pages at The Watertown Daily Times were beginning to take the shape i envisioned, my friend and the assistant publisher (i think that was his title; “Yanch,” as we called him in college, was the publisher in waiting) John Johnson approached me with the idea of going “cold type,” the initial computer publishing system. We agreed to publish the national sports news in the new cold type and the local news in the old “hot type” system.

The advertising sections of the paper had already migrated to cold type. The old guard in the newsroom were wary and reluctant to change. i readily agreed to give it a try.

It began well. i laid out the first sports page for cold type, inserting the AP news stories from the wires, editing, and writing the headlines. The second page was in hot type for the local news. The following pages would be extra hot type for local sports overflow and cold type for whatever space was available for national sports and commentary.

There was one problem. That new fangled computer driven system could kick out more sports news in one day than i had ever experienced. This was not so evident the first couple of days. I got the AP’s big news and the photographs, laid it out, and produced about three pages of newsprint on national sports; i laid out and filled up the second and third pages with local sports and ads, and it looked like it was going to work out just fine.

The size of the sports section then varied depending on the ads and the newsprint required to allow them to fit well into that edition. The sports section had been about one and one-half pages of newsprint. By the time i left, the section averaged over four-pages of newsprint daily.

Then came the first Thursday with the new system. For those who have not worked in the newspaper business, Thursday is grocery day. That’s the day all of the grocery ads are put in the paper. That means you have to have more newsprint, so the paper looks like a newspaper instead of four or five grocery ads. The new cold type system gave me the ability to fill up the space around ads. On the first Thursday of the new sports pages, the sports department, aka me, was overwhelmed. The paper that Thursday ended up with nine pages of sports section, something never even approached before. But there was only one of me to gather the sports articles and photos, lay out the nine pages, write the headlines, edit the articles (because even the giant wire services make mistakes), and get it to the printing press.

The deadline was 10:00. Somewhere around 9:15, i realized there was no way i was going to get my nine pages to the printing press by deadline. I ran to the general manager’s office and told him the paper was going to be at least a half-hour late because of the new system. He thanked me and said my alerting him would allow him to get the pressmen, the trucking staff, and the delivery boys ready to work faster than usual. I remember feeling good i had alerted him but bad i had missed deadline.

We got the paper out a little bit late but with not a great deal of disruption to the delivery system.

At the daily post-production meeting, the general manager stood at the front and addressed the editors and key personnel. “I want you to know Jim averted a potential disaster today by alerting me he was not going to make his deadline. This was understandable considering the amount of newsprint he had to manage for today, but him notifying me allow our delivery process to adjust and minimize the damage.

“I have been working here for over twenty years. I want all of you to know this is the first time I’ve ever experienced a staffer letting me know of a problem he caused in advance.

“I hope all of you learn from Jim’s example. He saved us a lot of money and anguish today by giving us a heads up, even though he was admitting to missing the deadline.”

As you can see, i’m still proud of that.

After a couple of months, it was apparent i needed full time help, and we advertised for hiring a sports reporter. I screened a couple of résumés and rejected them. Then one with some potential came pass by desk. I called the guy and set up an appointment. The next afternoon after the paper had been put to bed, the young man was escorted to the little area of the newsroom we had set up as the “sports department.”

I began to ask him about his experience. He began to spew out statistics like a slot machine that had hit the jackpot. He was Billy Beane’s and Bill Gate’s predecessor. Back then, we called them “geeks,” or “nerds.” And that wasn’t a compliment. I kept trying to get him to talk about athletes, how they played, and what were great moments in sports from him. I got batting averages, ERA’s, touchdowns, rushing yards, sacks, home runs, points, rebounds, and not one word about what he thought.

I didn’t hire him even though it could have meant i would be pulling another week or so of long hours by myself. But to me sports journalism was all of the things he didn’t mention. It’s become all of the things he thought was important. For the last two weeks, i’ve been sporadically watching the major league too-long playoffs (money, money, money). The airwaves are full of self-righteous former ball-players and announcers slobbering over every useless tidbit these idiots put out:

“The Royals are 36-2 when they are ahead going into the ninth inning.” Duh.

“He throws his changeup a lot after he’s gotten ahead with his fastball.” Duh.

I still believe there is a beauty in the game itself, in athletes overcoming odds and rising to the challenge. This is one reason i’m a terrible bettor: i always root for the underdog. I still think announcers need to let the game speak for itself. I don’t want to hear what these “experts” think i should know before every pitch or play from scrimmage. i have come to enjoy my television being on mute. I think all of these playoffs and “sudden death” playoffs in every sport are moneymakers for pro team owners and college coaches, and really don’t prove very much. If Ohio State beats Alabama in one game, they could get beaten in the next. The drama of last year’s college answer to the superbowl was exquisite, but such drama used to be in four bowl games on New Year’s day.

I believe the MLB season should be 154 games and there should be no wild card teams. Playoffs up the World Series should be best of three games.

If they are serious about shortening the games, then go back to not having the game time controlled by commercial time outs in baseball and football.

But i am old and out of date. I watch all of the descendants of that man who wanted to work for me in the stands, acting like complete idiots. Sports contests should be watched, not be a backdrop for maniacs. Andy Warhol’s “fifteen minutes of fame” has diminished to five seconds of dressing like a clown and doing something stupid (with a “cute” sign of course). i see my wanna-be-hire’s progeny on tweets and other social media making useless comments about something they inaccurately think they know something about. I listen to radio sports talk shows (why?) to hear rants and observations from unqualified yahoos, both those being paid and those who call in.

I think there are some worthwhile and entertaining things about today’s sports. And i’m tired of ranting about all of the imbecilic money-based things and the pampered overpaid athletes acting like goons instead of showing respect and responsibility (we used to call it good sportsmanship).

So i am stopping with the rants. I plan for this “Sports Commentary” on my blog to be pleasant observations and sometimes humorous observation about the sports. I will be honest in telling you my sources and suspect a great number of them will come from the San Diego Union-Tribune.

A sample will be forthcoming here soon.

I hope you enjoy them.

i wrote “Too Long” in 1966. It was most likely the period of my life when i was at the height of my literary prowess (and that ain’t too high up the ladder, folks). i was midway through my second go-round of college after flunking out of Vanderbilt, one “F” keeping me from being the first to flunk out of that wonderful university without failing a course, 14 “D’s” in four semesters, which also might be a record. But that is another story.

i had spent nine months working for Fred Russell at The Nashville Banner and was planning to become a sports writer. But when i enrolled at Middle Tennessee, i quickly met Dr. Scott Peck, the Dean of English, and Dr. Bill Holland with whom i became a close friend and he created the good student in me, or at least as good as i could be.

Dr. Peck, who got his doctorate alongside Robert Penn Warren and the other Agrarians at Vanderbilt, was simply brilliant and obviously loved his work as a professor. In one Shakespeare class, i had turned in a paper critiquing a play of another dramatist in the Bard’s era. i compared the play to an oater. When it was returned, a red A+ was at the top and below was scrawled, “See me immediately after class.”

Thinking he was going to praise my work, i walked up to his desk as the other students filed out of the room. Looking up at me from his desk, Dr. Peck said, “That was an innovative approach to the assignment, and you did an extremely good job. However, if  you had turned that in to several other professors here, you might be hanging from that big oak tree just outside this building.”

Dr. Holland received his doctorate from the University of Edinburgh. His doctorate traced the themes of Chaucer through the lions of British literature and assessed those themes in the Romantics, primarily Wordsworth. He gave me the opportunity to learn to love Wordsworth. We spent many hours together, mostly in his office, discussing many off the wall connections such as symbolism in Bobby Gentry’s “Ode to Billie Joe,”  and Bobby Vinton’s “Butterfly of Love.” We discussed how Plato’s account of Atlantis could have been miscalculated by a decimal point, and instead of being in the Atlantic could have actually in the Adriatic Sea. In 1966, this was not a well known theory, but has since been championed as most likely.

But these two professors certainly rivaled, equalled, if not surpassed the English professors at Vanderbilt, and they allowed me freedom of expression and challenged me to succeed.

In those seven semesters. i was finally getting my act together, but it was also a dark period. i was often despondent about losing my scholarship at Vanderbilt. i was working two jobs, deejay and Banner correspondent, which amounted to about 50 hours a week, taking a full load of courses straight through, living at home with my parents and commuting to the Murfreesboro college.

It was in this period, i wrote some of my best poetry…i think. Here’s one:

Too Long

The world is a beautiful thing;
if not in it,
i could sit,
watch it
go by for hours;
but the seat is hard;
it’s a pain in the ass
to sit on the cold concrete
too long.