i made a vow to reply to every comment on my posts here. In the last couple of months, i have been woefully remiss on that vow.

i apologize. i will not promise i will respond to every comment, but i will promise i will try.

Thanks to all of you who have commented. i cannot express how much your comments mean to me.

Written last night, Monday, October 25, 2021 in case you’re wondering.

Sometimes, sometimes, when you are my age, i guess, it just all falls into place. Or, at least, you think it does.

i experienced that falling into place thing tonight.

i’m not sure most people will understand. There was a time and place, a very small window of such for me tonight. Just hit it right.

Maureen, unlike me, likes to have the television on for background while she reads from her “kindle” (sounds like she is starting a fire to me but that thing is another electronic marvel i cannot abide, this one in particular because i like to feel and smell the paper when i read so the corners can get dog eared). That unattractive black screen was in living color on the Seattle-New Orleans football game, which neither of us was really interested. And then it was over. Neither of us cared to listen, even as background noise, and i mean noise, of the post game banal analysis of the talking heads. Somehow, i ended up with the controls. i went to streaming. As i was surfing, thinking i should just turn the damn things off — and i mean “things” as i had four of those remote thingies on the table, i increased surfing speed to mach 2. i caught a glance of something of interest to me. i backed up. PBS. Shows. “Austin City Limits.” Jon Batiste.

In the past, i have discovered some jewels on that show. Once, we caught Tom Waits when he was very young and relatively unknown, although i knew him because my shipmate, condo mate, the other “Booze Brother,” JD Waits, had introduced me to Tom’s music and revealed Tom was his second cousin.

So i checked Jon Batiste out.

i spent an hour enrapt, making connections.

The man and his band play my kinds of music, many kinds of my kind of music. Incredible.

The talent was amazing, enough just to enjoy all by itself.

i confess i didn’t even know who Jon Batiste is. i know now.

Not only did he wow wow me, he and his buddies and buddiettes (oh boy, that one is going to get me in trouble with someone) put a show on that stage that took me back to his and my roots…okay, my roots. i used to know all kinds of music, was a deejay, collected records, all sorts of music. Then i joined the Navy, went to sea back when you didn’t take much of anything with you, especially current music. i sort of got lost. Now, most of my music is my old stuff with a few more current artists one of my daughters introduced to me.

So Jon Batiste was new to me, but he took me back to old days.

There was the small table radio i put under the covers with me after listening to Big John R, Hoss Allen, Gene Nobles, and Herman Grizzard from nine until the wee hours on WLAC playing blues, real, gritty, soul, blues while i did my homework (ha, ha) in the upstairs room i shared with my brother on Castle Heights Avenue back home. i turned the volume down low and continued to listen as late as i could so i could order some great blues 45’s on Chess, Excello, and Nashboro labels from Randy’s Record Shop in Gallatin. Jon Batiste brought that back to me.

Then Jon sat down at the piano and did a bit of Beethoven and Gershwin like neither had heard before, and i marveled, wondering who the hell thought i should play a sonata at a recital at Peabody College in Nashville or a solo at the junior high graduation — oh i know who thought i had some talent: Mrs. Gwaltney, my teacher before i gave up the 88 for football, and my mother, of course; and i often wonder what my father thought of all that.

And then, Jon shifted back to stuff i knew and some stuff like hip hop i didn’t, but again he took me back, this time to the New Club Baron on Jefferson Street in Nashville where Cy Fraser and i would invade, taking along others, but the constant of Cy and I were always headed there when nothing was going on at Vanderbilt. White boys, honkies, red necks, jiving and being accepted by the otherwise black crowd while we listened to “Gorgeous George” (no, not the wrestler) with his revolutionary keyboard not a piano that looked more like an ironing board, and all sorts of other great acts, even Otis Redding after one of his big shows downtown at the Nashville Auditorium. We felt it.

Then Hurley’s on that side street in Newport, Rhode Island during OCS and while i was on the Hawkins, the destroyer across town at the Naval base. And Hurley’s immersed me in jazz and soul, real soul before it became some voice exercise, and i would listen to “My Satin Doll” until the cows came home.

And Jon played on and i was hearing Jimmy Reed and Eddie Floyd and Slim Hopkins and Sonny Boy Williamson…and Dvořák…and gospels…and Clarence “Frogman” Henry.

Jon Batiste. “Austin City Limits.”

i’m not to sure many of you will get where i was last night. It was damn near a religious experiment.

You see, i also heard Peace.

For the last several weeks and probably several more, my focus has been and will be on putting Steel Decks and Glass Ceilings in the can. i say that because every time i think i’m almost done, i discover something else that should be added, deleted or changed. Consequently, my posts have been few because my time is devoted to the book, and of course to my great escape, bad golf. Oh yeh, even with what you read here, i have watched nearly all of the National League playoffs.

While hard at work (when i’m not on a golf course) over the last several days, i have been considering sports, or rather the three major sports of my era. Changes over the years have altered the core of what i knew growing up and well into adulthood. You folks younger than me probably are all in with the new era of sports. It sure looks like it with the fans i see in the crowds acting out fantasies for their 15 seconds, not minutes of fame, some even frothing at the mouth. Today’s football, basketball, and baseball make me wonder about our sanity. My conclusions after wondering for a while make me sad.

If i were a manager of any baseball team, especially in the majors, i would require…i mean require or sit for any multi-million dollar player (and since even the lowest players in the majors makes at least $500,000 per season not including the bennies and the per diem compensation for meals, etc., which is pretty much more than i made in annual salary for all of my working days, all 1026 players and their replacements are multi-millionaires unless they blow it)…er, i went off on another rant…i would require them to bunt to the opposite side of a shift. Oh, there are lots of folks who want to outlaw “the shift” but we have too many people trying to make the game better…or worse to make more money, but that is just one more layer of interference in one of the most wonderful sports if played like a sport back when.

Bunt. Hit to the open area of the field. Play BALL, BASEBALL.

Then as i watched the San Diego State beat Air Force in football, i watched a quarterback scramble and throw a pass out of bounds. In my mind, the play begged the question, “When is intentional grounding intentional grounding?” The answer is rarely. You see if a quarterback is not in the pocket and throws the pass out of bounds or over the goal line with no receiver within an area code, the pass is not intentional grounding even though it was intentional grounding. And oh yeh, i think it was Dan Marino that started it, but when the time is running out and the quarterback takes a snap and immediately throws the ball into the ground to stop the clock, intentional grounding is not intentional grounding.

Hmm. It makes my head hurt.

My biggest gripe is games, athletic competition, remain barely on the field of play. Coaches control what is going on all the time. Watch them from the sidelines (and in baseball, watch them march to the mound to fix the pitcher (not) or rearrange the fielders, or heading to home plate to protest something some yahoo in a security booth somewhere watching the boob tube who saw something and call the bench coach who relays it to the manager who works the ump usually fruitlessly but sure to take five minutes or more if video replay is involved because those umps or refs have to consult with their yahoo in a booth watching the boob tube) or players, managers, coaches berating referees or umpires for questionable calls, which used to produce unsportsmanlike conduct penalties or ejection from that field of play. Statistics, not athletic ability, now rule football and baseball. The coaches have electronic communication or some other means to direct every play. They call timeouts from the sidelines. The players on the field are puppets even though they have incredible talent, because, apparently, they are short on brains without computers, videos, and statistics at hand. Oh, i forgot they have those little cuffs above their wrists where signals from the sidelines tell them what’s next.

Rules are made to make football safe. Really? You are trying to knock somebody on their butt at the line of scrimmage, in the backfield, in defensive secondary, and somebody thinks they are going to make it safe? The safe football game, and for that matter, the safe baseball game and the safe basketball game are the games where no one plays.

Nowadays, the athletes are all specialists. A designated hitter doesn’t play in the field. A pitcher doesn’t bat — in the American League and minors, and they are trying to make it for all of professional baseball so there will be more players who can make more ridiculous amounts of money when they can’t play parts of the game.

I still watch. Well, maybe not professional basketball because the rules have been tortured and abandoned. If I want to watch that kind of ball, i will go to a pickup game on some concrete, outside court somewhere.

The National Football League is an exhibition of superb athletes doing incredible things, but quite frankly even the exciting parts are predictable. i still watch baseball and the college sports and root for my teams, yet there is an empty feeling when they win, like so what? when my teams win, it’s not about the players playing the best ball. It’s about recruiting and coaches making them robots, incredible athletes totally under the coaches’ control, and those athletes are there because of money, either what they are making or what potential they can have to make MONEY.

We used to have pickup games as kids. Many of us played three sports or more. Now, the parents, the trainers, and the coaches demand devotion to learning techniques to play the game, their sport. A child can’t play a variety of sports. They have to be specialists. And the athlete from early childhood until they stop playing that sport is a slave to the sport, spending hours learning and practicing the best techniques, the correct stance, swing, throw, run, block, tackle…

Sounds like work to me.

Oh it’s a useless rant of a curmudgeon, but dammit, why can’t we just play ball?

i think i will ask Maureen to go with me for a walk on the beach today. i don’t think it will take 12 to 15 hours to watch pro football today on our television (and no, i don’t subscribe to the NFL network), but it will be fun, and i won’t have to listen to the talking heads.

Thank you for allowing me to let off some steam.

i often knock Joe Buck for being a terrible sports announcer.

He is. Perhaps the worst of all time.

In listening to commentators for the major league playoffs, i have realized they all are pretty close to awful.

Tonight, as the Atlanta Braves were within a pitch of closing out a 9-2 win against the buy-any-thing-we want-so-our-“fans”-can-show-up-late-expecting-us-to-win-and-leave-in-the-seventh-or-eighth-inning-or-earlier-if-we-are-behind-Dodgers, either Jeff Francoeur or Ron Darling, the former players turned color commentators said, “If the Dodgers had scored two runs earlier, this would have been a different ball game.”

Duh.

And we are listening to this?

i was going to entitle this “Disgusted,” but that seemed unbecoming to me.

i’m sad.

From sometime in the late 40’s until 1969, i was a UT Vols football fan. i attended enough games to fall in love with the game they played in orange jerseys with white numerals, white pants, white helmets, ankle top black shoes and not a sign of anybody’s name. They ran the single wing and had magic names, most notably for me, Johnny “The Drum” Major, and the Canale brothers. I was such a fan when Vanderbilt beat the Vols, 7-0 in 1964 in Nashville, my fraternity would not let me and several other hardcore Vol fans back into our fraternity house.

In November 1969, i took an extra liberty day from my ship, the USS Hawkins (DD 873) in Norfolk to fly to Knoxville where other Vandy friends picked me up to attend the Commodore-Vol  game. One of my best friends was a Vandy defensive back. At the time, even though UT had given up the single wing, high top black shoes, and came up with a bunch of different uniform color combinations with players names on the back of the jerseys, i still had mixed emotions. i rooted for both but would root for Vandy in head to head matches.

There were about a dozen of my friends and i sitting in the east end zone of Neyland Stadium, named after a football hero of mine. Having little time, i was still in my Navy service dress blue officer uniform. Shortly after the game began, Vol fans behind us began to yell obscenities at us and then began throwing stuff at us. In the second half, these “fans” began to throw drinks at us, colas, beers, and whiskey including the paper cups or cans. And i was in my Navy uniform. It was soaked and reeked of beer and whiskey.

i quit being a Vol fan.

Then i came out west. i wanted all three of my Tennessee teams, Vandy, UT, and MTSU to do well in football — there are other stories about basketball and other Tennessee schools for later posts — Again, i rooted for both the Commodores and the Vols until they played each other.

i have many good friends who are big Vol fans who are gracious people.

But last night, when a correct spot of a tackle didn’t go the Vols way against Ole Miss, idiot fans threw golf balls — and anyone who brought a golf ball into the stadium with the intention of throwing it at somebody has become unbalanced — water bottles, and trash at Ole Miss players and coaches. The Vols lost. And their fans lost my respect for them and their team. Sure, other college nuts could do it. But those other out of control fanatics aren’t the team i once loved. The Majors and the Canales are probably crying now at such a terrible representation of their school and their state.

i know i am.

Sad.