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Crime and medicine: Duo subjects for budding sports journalists

The role of a sports writer has seemed to widen each year. The media, and I would say rightly so, has reported in recent years on criminal escapades of athletes at all levels. Depending on how forthcoming the sports media are about developing stories on “student-athlete-criminals” the consumers of said media may be delivered crime stories ranging from jocks at the junior high to professional levels.

As is the case with most crime stories a person need not be arrested, tried or convicted  to have one’s name end up on the pages or on television in relation to some criminal misdeed. And if one is a prominent athlete, or just an athlete in some cases, or a celebrity a conviction is not always needed to rate coverage. Take the example today of Philadelphia Eagles wide receiver DeSean Jackson. Jackson has been shopped as of late by Philly front-office types. Reasons range from work ethic, or lack thereof, to temperament. The latest rap is that Jackson allegedly has ties with gang members. One such alleged gangsta, a rapper named “T-Ron,” has supposed connections to the notorious L.A. “Crips” gang. Such thin allegations involving Jackson says little as for his involvement, innocence or guilt. What does give rise to suspicions is that the Eagles have so intensely shopped Jackson who came off the previous season with big numbers and a big salary to boot.

Writing about such allegations takes no specific training as a journalist or sports writer. Perhaps these scribes would study their libel courses very well before engaging in publishing stories heavy with accusations and light on facts. To do hard-nose reporting on criminal escapades committed by a ball player and his friends requires a bit of training, if only OJT.

A second type of specialty reporting in sports news falls into the field of medicine. I thought of this having heard earlier on the radio that Houston Rockets guard Patrick Beverley was supposedly diagnosed with a torn meniscus in his right knee after an injury during the Rockets-76-ers game last night. Always sunny in Philadelphia, huh?

Deeper reading will probably find some journalist with a knowledge about such an injury, what it means, and how surgery might impact Beverley and his team on the Rocket’s path to the playoffs. I first heard this story earlier in the afternoon on Houston ESPN 97.5 “The Blitz” program. Hosts Dave Tepper and Houston Chronicle columnist Jerome Solomon ran down the Beverley story and how it could result in Jeremy Lin starting in place of the injured Rocket. These radio hosts made an interesting observation that former Knicks phenom Lin has as his strength these days playing from the bench. Whether this means  Lin can step up, of course, is a good question. Where Tepper and Solomon could have used help is in having someone with even the slightest bit of medical knowledge concerning the injury suffered by Beverley.

I know I could provide a little information about that injury. As a result of a medial and lateral tear of the meniscus cartilage, I have been ordered by my doctor to stand no more than 2 hours per day. This has gone on for a bit more than a month and a half due to a reexamination into my worker’s compensation case. I just learned today that surgery for my torn meniscus has been authorized so there is the possibility I might have an arthroscopic meniscus repair sometime next week. I have been and am ready to get it over with and hope it will help. Perhaps I can become an expert on such injuries. At least I might have more knowledge than I was given today on the radio. That isn’t slamming Tepper or Solomon. Such journalist or commentators aren’t expected to be lawyers nor doctors. They just need to know where to find one. And that’s my point.

If one has a dream of becoming a sports reporter, then legal and medical issues are the types of subjects which sports journalists are expected to encounter these days. My piece of advice is, if such subjects aren’t approached at some point in the first couple of years in J school, then I would suggest you find courses into which one may learn these issues. Basic criminal justice of the kind reporters require should be taught in news writing intro courses. If not, then sign up for an actual criminal justice class. You will likely find in those classes some would-be cops or actual LEOs who might add to your knowledge, that, in addition to what one learns in class. Medical classes are something of which I am not so sure. I learned my medical knowledge through EMT training in which I was certified for 10 years. I also dated a couple of nurses. (Pause.)

At the very least, talk to an adviser in your school’s nursing program. No telling what you might find there. Anything is better than nada, someone — I think Doug Sahm — once said.

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Watch for those fiery tornadoes

This story in NatGeo online oddly attracted me. The viral You Tube video is what the story is about, the subject being a “fire tornado.”

These fiery whirling dervishes of nature are more akin to dust devils than to real tornadoes which can cause nine kinds of hell in practically every part of the United States. This partial explanation from Wikipedia comes pretty close to explaining these whirlwinds:

 “Dust devils form when hot air near the surface rises quickly through a small pocket of cooler, low- pressure air above it. If conditions are just right, the air may begin to rotate. As the air rapidly rises, the column of hot air is stretched vertically, thereby moving mass closer to the axis of rotation, which causes intensification of the spinning effect … “

Most dust devils that form here in Southeast Texas are generally small in size. The same applies, though not always, for tornadoes. I would guess that the size has to do with the humid air we normally have here on the coast. I did see some larger whirlwinds when I have visited Colorado, where this fire tornado takes place. I have never seen a fire tornado although I have seen and been through a few tornadoes. I have seen firestorms as well. Or rather, I have seen at least one firestorm. This is a phenomenon which takes place when a fire is so large that it sustains its own wind system. This can occur naturally, as in a large wildfire, or in other instances such as happened most notably in the massive fire bombing of Dresden, Germany, in World War II.

The fire storm I witnessed happened during a fire that destroyed a plywood mill. It was what you would call a “massive” blaze. I could see the currents inside the heat and fire that drifted across the street and caught a wood yard on fire. A few hours later I went home, about 10 miles in the country from the fire. I found ashes up to a foot long and nearly as wide in the cow pasture. Had it not been spring and the area fair with rain, half the countryside could have been burned.

Nature can play all kinds of tricks with you and your surroundings. When that happens. You need to be elsewhere.

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March Madness turns to white bass fishing in East Texas

My interest in March Madness ceased on Sunday evening. The reason is simple. My team was beaten.

That my team, the Stephen F. Austin Lumberjacks, lost to UCLA is not a surprise. The Lumberjacks had never journeyed beyond the first round before Friday. That was when the team from Nacogdoches, Texas, shocked the hell out of a lot of folks in their mind-bending overtime win over fourth-seeded Virginia Commonwealth. This is only the second time SFA had gone to the big dance.

The Bruins practically invented college basketball or sits as its master of the sport. UCLA hadn’t won it all lately so they got themselves a new coach. So did Stephen F. Austin.

UCLA had height, and a lot of it. SFA were relatively little people compared to UCLA.  But SFA had heart. They had soul. They had a long-haired boy called “Sunshine” who wore tie-dyed shirts when not attired for basketball. Oh, and he likes to hunt and fish. He told one sports reporter he liked fishing for white bass on the Angelina River. Yes, that boy,  Jacob Parker, is the real deal if he knows about white bass and the Angelina.  This time of year the white bass make their “run” along the Angelina.

My friends and I used to hang out at a place on the Angelina known as Shawnee Landing. The property actually belonged to the U.S. Forest Service and was a nice little place to come hang out, go fishing, drink a beer or fire up a doobie. Unfortunately, too many found the place and made Shawnee too good of a thing. I don’t know if it’s closed now or not. All I know is it’s a kind of place where long-haired country boys like to go. I used to take all country roads — one was barely paved — to the place from my house. And on days I’ve had like today, I sure miss that part of Nacogdoches County and those times.

Well, ol’ Sunshine will be back next year and so will many of the ‘Jacks who brought them to San Diego for two rounds of NCAA tourney hoops. Hopefully, the Jack’s now second-year coach Brad Underwood will find him some big ol’ boys taller than the ones he’s got and who can shoot. Meanwhile, the Jacks are back home and Sunshine is probably out fishing. Let’s hope so. The boys, the new “media darlings” at the big dance this year, are Jacks who are back in Nac. Take me home country road.

It’s not a bad place to be.

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The days of grocers past

Does anyone remember the jingle: “Let’s go to Henke’s now, Henke’s now, Henke’s now … thrifty place to shop.”

Well, the song is a lot like the one you hear or may have had heard in the past that goes: “Let’s go Krogering, Krogering, Krogering … “

It’s all the same and with a reason. The giant grocer Kroger bought Houston-based Henke & Pilot chain the same year I was born, in 1955. The Henke name was no longer used beginning in 1966, or there about. Although the jingle seemed to hang on.

I suppose if you are under 30 and grew up in the U.S., most grocery stores have always been a constant. I know the grocery chains in East and Southeast Texas haven’t seemed to change much over those years. Where I live, in Beaumont, there aren’t a lot of grocery choices. There is Kroger, of course. Two larger regional chains seemed to have elbowed out any potential large competitors with the exception of Kroger. H-E-B, which was once pretty much a Central Texas chain has grown like crazy and even some of the smaller towns around here have mid-sized or small versions of its stores.

H-E-B has mega-stores in different locations in the state. Two were built when I lived in Waco. There is one humongous H-E-B in Beaumont on Dowlen Road that anchors a small strip mall. When it first opened it featured a small “Central Market,” which is the company’s gourmet grocery chain. One may find all the hipsters at the Central Market in Austin (that should be ‘Markets,’ and they are littered with ‘foodies’ in major suburbs like Plano and Southlake in the DFW area.) I will give the tres chic  H-E-B that it does have many great items one would be hard pressed to find elsewhere.

Unfortunately, Beaumont isn’t a hipster town — at least not in reality — so its H-E-B Central Market was gone and installed was a doc-in-a-box. A new, and presumably likewise large, H-E-B is now solid ground but will be coming up at the site of the old Baptist Hospital at South 11th Street and College. This is next door to the booming Memorial Hermann Baptist Hospital and its surrounding medical village. This is kind of a crossroads of where Beaumont’s  mostly Black, goodly-sized Hispanic and minority White population all have to go at one time or the other. If they don’t go to Baptist they usually go up 11th to Christus St. Elizabeth or to Texas Medical Center in Houston.

Of course, the “Golden Triangle” also has an abundance of Market Basket stores. It is a chain in Southeast Texas and Southwest Louisiana some half-century old, based in Nederland, Texas, that has seemed to do just fine.

Various other stores either went out of business or got bought out. The Brookshire Brothers chain, based in Lufkin, can be found pretty much in the Big Thicket and Deep East Texas areas. The company has also moved into areas of east Central Texas and parts of Central Texas as well.

One need not mention Wally World.

I think about some of the stores that were once here in Beaumont: Albertson’s, Gerland’s, gosh knows who else. In Nacogdoches, where I spent a great deal of my life, Safeway was once a huge, unionized store. Kroger was also unionized there. One of the first girls I dated upon first moving to Nac, I met at Safeway. Those are the kind of memories one likes to have of a grocery store instead of getting stuck in line to no end. The Safeway girl and I parted quicker than some of those lines, I would suppose. But we left amicably as she wanted to move back to Houston and I said, well, if someone wants to move to Houston then I guess I have no great opposition to it. I was fine just where I was at that time, and several other times.

Also I remember the little East Texas town from where I came. We didn’t have any of those big-named stores. Maybe a couple of years after I left a Brookshire Brothers came. It was a familiar brand because my uncle Sox retired from the company. Uncle Sox then worked part-time after retirement in a little town outside of Lufkin called Huntington. Uncle Sox worked for Boots store, named after a man called Boots. Sox and Boots. Seemed kind of proper, yet still gets a big family chuckle.

Some of the small-town stores I remember delivered. Dick’s Grocery, whom I am named for (Dick, not Grocery), used to set their fruits and vegetables out on the curb. I remember one store, owned by Ira Bean, sold a little of everything. Then there was Joe Harrell’s who we saw for smoked meats and his homemade sausage. And like family was J & J’s, the corner store, but not like in a convenience store. I remember they had a big old wheel of cheddar sitting on top of the butcher case. John & Juanita were as good of people you could find.

Man, those were the days. Well, excuse me because I have to go to Kroger’s. Have a great weekend.

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Will the isolation give up the ongoing Malaysian mystery?

Perhaps Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 is located in the Indian Ocean. Perhaps not. After the immense speculation and leads given the public from corporate and government sources one could think the Boeing 777 jet with its contingent of almost 300 lives aboard might just be anywhere. It is heartening to think a possible crash site might finally be spotted, according to media reports.

The strange paths this Beijing-bound flight supposedly took and the elements to which the flight pertains is certainly a mystery worthy of fiction. If indeed this jet is found in almost completely the opposite direction from where it was headed, then that too seals the mysterious flight which headed out just after midnight from Kuala Lumpur on March 8. And while the 24-hour media has raised the possibility the 777 might perhaps had been en route to as far north as Pakistan, the possibility the aircraft and its passengers and crew may lie in the Indian Ocean east of Western Australia seems to make more sense than any other ultimate destination.

It didn’t really hit me at first when a newscaster commented this morning that the missing place could in a place as “remote” as to the east of Western Australia. When one looks at a map it really can understand just how far removed from civilization such a place really is.

I made a trip once sailing out of Fremantle, the Swan River port city for Perth, Western Australia, headed for Jakarta, Indonesia. I don’t remember much about the passage, our two warships alone  out on the Indian Ocean. We had spent the better part of two months visiting ports all up and down the two major New Zealand islands and to three Australian ports in a semi-circular journey from New South Wales, to Tasmania and up to Perth. The majority of us sailors, under 25, had just experienced “sailor-man heaven.”

So I really cannot comment too much one way or the other about the trip across the western Indian Ocean and into the Java Sea. The only thing that really sticks out in my mind about the Indian Ocean is that it was generally hot as hell, it being during the heat of the southern winter. I did notice what appeared to be dirty-looking ocean water, it being one of those odd instances one comes across when at sea after awhile.

Few islands of the Indian to the west of Australia other than Madagascar are noteworthy.  The only place in the Indian Ocean where I have known people to go was Diego Garcia, British Indian Ocean Territory, home of the major U.S. Navy facility that was built in the 1970s mostly by Navy Seabees. A number of my Seabee friends were deployed there at one time or another. One even sent me a B.I.O.T. T-shirt though I don’t know what happened to it.

Yes, I would have to think that area west of of Perth is pretty remote as many ocean areas might be. Still the ocean is tranquil and desolate in many areas of the world as it is there. Hopefully, this remote area will soon uncover this ongoing mystery and provide some comfort to those with loved ones on Flight 370.