His name will be "Dave Parks" on the plaque hanging in the College Football Hall of Fame, but I still think of him as David.
David Parks, left end, Abilene High School Eagles, 1958-59. I was on those teams, for four games in 1958, and the whole season in 1959, when Parks really started on the road to national stardom. Now he is a new inductee into the National Football Foundation's College Football Hall of Fame, focused on his brilliance as a split end at Texas Tech. Even more American football fans remember him as an all-pro wide receiver for the San Francisco 49ers.
But the old Eagles cling to him as one of them, and he and we together cling to the team, and a man, that many of us consider the starting place for the rest of our lives.
Parks, interviewed about his induction by The Abilene Reporter-News, said when he was in seventh grade, all he wanted to do was be an Abilene Eagle. The Eagles won the Texas state Class AAAA championship that year, 1954, under their new head coach, Chuck Moser.
"By the time I was in seventh grade, I knew all of their cars when they passed on the street," Parks said. All I wanted to be was an Abilene High Eagle -- not a starter or anything like that, I just wanted to be on the team, be a part of the Abilene High Eagles."
Abilene High won state championships again in 1955 and '56 and ran its winning streak to 49 straight games before losing in the state semifinals in 1957, when David was a sophomore.
"I didn't have the size. I just had the want-to," he said. "My junior high coach said to go over to Abilene High for spring practice. He said, you probably won't make it, they'll just use you as a blocking dummy. He was right -- but it didn't make any difference. I just wanted to play."
David did have the want-to, and he acquired the size, and speed, and skills in catching a football that provided some spectacular photos in the Saturday morning Reporter-News in the autumn of 1958 and 1959. But he acquired something else, as did we all, who were on those teams, from the stars to the scrubs.
"The last time I ever stepped off the football field in the NFL, I was still using the basic techniques I learned at Abilene High," Parks told The Reporter-News. "When I went to Tech, I never considered myself the best player there, but I was so much better prepared than the quicker, bigger kids. I saw better athletes than me who didn't have the knowledge and thinking, 'God, if they knew what I knew.'"
This is a story you hear over and over, from kids who played for Chuck Moser, then went on to college ball. A lot of it was X's and O's, but a lot of it was better preparation, on and off the field, designed by a coach who wanted to provide his team and his players their best chance to succeed. Moser died in 1995, but when the players get together at reunions, he is still at the reunion's center. His teaching, and its role in all the directions that lives can take, gets much attention.
In 2000, at the end of the century, those Moser teams from 1954-57 that compiled the long winning streak were collectively honored as the "Team of the Century" in Texas high school football. I wrote a book, "Warbirds," recounting the details of those years. As I was doing this work, I came to understand that the reason for the book was the winning streak. But the book's content was about how they played the game. That's what David Parks took with him to Texas Tech, and the NFL, and now into the College Football Hall of Fame. There are men out there who do know what he knows, and that makes us all feel select.
May 16, 2008
Admiral Jack Christiansen
My appreciation of Jack Christiansen started with the news that he was a Navy admiral and a world-class character who drank "pink shit and rum."
This was reported to me by my wife, Karen, who was best friends with Tina Christiansen, the Admiral's daughter. Karen told good stories about parties on the Admiral's boat, the "Navy Cross." Karen said also that the Admiral loved women, and loved to flirt with them, including her. This gave me another good bearing on the man. I felt that, when and if we met, I wanted him to like me, as the man who married one of his favorite girls.
We did meet, but only briefly at first: one quick introduction at Tina's house a couple of years ago, led to a dinner at Tina’s house with her father, then a dinner in our home, and then a couple of months ago again at our house. This last event had a special purpose. The Admiral was dying, and Tina asked Karen (photographer extraordinaire) to take photos of her, her brother Tom, and their father, together. Today, one of those photos sits framed on a sideboard off our kitchen. It is the Admiral in profile, seated in an ordinary blue leather chair. Except he sat it in such a posture that it became a captain's chair, on the bridge of a ship, right there in our living room. I would like to know how he did that.
Tina loved her father fiercely. She fondly called him "Sir," and she loved to tell the stories, or get him to. They were stories great in their mix of respect, duty, irreverence and love that was characteristic of a Navy admiral and world-class character. He flew fighter jets and commanded aircraft carriers, but from a signature altitude. The man Tina described had a sure sense of command, and a low threshold of pleasure. She holds two memories equally vivid. She remembers dancing with her father in an officer's club ballroom when she was 12. And she remembers her father teaching her to read the ocean, and how sailors can see over the horizon, see things that others can't see. They scan it like a gunner. Look. Stop. Look. Stop. Look. Stop.
The "Navy Cross" is a 51-foot vessel in which the Admiral, after his retirement in 1975, traversed the Pacific, when it suited him, between San Diego, where Tina and Tom live, and his home, with their stepmother Clare, in Whidbey Island, Washington. Tina would call Karen and say, "Dad’s here!" If Karen and Tina’s other friends had enough “boat credit,” aka an appropriate supply of pink shit and rum, the Admiral gave them the run of the vessel. I suspect Karen and others got a boat ride with or without boat credit. Pink shit, beyond the horizon, is grapefruit juice. But it would be inaccurate to say the Admiral drank grapefruit juice and rum, and I only mention it to point that out.
The Admiral had to give up the Navy Cross a couple of years ago, due to failing health, a signal to all that the party was winding down. Adm. Christiansen died April 30, at 84. Maybe 200 people attended his services May 14 at Fort Rosecrans National Cemetery, on Point Loma in San Diego, and a pair of Navy jets roared over in tribute, in missing man formation. In their wake, an old Navy pilot near me said, "I love that sound."
Adm. Christiansen assumed command of his own memorial reception, ordering an open bar. "He wanted to buy everybody a drink at his funeral," Tina said. I wanted to toast him with a pink shit and rum, but I can't drink pink shit. On the bottle of a cholesterol medication I take, it says, "No pink shit." So I asked the bartender for white rum and grenadine, which is pink. "No grenadine," she said. She did have bitters, so I took a rum and bitters out to a life-sized six foot photo of the Admiral in a flight suit, walking a flight line. The photo was taken from ground level, which seemed to me the only way to get Adm. Christiansen in appropriate perspective.
We get a fix on all our relationships by a process of triangulation. I barely knew this man to whom I was lifting a rum and faux pink shit, but I had acquired enough readings to understand that I wanted him to like me. I thought if he liked me, maybe he would decide to rub some of himself off on me, or open some kind of door for me, showing me something he knew about life that I didn't. I still feel that, and in doing so, I keep him alive. I'm not the only one. Many people this week are having trouble getting it to register, that Jack Christiansen is "gone." There is a rip in our days, where his life passed.
This was reported to me by my wife, Karen, who was best friends with Tina Christiansen, the Admiral's daughter. Karen told good stories about parties on the Admiral's boat, the "Navy Cross." Karen said also that the Admiral loved women, and loved to flirt with them, including her. This gave me another good bearing on the man. I felt that, when and if we met, I wanted him to like me, as the man who married one of his favorite girls.
We did meet, but only briefly at first: one quick introduction at Tina's house a couple of years ago, led to a dinner at Tina’s house with her father, then a dinner in our home, and then a couple of months ago again at our house. This last event had a special purpose. The Admiral was dying, and Tina asked Karen (photographer extraordinaire) to take photos of her, her brother Tom, and their father, together. Today, one of those photos sits framed on a sideboard off our kitchen. It is the Admiral in profile, seated in an ordinary blue leather chair. Except he sat it in such a posture that it became a captain's chair, on the bridge of a ship, right there in our living room. I would like to know how he did that.
Tina loved her father fiercely. She fondly called him "Sir," and she loved to tell the stories, or get him to. They were stories great in their mix of respect, duty, irreverence and love that was characteristic of a Navy admiral and world-class character. He flew fighter jets and commanded aircraft carriers, but from a signature altitude. The man Tina described had a sure sense of command, and a low threshold of pleasure. She holds two memories equally vivid. She remembers dancing with her father in an officer's club ballroom when she was 12. And she remembers her father teaching her to read the ocean, and how sailors can see over the horizon, see things that others can't see. They scan it like a gunner. Look. Stop. Look. Stop. Look. Stop.
The "Navy Cross" is a 51-foot vessel in which the Admiral, after his retirement in 1975, traversed the Pacific, when it suited him, between San Diego, where Tina and Tom live, and his home, with their stepmother Clare, in Whidbey Island, Washington. Tina would call Karen and say, "Dad’s here!" If Karen and Tina’s other friends had enough “boat credit,” aka an appropriate supply of pink shit and rum, the Admiral gave them the run of the vessel. I suspect Karen and others got a boat ride with or without boat credit. Pink shit, beyond the horizon, is grapefruit juice. But it would be inaccurate to say the Admiral drank grapefruit juice and rum, and I only mention it to point that out.
The Admiral had to give up the Navy Cross a couple of years ago, due to failing health, a signal to all that the party was winding down. Adm. Christiansen died April 30, at 84. Maybe 200 people attended his services May 14 at Fort Rosecrans National Cemetery, on Point Loma in San Diego, and a pair of Navy jets roared over in tribute, in missing man formation. In their wake, an old Navy pilot near me said, "I love that sound."
Adm. Christiansen assumed command of his own memorial reception, ordering an open bar. "He wanted to buy everybody a drink at his funeral," Tina said. I wanted to toast him with a pink shit and rum, but I can't drink pink shit. On the bottle of a cholesterol medication I take, it says, "No pink shit." So I asked the bartender for white rum and grenadine, which is pink. "No grenadine," she said. She did have bitters, so I took a rum and bitters out to a life-sized six foot photo of the Admiral in a flight suit, walking a flight line. The photo was taken from ground level, which seemed to me the only way to get Adm. Christiansen in appropriate perspective.
We get a fix on all our relationships by a process of triangulation. I barely knew this man to whom I was lifting a rum and faux pink shit, but I had acquired enough readings to understand that I wanted him to like me. I thought if he liked me, maybe he would decide to rub some of himself off on me, or open some kind of door for me, showing me something he knew about life that I didn't. I still feel that, and in doing so, I keep him alive. I'm not the only one. Many people this week are having trouble getting it to register, that Jack Christiansen is "gone." There is a rip in our days, where his life passed.
May 09, 2008
A high, hard one for Faludi
Why the heck does Susan Faludi think the sports metaphor is "a particularly lamentable white male construct" (New York Times, May 9)?
For that matter, why assign it to white males? I know black males, white women, black women, and athletes of all ethnicities who use sports metaphors effectively, some as early as third grade, without impairing their worthier values.
All else being equal, I would consistently prefer a sports metaphor to a conflict reality. There are so many conflict realities, and declarative nouns to describe them. War. Economy. Gas prices. Globalization. Global warming. Violence. Murder. Myanmar. Rush Limbaugh's "chaos." Racism. Gender wars. Divorce. Politics. Karl Rove politics. George W. Bush.
I cry for relief. Toss me a sports metaphor, please. Quick, somebody, hit one out of the park. That's what sports and their metaphors are for. Relief. The nominative realities are never going to go away. Humans came to accept this several thousand years ago. I am no anthropologist, but the acceptance of nominative conflict realities may have directly preceded the invention of games and game metaphors. In fact I would be willing to contend that human awareness of games metaphors occurred not too long after the discovery of infidelity and long before the discovery of fire.
Sports provides all the conflict with none of the realities, and no one really loses in the end. Doesn't anybody realize that sports is nothing more than a multi-billion-dollar business based on not knowing who is going to win? In the media business, it's called the "threat to the status quo," which is one of the two definitions of news: "News is anything that changes, or threatens to change, the status quo." It's a dynamic, infinitely renewable definition. The Giants, third and long, two minutes left. Classic threat to the status quo. Memorable, even. They converted, scored, and New England didn't make it to 19-0. Maybe next year.
This political campaign is another classic of the same threat. Lord have mercy, Ms. Faludi, if you want metaphors about who is going to win, listen to "Hardball" for an hour. Oops. "Hardball" must mean that Chris Matthews and his cohorts must make sense only to white males who know what it means to play hardball.
Do I sound a tad hot? I guess I am. I'm tired of being assigned white male constructs. For three minutes, I wish I was Don Newcombe on the mound, and Susan Faludi was at bat. Do you know how to spell chin music?
Lamentably, Faludi just grasped the idea of the sports metaphor and assigned it to white males to try to make a point about Hillary Clinton. How convenient. And then she closed her argument, not with a reality, but a metaphor. Glass floor. See how useful they are?
For that matter, why assign it to white males? I know black males, white women, black women, and athletes of all ethnicities who use sports metaphors effectively, some as early as third grade, without impairing their worthier values.
All else being equal, I would consistently prefer a sports metaphor to a conflict reality. There are so many conflict realities, and declarative nouns to describe them. War. Economy. Gas prices. Globalization. Global warming. Violence. Murder. Myanmar. Rush Limbaugh's "chaos." Racism. Gender wars. Divorce. Politics. Karl Rove politics. George W. Bush.
I cry for relief. Toss me a sports metaphor, please. Quick, somebody, hit one out of the park. That's what sports and their metaphors are for. Relief. The nominative realities are never going to go away. Humans came to accept this several thousand years ago. I am no anthropologist, but the acceptance of nominative conflict realities may have directly preceded the invention of games and game metaphors. In fact I would be willing to contend that human awareness of games metaphors occurred not too long after the discovery of infidelity and long before the discovery of fire.
Sports provides all the conflict with none of the realities, and no one really loses in the end. Doesn't anybody realize that sports is nothing more than a multi-billion-dollar business based on not knowing who is going to win? In the media business, it's called the "threat to the status quo," which is one of the two definitions of news: "News is anything that changes, or threatens to change, the status quo." It's a dynamic, infinitely renewable definition. The Giants, third and long, two minutes left. Classic threat to the status quo. Memorable, even. They converted, scored, and New England didn't make it to 19-0. Maybe next year.
This political campaign is another classic of the same threat. Lord have mercy, Ms. Faludi, if you want metaphors about who is going to win, listen to "Hardball" for an hour. Oops. "Hardball" must mean that Chris Matthews and his cohorts must make sense only to white males who know what it means to play hardball.
Do I sound a tad hot? I guess I am. I'm tired of being assigned white male constructs. For three minutes, I wish I was Don Newcombe on the mound, and Susan Faludi was at bat. Do you know how to spell chin music?
Lamentably, Faludi just grasped the idea of the sports metaphor and assigned it to white males to try to make a point about Hillary Clinton. How convenient. And then she closed her argument, not with a reality, but a metaphor. Glass floor. See how useful they are?
May 04, 2008
The standards of a free press
Respondents to my "Macrame Journalism" post make some engaging points, while other points need clarification.
The post was not a defense of journalism (I'll get into that another time), but a definition of it. Readers are correct to say that journalism today suffers from self-inflicted damage. But what divides journalists from macramé journalists is education and training. The traditional journalism industry, both on and offline, would not hire applicants who could not show a baccalaureate level of journalism education. A macramé journalist, meanwhile, can join the field with an ISP connection and a blog account. Much of their work is very good, but at its best, it is commentary, not journalism. At its worst, it is the same as an avalanche of unsigned letters to the editor. Assigning such blather the stature of "citizen journalism" is inappropriate and dangerous.
The word "abridge" in the First Amendment makes clear that the authors understood that the power of the press predated the Constitution. The origins of such a press were with the Zenger decision in 1734 that established truth as justification to publish. The weight was on "truth." It was not enough for Peter Zenger and his attorney, Andrew Hamilton, simply to say his newspaper, The New York Weekly Journal, had printed the truth about government officials. Truth required documentation and verification. For almost 300 years, that documentation and verification has been the cornerstone of America's press. Investigative reporters won't publish information without triple verification, and then only after a phone call offering the opportunity to verify or deny to the story's subject.
Enforcing the First Amendment has required the enforcing of such standards, both in freedom of the press and in freedom of speech. The press was granted such power that in the courts a body of law was created and started to grow, protecting citizens from press abuses of its power. The standard of truth is the first burden placed on the press by that law. Free speech is held to a similar standard, which has also shown up in courts since 1789. Classic example: Is an individual who yells "Fire!" in a crowded theater, when there is no fire, protected from prosecution by the First Amendment? Not many Americans have turned their backs on the standards of free press and speech. When they do, thank God, it makes news.
Any out-of-work reporter (plenty of those around) could operate independently online, not writing commentaries like this one, but doing real journalism. As I pointed out in the last post, such work would be instantly recognizable as journalism, just as macramé journalism is instantly recognizable.
I won't tell my 100 college journalism students what one respondent said about "kids these days and their blogs and rock 'n roll music and long hair." They will be the online reporters and editors of tomorrow. Traditional journalism, in converged (print and broadcast) form is moving steadily toward the Internet, where doing business is infinitely cheaper than the traditional broadcast model that has been in place for the last 500 years. I call the new model "incast." No longer will news organizations (and other media) spend millions sending information out to the audience at large. Online, all that content is just files in a computer, accessible at any time to consumers coming in, a ridiculously cheap and efficient (one-to-one marketing!) model.
What are the news organizations going to do with all that money they save? They won't have to repeat cycles anymore like CNN, as one respondent pointed out. And they will have millions to hire new journalists to fill a practically infinite news hole. That's where my little longhairs come in.
The post was not a defense of journalism (I'll get into that another time), but a definition of it. Readers are correct to say that journalism today suffers from self-inflicted damage. But what divides journalists from macramé journalists is education and training. The traditional journalism industry, both on and offline, would not hire applicants who could not show a baccalaureate level of journalism education. A macramé journalist, meanwhile, can join the field with an ISP connection and a blog account. Much of their work is very good, but at its best, it is commentary, not journalism. At its worst, it is the same as an avalanche of unsigned letters to the editor. Assigning such blather the stature of "citizen journalism" is inappropriate and dangerous.
The word "abridge" in the First Amendment makes clear that the authors understood that the power of the press predated the Constitution. The origins of such a press were with the Zenger decision in 1734 that established truth as justification to publish. The weight was on "truth." It was not enough for Peter Zenger and his attorney, Andrew Hamilton, simply to say his newspaper, The New York Weekly Journal, had printed the truth about government officials. Truth required documentation and verification. For almost 300 years, that documentation and verification has been the cornerstone of America's press. Investigative reporters won't publish information without triple verification, and then only after a phone call offering the opportunity to verify or deny to the story's subject.
Enforcing the First Amendment has required the enforcing of such standards, both in freedom of the press and in freedom of speech. The press was granted such power that in the courts a body of law was created and started to grow, protecting citizens from press abuses of its power. The standard of truth is the first burden placed on the press by that law. Free speech is held to a similar standard, which has also shown up in courts since 1789. Classic example: Is an individual who yells "Fire!" in a crowded theater, when there is no fire, protected from prosecution by the First Amendment? Not many Americans have turned their backs on the standards of free press and speech. When they do, thank God, it makes news.
Any out-of-work reporter (plenty of those around) could operate independently online, not writing commentaries like this one, but doing real journalism. As I pointed out in the last post, such work would be instantly recognizable as journalism, just as macramé journalism is instantly recognizable.
I won't tell my 100 college journalism students what one respondent said about "kids these days and their blogs and rock 'n roll music and long hair." They will be the online reporters and editors of tomorrow. Traditional journalism, in converged (print and broadcast) form is moving steadily toward the Internet, where doing business is infinitely cheaper than the traditional broadcast model that has been in place for the last 500 years. I call the new model "incast." No longer will news organizations (and other media) spend millions sending information out to the audience at large. Online, all that content is just files in a computer, accessible at any time to consumers coming in, a ridiculously cheap and efficient (one-to-one marketing!) model.
What are the news organizations going to do with all that money they save? They won't have to repeat cycles anymore like CNN, as one respondent pointed out. And they will have millions to hire new journalists to fill a practically infinite news hole. That's where my little longhairs come in.
May 02, 2008
Macrame journalism
I was born in 1943, just in time to enjoy town squares, in the small rural towns. By the 1950s, and the arrival of better highways and more comfortable cars, residents of those towns had started to drive to larger regional cities to shop, eat, and see a movie. Around the town square, businesses closed, leaving darkened brick shells through which dry goods, sundries, hardware, groceries, movie stars and fountain Cokes had flowed.
In these empty storefront windows in the 1970s started to appear signs of business activity unrelated to the prosperity of the town. The most telling of these signs was this one: "Macrame." It proclaimed, loudest of all, that the square, once the center of commercial and civic activity for a proud people, was dead, and the old, sad, deserted buildings were now hosting splinter arts and crafts groups learning to knot yarn in a certain way.
Journalism is on that same path today. Since the Zenger decision in 1734 established its purpose and power in America, journalism has served a proud people continuously for almost 300 years. Now it is being gutted, its professionals bought out or laid off, its buildings closing, its customers and its business fleeing on a new superspeed highway to a new region that no one yet understands.
Where journalism was, in the pre-Internet world, Americans now find macramé journalism, a hobby practiced by a huge number of Americans on the Internet and in the blogosphere. This new, fun way of knotting information has done what the founding Americans hoped could never be done. Macrame journalism has a loop around the feet of the First Amendment, which is struggling, as calves do against the ropes, but will soon go over on its side.
Journalism is not Cowboys and Indians in the back yard. The term "citizen journalist" is an oxymoron. Many citizens now publishing on the Internet write very well, and argue convincingly, but without working knowledge of journalism definitions, values, and principles, and commitment to those principles, they are not journalists. Do you realize that the rate of media illiteracy in America is 90 percent? Not their fault; all media, including journalism, is based on a set of definitions and values that are not taught to American schoolchildren. They should be, just like algebra, but they are not.
The First Amendment, as it applies to journalism: "Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of the press." Do you realize what an amazing statement that is? It tells us that the framers of the Constitution in 1787 knew that freedom of the press already existed, like one of the self-evident truths, or an unalienable right. That kind of power, practically absolute, created by the recognition of truth as a right to publish, deserved great respect in its handling. It is scary now, witnessing hordes of amateurs calling themselves citizen journalists, and taking their work seriously, and even scarier that traditional publishers go along with it. Scary not because of an abuse of press power, that the First Amendment has managed to protect for more than 200 years, but of a draining of it. Without that power, democracy starts to die, too.
This is not a defense of journalism; it is a definition of it. You macramé journalists, go ahead and keep writing. It is your First Amendment guarantee of free speech. But to a journalist today, cruising the town square of journalism, it looks dead, and feels sad. It feels like the First Amendment is being looted.
In these empty storefront windows in the 1970s started to appear signs of business activity unrelated to the prosperity of the town. The most telling of these signs was this one: "Macrame." It proclaimed, loudest of all, that the square, once the center of commercial and civic activity for a proud people, was dead, and the old, sad, deserted buildings were now hosting splinter arts and crafts groups learning to knot yarn in a certain way.
Journalism is on that same path today. Since the Zenger decision in 1734 established its purpose and power in America, journalism has served a proud people continuously for almost 300 years. Now it is being gutted, its professionals bought out or laid off, its buildings closing, its customers and its business fleeing on a new superspeed highway to a new region that no one yet understands.
Where journalism was, in the pre-Internet world, Americans now find macramé journalism, a hobby practiced by a huge number of Americans on the Internet and in the blogosphere. This new, fun way of knotting information has done what the founding Americans hoped could never be done. Macrame journalism has a loop around the feet of the First Amendment, which is struggling, as calves do against the ropes, but will soon go over on its side.
Journalism is not Cowboys and Indians in the back yard. The term "citizen journalist" is an oxymoron. Many citizens now publishing on the Internet write very well, and argue convincingly, but without working knowledge of journalism definitions, values, and principles, and commitment to those principles, they are not journalists. Do you realize that the rate of media illiteracy in America is 90 percent? Not their fault; all media, including journalism, is based on a set of definitions and values that are not taught to American schoolchildren. They should be, just like algebra, but they are not.
The First Amendment, as it applies to journalism: "Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of the press." Do you realize what an amazing statement that is? It tells us that the framers of the Constitution in 1787 knew that freedom of the press already existed, like one of the self-evident truths, or an unalienable right. That kind of power, practically absolute, created by the recognition of truth as a right to publish, deserved great respect in its handling. It is scary now, witnessing hordes of amateurs calling themselves citizen journalists, and taking their work seriously, and even scarier that traditional publishers go along with it. Scary not because of an abuse of press power, that the First Amendment has managed to protect for more than 200 years, but of a draining of it. Without that power, democracy starts to die, too.
This is not a defense of journalism; it is a definition of it. You macramé journalists, go ahead and keep writing. It is your First Amendment guarantee of free speech. But to a journalist today, cruising the town square of journalism, it looks dead, and feels sad. It feels like the First Amendment is being looted.
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