And now a brief PSA for the Bloboverse, tiny though it may be ...
I'm outta here for a bit.
Taking the train to San Francisco and then driving up the coast to Seattle, so the Blob will mostly be MIA for the next 18 or so days. I may weigh in briefly occasionally, but the Blob is going semi-dark.
"So what?" you're saying now.
Also, "Good riddance!"
Also, "Nobody cares about your stupid trip, just like we don't care about your stupid Pirates!"
Gee. Thanks, guys.
Some days I don't know whether to pity satirists or roll my eyes at how easy they have it. This is because more and more in America reality has become so absurd it is its own satire, leaving satirists with either nowhere to go or an absolute gimme.
For instance, I saw this the other day on the satirical website The Onion. It's supposed to skewer the boneheads in Oklahoma who've decided how schools are allowed to teach about the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. It seems the chief bonehead, state superintendent of schools Ryan Walters, has decreed it's OK for teachers to talk about the Tulsa Race Massacre, but only if they emphasize it wasn't about race.
I'm serious. He actually said that.
Which means he teed it up very nicely for publications like The Onion, and at the same time made it impossible for them to satire. It's hard to make something look completely ridiculous, after all, when the real thing is already completely ridiculous.
And it is, of course.
A brief synopsis of what happened in Tulsa in 1921, just for background: The arrest of a young black man on a highly dubious charge of assaulting a white woman in an elevator mushroomed into an armed assault by a mob of angry (jealous?) whites on Greenwood, the black section of Tulsa which had become so prosperous it was called the Black Wall Street.
In a day-long pitched battle, the mob burned 35 blocks of Greenwood, torching 1,256 homes, plus churches, grocery stores, hospitals, pool halls, Masonic lodges, drugstores, doctors offices and a variety of other businesses. They even bombed the district from the air.
Black residents fought back, but largely to no avail. By the time the assault ended, some 300 blacks were dead -- some estimates put the figure much higher -- and Black Wall Street was gone.
But, nah. It wasn't about race. And The Onion's satire might not actually be satire.
Those hilarious made-up "quotes", for instance?
It's not hard to imagine Oklahoma kids actually saying them once Ryan Walters gets done warping history for them.
After all, you teach a kid fairy tales, that's what he knows. Name of that tune.
Legendary writer-of-sports Dan Jenkins loved to toy with Wimbledon, mocking its stodgy obsession with protocol and calling its comically severe officials "wing commanders", as if they'd all done their duty with the RAF during WW II.
I can only imagine what a good chuckle he's having in the Big Pressbox In The Sky this week.
It seems that during a third-round match between Anastasia Potapova and Mirra Andreeva, some fan decided to get a trifle rowdy. And in a totally Wimby sort of way.
Popped a champagne cork, the fan did. Right in the middle of Potapova's serve.
This prompted the presiding wing commander, Australian umpire John Blom, to admonish the fans for their out-of-control behavior.
"Ladies and gentlemen, if you are opening a bottle of champagne, don't do it as the players are about to serve," Blom announced over his microphone.
Now, you can ask yourself, as I have for awhile now, how lousy a professional tennis player's concentration must be if she's being distracted by a "pop!" from the stands in the middle of her service motion. Or why fans are not supposed to talk or move around in the stands during a serve.
I mean, really? You're telling me the best tennis players in the world let their attention wander that easily?
I find it hard to believe the best of them even know there are fans present when they get locked in. I tend to think they have the kind of laser focus that narrows their sensory world to the carefully proscribed rectangle of grass in front of them.
Apparently I'm wrong about that. But there's one thing I'm not wrong about.
A chair umpire scolding a fan for popping a champagne cork?
Most Wimbledon thing ever.
The Wreck of the Robert Huggins is not a song by the late Gordon Lightfoot, but it's become every bit as tragic as the Wreck ol' Gordon did write about. Now Hugs is in rehab, but there is evidence it's not taking.
That's because he's saying he'll be back at work as soon as he completes his required drying out.
This despite the fact he resigned as West Virginia's basketball coach, announced he resigned, even cleaned out his desk.
This despite the fact West Virginia accepted his resignation, appointed an interim coach and considers the matter closed.
But Hugs claims he never signed the surrender papers, and also they were sent from his wife's email account, which he and his attorneys claim makes them invalid. The Blob wrote about all this just a few days ago, and played it for laughs, imagining an unhinged Huggins denying all in his courtroom appearance.
I'm not laughing anymore.
I'm not laughing, because Huggins claiming he's going to show up for work again as soon as he gets out of rehab isn't funny. It's sad and deeply delusional, and suggests Huggins has a long way to go to sort out his personal demons.
Oh, the jokes are there, if I were so inclined. I could wonder, for instance, if Huggins has legally changed his name to "Milton Waddams", the guy who kept coming to work even after he was let go in "Office Space." I could say Hugs doesn't look a thing like Stephen Root, the actor who so memorably portrayed Milton. And I could say Huggins really isn't returning to work; he's just coming back for his stapler.
But my heart's just not in it.
All I see now is a broken man who's go a lot of fixing ahead of him. If in fact he's fixable at this point.
The Big W is checking out of the NBA's summer league after two games, and that's the most intelligent thing I've heard since the days of the USFL, when the late John Bassett told Donald Trump he was going to deck him if he didn't shut the hell up.
The Big W, if course, is Victor Wembanyama, and after he went for 27 points the other night the San Antonio Spurs decided they'd seen enough. So they'll sit him down for the rest of the summer league, whose purpose the Blob has yet to divine.
Look. The list of stuff the Blob doesn't get is longer than Godzilla is tall, so it could well be the summer league has some intrinsic value I'm missing here. But I can't figure out what it is other than the obvious, which is to help the NBA and its teams add to their pile.
Summer league? To me it's the What The Hell League.
That's because to play even a handful of games after you've already played 9,000 games in an endless regular season seems counterproductive, not to say stupid. For one thing, it practically begs for guys to get hurt. I mean, did you see what happened to Portland Trail Blazers top pick Scoot Henderson in his very first summer league game?
Suffered a shoulder strain that kept him out of the next two games, Scoot did. And for what?
Beats me. I mean, it's not like the Trail Blazers don't already know the kid can play, having likely watched a million hours of tape on him. And in less than three months, another long, looooong NBA season commences. So what's the point of playing games in the summer, other than to add that much more wear and tear on already overextended bodies?
Oh, sure, I suppose a lot of the guys playing summer league games are vying for roster spots. But isn't that what training camp and the preseason are for? So, again ... seriously, what's the point?
Other than to give your top draft picks more chances to get hurt, that is. And to give ESPN, which airs summer league games 24/7 as if they matter, an apparently much-needed revenue stream.
As it stands now, summer league play finishes up on July 17. NBA training camps open in a shade more than two months after that, on September 27. Preseason games begin on the 30th and run through October 14. The 82-game regular season opens four days later.
Two days after that, some high-end pick who played all the summer league and preseason games will blow out a knee and be done for two or three months. Or something like that,
I'm not saying it'll be because he played a handful of worthless games in July on top of a long college or overseas season. But who knows?
What you can say today about Pat Fitzgerald getting the boot from his alma mater is that Northwestern University has a hell of a journalism department, and the kids just taught all of us why newspaperin' done right still matters.
What you can say about the New York Times is it could learn a thing or two from those kids, and at this rate you might as well make a paper hat out of it and float it down the Hudson.
Two newspaper parables. Two very different lessons.
The first is Thou Shalt Not Underestimate The Power Of Local News, because the kids at the Daily Northwestern did what good local journalism is supposed to do: Inform and enlighten its community, and in doing so make it a better and safer place.
This is not to celebrate the firing of Fitzgerald, mind you, or to suggest his ouster makes Northwestern a better place. But it does suggest the school's freshmen football players might breathe easier now.
The widespread sexualized hazing unveiled by the Daily Northwestern, after all, exposed a sick culture that was both pervasive and too deeply rooted for Fitzgerald or his supporters to credibly deny they knew about it. The former player who talked to the Daily Northwestern said he believed Fitzgerald even participated in it.
It was concerning enough that Northwestern had already opened a six-month investigation into allegations made late in 2022, long before the Daily Northwestern story broke. That happened Saturday; two days later, Fitzgerald was gone.
And speaking of gone ...
So is the New York Times sports department.
The Times, America's alleged "paper of record," decided that record didn't need a department anymore that had won it two Pulitzer Prizes. So, with little warning, it announced it's dissolving sports and reassigning its sportswriters to other beats,
This likely came as a profound shock to those writers, for whom the sports department of the New York Times was the sort of newspaper mecca that rarely exists anymore. Hey, son, guess what? You're not gonna be the next Red Smith after all. You're gonna be covering next week's sewer board meeting.
I don't know what Red's saying about that in the Great Watering Hole In The Sky. But for all his worldly sophistication, I bet it ain't printable.
They were ink-stained wretches and kings of New York back in the day, and everybody knew their names. Red and Arthur Daley and Dave Anderson and George Vecsey and, more recently, William C. Rhoden and Selena Roberts and Pete Thamel. They were the backbone of what was sometimes derisively called the Toy Department in newsrooms, which was never accurate but always carried the aroma of jealousy.
After all, the so-called Toy Department sold the paper. And -- at the Times level, anyway -- generally contained far fewer hacks by volume.
Smith, the erudite son of Notre Dame, could have written intelligently about virtually anything. George Vecsey could have and did, having served a stint as a national and religion reporter who interviewed everyone from Tony Blair to Billy Graham to the Dalai Lama. He also wrote Coal Miner's Daughter with Loretta Lynn, whose film version won Sissy Spacek an Oscar in the title role.
Now all of that is gone, shuffled off to the Times online side hustle The Athletic. You want boxscores and game stories — but no longer the kind of beat writer access that produces the big stories — you have to go there.
Or you can just pick up the Daily Northwestern.
And now we arrive at the All-Star break, and Babe Ruth 2.0 -- aka Shohei Ohtani -- leads all of baseball with 32 home runs, and on the bump he's tied for fourth in strikeouts with 132, and now I'm falling asleep and dreaming about a headline in the newspaper.
Pirates Sign Ohtani To Monster Deal, it says.
And, yeah, OK, so an aardvark will fly before that happens. But it's a pleasant midsummer dream, so buzz off.
In my dream, see, Pirates owner Bob Nutting is visited by three ghosts, or maybe three guys named Luca Brasi. Together they convince him to stop pinching every penny until it screams like Jamie Lee Curtis in "Halloween." Luca adds that Roberto Clemente is watching what Nutting's doing to his Pirates, and he ain't pleased, know what I mean, Bob?
Anyway, Bob decides he doesn't need any more ski lodges, and that pile he's sitting on isn't bringing him happiness, and. damn, those pliers Luca's carrying look kinda scary. So he decides the fans he's been fleecing deserve a ballclub worth its proud heritage, and he opens the vault and asks Ohtani how much he wants.
Either that, or he sells the team to someone who actually cares. That'd work, too.
At any rate, in my dream Othani's wearing black-and-gold, and the Pirates go out and get some other guys to go with him, and suddenly they're the Pirates again and no longer the Cruds I've been watching with such weary contempt. And all of us in our Clemente jerseys live happily ever after.
"That's the stupidest dream I ever heard," you're saying now.
Yeah, well, Ohtani's gotta go somewhere, right?
That's the buzz right now, it seems. The Angels once again are not going anywhere, and now Mike Trout's on the shelf with a broken wrist, and so the trade rumors are flying.
What good is the best player in baseball if you're still below .500 at the All-Star break? And with Trout out, not likely to get much better?
The situations fairly shollers "reset", and the Angels could get a whole lot of resetting for Ohtani. Of course, it'll be a club that has money and is willing to spend it that winds up with him.
This raises the intriguing possibility the Cubs might have a shot, but of course not really because it's the Ricketts family and because, you know, it's the Cubs. So it'll likely be the Dodgers or the Yankees or the Red Sox, one of the usual suspects.
Although ...
Although someone the other day floated the idea of Ohtani-to-the-Orioles, who are two games back of Tampa Bay in the AL East and poised for a breakthrough that hasn't happened in decades.
The O's in the Series again? Really?
Gotta admit. That would be kinda cool.
These are not the fun days at Northwestern University, where a successful football program and its revered coach have been found lacking. And it doesn't help when the president of the university, in his own oopsie way, has been found lacking, too.
An explanation is in order.
It seems a whistleblower came forward not long ago with a sordid tale of the sexualized hazing of freshman football players. These included something the whistleblower called "running," which apparently involved a freshman being held down while eight or 10 upperclassmen had their way with him in a "sexualized" way. You can interpret that any way you want, and you'd likely be right.
In any case, it was characterized as a regular occurrence, which of course is profoundly dismaying for an institution that prides itself on its integrity. And so the university leaped into action, suspending longtime head coach Pat Fitzgerald, canceling preseason practices in Kenosha, Wis. (where some of this sick stuff allegedly took place) and appointing a locker room monitor independent of Fitzgerald and his staff.
Oopsie.
Oopsie, because yesterday Northwestern president Michael Schill sent out a letter to the NU community saying that, um, they might have jumped the gun a bit. And not because they found the allegations false or punished Fitzgerald too harshly.
No, sir. Now Schill thinks Coach's punishment wasn't harsh enough.
"In determining an appropriate penalty for the head coach, I focused too much on what the report concluded he didn't know and not enough on what he should have known," Schill wrote. "As the head coach of one of our athletic programs, coach Fitzgerald is not only responsible for what happens with the program but also must take great care to uphold our institutional commitment to the student experience ...
"Clearly, he failed to uphold that commitment."
Also clearly?
That Schill should have given all this a few more seconds thought.
But because he didn't, he comes off as a vacillating twit who rushed to judgment because oh my God our football program is infested with pervs and I have to do something fast. This seems not only to have sprung from an urgency (panic?) to blunt embarrassing publicity, but as a reaction to the lightning judgment of social media, which has never met a knee it wouldn't jerk.
I could be way off base about that. But I don't think so.
Either way, the backtracking is not a good look. That Schill got it absolutely right here only slightly mitigates the fact it took him two swings to do so.
Yes, a college coach is responsible for everything that happens in his program. He sets the tone, he establishes the culture, he's the cop who punishes any deviation from that culture.
So if Fitzgerald didn't know about the alleged hazing, he wasn't doing his job. And if he did know, and didn't properly address it, he wasn't doing his job, either.
That should have dawned on Schill sooner rather than later. But you know what they say.
Haste makes waste. Or oopsie.
When last we left poor Bob Huggins, he was guest-hosting How To Blow Up Your Career In Two Easy Steps, having 1) smeared both Catholics and gays on a a Cincinnati radio show, and 2) gotten falling-down drunk in Pittsburgh and charged with DUI after blowing .21 on the old drunk meter.
Then he announced his resignation (under duress, surely) as head basketball coach at West Virginia.
But you think this means Hugs is finished? Hell, no, he's not finished!
Now his attorney is saying never mind your lying ears, Hugs never actually resigned. Sure, he announced he did, and he cleaned out his office and left, but that's not what really happened. That's only what you think happened.
See, what really happened was, um ... well ... oh, never mind the grubby details. The point here is Hugs is demanding to be reinstated or BY GOD HE'LL SUE. And, look, he's got this here lawyer to say so and everything!
I can only imagine what happens when all of this lands in some poor judge's courtroom.
HUGS' PEOPLE: Your honor, we demand Bob Huggins be reinstated as head basketball coach at West Virginia on account of he never actually resigned as head basketball coach at West Virginia.
WEST VIRGINIA'S PEOPLE: Yes, he did!
HUGGINS (bypassing his people): No, I didn't!
WEST VIRGINIA AD WREN BAKER: (bypassing their people): Bob, I was there! I heard you announce it myself!
HUGGINS: Nuh-uh!
BAKER: Bob!
HUGGINS (crossing his arms and shaking his head): Nope. Nope, nope, nope. Nnnn-ope.
JUDGE: Bob!
Oh, it's gonna be more fun than Saturday night at Mar-a-Lago. And just as bizarre.
They packed the Thomas and Mack Center in Vegas last night for a summer-league NBA game, and it was ... a summer-league NBA game. Which is to say, a whole lot of hoopin' was done, some of it worth watching.
Also, you couldn't conclude a thing from it.
The draw, of course, was the No. 1 pick in last month's draft, Victor Wembanyama -- aka Wemby, aka The Big W. He was not particularly impressive, missing 11 of his 13 shots and scoring just nine points in a tick over 27 minutes. He also got tired, he confessed, which might have been expected considering he's 7-5 and a 16-ounce beer outweighs him.
He's a really tall penknife with feet, in other words. Turn him sideways and he vanishes.
But he did have three assists, and five blocks, and eight rebounds, and showed us flashes of why so many think he's a special talent. And the sellout crowd got to see a 7-5 guy put the ball on the floor and take it to the tin, which is not something you see every day.
So score The Big W's debut a no-decision, with Wembanyama admitting what was obvious: He's got a lot of learning to do.
On the other hand ...
Well, on the other hand, by last night he'd already racked a W. So he had that going for him.
The W came out of Vegas, too, and it was the local constabulary who delivered it. Vegas police concluded there was nothing to an incident involving Wemby, Spurs security and former singer Britney Spears, whose celebrity card expired some time ago.
Seems she wanted to meet Wemby just like the rest of America, and so, assuming her celebrity card was still valid, she marched up behind him in a Vegas nightclub and put a hand on his shoulder. Spurs security, doing its job, shoved her hand away (Don't touch, missy, you could hear them saying). In doing so Spears was struck.
Supposedly it was because the security guy backhanded her, which seemed unlikely. The police concluded she'd actually smacked herself in the face when her hand was pushed away.
Ado about next to nothing, in other words, and shame on the social media knee-jerkers who thought the incident showed Wembanyama was already becoming yet another entitled young athlete. First of all, it was the team's security, not Wembanyama's, so Wemby wasn't in charge of them. Hard to fathom, therefore, how it was any reflection on him that Britney smacked herself in the face.
So, yeah. Call it a W.
And a to-be-determined-later.
I remember Johnie Cooks.
I remember he was a linebacker the Colts took second in the draft in 1982, two years before they abandoned Baltimore for Indianapolis. A terror at Mississippi State, he was one of the league's top defensive rookies in '82, and thus was a name we all recognized that first season in Indiana.
He was at Anderson College with the rest of the Horseshoes that summer for training camp, when none of us had much of a clue. Was that Mike Pagel back there in the pocket, or Johnny Unitas? Weren't running backs Randy McMillan and Curtis Dickey, going to pile up eleventy-hundred yards apiece and grind defenses into disgusting chewed-up defense bits? And Cliff Odom, Barry Krauss and, yes, Johnie Cooks -- weren't they the All-Pro backbone of a fearsome D?
Look, there's reserve linebacker Gary Padjen knocking over a garage in a local TV ad. How tough is that?
Tougher'n Colts coach and legendary hard-ass Frank Kush, by golly. You could take that to the bank without a co-sign.
And then ...
And then, the Colts broke camp and the season started and they were what they were, a 4-12 football team. And the legendary hard-ass didn't make it through the season, fired with a game to play.
And now, a bunch of years later, he's gone. And so is Johnie Cooks.
He died this week at 64, and not for the first time my immediate reaction was "But he wasn't that old!" It didn't seem that long ago, after all, since that first summer in Anderson when he was a starter and we all sweltered and marveled that an actual NFL team was here among us. Truthfully it never does.
But you know what?
It really hasn't been that long ago. Because Cooks really wasn't that old.
He was, however, an NFL linebacker for a decade, initiating and receiving car-crash contact week after week. It takes its toll, all of that. Just go sit in the hotel lobby in Canton, Ohio, on Hall of Fame weekend, and watch the parade of broken bodies hobble past, old beyond their years.
Almost 60 former NFL players have died so far in 2023, and the year's barely half over. Some of them saw their full measure of days and more -- Jim Brown was 87 when he passed, Joe Kapp 85, and 24 others were in their 80s or 90s -- but a distressing number did not.
Charles White, at 64. Calvin Muhammad, also 64. Clark Haggans at 46 and Sonny Gordon at 57 and Tracy Johnson at 56 and Stanley Wilson at 40 and a bunch of others who didn't make it to 70, or barely did.
And, sure, you can't blame the football threshing machine for all of them. Some died of cancer and some from various other ailments, and one, 35-year-old Ryan Mallett, got caught in a riptide and drowned in Florida. And then there were former Lions and Chargers linebacker Jesse Lemonier and Browns defensive end Chris Smith, who were just 25 and 31 when they died this year.
I couldn't find the cause of death for either. Suffice it to say they're two more NFL players who are no longer with us, but should be.
And of whom, again, we can only say this: "But he wasn't that old!"
That day in Spiece Fieldhouse it was July and humid and the place was one big sweaty drum section, making its sound in a syncopated whap-whap-whap that came from everywhere and could only be called Baller Jazz.
It was the sound basketball makes in the summertime, when a million kids with a million dreams hit the road for this tournament or that tournament or some other tournament.
This day it was the USSSA Boys National Basketball Championship, and there were 1,500 ballers there with 1,500 look-at-me signs hanging around their necks for the college coaches in their shorts and sandals and golf shirts emblazoned with their school logos. On a dozen or so courts, kids were taking it to the tin or pulling up for the J or flushing a dunk (with authority!). It was like being in a sneak-squallin’, ball-callin' house of mirrors, one multiple exposure after another.
And it was Spiece Fieldhouse's DNA -- a beating basketball heart in a basketball state, where the jerseys of famous Hoosiers hung from the rafters and Hoosier basketball memorabilia that greeted you the instant you stepped in the door.
You can say goodbye to all that now.
Blame market saturation or market demand or the weather, if you like, but mainly blame the rise of pickleball. Last anyone looked it hadn't yet taken over the world, but it had all its outlying provinces surrounded And now that includes Spiece Fieldhouse, erstwhile hoops mecca.
At the top of the week, local media ran stories about the demise of the Fieldhouse, or at least the basketball part. This summer they'll close the place down, tear up the basketball courts and replace them with pickleball courts. Demand, meet supply.
Somewhere John Wooden just rolled over in his grave and uttered a most un-Wooden-like scream. Pickleball over basketball? In Indiana?
Well, yes. It's for all the reasons listed above: The market is full to the brim with basketball tournaments and basketball facilities, including right here in the Fort. But there's a market for pickleball, whose popularity is exploding.
And, no, I don't know why.
Oh, it's not that I have anything against it, or bear it a grudge because I got hurt playing it (I didn't, because I haven't). And I suppose it keeps our senior citizens occupied, and as one myself I can say that's not a bad thing.
Pickleball is great for seniors, because it's kinda like tennis if you shrunk it in the dryer. It’s Giant Ping-Pong is what it is, and you play it with a kinda ping-pong ball and an oversized kinda ping-pong paddle, and it sounds a lot like ping-pong.
Pock. Pock. Pock. And an occasional, satisfying thwock! when you really lay into one.
Tennis players, or so I've been told, tend to hate it, because pickleball is taking over their courts in places. Also the whole pock-pock-pock thing drives them nuts. Which I can understand, because I could see how it might eventually feel like audio waterboarding.
And yet ...
And yet, pickleball is THE thing now in leisure sports, precisely because it's so versatile. Seniors can play it, kids can play it, professional athletes can play it. In fact there's both amateur and professional competitive pickleball, with tournaments everywhere.
So, it's here to stay. And Spiece is merely filling a need by converting to it. It's one of those bidness decisions, and from the looks of it a pretty shrewd one.
Get ready, Fort Wayne.
The basketball whap-whap-whap is gone. Here comes the pock-pock-pock.
There's a tiny American flag jabbed in the dirt in my front yard this morning, and I know how it got there.
It was me. I'm the culprit.
I put it there to remind myself we still live in a country worth all the noise that went rattling around the neighborhood last night, even if it's also worth wondering how it survives its citizenry. We are a proud, brave, venal and stupid people, we Americans, capable of great acts of sacrifice and nobility and equally appalling acts of hatred and and violence. We are human beings, in other words.
It's tempting, in these riven days, to think we have never been so divided, never been so susceptible to fear-mongers and demagogues and the crass self-interest of those who gleefully feed on our worst impulses. The history nerd in me recognizes this for what it is, the endless recycling of themes that go back to the founding of the republic. Everything that is in America, you see, also was.
The appalling fear-mongering over illegal immigration, for instance, has ever been thus. If the worst elements of American society refer to those coming up from Mexico and Central America as an "invasion" (with all the implied menace of that charged word), those same elements used the same rhetoric when refugees from the Great Famine in Ireland began landing on our shores in the 1840s. Ditto the Asians, Italians, Russians and Eastern Europeans who followed in succeeding years.
All of them, or the great majority of them, came to America fleeing oppression or violence or religious persecution or poverty. All of them crossing our southern border today, or the great majority, are fleeing much the same thing. And all of them were portrayed by the aforementioned elements as murderers and rapists and terrorists and drug-dealers, coming to take our jobs and our security and our very lives.
A hundred years ago, there was even a foreshadowing of the current wave of anti-immigrant sentiment. During the crafting of the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 -- the most restrictive and baldly racist anti-immigration legislation in American history -- one of the crafters, a man named John B. Trevor, looked to the south and feared an "undesirable mongrel immigration" from Hispanic populations.
Listen to the rhetoric coming out of Washington today. Not a hell of a lot different, if in fact there is a difference.
And yet, as a country, we've achieved great things despite all this -- with the significant contribution of those successive waves of immigrants the worst of us swore were an existential threat to America itself. Yeah, not so much, Bubba.
But so it goes in a nation that has endlessly wrestled with the concept of freedom and to whom it applies, and which is no more loud and contentious and divided by that debate than it's ever been.
If today's Right demonizes the Left and vice-versa, after all, both are only following the example set by our forefathers, who perhaps demonized one another even more egregiously. Helped along by every bit as vicious a partisan press as today's, the Jefferson Republicans branded the Hamilton Federalists as "monarchists" who wanted to return the young America to a state of servitude to a king; the Hamilton Federalists responded by branding Jefferson a liar, a hypocrite, an atheist and a proponent of mob rule.
Both were probably on the mark, to some extent. And hugely off it in the main.
Which brings me back to that flag planted in the dirt in our yard.
Some people think by putting it there I'm declaring myself in league with the "patriots" who use the flag and the troops and the Star-Spangled Banner as cover in the pursuit of blatantly un-American aims. I say people can think what they want, this being America. And since it is, no one gets to dictate what putting an American flag on my lawn on the Fourth of July means to me.
It means America ain't perfect. But I'll still take it over anything else you've got.
OK, so I'd never heard of the guy, either. Van Ginsburg, was it? Van Grizburger? Van Morrison?
Something like that.
But, nah, his name is Shane van Gisbergen, and he's from New Zealand, and late on a storm-tossed day on Lakeshore Drive and Michigan Avenue, he was showing the world his own Miracle Mile. The street course was new and crawling with slick spots from earlier downpours, but he never turned a wheel wrong. Ran down Chase Elliott and ran down Justin Haley, and then drove away from both at the end as chill as can be.
And there it was: First NASCAR street race in Chicago; first guy to win his first Cup race since Johnny Rutherford won one of the Daytona qualifiers for Smokey Yunick: first Kiwi ever to win a Cup race. A day for firsts, it seems.
And if there was a certain symmetry to that, it wasn't like van Gisbergen was new to all this. We might not have heard of him, but that doesn't mean anything. It just means Americans are provincial creatures who don't spent a lot of time thinking about racing in New Zealand.
Where van Gisbergen -- aka, "SVG" -- is THE guy, as it happens.
To begin with, he's 34 years old, not 18 or 19, and he's been wheeling cars similar to Cup cars for 17 years in New Zealand's road-course Supercar Championship series. In that time, van Gisbergen has won three titles, 79 races and 46 poles, and made 174 podiums in 499 starts. And he's won the Bathurst 1000, the Supercar's Daytona 500.
All of that makes him the fourth most successful driver in the series 27-year history.
His ride at Chicago came via Trackhouse Racing's Project 91, whose goal is to give international drivers entree into NASCAR. And if you're looking for international drivers with experience in Cup-type cars, you weren't going to look very long before you found van Gisbergen.
So, yeah, a day for firsts. But not necessarily a day for surprises.
They'll be doing something pretty silly today up in Chicago, weather permitting. Bunch of wild boys will climb in muscled-up Toyotas and Chevies and Fords, and then they'll go blaring along Lakeshore Drive and Columbus Drive and Michigan Avenue like they don't have a lick of sense.
They'll bellow past Buckingham Fountain in Grant Park. Turn Lake Michigan into a blue-green blur (dotted with sailboats if the weather's right). Hang a few squalling lefts and rights like commuters in the express lanes on the Dan Ryan, only crazier.
The Grant Park 220, NASCAR will call this.
Jimmie Johnson, who wanted badly to run this first Chicago street race in his semi-retirement, will not be there.
Something a lot more serious happened to his family this week, see, which is why what happens in Chicago today will feel so ... pointless. It's bread and circus for the masses, is all it is. What happened to Jimmie Johnson's family, on the other hand, is real life at its worst.
What happened was his mother-in-law picked up a gun and shot her husband, and then her 11-year-old grandson, and finally herself.
And so while the masses will gather to see just how fast a man can drive on Lakeshore Drive when there are no cops looking, Chandra Johnson will struggle to find sense in the senseless. In one awful swoop, her mother, her father and a beloved nephew are gone. And by her mother's own hand.
In the days since, speculation has blossomed like summer weeds, because in these matters human beings need a "why". The most plausible explanation is it was delayed-reaction blowback from another family tragedy, the skydiving death of Chandra's brother nine years ago. Mom reportedly had been struggling with depression since.
People will call what happened this week unimaginable, because that's the word everyone hangs on tragedies like this. It's not really. Depression is rampant in 2023 America, for reasons both understood and not so. And Americans die by the gun every day in our national shooting gallery.
Two more victims were found in a strip-mall hair salon last night in Indianapolis, where there's a shooting in the wee hours almost every night. Thirty more people were shot, and two died, at a Baltimore block party on the same night.
Depression and violent death are our new normal, sad to say. Or at least they are too damn often. That they have touched a celebrity athlete's family, therefore, is not unimaginable at all.
It's just life, real as real. And no fairy tale even for the blessed among us.
I'm in Gettysburg, Pa., in other words. That's because 160 years ago this morning, just about this time, Harry Heth collided with John Buford's cavalry just west of town, where the hills roll gently and mundane features with names like Willoughby Run and McPherson's farm were about to become notorious.
Day 1 at G'burg, 1863. And what is there to say about that except for the next three days American would slaughter American in unimagined numbers -- giving birth, in the inevitable American way, to both hallowed ground and one of our great tourist traps?
People come to Gettysburg notionless, because it's something you just do if you're an American even if you don't know why. And so a good many who come here know almost nothing about the Civil War. Among other things, this makes Gettysburg park rangers among the most patient men and women in the world.
The Civil War?
Visitors to Gettysburg know Yankee fought Confederate here, and then some other stuff happened, and then Lee surrendered to Grant at Appendix. Or something like that.
Yet I go back as often as I can, despite the ghost tours and the gift shops where toy muskets and plastic swords and cheesy paper kepis, blue and gray, are prominently displayed. I go back because I'm a confirmed Civil War nerd, and also because Gettysburg speaks to me in a different voice every time I do.
And the wondrous thing about that?
I never know what voice I'm going to hear until I hear it.
One visit I may be drawn to the Wheatfield, thinking about Colonel Cross of New Hampshire and Samuel Zook, Union commanders whose lives ended there on July 2. Once I tramped through the fields and marshes around the Trostle Farm and Plum Run, where a Mississippi politician named William Barksdale led a charge on the same day that nearly broke the Union line until he went down with five bullets in him just ahead of dusk.
I've smoked a cigar at the Indiana monument on Culp's Hill, where a Harvard man named Charles Mudge led a hopeless charge that left him lifeless somewhere in the fields around me. I've spent time alone at the remote spot where a gallant young cavalry officer, Elon Farnsworth, was killed late on July 3 in a senseless charge ordered by his commanding officer, the supremely boneheaded Judson Kilpatrick.
Mudge was just 23 when he died. Farnsworth, too. A Union artillery officer named Alonzo Cushing was 22 when, somewhere inside the wall on Cemetery Ridge where Pickett's charge was gasping its last, a bullet hit him in the mouth and killed him.
And at the other end of the battlefield, on a peaceful knoll where wildflowers blazed red and yellow the last time I was there, a 19-year-old lieutenant named Bayard Wilkeson was mortally wounded and a 29-year-old brigadier general named Francis Barlow grievously so as Confederates swarmed them from three sides.
So much youth. So much gone promise. So many bright lives still drawing breath on this morning 160 years ago, and turning black and horrible in the summer sun by the end of this day or the two days following.
Gettysburg spoke to me in that voice, that day on what's now known as Barlow's Knoll. It was late May and the sun was warm and I sat down next to a silent cannon, watching the breeze blow the wildflowers around and trying to imagine what it must have been like on this hilltop late on the afternoon of July 1, 1863.
I couldn't do it. There was simply too much peace and solitude here now, and so much sound and fury and singing menace in the air then.
It is that impossible leap, I suppose, that makes the Knoll one of my favorite spots on the battlefield. I come here whenever Gettysburg speaks to me in the voice of lost youth and sacrifice, which is often. I wish I were there now.
It's right about 9:30 in the morning, as I write this. Off to the south and west, Buford is hanging tough as Harry Heth piles in more and more troops and artillery. In a little while, John Reynolds and the First Corps will show up, and a Confederate sniper will draw a bead on Reynolds and kill him. A while after that, the fabled Union Iron Brigade -- boys from Michigan and Indiana and Wisconsin -- will plow ahead into the woods, and the Confederates will close in on three sides, and the Midwestern boys will sacrifice themselves to buy their army time.
Me, I'm back here in Indiana, drinking coffee.
From an Iron Brigade mug, natch.
