A Wonderful Book!
The true things always ambush me on the road and take me by surprise when I am drifting down the light of placid days, careless about flanks and rearguard actions. I was not looking for a true thing to come upon me in the state of New Jersey. Nothing has ever happened to me in New Jersey. But came it did, and it came to stay.
In the past four years I have been interviewing my teammates on the 1966-67 basketball team at the Citadel for a book I'm writing. For the most part, this has been like buying back a part of my past that I had mislaid or shut out of my life. At first I thought I was writing about being young and frisky and able to run up and down a court all day long, but lately I realized I came to this book because I needed to come to grips with being middle-aged and having ripened into a gray-haired man you could not trust to handle the ball on a fast break.
When I visited my old teammate Al Kroboth's house in New Jersey, I spent the first hours quizzing him about his memories of games and practices and the screams of coaches that had echoed in field houses more than 30 years before. Al had been a splendid forward-center for the Citadel; at 6 feet 5 inches and carrying 220 pounds, he played with indefatigable energy and enthusiasm. For most of his senior year, he led the nation in field-goal percentage, with UCLA center Lew Alcindor hot on his trail. Al was a battler and a brawler and a scrapper from the day he first stepped in as a Green Weenie as a sophomore to the day he graduated. After we talked basketball, we came to a subject I dreaded to bring up with Al, but which lay between us and would not lie still.
"Al, you know I was a draft dodger and antiwar demonstrator."
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=26069
PLEASE SEE MY SIDEBAR FOR A LINK TO PAT CONROY'S BOOK: My Losing Season
posted by VerityINK at 11:43 AM
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5 Comments:
My God, that was a beautiful line "America is good enough to die for even when she is wrong"! He just gets better and better....
That was a helluva excerpt. He has grown a LOT in his life. I wish all the dum kids who protested back then could read it. THIS is what Kerry needs in his stocking Christmas morning.
TELLER--I know, that line blew me away, too! What a beautiful, original thought!
It takes courage and maturity to admit a major error in thinking and acting! Good he got to that stage!
tmw
absolutely gorgeous writing. I stand in awe of the man.
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