I was the game, but I’d been alerted via Jeff “Skin” Wade’s Twitter feed that he and the rest of the Dallas Mavericks’ broadcast crew would be talking about the oral history of Dirk Nowitzki’s career that appears in our December issue. And indeed, they did. After the jump, so as not to ugly up the front page, a picture of my TV. Which I put up here for posterity as a reminder for my bosses of the good times, so as to brunt the impact whenever I inevitably screw up something in the future.
Many years ago, when I was a junior at Cistercian Prep, a great man by the name of Tom Hillary (God rest his soul) talked me into playing football. One of the first games I played in was against Trinity Valley, whose running back was a large, fast young man called Tom Williams. That Friday night, Williams repeatedly broke into the secondary, where I had the misfortune of trying to stop him. I weighed about 150 pounds in high school. I think Williams went about 210. I can’t recall the score of that game. Needless to say, Cistercian did not come out on top. I survived the game with deep emotional scarring.
Which brings us to the big Yale-Harvard game over the weekend. Yale led 10-7 with just 2:25 left in the game, but the Yale coach called a fake punt on a fourth-and-22 from his own 26-yard line. The play didn’t work, and Harvard came back to win 14-10. The Yale coach? My old friend Tom Williams, from Trinity Valley.
Sweet, sweet schadenfreude. (Yale’s a good school. I assume one of his players can define the word for him.)
The program, at 9 p.m., reviews the history of attempts to make something more than a smelly ditch out of the river. Bud Kennedy discusses here.
1. Did you know that Dallas has more toll roads than any other city in Texas? We do. And guess what? Looks like we’re getting some more! But these are different kinds of toll roads, my friends. Last summer, the Texas Legislature called for an end to comprehensive development agreements, which are 50-year deals with private companies who then collect the tolls. But guess how the Transportation Department plans to expand I-35 to Denton? Pass through financing. What does that mean? A private company builds a state road (with some added tax dollars), and Texas pays back the money over the next 30 years or so based on the number of cars that “pass through” the road. Yup. Sounds totally different.
2. Yesterday was the 46th anniversary of President Kennedy’s assassination, and many gathered at Dealey Plaza to pay their respects. Luckily, no additional tragedy came out of the mourning. According to the DMN article: “One woman, perhaps overcome with grief or poor judgment, placed an infant in the middle of Elm Street on an ‘X’ taped to the road at the spot where Kennedy was shot for the second time.”
3. People are mad–yet happy–at the Dallas Cowboys for their ugly, last-minute win over the Redskins. I am so ready for football season to be over so we can return to more dignified topics such as jai alai and ant farms. I really miss Mad Men.