A Sports Silver Taps

Let's face it, Aggies.  That cute little 113-year experiment we like to call the football program has come to a sad end.  It's time to lay it to rest and come to terms with what we really are: a basketball school. 

If I had known there would be this much excitement to be had watching the basketball team right now, I would have deferred my enrollment by a decade.  Before I started at Texas A&M, I had run as many March Madness pools (2) as I had attended college football games. But I quickly bought into the prospect of Aggie football. 

The A&M teams of the 1990s were definitely cool, in a slightly uncool (running and defense) sort of way.  Head coach R.C. Slocum was so boring that his secret e-mail newsletter was cancelled after three weeks because, as it turns out, boosters were not interested in finding out whether R.C. would be having oatmeal or cream of wheat for his pregame breakfast.  But as predictable and conservative as he and his teams were, they won, especially at home and especially in November.  Players like Dat Nguyen and Dante Hall brought their own brand of excitement, as well as conference championships in 1991, 1992, 1993, and 1998.  Fittingly, the last time the Aggies have finished in the top 25 in a final AP poll was 1999. 

Since then, the team has been plagued by poor play, substandard recruiting, and secret newsletters.  Most importantly, they've had to face some real competition.  Not from Texas Tech or Oklahoma or even Texas, but from a little sports team just a couple blocks down the street.  We're talking about a team that doesn't wear cleats, doesn't play for sixty minutes, and whose field the Aggie band can't even fit on!  And they don't even really play on a field!

I'm speaking, of course, about the juggernaut that is the Fightin' Texas Aggie Basketball Team.  Once the doormats of the Big 12, the 2007 Ags came from out of nowhere to capture their first Sweet 16 in twenty-five years.  What's more remarkable is that over this (one-year) stretch of Sweet 16 berths, the Aggie basketball factory has produced more NBA lottery picks (1) than Duke, UCLA, UConn, Arizona, and Kentucky combined.

The 2007/2008 basketball team, ranked #14 in the preseason, rolled past Emporia State in its preseason opener.  It should be another exciting year for the basketball team, further cementing the sea change at the once football-crazed school.  Yes, the experiment we call "Texas A&M as a football school" has clearly run its course.  It's time to bury the Aggie football program--don't worry, we'll make sure that wherever we put it, it'll have a good view of the Reed Arena scoreboard.

New York Pictures

http://pictures.thelauves.com/nyc0710.html

With the St. Thomas sand barely shaken from our shoes, we headed off to the Big Apple for Laura Beth and Ben's wedding. We arrived on Friday just in time to eat lunch at an honest-to-goodness New York pizzeria before heading to the rehearsal. The rehearsal dinner was great, with fried chicken, asparagus, and some incredible cornbread, all in the beautiful setting of Ben's office which doubles as the home of his manager. Their ceremony was beautiful, with lots of personal touches and Irish traditions. We had a great time meeting Laura Beth and Ben's friends but also truly enjoyed the time we spent with the Browns and Jeff & Julie Boneau. On Sunday, October 7, we attended mass at St. Patrick's Cathedral and Brandi lit a candle in honor of her Dad's birthday that day. We then saw two great Broadway shows (Spring Awakening and Spamalot), and visited one of Brandi's old haunts, Scruffy Duffy's, where we watched the Yankees' only postseason win. We ended the night walking through Times Square and stopping to share another slice of pizza. On Monday, Brandi spent some time shopping on Fifth Avenue, while Daniel made a purchase from Rupert Gee, ate a street gyro, and watched the Columbus Day parade. Then we took the subway to Central Park and spent some time at the Natural History Museum. Stegosaurus is Daniel's favorite dinosaur, but Brandi can't be too far behind. After the museum, we went to Italian restaurant that was surprisingly expensive (and probably once hosted a meeting of the Five Families) and then headed to the airport. It was very important for us to make it to New York, because it holds a very special place in Brandi's heart. Next stop on our Take Your Spouse to Your Favorite Places Tour? Washington, D.C.!

Honeymoon Pictures

http://pictures.thelauves.com/honeymoon.html

"Our flight tomorrow? It's at 8:00 in the morning," said the newlyweds to anyone who would listen on the day after their wedding.

There was a lot happening on Sunday, so much that we forgot to pack (or even check our flight itinerary) until about 8:00 that evening. When we finally checked on our flight, we discovered that it left at 6:00 in the morning. We packed until about 2:00 Monday morning, set an alarm for 3:30, and were like zombies the rest of the day. We played the newlywed card to gain entrance to the American Airlines Admiral's Club (rather than surrender 60,000 frequent flyer miles), and we slept for about four hours of our six-hour DFW layover. We arrived in St. Thomas late Monday evening.

We awoke Tuesday to an absolute paradise, and we immediately went parasailing, had a nice swim, and just generally took it easy. We went shopping, made a trip over to St. John's (including some time on the world's 10th most beautiful beach), had an incredible snorkeling excursion, and went on a sunset cruise on our final night. All in all, it was a wonderful honeymoon, and it was a little tough to get back to the real world.

Banff Pictures

http://pictures.thelauves.com/banff.html

We jetted off to Calgary for a stay in Banff National Park on December 1, 2006. Brandi went first through the metal detector, and when we both were through it she turned around to me and said, "You didn't beep?" Little did she know that I was deathly afraid of setting off the alarm and someone finding out what I was hiding in my pocket. From the sled dog adventure to an amazing fondue dinner to the proposal, this was the perfect start to our engagement.

Welcome to our new blog!

This is the first post of what will hopefully be many posts by Brandi and me. You may notice the presence of several older posts already on here--those are from my old SportsHistory blog. I want to make it clear to the two readers of the SportsHistory blog that the semi-regular entries you have grown to love will not be going away; they will just be supplemented by the occasional travel journal, some pictures, and whatever Brandi would like to post about, presumably her frustration with trying to go clothes shopping with Daniel. (In my defense, I missed all of the Texas game and half the A&M game, so I think that justifies a little orneriness.)

In setting up this blog, I've had to migrate everything over to WordPress from Movable Type, so expect there to be some growing pains, and I should customize things a little better once I get used to the new digs. For those of you thinking the header image is a bad Photoshop job, you're wrong, only because I didn't use Photoshop at all. I used Paint, which I wouldn't recommend. The image of the two of us is taken from a very nice image from our sunset cruise in St. Thomas--a great picture, but unfortunately not good for a banner image. So I did my best to find a similar ocean sunset. We both do actually have faces, but we'll keep you in suspense for just a little bit longer.

The War on God Bless You

It's that time of year again. The time when we all strive for peace, love, and good health, though the forces of evil sit right around the corner. It's allergy season. And though most of us see this as a time to spread good wishes, the forces of secularism are out to ruin it once again.

Since the Middle Ages, "God bless you" has been an effective means for not only warding off disease, but also for letting everyone in your vicinity know whose side you stood on, eternally speaking. But somewhere along the way, we have gone from "God bless you" to just "Bless you." Apparently, being relatively free of bubonic plague for the last few centuries has emboldened us to the point where we no longer feel the need to invoke the source of all our blessings. "Bless you" is hardly a blessing at all; it's a sentence without a subject. And it's also a way of surreptitiously shutting out those of us who oppose the secularization of sneeze acknowledgments. Consider the following:

In Minot, ND, a kindergarten teacher said "God bless you" after a five-year-old girl sneezed in class. That girl's mother petitioned the school board, and the teacher was put on a 30-day probation.

In Cleveland, OH, Wal-Mart employees have been instructed to give a two-word response to anyone spreading germs on store premises: "Bless you." The employee handbook has been amended to read, "If any employee hears another person in the store, whether co-employee or guest, issue an audible sneeze, he or she is to respond with a polite but unmistakable '[censored] bless you.'"

In Ontario, CA, a family of ear, nose, and throat specialists placed a giant sign reading "God Bless You" in their front yard. The sign was repeatedly vandalized, and several attempts were made to steal it. The neighborhood home owner's association took no action.

What's worse, many religious leaders seem to be turning a blind eye to this phenomenon, even, in some cases, leading their flocks in the wrong direction. Bill O'Reilly, well-known pundit and talk show host, recounts a story in which he realized the severity of the problem. "I'm sitting on an airplane, and I've got a minister sitting next to me. I sneeze, and he says, 'Bless you.' That's it. Not even a 'G'bless you.' Nothing. It pains me to think about this man standing in front of a congregation every Sunday and sermonizing on moral issues."

Some allergy season in the not-too-distant future, it will be possible to sneeze without inviting others to display a paradoxical indifference toward their creator. Until then, just hold it in.

Let’s Talk Loyalty

News of Billy Gillespie's departure hit me like a kick to the stomach. I guess I should know better--I thought that A&M's announcement of an agreement on a new contract was meaningful, but I've seen this movie too many times before, and I should have known that when a bigger program comes calling, that takes precedence over whatever niceties have been said on behalf of the current program. Not that the niceties are insincere, it's just that money tends to have more of an effect than you would think. At least that's what I would think happens, because big time coaches and athletes have proven themselves time and time again to be mercenaries, talking over and over again about how they want to stay put, and leaving at the drop of a hat when a little more money comes calling.

It seems, however, that loyalty is a one-way street nowadays. For 80% of the Aggie basketball fans, the philosophy has been, Put a winning team on the court and I'll show up. I think that's natural, up to a point, but it always sounded a little contradictory from a student body that considers itself the greatest, classiest, most loyal sports (read: football) fans in the country. It's easy to talk loyalty when there's no cost involved, when you're talking about how loyal someone else should be to you.

All of a sudden we have an opportunity to show some real loyalty. So A&M is not a basketball program that can outattract the most successful college basketball program of all time--that's not exactly a shock. But I still have no idea how good a program we have; that will be demonstrated over the next few years. Because all we've had so far is a coach who decided to use the program as a stepping stone, and a group of fans who decided to ride the wave of success. The school is committed, I believe, to building a winner. But it's going to take more than that to have a consistently successful program.