Creative Me
Cavaliers fans to King James: Go directly to hell …
It’s not easy to unbreak a heart, not when a person has left that heart in shards. And in Cleveland, those men and women with broken hearts won’t see theirs fixed. Their anger is too visceral to discard, and if anyone doubts that, just look around the city or listen to the talk on the streets or check out made-for-the-moment websites: It’s LeBron James everywhere, 24/7. In the streets around Progressive Field and The Q, vendors hawked T-shirts tonight that said “QUITNESS” or something about James’ momma too crass to mention. One Internet site has been peddling a particularly telling T-shirt for $13.99. It reads: “I WITNESSED NOTHING.” That’s only half true. Nobody can say that James didn’t treat Cavaliers fans to seven seasons of incredible performances. He was an MVP twice; he took the Cavs to the NBA Finals; he won a scoring title and an Olympic gold medal; and he made basketball matter in this football-crazed city.
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MY MUSINGS
Why pick dying over living?I still wonder why Jay took his life. Not that I have a right to know the answer, because Jay and I had be absent from each other’s lives for close to 20 years. Jay and I had built a friendship in my early days as a journalist, and he, at the time we met, was an intern at the newspaper I was working for. We became fast friends, and we stayed friends as his career – and mine — flourished. |
ABOUT FRIENDS
The cruelest hurt of all …I could hear the hurt in his voice. I had heard it before a couple of months earlier when he called late one night to talk to me. His call this time came midmorning. The night earlier started merrily, he said. He attended a scholarship program at his college with his parents, who drove in for the event. |
POP CULTURE
Saving the free press has a costI wonder what will happen when the newspaper business is even less of an institution than it is these days. The public’s watchdog isn’t asleep; it’s on life supports. I’m the last person to suggest the business was perfect even in its glory days; it had flaws and conflicts of interests and biases and carelessness and downright frauds. Yet the industry did more good for the public than bad. No institution has been more mindful of this democracy and its excesses than the newspaper business. |
FAMILY AFFAIRS
Ties to game bind dad, sonBUENOS AIRES — The love of baseball starts with a father and his son tossing a baseball in the backyard. The love grows stronger as the father teaches his son to hit. It grows even stronger as the father volunteers to coach his son in a league with other fathers (or, sometimes, mothers). |
