Now, About Motorcycles
My grandfather (“Pappaw”) was proud of a certificate that attested to him having put more than 100,000 miles on his Harley-Davidson, so he obviously liked riding motorcycles. And his son—my father—was much the same. He...
Macca
Remember those long-ago days when people in the USA first got hip to the Beatles? Seems there was an avalanche of publicity, much of it of the fawning variety, when John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr invaded our...
DKR, the Bear and Other Jim Crow Coaches
Nobody ever said that running a big-time football program is easy. You have to deal with pushy alumni, egg-heads on the faculty who want to abolish intercollegiate athletics and know-it-all reporters at the local newspaper, not to mention...
The Bogosity of Billie Jean King’s Defeat of Bobby Riggs
I was a junior at UT on September 20, 1973 when the so-called Battle of the Sexes took place at the Houston Astrodome before 30,000 howling fans and another 90 million, including me, who watched on television. In a heavily hyped, one-off...
Abner Haynes’ pro career
I hope I have made it abundantly clear that Abner Haynes deserves to be in the College Football Hall of Fame. His exploits for the North Texas State Eagles in the late 1950s should suffice. Further proof is the fact that the process of racial...
The Vagaries of Being Named an All-American and Winning the Heisman Trophy
Bear with me as I gaze 57 years into the past, back to the 1959 college football season. I propose to look at some numbers and hazard a supposition or two. Washington beat Wisconsin in the Rose Bowl, Georgia beat Missouri in the Orange...
Our Final Meeting with the Cultural Heritage Administration
Cheol-Woong Rim and I were a bit late in arriving at the National Palace Museum, adjacent to Gyeongbokgung—the biggest and most central of Seoul’s five royal palaces. The date was July 22, 2016, which meant that more than three...
I Miss the Southwest Conference
Almost 7,000 miles separate me from the land of my birth, so obviously I am not on the scene. My feel for what’s happening in the USA in the summer of 2016 is a bit shaky. That applies to numerous issues—Donald Trump winning the...
Korean Cars, Korean Drivers
According to the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport, there are now more than 20 million cars or trucks in Korea. That’s one four-wheeled, motorized vehicle for every 2.56 people. Quite a jump from the 7,000 cars in the...
9880 Marlin Drive
I have only two vague memories of life before my family moved into a red-brick home in far east Dallas in the summer of 1957. In the first, I was quite young—maybe one year old? I was in a crib, and there were a number of adults in the...
Kim Jong-Un and his “Pleasure Squad”
The North Koreans are in the news again. I refer not to them testing a hydrogen bomb or sending another missile over the East Sea or hacking computers in South Korea and the USA or putting the clamps on desperate would-be refugees or sucking...
My books, my library
Shortly after marauding British soldiers burned much of Washington, D.C. and the Library of Congress in 1814, former president Thomas Jefferson offered to sell most of his library (6,487 volumes—the largest private collection of books in...