The greatest benefit of having a press-row seat at University of Texas basketball games in the 1996, 1997 and 1998 seasons was that I got an up-close view of how the game was played (by 10 athletes) and called (by 3 men in black-and-white...
I’m trying to think what I was doing in 1988. I was living on Lafayette Street in east Austin, working as a proofreader at G&S Typesetters, writing a weekly column for the American-Statesman and preparing to run my first marathon. It...
Rodney Elkins, Tony Sandow, David Twedell, Jeff Seacrest, Mickey Williamson, Sammy Ritter, David Posey, Jimmy Allen, Randy Patrick and Barry Payne were some of my male classmates in third and fourth grades at Edwin J. Kiest Elementary School...
[It’s a sad fact that my year-long effort to get Abner Haynes into the College Football Hall of Fame and my even longer drive to convince the French to put Jikji on a Seoul-bound airplane ended—unsuccessfully—within a couple...
Given that both of my parents are deceased, I have no way of learning more about the earliest part of my life. A pediatrician apparently thought I might have polio or another debilitating disease of the lower extremities, and so the decision...
More than 40 years after the demise of the American Basketball Association, you can still color me red, white and blue—as in the league’s rather garish ball. During my junior year of high school, I considered myself lucky to...
In one respect, I am unqualified to write this piece since I am 7,000 miles from the scene and have been living the expat life for almost a decade. Nevertheless, I am a graduate of the University of Texas, wrote three books on Longhorn sports...
I can hardly imagine why Dr. Norman Davies did not respond to my e-mail. I had written to him in Oxford, England after having completed his 1,200-page book on European history. I said nice words, of course, but I also gently asked why he had...
Here I am at age 64, and I’m learning as never before. I do so primarily as an autodidact, by reading nonfiction books (history, biography, sports and so on). The content comes first, but there are other benefits. It has been...
Exactly 50 years have passed since the 1967 college football season. I was a ninth-grader at Hill Junior High School in Dallas, growing up but still quite immature. That, I believe, helps explain why I was so enthralled with the showing of a...
My college days consisted of seven semesters at the University of Texas and one at Stephen F. Austin State University. During that time, I recall just one truly bad teacher—Dr. Herbert Hirsch, a bull-headed, left-wing government...
Tuesday, December 6, 2016. Tonight in New York City—the Grand Ballroom of the Waldorf Astoria Hotel, to be exact—14 former players will be inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame, operated by the National Football...
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