On The Heart Beat
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Be Careful With New Resolutions
This heart just won’t quit.
The On The Heart Beat corner of SportsEdTV has penned essays of heartwarming and even heart-wrenching accounts of athletes, in most stages of life and play.
This edition recounts an interview we held with a still passionate sports octogenarian—that’s a story with eight decades and as many sides to it.
Invoking curmudgeon privilege our subject used “resolutions I should have made” to build the construct of our time together.
Invoking writer’s privilege we preface his chronology, observing this sports fiend continues to learn, compete and celebrate sports at marginally obsessive levels.
Edited for PG audiences and posterity, the occasionally sage, sometimes impudent offerings emanate from the bleeding sports heart of a lover of games played, seen, and heard since before Pearl Harbor.
“RESOLUTIONS HE SHOULD HAVE MADE”
In the 1940’s he should have resolved to grow up like the neighborhood kids, memorized times tables, played cops and robbers, and read Tom Mix and Hopalong Cassidy comics.
Instead, he hero-worshiped Red Sox baseball and memorized batting averages. Reviewing box scores in the dailies and hot stove rumor-mongering in the offseason while softening the leather of a Marty Marion infielders’ special got him through the winters.
In the 1950’s he should have resolved to leverage his mom-gifted advanced verbal skills to absorb the classic works of literature and acquire the attendant scholarly benefits.
Instead, Little League beckoned, and he donned the catchers’ tools of ignorance. The discovery of basketball came next and igniting another passion leading to a pip squeak’s frustration until a late growth spurt put a varsity letter on his BMOC sweater.
In the 1960’s he should have resolved to advance schooling.
Instead, he helped bless the world with three more athletes—you should have seen that Little League team--and combined wordsmithing and sports beginning a play-and-tell period which awakened a latent golf passion.
In the 1970’s he should have resolved to stay the course.
Instead, he heard echoes of iconic sports voices Marty Glickman, Curt Gowdy, and Pat Summerall calling him to radio with pictures. When a golfing buddy extended an offer to produce sports television, the risks hid behind the thrills and a wild sports TV story ensued.
In the 1980’s he should have resolved to ride the growth wave.
Instead of nursing a punctured pioneer’s pride his retour to the ad and promo game was accompanied by a growing, albeit destructive, relationship with John Barleycorn. A better friend, Bill Wilson got him off the bench and back in the game.
In the 1990’s he should have resolved to wear the media man hat again.
Instead, an entrepreneurial bug bit him hard when he met golf's Rainman, Moe Norman, and wrote a trio of best-selling books and videos espousing the Canadian golf savant’s better way to hit a ball on the ground with a stick. It expanded to a teaching academy and relit competitive fires yet to extinguish.
In the 2000’s he should have resolved to travel a graceful path toward retirement.
Instead, as an agonizing case of golfers' yips led to dousing burning competitive fires he was led to a yips cure hidden in the science of an appreciative heart—technology requiring adjusting a lifelong penchant for white-knuckling play.
In the 2010’s he ignored society’s resolve to put years of value out to pasture.
Instead, the entrepreneurial malady metastasized into the creation, design, and development of a pair of sports-related innovations, EQuatrics™, a balanced scoring system for golf and Harmony Games®, events with teams comprised of diverse players. Both are pandemically mothballed.
In the 2020’s he should have resolved to acquiesce to covid confinement.
Instead, he collided with SportsEdTV and buckled in for another thrilling sports media rocket ride described in more detail here.
By now you likely know that he is me.
