Rudy Giuliani is in the stocks for saying that he does not believe that President Barack Obama “loves America.” He said this at a small, private dinner for Scott Walker, who probably will not be inviting Giuliani to very many events in the near future. Giuliani went on to say that he wasn’t questioning the president’s patriotism — angels and ministers of grace defend us! — only noting that the president’s rhetoric is decidedly low-cal on the American exceptionalism but full-fat when it comes to criticism. It may be the case that the president is a practitioner of the Smokey Robinson school of patriotism: “I don’t like you, but I love you.” Something’s really got a hold on this guy, and it is not an excessive fervor for the American order.
Questions about patriotism and love of country are, according to our self-appointed referees, out of bounds, déclassé, boob bait for bubbas, etc. Those are questions that we are not allowed to ask in polite society. Why? Because polite society does not want to hear the answers. Does Barack Obama like America? The people around him certainly seem to have their reservations. Michelle Obama said — twice, at separate campaign events — that her husband’s ascending to the presidency meant that “for the first time in my adult lifetime, I’m really proud of my country.” She was in her mid 40s at the time, her “adult lifetime” having spanned decades during which she could not be “really proud” of her country. Barack Obama spent years in the Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s church as the churchman fulminated: “God Damn America!” The Reverend Wright’s infamous “God Damn America!” sermon charges the country with a litany of abuses: slavery, mistreatment of the Indians, “treating citizens as less than human,” etc. A less raving version of the same indictment can be found in the president’s own speeches and books. His social circle includes such figures as Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, who expressed their love of country by participating in a murderous terrorist campaign against it.
Does Barack Obama love his country? Call me a rube for saying so, but it’s a fair question.
To ask the question is not the same as venting the familiar swamp gasses: that he’s a foreigner, at heart if not in fact; that he’s a Manchurian candidate sent to undermine the republic; that he’s a secret Marxist or secret jihadist sympathizer; etc. Put it this way: Why would anybody who sees the world the way Barack Obama does love America?
For the progressive, there is very little to love about the United States. Washington, Jefferson, Madison? A bunch of rotten slaveholders, hypocrites, and cowards even when their hearts were in the right places. The Declaration of Independence? A manifesto for the propertied classes. The Constitution? An artifact of sexism and white supremacy. The sacrifices in the great wars of the 20th century? Feeding the poor and the disenfranchised into the meat-grinder of imperialism. The gifts of Carnegie, Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, Morgan, Astor? Blood money from self-aggrandizing robber barons.There is a personality type common among the Left’s partisans, and it has a name: Holden Caulfield. He is adolescent, perpetually disappointed, and ever on the lookout for phoniness and hypocrisy. His is the sort of personality inclined to believe in his heart the declaration that “behind every great fortune there is a great crime.” (He also believes that this is a quotation from Honoré de Balzac, whose works he has not read, when it fact it comes from Richard O’Connor’s The Oil Barons: Men of Greed and Grandeur.) He believes with Elizabeth Warren that the economy is a rigged game based on exploitation and deceit rather than on innovation, productivity, and competition. He believes with Barack Obama that the only reason (e.g.) Staples does not pay its part-time associates more or schedule them for more hours is so that it can pad its executive pay and protect its “billions” in annual profits. (He believes that Staples, whose financials he has not read, makes “billions,” when in fact it does no such thing.) Say an admiring word about Steve Jobs and he’ll swear that there are four-year-olds working 169 hours a week in Chinese sweatshops producing iPods at the point of a bayonet. He believes that most people get into Harvard and Yale because they have influential parents (that’s the University of Texas, unfortunately), that rich Americans mostly inherit their money (in reality, about 15 percent of their assets are inherited, less than for middle-class families), that the U.S. goes to war abroad to enrich contractors at home, and that the entire history of Latin America must be understood through the prism of the United Fruit Company’s maneuverings in 1954.
Give Holden Caulfield a television show and you’ve got Chris Hayes.
Barack Obama has a great, big, heaping dose of Holden Caulfield in him. That and chutzpah: When as a candidate he was in trouble because of his association with the racist lunacy of the Reverend Wright, he responded by giving the American public at large a lecture on racism and its culpability therein, while his minions began proclaiming that the only reason to oppose this politician with the racist associates was — presto-change-o! — racism. But if you believe that the system is basically rotten, that the society that produced that system is basically rotten, that the game is rigged, that your opponents are all phonies and hypocrites, then what’s a little intellectual dishonesty in the service of the common good?
There is very little that a man with Barack Obama’s views and proclivities should love about the country, beyond the fact that its people are so vulnerable to insipid sentimentality that they twice elected him president.
To love one’s country is not to love blindly. After witnessing a spectacular Independence Day fireworks display, William F. Buckley Jr. asked: “Are we being given upscale signs and sounds that serve as phony fermenters of a synthetic patriotism?” This was during the Clinton administration, and he was considering the “disfiguring contemporary data” on crime, abortion, drugs, etc. “Burke said it definitively,” he wrote, “that a society, to be loved, must be lovely. The consensus, on the Fourth of July, seemed to be that the American people still think it that, but that some probationary signs are flying.”
That was 1998. A decade later and the signs would be far more than probationary. That much is plain to Rudy Giuliani, and it should be plain enough to the rest of us, too.
Month: February 2015
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No comments on How Obama really feels about the U.S., and us
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The number one single today in 1973:
Today in 1976, the Eagles’ “Their Greatest Hits” became the first platinum album, exceeding 1 million sales:
Today in 2000, Carlos Santana won eight Grammy Awards for “Supernatural”:
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Scott Walker belongs to an embattled minority that happens to be most of the population. The root of this paradox is that Walker is an extreme outlier among top elected officials — and the journalists and consultants who surround them — in not having graduated from college, at the same time that a solid two-thirds of the country lacks a four-year degree.
Such is the domination of not just college grads, but specifically Ivy League grads and especially Harvard grads, at the upper echelons of our government that the nation’s political competition can be seen as one big intramural battle at the Harvard Club.
George W. Bush (Harvard Business School, 1975) was succeeded as president by Barack Obama (Harvard Law, 1991), whose fiercest tea party critic is perhaps Ted Cruz (Harvard Law, 1995).
Should Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton get elected president she will at least provide a dollop of diversity (Yale Law School, 1973) and restore to New Haven what had once appeared to be its ascendancy, running from George H.W. Bush (Yale, 1948) to Bill Clinton (Yale Law School, 1973) to the double-credentialed George W. Bush (Yale, 1968).
For someone from a state school to try to break this glass ceiling would seem formidable enough, let alone someone like Walker, who dropped out of Marquette in 1990.
For all that we celebrate the do-it-my-own-way pluck and creativity of the nation’s great entrepreneurs who didn’t graduate, we tend to consider a four-year degree an indispensable stamp of respectability and capability. It shouldn’t be.
Walker’s example, as the man who has been elected governor of Wisconsin three times and is at or near the top of Republican polls for president, stands for an important point: Success in American shouldn’t have to go through a B.A.
This is something that the nation’s elite has trouble grasping. Howard Dean (Yale, 1971) expressed the liberal id on this question the other day on “Morning Joe.” Discussing the flare-up over Walker ducking a question on evolution in London last week, Dean said “the issue is how well-educated is this guy? And that’s a problem.”
When Joe Scarborough pushed back at him for calling Walker dumb, Dean clarified, “I didn’t say dumb, I said unknowledgable.” Oh.
The Washington Post ran a piece last week headlined, “As Scott Walker mulls White House bid, questions linger over college exit,” although no questions linger over his college exit. He left to take a full-time job with the American Red Cross. Mystery solved.
The dirt, such as it is, from the Post report is that Walker “had trouble showing up on time for French” and was completely bored in “a class on the politics of the Third World.” Can we at least contemplate the possibility that the class on Third World was genuinely boring? The Post characterizes Walker’s failure to graduate as one of “a string of defeats” he suffered at the time, yet the defeat was simply getting on with his life.
Do we really believe that Scott Walker would be any more or less impressive if he had — to choose from some of Marquette’s current course offerings — finished up his final credits by acing such classes as Economic and Social Aspects of Film, Sociology of Gender and Sex, and Principles of Peer Facilitation Among College Students?
Perhaps, if he had been more diligent in his studies, he would derive great pleasure from being able to read Flaubert in the original and discuss with fluidity the 1966 coup in Nigeria that brought to power Maj. Gen. Johnson Aguiyi-Ironsi. But clearly none of this interested him, as indeed it wouldn’t interest anyone but the most devoted Francophiles or Africanists.
As a practical matter, Walker used college as vocational education for what was his true passion: politics. He told John McCormack of The Weekly Standard that attending Boys State and Boys Nation during high school fueled his interest in running for office. So he took up political science. But studying political science has about as much bearing on becoming a politician as studying marine biology does on becoming an Olympic diver.
There are professions, becoming a lawyer or doctor, that require years of postsecondary education. Being a politician — or, ahem, a journalist — aren’t among them. These are things you primarily learn by doing. Walker ran for student office repeatedly at Marquette, then for real office almost as soon as he left school, steadily building a career that has made him more successful and influential than world-class political science Ph.D.s.
We shouldn’t overlearn from Scott Walker’s example, of course. For many people, it’s better to graduate from college than not. But not for everybody. It would make more sense if we had a postsecondary system that had ways of training and credentialing young people that wasn’t so overwhelmingly dependent on a four-year degree, which is controlled by a lazy, inefficient and tuition-hiking academic establishment.
Walker’s proposed 13 percent reduction in funding for the University of Wisconsin system is being linked by some commentators to his own college experience, making him an “antagonist of the academy,” in the words of an article for Inside Higher Ed. But the Walker proposal should be viewed as external pressure to stimulate needful reforms that the university system would never undertake on its own.
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The number one song today in 1991:
Today in 1998, the members of Oasis were banned for life from Cathay Pacific Airways for their “abusive and disgusting behavior.”
Apparently Cathay Pacific knew it was doing, because one year to the day later, Oasis guitarist Paul Arthurs was arrested outside a Tommy Hilfiger store in London for drunk and disorderly conduct.
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The number one single today in 1960:
Its remake 16 years later — which I had never heard of before writing this blog — finished 12 places below the original:
The number one British single today in 1962:
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The number one British album today in 1970 for the first of eight times on top of the British charts:
The number one British single today in 1976 was about a supposed event 12 years earlier:
The number one single today in 1981:
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As Christians know, Lent began with Ash Wednesday two days ago.
Which means it’s time for Lent Madness:
To prove John F. Kennedy’s observation that life is unfair (as if he would have known that before Nov. 22, 1963): It is unfair for Wisconsinites to have to observe Lent. Wisconsinites observe Lent for far longer than Ash Wednesday to Easter every year. It’s called winter.
I am going to wade into the snakepit of theology by making a radical observation about Lent. My educated guess is that those who went to church on Ash Wednesday heard, and those who go to church this weekend will hear, a sermon about the two kinds of sacrifices we should make for Lent.
The traditional sacrifice is to not do something you usually do — drink beer, eat sweets or junk food, or, for a few friends of mine, social media. (Which means they won’t read this, of course.) The alternative sacrifice is to do something you usually don’t do — pray more often, attend church more often, or go to or do a Bible study, for instance.
There is nothing wrong with doing any of that during Lent. Christians are taught to make an additional sacrifice during Lent to honor Jesus Christ’s ultimate sacrifice on Good Friday. The way Lenten sacrifices usually work, though, is that whatever Christians sacrifice for Lent comes back, or goes away, once Lent is over. That may be within the letter of the Lenten sacrifice; it is not in the spirit of Christianity.
Consider two examples. I know someone who (not for religious reasons) would decide he was too heavy and would go on a diet. He would simply not eat as much as he usually ate, or not eat between meals. Unfortunately for those around him, because he was hungry, he became grumpy during his diets, which meant while he dieted, everyone else suffered. That is a non-religious example of a violation of 2 Corinthians 9:7, which tells us Christians that “Every man according as he purposes in his heart, so let him give; not grudgingly, or of necessity: for God loves a cheerful giver.”
Before that in the Bible comes Matthew 6:5–6, in which Jesus Christ tells us, “And when you pray, you shall not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men. Truly I say to you, They have their reward. But you, when you pray, enter into your closet, and when you have shut your door, pray to your Father which is in secret; and your Father which sees in secret shall reward you openly.”
Being a nominal Christian is not difficult at all in the U.S. I got a few strange looks from people Wednesday night when I announced a basketball game seven hours after I went to Ash Wednesday Mass and got the physical reminder that we are dust and unto dust we shall return, but I could not care less about that. The traditional Catholic sacrifice of not eating meat on Fridays during Lent isn’t a sacrifice at all given the quality of Wisconsin fish fries, put on by numerous Catholic churches.
(Even though I’m an Episcopalian now, my Roman Catholic upbringing still compels me to avoid meat on Fridays during Lent. Again, this is not a sacrifice since I’m a big fan of seafood. It would have been a bigger sacrifice decades ago when seafood wasn’t as plentiful and Catholics ate tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches, or macaroni and cheese, or tuna/cream of mushroom soup/peas/pasta casserole during Lent. I find none of that particularly appealing. Fettucine Alfredo, on the other hand …)
It’s not my place to tell a Christian whether or not he or she is a true Christian. The Bible, however, doesn’t include the concept of Lenten sacrifice, though sacrifices are found throughout the Old Testament, and fasting is found throughout the Bible. (Obviously only the New Testament after the Gospel would even include a Lent-like concept.)
What Christians are supposed to do during Lent is based on tradition, not really on Scripture. Why, moreover, would a sacrifice fit for Lent be something we should only do between Ash Wednesday and Easter? If that sacrifice makes us better Christians, shouldn’t we make that sacrifice — whether doing without something, or doing more of something — all the time?
As a non-theologian non-member of the clergy, this is what bugs me about Christianity today. The approach of the Joel Osteens and the adherents of the theologically dubious “prosperity Gospel” seems to be that your life will become easier if you become a Christian. That certainly was not what the Bible depicts from the Acts of the Apostles to the end. That’s not what’s happening to Christians in the Middle East today. Our responsibilities as Christians are in this life; our rewards are in the next life.
Our responsibilities as Christians are also individual responsibilities. Jesus Christ didn’t tell us to hire someone to feed the poor or house the homeless, and He didn’t tell us to have Congress or the state Legislature to tax us to clothe the naked or care for the ill. Each Christian is supposed to feed the poor, clothe the naked, house the homeless, care for the ill, etc. And, though we will always be sinners, those who note Jesus Christ’s forgiving various sinners in the Gospels often forget to add His following admonition: “Go and sin no more.”
I think an interpretation of the Bible that doesn’t include the most difficult option at all times is a misunderstanding of what we’re supposed to be and do as Christians. There is nothing easy about being a real Christian. We are called to be better than we are, to be more than the most evolved animal on the planet. If you think acknowledging Jesus Christ as your Lord and savior ends your responsibility as a Christian, you’re wrong. If you think doing good works is enough to be a Christian, you’re wrong.
Maybe Lent is a good time to start something of a self-sacrifical nature. The end of Lent doesn’t mean you should stop.
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One year ago when Wisconsin was making its run in the NCAA basketball tournament, the media world outside Wisconsin discovered Badger coach Bo Ryan.
Now that the Badgers appear to be exceeding their 2013–14 season, and Ryan is a finalist for the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame, the New York Times has discovered Ryan too, beginning with a strange headline and some Noo Yawk condescension:
As one approaches this town of 11,000 in the southwest corner of Wisconsin, the largest letter M in the world looms to the north. Made of 400 tons of whitewashed limestone, measuring more than 200 feet in each direction and symbolizing the University of Wisconsin-Platteville’s mining tradition, it is peaked on the kind of hill not ordinarily seen in the northern Midwest.
Yet on another nearby hill, numerous Wisconsin-Platteville men’s basketball teams have been molded. During 15 seasons as coach of the Division III Pioneers, Bo Ryan began his seasons by making his teams repeatedly sprint up it for several days. The hill is about 200 yards and bumpy, with an incline of about 30 degrees.
“We were the thing to do in the winter, and our players wore that as a badge,” Ryan said of the popularity of Wisconsin-Platteville basketball.
While college basketball’s brand-name coaches scour the country’s high schools and Amateur Athletic Union circuits in search of the most gifted players, Ryan, now in his fifth decade coaching in the state, takes cornfed Midwesterners (mainly from Wisconsin, Illinois and Ohio) and plugs them into his system. Most important, he wins.
Following an unusual career path, Ryan has made four stops at three programs in the same university system the past 39 seasons. After eight years as an assistant at the flagship in Madison, he took over Wisconsin-Platteville’s team and led it to four national titles. Signifying his importance there, the Pioneers now play on Bo Ryan Court.
Ryan then coached two seasons at Wisconsin-Milwaukee, a Division I midmajor, and has been the Badgers’ head coach since 2001.
“This is unusual, from what I’m told,” Ryan, 67, said, his modesty on full display.
Ryan’s career seemed to reach its pinnacle last season when the Badgers (30-8) mounted an N.C.A.A. tournament run that was halted only by a last-second 3-pointer by Kentucky’s Aaron Harrison in the national semifinals.
This season holds perhaps even more promise. Having returned most of its best players — including guards Josh Gasser and Traevon Jackson, forward Sam Dekker and the big man Frank Kaminsky, a national player of the year candidate — Wisconsin is 23-2 over all and, at 11-1, the class of the Big Ten conference.
Otto Puls, who has been the Badgers’ official scorekeeper for 51 years, said, “There’s never been the anticipation there’s been this year.”
Before last year’s Final Four run, casual fans perhaps recognized Ryan for little more than his slicked-back white hair, wolflike face and similarly vulpine attitude toward referees. His teams were known for a deliberate offense unafraid to exploit the game’s 35-second shot clock and an annoyingly milquetoast and effective man-to-man defense.
Yet, since Ryan took over the Badgers in 2001, his teams have never finished lower than fourth in the Big Ten and have not missed the N.C.A.A. tournament. Ryan has a .735 winning percentage as the Badgers’ coach, including the best career Big Ten winning percentage of coaches with at least five years’ experience, and a .904 winning percentage at Madison’s Kohl Center. …
Ryan’s style can best be described as old school. When Ryan met with his players after he was hired at Wisconsin, he instructed one to remove a baseball cap, according to Pat Richter, the athletic director then. Ryan once published a book called “Passing and Catching the Basketball: A Lost Art.” The post moves he teaches are named for long-retired players like Jack Sikma, Bernard King and Kevin McHale. He keeps an old fruit basket in his office in homage to basketball’s inventor, James Naismith, who hung up peach baskets in a Y.M.C.A. in Springfield, Mass.
He also tells corny jokes, including one involving the basket.
“He had them throwing a soccer ball into the basket,” Ryan said, referring to Naismith, “and when they went in — it rarely went in — they had a ladder near each basket, and they’d go up and take it out.”
Ryan continued: “As the story goes, the women’s physical education teacher had the idea: ‘Why don’t you cut the bottom out?’ ”
Ryan paused for effect and added, “I always say women are credited with the fast break.”
After giving the punch line room to breathe, he said, “It always goes over well with the moms.” …
In 1973, Bill Cofield hired Ryan as an assistant at Dominican College of Racine, in Wisconsin. Ryan also coached the baseball team there because there was money for only one job. School finances led to his dismissal after one season; Ryan said he paid for baseball uniforms with his unemployment check. But in 1976, Ryan returned to the Badger State as an assistant at Wisconsin under Cofield.
Before the 1984 season, George Chryst, then Wisconsin-Platteville’s athletic director (and the father of the new Wisconsin football coach Paul Chryst), hired Ryan to take over the Pioneers, who were struggling in the nine-team Wisconsin Intercollegiate Athletic Conference. Fifteen years later, Ryan had eight W.I.A.C. titles and four national championships.
In 1999, Ryan took over Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Division I program for two seasons before assuming his current position.
“I think of him as a Wisconsin guy,” said Badgers guard Gasser, who is from Port Washington, outside Milwaukee.
Zach Bohannon, an Iowan who was a captain for Wisconsin last season, said: “He’s got that hard-nosed East Coast feel sometimes, as needed in competition, but he’s very, very down to earth.” …
Ryan spent a quarter-century coaching in the University of Wisconsin system before securing the top job. He and his wife, Kelly, who is from Chicago, found Platteville a nice place to raise their five children. But Ryan’s time in the coaching hinterland was not put to idle use. Rather, he cultivated his adopted state. Where others saw cows, he saw talent.
“There was a basketball camp here, but it wasn’t that many kids,” Ryan said. “Bill Cofield, the head coach, let me run the camps. You know what happens when you start running camps? You get to hire the coaches. I’m hiring a lot of young people. I’m hiring coaches throughout the state.”
He added, “Throughout the state, I could go to pretty much any school, tell you their mascot, and say, ‘Oh yeah, the head coach is Bob such-and-such.’ ”
The camps took off after his move to Platteville, when Ryan brought about 2,000 players a year to the southwest corner of the state.
“It was the biggest thing in Wisconsin, as far as camps you went to,” said Jeff Gard, who played for Ryan at Wisconsin-Platteville and is now the coach there. (Gard’s brother, Greg, is an assistant on Ryan’s staff.)
Foul: Jeff Gard, the current UW–Platteville coach, graduated from UWP, but didn’t play for Ryan or any other Pioneer basketball coach. He was a football player, which puts him in the same camp as former Purdue coach Gene Keady.
Ryan also had a philosophy and a system, which he passed on to players and coaches in his camps. Though he is frequently lauded for recruiting to his strengths, it may be more precise to say that Ryan’s presence in Wisconsin allowed him to shape the kinds of players he would want to recruit.
Much like Dean Smith, Ryan was ahead of his time in analyzing offense and defense on a per-possession basis. This outlook can shape offenses that, to critics, appear plodding, but a slow pace is not a requirement.
“If you value the basketball and you take care of your possessions, you can have a lot of possessions or a few possessions,” Ryan said.
At the camps, players learned Ryan’s swing offense, which relies on minimal dribbling, lots of passing and movement without the ball and requires players to be able to play all five positions, including the low post. High school coaches across the state — many of them alumni of Ryan’s camps, which he still runs — tend to use the swing, in the way that junior varsity runs the same schemes as varsity.
“It was all about his system — unlike traditional camps, where you just go out and play,” Gard said. “Everyone’s taken the nuances of Coach Ryan and put them into his system.”
Even now, Ryan invites coaches from around the state to his practices.
“Every time you come here, you run into people you’re butting heads with,” Jeff Knatz, Waunakee High’s junior varsity coach, said during a Wisconsin practice. Like many of the coaches in attendance, Knatz runs the swing. …
Practice is where Ryan’s philosophy is most completely manifested. One day early this season, warm-ups resembled vintage calisthenics, with the players, hopping in their gigantic sneakers, resembling ducks. Then came a variation on the famous Laker drill, which involved passing up and down the court in continuous figure eights, culminating in layups. Players assumed all the positions — inbounder, distributor, scorer.
“I try to get 7-footers and 5-9 guys to be complete players,” Ryan said. (Kaminsky, who has the moves and shot of a guard but a 7-foot frame, is the ideal of a Ryan player.)
Ryan spoke little during practice. When he saw something he did not like, he whistled with his lips — as loud as an actual whistle — and berated the offenders.
The players ran a quintessential swing play, a double-screen that left a man open to receive the ball at the top of the 3-point line, from which he either shot or tossed the ball to a big man in the low post.
This team may be the perfect incarnation of Bo Ball, which could best be defined by reference to several marble plaques Ryan has in his office, each listing a category in which his team has been statistical champion: points allowed per game, turnovers per game, assist-to-turnover ratio, free-throw percentage.
The Badgers have the fewest turnovers per game in Division I this season and the second-best assist-to-turnover ratio. They have committed the fewest fouls per game. Most important, according to the statistics site KenPom.com, they have the highest adjusted offensive efficiency in Division I.
I have been announcing UW–Platteville basketball this winter, and it’s been a blast. It has forced me to try to expand my description of how the swing offense works (to the extent that I understand it), because UW–Platteville and, it seems to me, nearly every other WIAC team runs the same offense, with the ball swinging (hence the name) from left corner to left wing to top-of-the-silo (or “top of the key,” the traditional term I don’t use anymore because the lane, when viewed from above, looks more like a silo than the initial keyhole design) to right wing to right corner, and back, with a pass to a post player inside or just outside the lane.
Ryan has been nominated (along with, ironically given how last season ended, Kentucky’s John Calipari) to the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame. What did Ryan think about that?
“It would be a thank you to all the people that I’ve either played for, played with,” he said. “And all the administrators, all the faculty at all the schools, and the players, obviously.”
“Some of the players have texted me or e-mailed me,” he said. “They can’t Facebook me or Tweeter me or whatever that is, because I don’t have it.
“I said thanks for making this possible to any of the players or coaches or people that have responded to that announcement.” …
“But, hey,” he said. “That would put a smile on the face of the 12th man that I had at Brookhaven Junior High School, Sun Valley, Platteville, Milwaukee, Madison, I’d be pretty happy.”
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The Beatles had quite a schedule today in 1963. They drove from Liverpool to London through the night to appear on the BBC’s “Parade of the Pops,” which was on live at noon.
After their two songs, they drove back north another three hours to get to their evening performance at the Swimming Baths in Doncaster.
The number one song today in 1965:
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 