Enotes

  It's HERE and ready to ship in time for Christmas! Basketball Bones, the little basketball game that could, the one invented in my basement in the summer of 2008, is now available IN PRINT with dice, cards, charts, the whole shot! Check it out at the PT Games online store! Thanks again to  Tim Plum  for helping me realize this dream!! Complete game with 4 sample teams just $32, postage paid. 2011-12 season card set (over 500 players rated) just $55 . Great Christmas gift! Ages 12 and up! More on the game: The basketball game is tied with less than 30 seconds to play. Just about everyone in the building expects the superstar scorer from the visiting team to get the ball in his hands to take the potential game-winning shot.  Everyone is standing—fans and players alike. Chants of “DEE-FENSE…DEE-FENSE” rock the arena. The clock ticks down. But the superstar doesn’t get the basketball. His teammates are unable to get it to him, thanks to great bal...

Raise your hand if you'd heard of Fennville, Michigan prior to last weekend. That's what I thought. We didn't know Wes Leonard, certainly, but we didn't even hear about his hometown, either. Now Fennville is stamped onto our brains, and Wes Leonard is in our hearts. We didn't know Wes Leonard personally, but we know who he is. He's that great kid you'd like your daughter to marry. He's the athlete who turns the fans on and pleases his coaches. He's that good-looking boy who is morphing into a man and doing so with little drama or maintenance. You know him. I know him. Perhaps you're even lucky enough to know him personally, or, bonus, be his dad or uncle or brother or friend. You didn't have to know Wes Leonard personally to know who he was, or how tragic his story is. Leonard is the 16-year old boy who collapsed and died moments after hitting the game-winning layup for Fennville High School, giving his team a perfect 20-0 record. Fennville i...

Before Don Meredith's cowboy boots stepped into them, the broadcast booths in NFL cities were the equivalent of libraries. You were to be courteous, staid, and peer at the game over your eyeglasses. Then along came former NFL quarterback Meredith, and before long, sometimes what went on inside the booth sounded a lot more fun than what was happening on the field. Dandy Don is gone. He died Monday, at age 72 from complications brought on by a brain hemorrhage. Turn out the lights, for the party is truly over now. Dandy Don is what Howard Cosell called him when Meredith, Cosell and Frank Gifford teamed to form what is STILL the best "Monday Night Football" broadcast team in the franchise's 41-year history. Meredith was just two years ago a player when he joined the team in 1970, the show's first season. He was the battered and bruised leader of the Dallas Cowboys, the first QB to lead the franchise to a championship game. But Meredith's fun take on life and his ...

I'm not a fan of football played under the lights, as a rule. And it has nothing to do with the Lions being shunned by "Monday Night Football" every year. I know it's done for the almighty TV dollar, but night college football games especially rankle me---especially those played on days other than Saturday. College football games have been popping up all over the dial on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays. That's not college football---that's just competitive "ER". But there is some night football that tickles my fancy. As the parent of a marching band member, one of the duties is to attend the home football games on Friday nights. There are far more daunting tasks. High school football in prime time is OK by me because that's tradition. Once the stadiums around the country began installing lights in earnest in the 1960s, it was only natural to keep the high school gridders to a predominantly Friday schedule, and leave Saturday for college and Sunda...

With a coach like Gerard Kemkers, who needs competition? By now you may have heard of poor speedskater Sven Kramer of Holland, whose gold medal was torpedoed by his own coach, Kemkers. Kemkers, who admitted later that he had been momentarily distracted, nonetheless barked out an order to his skater late in his 10K meter race to change lanes, a gaffe that caused an illegal move by Kramer and thus disqualifying the young man. Kemkers, distraught, tried to comfort Kramer immediately after the race but the skater angrily brushed him off, making wild arm gestures and slamming his glasses to the ice. Kemkers is lucky that Kramer didn't blend him into Hollandaise sauce. "I was on my way to making the right decision," Kramer said later. "Right before the corner, I changed my decision. I changed my decision on the advice of my [coach]." Coach Kemkers (left) tries to console the destroyed speedskater Kramer Kemkers was distraught afterward. "My world collapsed,"...