It is probably lucky public school teachers didn’t have guns in the 1950’s. They would have shot some of us.

November 6, 2019 I posted an article on gambling and tennis (see below). Less than 3 years later check what percentage of tennis channel advertising is gambling money.

One related item popped up in last week’s news. A tennis chair umpire was charged with illegal manipulating of the scoring device. Go figure!

Better get a toe hold on this.

***************

In 2017 my friend Chuck Kriese, former Clemson tennis coach, asked me to be a panelist at a meeting in Bradenton FL. to deal with the international issue. (I thought).   Coach Kriese has long been an ally on the international issue. There were ten people on the “panel” and I was asked to speak first (see notes). I did so attempting to gain support for tennis scholarships for Americans.

The second speaker startled me and others with his topic. Stripped down, it proposed to bring smaller satellite tournaments for college tennis in America. One panel member questioned where was the financing of these local tournaments coming from? Response: “we already have five million dollars in reserve.” Silence! Who is that sponsor was the question from the floor. I do not remember the name but another panelist replied “that is a gambling outfit in Europe isn’t it?” Yes was the answer. We all seemed a little stunned. And did not bring up the subject through the next several presentations.

As I exited the meeting Coach Kriese stopped me and asked “what do you think?” I was very frank with my friend –“Chuck this is an attempt to bring big time gambling to American College Tennis.” I was then no longer involved with this effort.

Concern for the game,  I reported this development to all involved in American tennis that I thought should be aware. Hardly anyone was aware of such a movement and I worried about overreacting and put my concern aside.

Still it nagged at me. How about the pro who revealed this scenario in the meeting: ”yes, one of my fifteen year old players asked me what to do about that man.”  Why?

“He stopped me on the way to the dressing room and offered me $1500.00 to lose the second set”.

One statistic said the volume of betting on tennis was second only to soccer in Europe.

The light comes on! With the ability to electronically report the current score of a tennis match worldwide was now technologically available to anyone as the official punched in the score. Anybody, tennis knowledgeable or not could place a bet on anything in the game. Second serve a double fault? Total number of games played per match?

Light #2. Gamblers get a 4% vigorish on any bet. The more bets the more 4% flows to management.

Voila. Where can you find the most number of tennis matches played in the world? Europe satellites? Nope. College tennis in America, no where close. Men & women, all divisions. How about Old Dominion’s number four girl against number four from William & Mary?

Will NC’s number two guy win the next point? 4% !

Today’s paper features an article entitled “New Series Seeks A Improved Pathway To Pro’s for US Tennis”.

Did I attend the beginnings of this current attempt? Is this really a “pathway to gambling”?

ORACLE is now the ITA (College Tennis) leading sponsor. All gamblers need now is that score recorder in a college referee’s hands. Worth watching this all develop?

A SENSE OF THE MYSTERIOUS by Alan Lightman

Dr. Jo Watts Williams, beloved matriarch of Elon University,  told me “…children  need time to go looking for lizards.” 

Perhaps author Lightman was making similar points in the concluding parts of his book.  Addressing the modern rapid pace of change  brought on by technology,  he admonishes thusly”:  

Certainly, few people could deny that the new technologies of the “Wired World” have improved life in many ways. Some of the less agreeable symptoms and features of the “Wired World” seem to be:

1. An obsession with speed and an accompanying impatience for all that does not move faster and faster. *

2. A sense of overload with information and other stimulation. Our computers are not only foster but they store more and more data.*

3. A mounting of obsession with consumption and material wealth.*

4. Accommodation to the virtual world. The artificial world of the television screen, the computer monitor, and the cell phone has become so familiar that we often substitute it for real experience.*

5. Loss of silence. We have grown accustomed to a background of machine noise wherever we are. *

6. Loss of privacy. With many of the new communication technologies, we are, in effect, plugged in and connected to the outer world 24 hours a day.*  

 In recent decades, however, this trend has accelerated to a disturbing degree. If we have indeed lost in some measure the quality of slowness, have lost a digestible rate of information, immediate experience with the real world, science, and privacy, what exactly have we lost?

I believe that I have lost something of my inner self. By inner self I mean that part of  me that imagines, that dreams, that explores, that is constantly questioning who I am and what is important to me. My inner self is my true freedom. 

“…the truly important spaces of one’s being cannot be measured in terms of square miles or cubic centimeters. Private space is not a physical space. It is a space of the mind.”

*Substantial additional support comment omitted.

My parents bought their first house in 1961. $13,000. They both lived to 93 years, the last seven in a nursing home. My one sister and I split only the sale of said house.

My first job included basketball coaching and that was when schools first integrated in our area. Our school didn’t have football or women’s varsity sports. Like most similar schools the first black kids we had were athletes, men’s basketball players. Most were the first in their eastern north carolina families to go to college.

The wtiting below comes from WHY TEACH AND COACH?:

********************

You never know who you’re influencing when you coach. The same was
true for teaching in college. Formal classroom or just talking to kids.
A basketball player named Damien Carter appeared in my doorway one
day at Elon. He said he rode up and down I-85 often and had planned to
stop by many times.
He was in his 40s, had been a pretty solid player at Atlantic Christian
College, having transferred from UNC-Wilmington. At Wilmington he
hadn’t played as much as he wanted. The same was true at ACC later on,
and he found his chances of pro ball weren’t going to materialize. He was
about to quit college though his grades were good.
I don’t remember the specific conversation with Damien, but it was one
of fifty I’d had with basketball players.
It went like this:
Are you the first from your family to go to college? Often the answer was
yes. You’re not going to make $100,000 playing pro ball, you understand?
You can get your degree and get a good job. People are looking for athletic
people with degrees.
Your job is to elevate your family and its expectations one generation.
Put your money in compound interest, and expect your children to go
to college.
I agreed with Damien that was the gist of what I advised the “first kids.”
Damien smiled and added, “Coach, my two daughters have college
degrees, and I’ve got a million bucks in the bank!” Compound interest.

***************

What I inherited from parents wasn’t material. Nor did I select a high paying job. We all valued education. Both of our son’s have done well. They have advanced our family a generation. And at age 82, and along with my wife, we may be able to help others. Even Warren Buffett limited his kids, reasoning it made it dangerous to give them too much.

I do feel good about the gifts a teacher /coach can give. Later in retirement I stumbled on “hobby writing” . Recently I have all the good advice I have free online. i have tried to “leave it all on the field (or court)”

Repeating a comment from a personal article (PORTALS POTHOLES-Feb 2022)”

“For years football coaches have often recruited unhappy players from other teams. Or those who can legally transfer and play at a different school. The new NCAA “Portals Rule ” has jetstreamed this strategy. One of the sad side effects of “Portals ” is that high school seniors are overlooked for older and seasoned upperclass international college kids.

My guess is that this avenue will be adopted to American college tennis. And it will undoubtedly involve international players who can now easily move to “greener pastures”. American high school aspirants will be moved down the prospects list, or be dismissed even quicker”.

August 1, 2022

Sadly this appears spot on so far. One conversation I just had with a current NCAA Division 1 tennis coach began with his frustration with current recruiting over the reality that everyone knew everything about those in “the portal”.

Since 1970 the number of international college tennis players has grown steadily. Rosters of teams now often are 100% international.

“How about recruiting American high school seniors?” I asked.

Coach: “Not even on the radar.”

Where have you gone , Mrs. Robinson ?”

I was assigned to teach  a college course beginning in the fall of 1965: THE PREVENTION OF INJURIES TO ATHLETES.  And once a semester through 1985.   I served as a trainer to my own teams and many others for forty years,  learning as I went.  

There were milestones in my self education.  My core discovery was Dr. Don O’Donoghue and his book on the same topic.  It for decades was the Bible  of Sports Medicine.   Head, heat and heart issues (big problems).  The Louisiana heel  lock for ankles,  CPR, spearing and football.

I began before under wrap.  Shaved their legs above the knee to practice taping knees.  Had the class ugly leg contest for shaved  male legs.  No telling how many ankles I taped.  Discovered Elastoplast.   Still carry band aids in my wallet, but mostly for grandchildren now.

When I spied ON ANY GIVEN MONDAY by Dr.  James Andrews I compared some content with O’Donoghue.   One of the best discoveries of an old teacher is the confirmation that what you taught holds up over time.  Much of this “new” book has origins from the last century.

This new book should be read in total.  I have “cherry picked” some comments and summarized  some information I found interesting:  

*50 % of all sports are related to overuse.  60% are preventable by common sense”.   

*Youth sports injuries cost  2.5 to 3 billion dollars annually.”

*Odds of a football player making a pro roster are 6,000 to 1.”

*27%  of all insurance monies for sports injuries are for cheerleading.  While 57% goes for football, there are ten times as many football players.”

*Serious injuries?  Knees-30%, Ankles-12.3 %, Shoulders-10.9 %.”

*Preparation is 90% of execution.”

• “Every team should have a trainer.”

• There is a fine line between beneficial training and that that is ultimately detrimental.”

*MYTH:  No pain no gain.”  Young ones don’t need to hurt big time.

*During the 26 years between1982 and2008, there have been 72 catastrophic injuries reported in cheerleading, with two deaths. Gymnastics, which incorporates many of the same tumbling passes and boasts similar numbers of participants , had a total number of nine catastrophic injuries during the same period.  That is a pretty drastic difference.  Clearly, something needs to be done to protect cheerleaders from increasingly common and increasingly serious injuries.  Football, too, deserves a critical examination.  In 2007 there were 920,000 players under the age of eighteen treated in emergency rooms for injuries.”

• Dr. Andrews cites parents looking for an agent for  a tennis playing child, age 6.

A recent friend and I discovered our commonality of being single male siblings who moved to a new small North Carolina town.  Both of us “older”, he followed my personal story with his:    Yeah —I was a teenager when we  moved.  We went to church the first Sunday.  After Sunday School a guy bumped and challenged me:  Meet me behind the church after the preaching  and we’ll find out how tough you are!

I said “Why don’t we meet out front and let everybody see”!  Backed the fight off.

It seems urgent  that some kind of wisdom must emerge.Shooting children ?  Bombing families?  Hanging the vice president ? No vaccine?

Where is “the man (woman) on horseback?”

Will the truth be told on jan. 6th, 2022,  this week.  

Will someone find a way to limit gun loopholes?

Are there now courageous  politicians wiling to “step-up”?

Have you looked at the seeds at The French Open (2022, Men’s Singles)?

Nadal #5 in Paris?

While I doubt if there is a player in the 2022 draw as good on clay as Nadal at his best, I think this total group has more really fine players than any draw ever.

Ought to be a shootout!

Note: These comments are a continuation of the HARARI blog

1. Book One

SOUTH TO AMERICA:  A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation. Imani Perry

Author Perry subdivides the South, southern state histories, cities and towns, and geographical areas (Appalachia, the Low Country), citing unique and common behaviors.

“Nevertheless, in this country’s history, Black and White have never been mere adjectives, and Indigenous, a global term, is specific in this nation. These are identity categories that were made by law, custom, policies, protest, economic relations, and perhaps most potently, culture. Politeness, grammar rules, and political ;pieties aside, this strikes me as a simple truth that ought to be acknowledged. I didn’t make the rules. I am trying to tell them to you.”

*******

“Race is at the heart of the South, and at the heart of the nation. Like the conquest of Indigenous people, the creation of racial slavery in the colonies was a gateway to habits and dispositions that ultimately became the commonplace ways of doing things in this country. They came to a head at the dawn of the Civil War, only to settle back into the old routines for a hundred years before reaching a fever pitch again before receding.”

*****

Remember, the Deep South was made at the crossroads between the lust for cotton and the theft of Indigenous land. It was a tandem movement.”

*****

“To be beautiful, it must be truthful. And the truth is often ugly. But it’s funny, too. And strange. Also morbid. This is a collection, but it is also an excision, a pruning like we might do to z plant in order to extend its life Most of all, please remember, while this book is not a history, it is  true story.”

*****

“He (H.L. Mencken)  could not reconcile the creed of the slaveholder with the word of God.”

“North Carolina is in the Bible belt, that region that reaches from the Southeast into the Midwest with a shared Protestant conviction.  Still, Mencken’s warnings encouraged Carolinians to grow beyond evangelical moral certainty and into the curiosity and deliberation of rationalism He wrote:

Helping to get rid of this incubus is the first task of every enlightened Southerner today. It stands in the way of every free functioning of the mind, and is an impediment to all genuine progress, on whatever plane. I’ll begin to believe in the prophets of Regionalism when I hear that they have ceased to fever themselves over the sins of New York, and applied themselves courageously to clearing the ground in their own Region. Let them begin at home.”

*****

“…THE CHANGING SAME.”

“WICKED SILENCE”

“…THE WIND IS BLOWING BUT THE TREES AIN’T MOVING!”

THE MARROW OF TRADITION”

*****

“We have never stopped living the complications  caused by oil complications.”

*****

Julius Shakespeare Carr ( Carboro named for him) I whipped her till her skirt hung in threads.

*****

Wilmington 1988—250 blacks drowned.  Ben Chavis.  Duke lacrosse—Chrystal Gail Davis.

Greensboro massacre, Woolworth sit in.

*****

‘The God of Masters”

“The God of Slaves”

******************************

2. Second Book

AMERICAN MADE (What happens to people when work disappears)  by Farah Stockman  

TP —-labor vs management

I lived in a  mill town.  And a tobacco state.  And a textile area.

“…pussy grabs back.” ((Trump)

“eat steak” or kissing the boss’ ass.

Trump cut corporate taxes from 35% to 21%.  Edged up tax on the middle class,   

CORPORATE REVENUES DROP 40%.  National deficit pushed to “dangerous levels”.