07:22
The nectar glow of sunrise infuses the horizon as the Jeep moves along the track, a plume of dust in its wake. Amani whistles in the driver’s seat. He has just run a new personal best. With four weeks left til Chicago it is exactly where he wants to be, tossing out records, making new ones.
Read MoreThe alumni arrived on Friday. They were everywhere at once, swarming the quad, pointing at the old-time buildings and bike paths like, would you look at that! In the two hours it took for football practice to finish (a packed schedule with the hitting drills, sled drives, and no-contact scrimmage), our campus was transformed into a refugee zone. Where my friends had walked before, now strangers. T
Read More"Hey, hero, you trying out for football?" Frank's father, Joe Merino, calls out from the TV room.
Joe must be kidding. Frank is only 12. He's also heavy, fat, what adults call a Husky. Mighty big. No wonder. Cooking's his favorite hobby. In fact, he's now busy frying burgers, as he usually does when Mom and Dad come back from weekly shopping at the A & P.
Read MoreMy dad was a great man. Let’s start with that. But this story is about my Uncle Ted. I had some of his DNA, sure, but the gene we shared completely was baseball.
My father did not like the game. There was no baseball in Krakow.
Read MoreWearing an unbound, steely-eyed, self-possessed look as the blood red sun starts to set before him beneath the last stretch of late July Ohio cornfields in the distance—after all, lest we ever forget, this is America, “Land of the Free, Home of the Brave”—Billy Ventura stands poised in his helmet, elbow and knee pads, chin up, chest out, shoulders thrown back, his right foot stamped down upon the tail of his skateboard, its wheels hanging over the vertical lip of his ten foot halfpipe as if in breathless anticipation.
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