Sadly, my life's orbit (or his) has taken Big D. out of my life and I miss him. We shared a lot of good times together, most revolving around, of course, watching or playing (city league softball) sports.
And, now, as I view the world through my 51 year old eyes, I see my sons, 9 and 5, and they are two of the biggest sports fans I know. This is the story of how that came to be.
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My mom left Jackson, Tennessee, for Memphis to attend nursing school in the 1957 or 1958. To my knowledge, she never played high school sports, not that there were a lot of options available for girls in those days. What she had going for her, however, was height - 5'8", sharp elbows and, I think, a love of competition.
I'm not exactly sure how or when it happened, but at some point Jim Stockdale, the coach of the women's basketball team at the University of Tennessee School of Nursing in Memphis (the original "Lady Vols") found her. Or maybe she found him. I'd love to know the real story if anyone who reads this blog knows it. At any rate, she joined the basketball team as a defensive player. As I understand it, in those days, women still played 6-on-6 basketball and my mom was one of the two players on the court who played only defense. Over the years, I've heard Coach Stockdale - who has forgotten more about basketball than I will ever learn - say my mom had 5 fouls and sharp elbows and she wasn't afraid to use either one of them.
I'm meandering a bit here, but bear with me, please. Many, many years later, my mom, Coach Stockdale and a few other of the other original "Lady Vols" alumni scheduled an annual reunion in Nashville to coincide with the Lady Vols - Lady 'Dores (Vanderbilt) basketball game. Often time, my mom hosted the entire group at our house for chili and drinks before or after the actual game. Through those dinners and by attending the games with my wife and later, children, I got to know a lot of my mom's old teammates and friends. To say it's a special group is an understatement. Several of them have reached out to Tracy or me the last year to share an anecdote about my mom or just to tell us how much she means to them. That, in turn, means the world to us, I promise you.
My mom married my dad, Howard Newman, who was a sports fan and, in fact, played high school football and a year of college football at Case Western Reserve. They me while he was in medical school in Memphis and eventually moved to California where I was born in 1966. My mom became a hug Lakers fan and used to religiously listen to Chick Hearn broadcast the game on the radio. Jerry West, Elgin Baylor, Gail Goodrich and Wilt Chamberlain became the heroes of my infancy through stories I heard about my parents being Lakers' fans. I think - but can't confirm - that my parents actually shared season tickets with three or four other couples and that I may have attended a game or two.
After my dad died in 1972, we moved back to middle Tennessee. I grew up a diehard Lakers fan at a time when no one, and I mean no one in Tennessee, cheered for them. It was part of my identity, particularly during the halcyon days of the Magic Johnson-Larry Bird Lakers vs. Celtics rivalry. Magic was my guy and I was a hug NBA fan long before it was in vogue for kids my age to follow the NBA. My mom encouraged my fandom and we cheered together for the Lakers from afar. We celebrated the Lakers' titles in the 1980's. We commiserated together - from afar - when Magic announced in 1991 that he was HIV+ and was retiring from basketball. We celebrated together - again - during the Shaq-Kobe championship years, as I was back in town after law school.
When I was a kid, my mom and I good-naturedly fought over who got dibs on the sports page every morning and evening (Nashville was a two newspaper town in those days with the Tennessean and the Nashville Banner). We both read Sports Illustrated every week and anticipated its arrival in the mailbox. My mom got me a subscription to The Sporting News when I was eight or nine and I absolutely reveled in reading it each week, particularly the columns by national sportswriters like Bill Conlin, Art Spander and Dick Young. I loved to peruse the baseball box scores.
My mom was huge - I mean huge - Vanderbilt men's basketball fan so, of course, I was, too. We had season tickets - first two, then later, four - for more than three decades, I think. I bet I went with her to close to 200 basketball games at Memorial Gym. Together, we lived and died with Vanderbilt basketball. She was so superstitious that she sat in the same place at Vanderbilt basketball games and ate the same food at the same time, game after game. I can talk more old school Vanderbilt men's basketball than anyone I know.
My mom loved the NCAA basketball tournament. In retrospect, it was the highlight of her sports viewing year. It was the same with me. Captains of her "All-American" team over the years included Steve Kerr, Steve Alford and Wally Szczerbiak. You know, the good looking basketball players. I started a NCAA tournament pool in my fraternity house at college before that was really a thing. We called my room "Tournament Control Center," a send up of ESPN's early, around the clock coverage of the tournament.
Truly, if there was a sports team or event - World Series, NBA Finals, Super Bowl - she chose a side and rooted for one team or the other. She simply loved sports. And she instilled that love in me, for better or worse. My mom indulged my love of sports as a child in that she allowed me to cover my bedroom wall with Sports Illustrated covers and other posters.
My mom encouraged me to play sports, which I did throughout my youth. I was (and am) an average athlete at best, one with good hand-eye coordination who was smart and knew the right play to make at the right time. I could play almost anything okay, but wasn't great at anything. J.P. is the same way, I think, and Joe probably will be, too. My mom attended every game I ever played in any sport as a kid. I vividly remember sitting down at the kitchen table after late baseball games on weeknights and having a snack and drink, going over the details of the game with her. Her support and interest in my accomplishments athletically - as modest as they were - was a constant. I inherited that from her and I want to honor her by being there for my boys when they play sports.
My mom took so much pride in Alice's accomplishments in sports, particularly in middle school and high school, as we all did. Alice was below average athletically but she worked her ass off to become a good basketball and volleyball player. Softball came more naturally to her and was her best sport. After I left for college, my mom and her friends traveled across middle Tennessee in the middle and late 1980's to watch Brentwood High School's girls' basketball, volleyball and softball teams play. And I know for a fact that she loved every minute of it.
When I graduated from law school and returned home to work in Nashville in the early 1990's and later opened my own law practice in Franklin, my mom's love of sports was stronger than ever. It was the hay day of the sports talk radio era in Nashville and my mom was a devoted George Plaster listener, literally for years and years. We talked on the telephone almost every day to discuss the sports topic of the moment on George Plaster's afternoon sports talk show. Later, after I was well established professionally in Franklin, my mom called me often in the afternoons to report on breaking sports news as reported by George Plaster on his show. She loved to scoop me on the latest sports news. It was a point of pride for her to tell me something about a sports story I didn't already know.
My mom loved the Titans, too, especially in the Eddie George-Steve McNair era, when they were contenders every year. On more than one occasion, Steve McNair visited her floor at Baptist Hospital and spent time with the patients, many of whom has been there for quite a while. At one point, she and a fellow nurse made a bulletin board on her floor highlighting the Titans and their accomplishments. It had pictures of the players, newspaper articles, etc. I remember that when Titans' players stopped by her floor, they always enjoyed looking at the bulletin board. Similarly, the walls in the playroom at her house were covered with sports memorabilia, a lot of it related to the Titans. In fact, she had framed the front page of the newspaper from the "Music City Miracle" and it hung proudly on the wall.
This just occurred to me, as I thought about my mom's Titans' bulletin board on old 3500 floor at Baptist Hospital, which is now closed (the floor, not the hospital). The only time she ever got in any trouble in 17+ years working there was when another nurse - on her own, not at my mom's request - clocked her in for the night shift when my mom was running a few minutes late, on the way there from a Vanderbilt men's basketball game. My mom had planned to mark herself late but the other nurse wanted to cover for my mom when it wasn't necessary. That story has always been a favorite of mine, because it says so much about my mom, her love of sports and how much her co-workers loved and respected her.
When Tracy's kids, Kaitlyn and Matthew, grew older and began to play recreational sports, my mom of course rarely missed a game. Soccer (in the early days), baseball and basketball, she was there for almost all of their games. She took great pride in their accomplishments and, I think, enjoyed the fact that they share her love of sports. She loved going to Matthew's baseball games and Kaitlyn's middle school and high school basketball games. Ironically, I realized for the first time that my mom had a real problem - probably dementia or Alzheimer's disease - when Tracy called me in a panic one night about 10:30 p.m. and told me my mom had gotten lost going home from one Matthews' baseball games Franklin. She ended up at a store on Nolensville Road, across from Southern Hills Hospital in Nashville, and I found her and drove her home. That was the night everything changed for her and for us.
One of the low points for me, if I'm being honest, occurred last fall when I picked my mom up from Maristone and took her to one of Kaitlyn's basketball games at Overton High School in Nashville. She got so confused on the way home and started crying when I arrived back at Maristone to drop her off after the game, because she wanted to go home to her house. It was one of the worst nights of my life and, possibly, the last time I drove my mom anywhere.
My mom attended many of J.P.'s early soccer, baseball and basketball games, although with three grandkids playing sports by then, she had to divide her time between them. She saw many of J.P.'s games, though, and a few of Joe's. By the time Joe started playing baseball and soccer, it was tough for my mom to get around well enough to get to his games. On at least a couple of occasions, my friends at the West Nashville Sports League were kind enough to help her into the 4-wheeler and drive her down to the baseball field from the parking lot to watch J.P. or Joe play baseball.
Much to my chagrin, both of my boys are Vanderbilt fans, in large part because of my mom's love for Vanderbilt athletics and the fact that she bought them Vanderbilt gear almost from the day they were born. T-shirts, sweatshirts, shorts, posters, etc. When she still had her men's basketball season tickets, J.P. and I went to a handful of Vanderbilt games and sat in her seats. That just intensified his love for all things black and gold. Joe loved Vanderbilt because J.P. did and, probably because I didn't. That just the way it works.
Which is probably as good of a segue as any to my boys and their love of sports. They are crazy - and I mean crazy - about sports. They would watch or play sports 24 hours a day if Jude and I would let them. They love the Predators, Titans, Dodgers, Lakers (J.P.), Warriors (Joe), Braves (Joe), Cubs (Joe) and Seahawks. Many, many nights, they beg for us to have a "sports picnic" for dinner, which means we eat dinner in the den and watch sports on television. J.P. reads about sports constantly, whether it's his favorite magazine - Sports Illustrated for Kids - or a library book about a sports figure. The boys play football or hockey upstairs it he playroom constantly. Other times, they quietly look through their hockey/football/basketball/baseball cards and sort them in notebooks, just like I did at their age.
For more than 20 years, Jude and I have been part of the Foodbrothers - a weekly college and pro football pool started by Jeff Williams (aka "El Jefe"), one of Jude's best friends from her days at Tulane University. My mom was in the pool for several years. I even took her to Las Vegas for the annual Foodbrothers' Summit on fall. She always was great at picking winners, against the spread, in football. When I asked her how she did so well, all she would say is that "she consulted her sources."
It breaks my heart, now, to look back at the Foodbrothers' historical records on the website and see that as recently as 2012, she finished in third place for the season. Amazing. By 2014, which is when we know now that her problems began to become apparent, she stopped making her picks each week, likely because she had a hard time operating her computer. As I recall, now, she started telling me that she felt it was too much pressure to have to make football picks every week. I should have known then that something was going on with her, but I probably didn't want to believe it. Prior to that year, she and I would talk on the telephone throughout the weekend and compare our picks or tease one another about who was doing better that week. At one point, my sister (Tracy), my cousin (David), my mom and Jude were all in Foodbrothers together, picking games against each other every week in the fall.
Last spring, J.P. joined the Foodbrothers' NCAA tournament basketball pool. And won the entire pool, straight up, at the age 8. I've won the basketball pool exactly once in 20+ years. Jude has never won it. More importantly - to J.P., anyway - he won $500, which we'll probably hold on to for him until college. He was so proud of himself. Last fall, I won the Foodbrothers' football pool, so J.P. and I held the football and basketball titles at the same time, keeping it all in the family.
Which brings us to this fall. J.P., at 9, became the youngest ever Foodbrother when he joined the weekly football pool. And here's where it gets crazy, or maybe not so much, given who his grandmother is. He was the weekly winner the first two weeks of the season (winning $100) and he's been in first place for the entire season so far, leading wire to wire. That's out of 41 people, all adults, most of whom have been in the Foodbrothers and picking games for a long time. In second place, 17 points behind him, is his old man. The competition is fierce in our house, for sure. Jude and I have joked that the the "P" in J.P. stands for "point spread," as in "Johnny Pointspread." It's crazy and it's fun and if there's one thing I do know, my mom would absolutely love it.
Sports, and the love of sports, is the tie that binds our family together. That much is clear to me. And is started with my mom, a single parent likely searching for a way to bond with her oldest child, a boy who found himself without a father at age 5. Was it a deliberate decision on her part? I'll suppose I'll never know. But what I do know is that sports was a currency in which my mom and I traded and a language that we shared. And now I've passed a love of sports along to my sons and that love brings us closer together.
It all started with my mom, the biggest sports fan I've ever known.
When I was a kid, my mom and I good-naturedly fought over who got dibs on the sports page every morning and evening (Nashville was a two newspaper town in those days with the Tennessean and the Nashville Banner). We both read Sports Illustrated every week and anticipated its arrival in the mailbox. My mom got me a subscription to The Sporting News when I was eight or nine and I absolutely reveled in reading it each week, particularly the columns by national sportswriters like Bill Conlin, Art Spander and Dick Young. I loved to peruse the baseball box scores.
My mom was huge - I mean huge - Vanderbilt men's basketball fan so, of course, I was, too. We had season tickets - first two, then later, four - for more than three decades, I think. I bet I went with her to close to 200 basketball games at Memorial Gym. Together, we lived and died with Vanderbilt basketball. She was so superstitious that she sat in the same place at Vanderbilt basketball games and ate the same food at the same time, game after game. I can talk more old school Vanderbilt men's basketball than anyone I know.
My mom loved the NCAA basketball tournament. In retrospect, it was the highlight of her sports viewing year. It was the same with me. Captains of her "All-American" team over the years included Steve Kerr, Steve Alford and Wally Szczerbiak. You know, the good looking basketball players. I started a NCAA tournament pool in my fraternity house at college before that was really a thing. We called my room "Tournament Control Center," a send up of ESPN's early, around the clock coverage of the tournament.
Truly, if there was a sports team or event - World Series, NBA Finals, Super Bowl - she chose a side and rooted for one team or the other. She simply loved sports. And she instilled that love in me, for better or worse. My mom indulged my love of sports as a child in that she allowed me to cover my bedroom wall with Sports Illustrated covers and other posters.
My mom encouraged me to play sports, which I did throughout my youth. I was (and am) an average athlete at best, one with good hand-eye coordination who was smart and knew the right play to make at the right time. I could play almost anything okay, but wasn't great at anything. J.P. is the same way, I think, and Joe probably will be, too. My mom attended every game I ever played in any sport as a kid. I vividly remember sitting down at the kitchen table after late baseball games on weeknights and having a snack and drink, going over the details of the game with her. Her support and interest in my accomplishments athletically - as modest as they were - was a constant. I inherited that from her and I want to honor her by being there for my boys when they play sports.
My mom took so much pride in Alice's accomplishments in sports, particularly in middle school and high school, as we all did. Alice was below average athletically but she worked her ass off to become a good basketball and volleyball player. Softball came more naturally to her and was her best sport. After I left for college, my mom and her friends traveled across middle Tennessee in the middle and late 1980's to watch Brentwood High School's girls' basketball, volleyball and softball teams play. And I know for a fact that she loved every minute of it.
When I graduated from law school and returned home to work in Nashville in the early 1990's and later opened my own law practice in Franklin, my mom's love of sports was stronger than ever. It was the hay day of the sports talk radio era in Nashville and my mom was a devoted George Plaster listener, literally for years and years. We talked on the telephone almost every day to discuss the sports topic of the moment on George Plaster's afternoon sports talk show. Later, after I was well established professionally in Franklin, my mom called me often in the afternoons to report on breaking sports news as reported by George Plaster on his show. She loved to scoop me on the latest sports news. It was a point of pride for her to tell me something about a sports story I didn't already know.
My mom loved the Titans, too, especially in the Eddie George-Steve McNair era, when they were contenders every year. On more than one occasion, Steve McNair visited her floor at Baptist Hospital and spent time with the patients, many of whom has been there for quite a while. At one point, she and a fellow nurse made a bulletin board on her floor highlighting the Titans and their accomplishments. It had pictures of the players, newspaper articles, etc. I remember that when Titans' players stopped by her floor, they always enjoyed looking at the bulletin board. Similarly, the walls in the playroom at her house were covered with sports memorabilia, a lot of it related to the Titans. In fact, she had framed the front page of the newspaper from the "Music City Miracle" and it hung proudly on the wall.
This just occurred to me, as I thought about my mom's Titans' bulletin board on old 3500 floor at Baptist Hospital, which is now closed (the floor, not the hospital). The only time she ever got in any trouble in 17+ years working there was when another nurse - on her own, not at my mom's request - clocked her in for the night shift when my mom was running a few minutes late, on the way there from a Vanderbilt men's basketball game. My mom had planned to mark herself late but the other nurse wanted to cover for my mom when it wasn't necessary. That story has always been a favorite of mine, because it says so much about my mom, her love of sports and how much her co-workers loved and respected her.
When Tracy's kids, Kaitlyn and Matthew, grew older and began to play recreational sports, my mom of course rarely missed a game. Soccer (in the early days), baseball and basketball, she was there for almost all of their games. She took great pride in their accomplishments and, I think, enjoyed the fact that they share her love of sports. She loved going to Matthew's baseball games and Kaitlyn's middle school and high school basketball games. Ironically, I realized for the first time that my mom had a real problem - probably dementia or Alzheimer's disease - when Tracy called me in a panic one night about 10:30 p.m. and told me my mom had gotten lost going home from one Matthews' baseball games Franklin. She ended up at a store on Nolensville Road, across from Southern Hills Hospital in Nashville, and I found her and drove her home. That was the night everything changed for her and for us.
One of the low points for me, if I'm being honest, occurred last fall when I picked my mom up from Maristone and took her to one of Kaitlyn's basketball games at Overton High School in Nashville. She got so confused on the way home and started crying when I arrived back at Maristone to drop her off after the game, because she wanted to go home to her house. It was one of the worst nights of my life and, possibly, the last time I drove my mom anywhere.
My mom attended many of J.P.'s early soccer, baseball and basketball games, although with three grandkids playing sports by then, she had to divide her time between them. She saw many of J.P.'s games, though, and a few of Joe's. By the time Joe started playing baseball and soccer, it was tough for my mom to get around well enough to get to his games. On at least a couple of occasions, my friends at the West Nashville Sports League were kind enough to help her into the 4-wheeler and drive her down to the baseball field from the parking lot to watch J.P. or Joe play baseball.
Much to my chagrin, both of my boys are Vanderbilt fans, in large part because of my mom's love for Vanderbilt athletics and the fact that she bought them Vanderbilt gear almost from the day they were born. T-shirts, sweatshirts, shorts, posters, etc. When she still had her men's basketball season tickets, J.P. and I went to a handful of Vanderbilt games and sat in her seats. That just intensified his love for all things black and gold. Joe loved Vanderbilt because J.P. did and, probably because I didn't. That just the way it works.
Which is probably as good of a segue as any to my boys and their love of sports. They are crazy - and I mean crazy - about sports. They would watch or play sports 24 hours a day if Jude and I would let them. They love the Predators, Titans, Dodgers, Lakers (J.P.), Warriors (Joe), Braves (Joe), Cubs (Joe) and Seahawks. Many, many nights, they beg for us to have a "sports picnic" for dinner, which means we eat dinner in the den and watch sports on television. J.P. reads about sports constantly, whether it's his favorite magazine - Sports Illustrated for Kids - or a library book about a sports figure. The boys play football or hockey upstairs it he playroom constantly. Other times, they quietly look through their hockey/football/basketball/baseball cards and sort them in notebooks, just like I did at their age.
For more than 20 years, Jude and I have been part of the Foodbrothers - a weekly college and pro football pool started by Jeff Williams (aka "El Jefe"), one of Jude's best friends from her days at Tulane University. My mom was in the pool for several years. I even took her to Las Vegas for the annual Foodbrothers' Summit on fall. She always was great at picking winners, against the spread, in football. When I asked her how she did so well, all she would say is that "she consulted her sources."
It breaks my heart, now, to look back at the Foodbrothers' historical records on the website and see that as recently as 2012, she finished in third place for the season. Amazing. By 2014, which is when we know now that her problems began to become apparent, she stopped making her picks each week, likely because she had a hard time operating her computer. As I recall, now, she started telling me that she felt it was too much pressure to have to make football picks every week. I should have known then that something was going on with her, but I probably didn't want to believe it. Prior to that year, she and I would talk on the telephone throughout the weekend and compare our picks or tease one another about who was doing better that week. At one point, my sister (Tracy), my cousin (David), my mom and Jude were all in Foodbrothers together, picking games against each other every week in the fall.
Last spring, J.P. joined the Foodbrothers' NCAA tournament basketball pool. And won the entire pool, straight up, at the age 8. I've won the basketball pool exactly once in 20+ years. Jude has never won it. More importantly - to J.P., anyway - he won $500, which we'll probably hold on to for him until college. He was so proud of himself. Last fall, I won the Foodbrothers' football pool, so J.P. and I held the football and basketball titles at the same time, keeping it all in the family.
Which brings us to this fall. J.P., at 9, became the youngest ever Foodbrother when he joined the weekly football pool. And here's where it gets crazy, or maybe not so much, given who his grandmother is. He was the weekly winner the first two weeks of the season (winning $100) and he's been in first place for the entire season so far, leading wire to wire. That's out of 41 people, all adults, most of whom have been in the Foodbrothers and picking games for a long time. In second place, 17 points behind him, is his old man. The competition is fierce in our house, for sure. Jude and I have joked that the the "P" in J.P. stands for "point spread," as in "Johnny Pointspread." It's crazy and it's fun and if there's one thing I do know, my mom would absolutely love it.
Sports, and the love of sports, is the tie that binds our family together. That much is clear to me. And is started with my mom, a single parent likely searching for a way to bond with her oldest child, a boy who found himself without a father at age 5. Was it a deliberate decision on her part? I'll suppose I'll never know. But what I do know is that sports was a currency in which my mom and I traded and a language that we shared. And now I've passed a love of sports along to my sons and that love brings us closer together.
It all started with my mom, the biggest sports fan I've ever known.
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