Lawnmower Man

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Have you ever had your automobile start sounding like a lawnmower instead?

             I have.

This was the make/model of my first set of wheels. It was
charcoal grey and had royal blue trim. Treated me well.

The first car I ever owned was a charcoal grey 1991 Chevy Cavalier. I paid seven grand for it while I was still in the Navy. Wasn’t too bad of a thing, since I paid off the loan while I was on deployment in 92-93 and usually didn’t have a place to spend money anyway. I had it shipped off the islands and drove it around while I was in college and for my first few years afterward.

            This was the car that got me through college at Texas Tech in the mid-late 90s and it was the car that I drove to O’Banion Field one spring day in 1997 or so. I was there to cover a high school playoff baseball game, I think between Amarillo Tascosa and maybe Midland High School. There used to be a railroad track between the highway and the parking lot and you had to gun the engine a bit to get up the embankment and over it.

O'Banion Field, where Coronado High School plays its
 home baseball games. 

            I managed to give it too much gas and I went up and over too quickly, and the undercarriage of my car slammed down against the railroad track and made it sound like a something you’d push across your front lawn instead of a four-door sedan. My tailpipe made a grating noise as it started dragging along the ground.

            This isn’t something you want to have happen as you get ready to broadcast a game. Concentrating is difficult enough, and here I am about to lay out $800 to get my tailpipe reattached. Swell.

            They later made that area idiot proof and leveled that embankment. There’s a frontage road there nowadays as you come off the Brownfield Highway. Even the railroad tracks are gone. Thanks guys.

           

           

House of Cards

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The First Lady and I have been big House of Cards fans for its entire run. There have been times when it was unpleasant, especially when there was lots of random killing of people and seeming disregard for human life. I never handle that well, even though it’s fiction.

            On the other side of that, I did like how the next thing built upon the last, and so on. Such as when Frank Underwood killed Zoe Barnes which aroused suspicion for a while and kept on through the series. Even the death of Peter Russo, while shocking, was another maneuver by a man whose thirst for power was eclipsed by nothing. Hence the title ‘House of Cards.’    

            The writing was also good and the actors delivered their lines impeccably. So we were excited for the sixth and final season of HoC, even though Kevin Spacey’s poor choices meant the dynamic would be vastly different.

            Sadly, we feel the final season did not deliver. Robin Wright was fantastic as Claire Underwood. It just felt like late in episode 5 (of eight), they realized they were going to run out of time so they just killed everybody off. Nothing strikes me as more of a cop out than offing people you don’t need in a seemingly unnecessary fashion.

            Let’s start with Secretary of State Catherine Durant. She feared for her life and got tipped off, so she ran to another country to plot her next move. There was a lot of buildup for this maneuver and they went to a lot of trouble to have her funeral and what not, even showing her boiling her phone at the end of episode 4. I had hope there would be something to this storyline down the stretch. I thought Durant, as a seasoned and dedicated public servant, could make Claire’s life difficult. But we get a few throwaway lines and a very short cutaway where we see her being shot and killed. That’s it. Nothing more.

          Patricia Clarkson’s character, who I never really understood, was Jane Davis, the Deputy Under Secretary of Commerce for International Trade. It seemed like she just showed up in the situation room one day out of nowhere during season 5, and we never really knew her role or why she was there. But in season 6 she asked Secretary Durant to lunch so she could kill her, presumably at the behest of Claire. That’s when Durant gets tipped off and runs off to France or wherever. Then a little bit later we see Jane get whacked in the same willy-nilly way.

Then there’s Tom Hammerschmidt, dedicated newspaperman and the Editor-in-Chief at the fictional Washington Herald, who knows this mega-story exists and is trying to tie the loose ends together left behind by his predecessors. Tom knows the dragnet is tightening as the White House tries to silence voices. Knowing at the very least he’s being watched, he goes out for a late-night bite to eat and sees someone in a dark outfit, starting to cross the street coming towards him threateningly. He attaches his data stick to his dog’s collar and sends him off to wherever, then kneels down and waits for the end.

Let’s not forget Doug Stamper. That felt like the biggest letdown. Why the need to kill him?

All of these deaths make no sense to me. All the buildup and storytelling around these four just to basically flip a switch and turn out the lights at the end. My thought on that is there’s so much opportunity for speculation with all of the now-deceased. How do they all go forward? The what ifs could continue indefinitely on message boards. Maybe even a spinoff or two. Instead at the very end we get Claire essentially drumming her fingers together like Mr. Burns from The Simpsons.

It all reminded me of watching The Departed, Martin Scorsese’s 2006 movie. When the film has run out of plot but doesn’t really have an ending, just start whacking people and run the credits.
Moving briefly to the undead/soon-to-be-dead category, who are the Shepherds? I’m a fan of both Diane Lane and Greg Kinnear (and they don’t disappoint), but where have they been during the first five years? If they’re so influential why are we just now hearing about them?

       I know there were constraints. This is the final season and there’s no more Francis Underwood. However we both waited the long wait for season 6 of this outstanding show and were left disappointed and wanting more.

Andress, UTEP, and Kansas State

We all have thousands of reasons why we love our sports teams. Perhaps we don’t know any other way or it’s a way to remember a more innocent time. Family is a big part of it—how many stories are out there about how a parent took their kid to a game? A lot of these are true for me, but my favorite teams make it easy to connect the dots.  

            Jim Forbes graduated from Bel Air High School in El Paso and played basketball at UTEP from 1971-1974 under Don Haskins. Forbes was on the 1972 US Olympic men’s basketball team that got screwed in Munich. He never played professionally and was an assistant coach from 1981-84 under the Great Man at UTEP. Forbes has been a boys’ basketball coach in town for a long time, at Riverside for many years and currently at my alma mater, Andress High School. He’s taken the Golden Eagles to one state tournament and a few other deep runs in the playoffs. I always say rooting for Andress basketball is just like rooting for UTEP basketball—it connects my childhood (AHS was my first love in sports) to my upbringing and into the present. I hear about Coach Forbes’ squads and it reminds me of going to Andress games as a boy and some of those great football teams Allan Sepkowitz coached in the 80s and 90s.

            One of my first memories as a football fan was going to a game with my dad in the late 1970s. It was a rainy Friday night game, with the good guys hosting El Paso High. We stayed for the duration, largely because I could get $1 off football tickets at my elementary school which was adjacent to the stadium. $3 for adults and $2 for students if you got them before Friday. I remember getting swept up in football fever as a junior high student in the mid-80s when we lorded over El Paso football.

            Jim Forbes’ teams also connect me to Coach Haskins, who coached the Miners for 37 years (1961-1999). My brother and I would always watch the Miner games from Laramie, Provo, Albuquerque, or wherever, since we didn’t go to the games and there weren’t very many televised home games. Some were local broadcasts (Bob Nitzburg and the CBS affiliate) and some were regional telecasts. It was always fun to watch and good to know that while we might not win we sure as hell wouldn’t be outcoached.

            We watched the famous paper cup game at New Mexico in the mid-1980s when Wayne Campbell missed a free throw late in the game but got another try because a fan had thrown a paper cup onto the court. Campbell makes good on his second chance and the good guys snuck out of University Arena with a crucial conference win.

            I like that Forbes learned under Coach Haskins and is passing those lessons forward as a coach at Andress, a place that means a lot to me.

            There’s another layer to this connection—Jeff Woodruff coached as UTEP football assistant under Mike Price from 2004-2011 and has been the head coach at AHS for the last three seasons. So UTEP athletics has also made it to the Andress football sideline, although through the years my Eagles have had significantly better seasons than have my Miners. So rooting for Andress football is just like rooting for UTEP football. Well, kind of, anyway.

            It’s in that vein that I welcome Dana Dimel as coach of the UTEP football program. Dimel is a former mid-major head coach at Wyoming and Houston, and comes to El Paso following his second stint under Bill Snyder at Kansas State.

            KSU is one of my absolute favorite teams. I learned so much, made so many friends, and even met my bride while living in Clay Center, 45 minutes outside Manhattan, Kansas. I attended a lot of K-State games with these people, had so much fun, and fell in love with all things purple. While I never attended KSU (just as I never attended UTEP), I am still a loyal and dedicated fan who shows up when it’s raining and when the sun’s out. The only time I take sides against the Wildcats is when they play the Miners. They are my top two favorite teams.

            I am also pleased that Coach Snyder is a good man. Not a perfect man, but a good man, who has won 200+ games as he completely reversed the fortunes of a downtrodden KSU program. I am able to connect Bill Snyder with Don Haskins in terms of both being good men who truly seem to want to do the right thing. Surely Coach Dimel will bring some of Uncle Bill’s lessons with him to the Sun Bowl-- 16 goals anyone? K-State people Mike Cox, Jeremy O’Hara, Keith Burns, and Jake Waters are a part of Dimel’s first coaching staff at UTEP. Jake was our QB when we went to Tempe and beat Michigan in the Wild Wings Bowl in 2014. That bowl trip has special memories for my wife and me.

            Miner football, to put it mildly, is in a bit of a funk following an 0-12 season during which favorite son Sean Kugler stepped down as head coach. So with any luck watching UTEP football will become just like watching K-State football.

            Go get 'em Coach Dimel, we're counting on you.