"Syracuse Had a Bad Week"

So says my good friend who has shared sports with me since the 7th grade.  We've gone to SU football and basketball games together since then.  I'd get a ride to her house and we'd walk over to the stadium, Dome or Manley Field House.  We were rabid Green Bay fans as well.  We had a falling out when our lives diverged, but she always sent my mother a Christmas card - something I learned when I came back East as a Seahawks fan.  We started going to games again at the Dome.

I record the SU games we don't attend and watch them over Mike's or Dmitri's pizza.  She listens to them if she can, and if the aerial is pointed just right she can sometimes get them out towards Rochester in the country.

So "Syracuse had a bad week" was all she needed to write me when we played our daily Words with Friends.

The men's basketball team lost inexplicably two games in a row.  The broadcast that started with a look back at Devendorf jumping on to the table when he thought the marathon game versus UConn was over ended in a chant of "Let's go, Huskies," not Orange.  The next night Oregon made it worse.

At Yankee Stadium QB Dungey was injured less than 9 minutes into the game.  Again he was injured.  Again he was taken off the field possibly never to return wearing orange.  Just like in the other three seasons. And the game got worse, if that was possible.  Symbolically the phenom Szmyt finally got to attempt a field goal and it hit the uprights and bounced back.

That was Saturday.

On Sunday, on 60 Minutes, Tim Green courageously talked with Steve Kroft about his ALS  diagnosis.  They looked at photos of him taking down quarterbacks, celebrating by bumping helmets with teammates.  They talked numbers of players who had the same diagnosis, and others with CTE.  This man who had spoken so eloquently at Alex's sports banquet years ago had difficulty forming words.  The man who wrote the books I read voraciously was now writing with a sensor.  This man who shared his search for his birthmother and touched a chord in me sat with his kids and wife contemplating a bleak future.  And then he said he would do it all again....no regrets.  There was something so magical about hearing stadiums erupt that he was willing to endure his current pain because of that memory.

I don't get it.  And he said he knew people who hadn't experienced it wouldn't get it.

He and Steve Kroft were seen walking in the Village, past our office where I am writing this blog now.  They got out on the boat and drove past our iconic - but ever-changing - shoreline.  "What a beautiful place to live," the world watching the show must have thought.

How sad to leave it behind.

"Syracuse had a bad week."


Go to www.tackleals.com to donate to Tim's team.