Moronic moments: We came to get down so jump around

Moronic Moment - "Watch out, moron!” “No, you da Moron!” “Life is a highway. I wanna ride it all night long.” – Rascal Flatts. I was almost a flattened rascal Memorial Day on divided roadway on Dickinson Avenue in Dewey. Runners were instructed to go to the right after passing under the start archway on their way to an out-and-back 5K race. Except with ADD in play all day, every day, most runners ran straight at Fredmoron as I came to balance into the football position to take some cheap shots both with camera and collisions. I later realized that the only person calling me names was me. I prefer the Bugs Bunny version, “Don’t be a maroon!”    

I came to get down! The Harrington Harrier, Matt Sparacino, was the first runner back at the Highway One Companies 5K Memorial Day Monday, so he got to break the banner as the music played, “I came to get down so get out your seat and jump around.” No one really listens to the lyrics of “Jump Around,” written by House of Pain in 1992. Wisconsin home football games have the entire stadium jumping to start the fourth quarter since 1998. The song has survived in sports while “Who Let the Dogs Out” (Baha Men, 2000) went away. The Rocky theme, “We are the Champions,” “Another One Bites the Dust” and a band favorite “Hey Baby” continue to endure at some level, but the “Jump Around” wins for getting 100,000 people jumping around for two-and-a-half minutes.

Running community conflated - Last Sunday was the 32nd running of The Masser Five Miler, which always occurs on Memorial Day weekend. Lee Masser passed away Sept. 4, 2020. Not to conflate, equate, fuse or blend a Masser memorial moment before a race with fallen soldiers, but each year Race Director Tim Bamforth mentions longstanding runners who are no longer walking the planet. As Nat King Cole’s “Unforgettable” played in the background, the first name Tim read was his dad John who died three weeks earlier. Tim’s older brother John, an elite runner and a 4:09 miler, died in 2002 at the age of 42 from a heart attack. Much respect to fallen soldiers while also remembering people from a community of runners. Unforgettable is what they are.

Big Red - The Big Red of Cornell won the NCAA Division I national championship of lacrosse with a 13-10 victory over the University of Maryland. How does an Ivy League school that costs 70K a year just in tuition and gives no athletic scholarships, doesn’t participate in NIL monies and doesn’t use graduate students win a national title against schools that do all those things? The average SAT score composite at Cornell is 1520 on the 1600 scale. The average GPA of students coming out of high school is 4.15. Do recruited athletes level up to these standards? Really, who knows how any of it works? The acceptance rate at Cornell is 11%. The eight Ivy League schools are Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Princeton, Penn and Yale. Four more universities with comparable reputations are Stanford, MIT, Northwestern and the University of Chicago. Griffin McGovern (Salesianum) and AJ Nikolic (Malvern) are “local” players on the Cornell roster. I admit to not having a grasp of how the system works, but I will go out on a limb and say legacy lives most of the time, except for examples where the athletic talent is not worth throwing down the legacy card. I think there is one in the Uno deck? 

Snippets - “Haters gonna hate.” We hear that expression a lot, but in my world, I will counter with “helpers gonna help,” and that is a human force that is unstoppable, from family and friends to teachers and coaches. There is an emphasis on inclusion because the opposite is exclusion, like if you’ve even been cut from a team or been rejected by the college you always wanted to attend. This is where the big-issue people usually weigh in, but sports is fraught with unfair advantages and upside values, so I go back to “helpers gonna help” because we basically can’t help ourselves, sounds like a logical fallacy. We who watch sports read lips. The most common three-word sentence, NFW – it’s kinda funny really.  Sometimes the good news is the bad news: “Regardless of the weather, you can always play on turf.” I don’t like taking a beating while photographing a game. People always offer to help me when I arrive at a game carrying two cameras and a chair. The good news is they are so nice to me; the bad news is I look like a guy who needs help. Chet Holmgren is a 7-foot-1, 200-pound center for the Oklahoma City Thunder. His nickname is “The Trebuchet,” a medieval contraption used to launch stones. Later in Sussex County, it was used to throw pumpkins. Bruce Hefke and his carpentry students at Sussex Tech built one and became world champions in the human-powered division. The NBA to Punkin Chunkin, now many columnists can make that connection? Go on now, git!