[VIDEO] An unlikely baseball game started between the Ku Klux Klan and the Negro League's Wichita Monrovians on June 21st, 1925. It wasn't consider a groundbreaking event and thus it was largely unknown perhaps outside of Wichita, Kansas. However, the story behind how this happened and who defeated who is something worth watching in Mr. Beat's latest video.
[VIDEO] I've been thinking about doing some nostalgia type posts and this post I want to dedicate somewhat to the time I first got cable. My folks wired our home with cable first in the late 1980s to early 90s.
Cable exposed me to a new world different from the channels you could get over the air back then. WBBM, WMAQ, WLS, WGN, WTTW, WYCC, WFLD, WSNS - Spanish, WCIU - used to be a Spanish channel before 1995, WGBO - became Spanish after 1995, or WPWR - which was the channel I used to watch a lot of Star Trek. Before cable that was my TV world and I still would occasionally refer to them by their channel numbers 2, 5, 7, 9, 11, 20, 26, 32, etc....
This was one of the memorable shows I remember from watching cable back then the Sportswriters on TV on the former Sports Channel Chicago. As I kid I just didn't get it, what do these old guys doing talking around a poker table smoking their cigars know about sports. BTW, until recently I didn't know they used a poker table for their set...
Anyway this edition I found commemorated old Comiskey Park which used to stand on the north side of 35th Street. Riding the L or even on the Dan Ryan this was a very recognizable landmark. That was until the Chicago White Sox was considering leaving Chicago for Florida and was demanding a new baseball stadium which they got thanks to some machinations in Springfield.
So at some point before the final game there in late 1990 they do a show there at home plate. They're talking about the history of the place and the athletes who played there. And to share this as part of my nostalgia is one way to acknowledge that there is a world series between the Astros and the Braves right now.
Also to show how close the White Sox where to getting into the fall classic this year. Well hardly since they were eliminated in the American League Division Series. The ALDS didn't exist back in 1990 as the top two teams in both leagues then went on to a League Championship Series to determine who goes to the World Series.
Regardless it's hard to believe how long ago 1990 is. How much different the world has become now? I don't know about you and can't believe I've gotten that old but that era just seemed far more simpler than 2021. It's unbelievable.
I hope you enjoy this look back.
I just wanted to share this article. There are some parents out there obsessed with getting their children into a top tier college. They're getting them ready early, but then do children not deserve their childhoods.
I don't have children but I don't mind they get involved with sports, however, my hope is that they enjoy playing and they should decide if they should do this for their livelihoods or to get into a top-tier school.
This quote kind of grinded my gears a tad:
On paper, Sloane, a buoyant, chatty, stay-at-home mom from Fairfield County, Connecticut, seems almost unbelievably well prepared to shepherd her three daughters through the roiling world of competitive youth sports. She played tennis and ran track in high school and has an advanced degree in behavioral medicine. She wrote her master’s thesis on the connection between increased aerobic activity and attention span. She is also versed in statistics, which comes in handy when she’s analyzing her eldest daughter’s junior-squash rating—and whiteboarding the consequences if she doesn’t step up her game. “She needs at least a 5.0 rating, or she’s going to Ohio State,” Sloane told me.What's wrong with Ohio State? Why this pursuit of an Ivy League education? Don't get me wrong if you get in you're set, however, there are plenty of great schools to attend out there - like Morehouse for instance. :P
In 1988, the University of California sociologist Harry Edwards published an indictment of the “single-minded pursuit of sports” in Black communities. The “tragic” overemphasis on athletics at the expense of school and family, he wrote in Ebony magazine, was leaving “thousands and thousands of Black youths in obsessive pursuit of sports goals foredoomed to elude the vast and overwhelming majority of them.” In a plea to his fellow Black people, Edwards declared, “We can simply no longer permit many among our most competitive and gifted youths to sacrifice a wealth of human potential on the altar of athletic aspiration.”
Thirty years later, in a twist worthy of a Jordan Peele movie, Fairfield County has come to resemble Compton in the monomaniacal focus on sports. “There’s no more school,” a parent from the town of Darien told me flatly. (She, like Sloane and several other parents, did not want to be identified for privacy and recruitment reasons.) “There’s no more church. No more friends. We gave it all up for squash.” She says she is working on a memoir that she intends to self-publish, titled Squashed.
This article went from obsessions of college admissions to obsessions with sports. I guess families have their obsessions with getting what's best for the young people.
Parents, what's your read on this?
h/t Newsalert
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| Kyle Fuller in 1936 Bears Jersey |
