To say Kurt was gruff is to understate things by a magnitude of 10. Or perhaps 100. While I'm sure there are those who will never believe it, there really was a soft and generous side to the 20-year Air Force veteran. He just didn't want anyone to see it.
Kurt spent 24 years ruling over his "dungeon" in the bowels of Davis Varsity House before retiring in 1998.
For a few years after he retired Foshey – that's what most everyone called him – would phone me up looking for some inside skinny about what was happening in the athletic department. As more and more of the coaches he worked with moved on the calls became less frequent, and then they stopped all together. I hadn't heard from Kurt in a few years and feel badly that I didn't take the initiative to pick up the phone and call him just to say hi.
He was a good man and a friend.
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Spring practice No. 2 at 4:45 this afternoon. Check the top of this blog for the "lede" to tonight's post and a link to the premium side story.•
Got an email from a regular reader who writes:Coke Zero is running a promotion through Saturday where if you text "NCAA" to 2653 followed by the codes from four Coke Zero bottles (or Fresca botles, which also have black caps, so the computer can't tell the difference), they'll send you a code that you can redeem online for a free t-shirt, set of earphones, or skin (for a laptop/iPod/smartphone/whatever) branded with the logo of a participating school. Dartmouth is one of the participating schools, along with Yale, Brown, Princeton and Penn.
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From a story in the Yale Daily News about one of my favorite nonfiction authors:(Author Malcolm) Gladwell also discussed topics in his upcoming book, whose title has not been released, such as the lives of children of billionaires and the experiences of Ivy League students. He said he used to think of the Ivy League as a “pernicious force that perpetuated privilege in America,” but now believes it “doesn’t do anything at all.” He claims in the book that the career outcomes of Ivy League students and students of similar intellect at state schools do not vary greatly in prestige or wealth.Green Alert Take: Ivy vs. state schools? I'll let you know in four years.
“I have an entire chapter on why you’d all have been better off if you’d gone to your second-choice school,” he said.
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And finally, I headed out to the driveway yesterday afternoon and discovered Flat Tire No. 3 of the spring. While I'm grateful the tire went flat at the house (the spare was low and I was able to use the electric pump to inflate it) I'm getting a little tired of this. Tired enough to shoot the following picture of junk I picked up on our dirt road within 200 yards of the house after the last grading. Those metal wires are stiff and sharp. I suppose the wonder is that we don't end up with even more flat tires. The junk and picture are going to be shared with a few folks who probably need to see them.
