A Couple Of Nicks In The News

Another former Dartmouth player has found his new home as a graduate transfer. This time it is 6-foot-1, 285-pound starting center Nick Marinaro, who will be suiting up for the Miami Bobcats (LINK).

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With the NFL Draft in Green Bay starting one week from Thursday, a local TV station checked in with former Dartmouth quarterback Nick Howard, who hoping to get a shot as a fullback/tight end hybrid after spending last fall as a grad transfer at Butler. Click the photo to read the story.

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In a Yahoo story former Dartmouth and Arizona Cardinals linebacker Zack Walz ’98 offered thoughts on former teammate and friend Pat Tillman prior to the annual fundraising run honoring the NFL star who died 20 years ago this month in Afghanistan. From the story (LINK):

This year’s run was on April 12 filling the streets of Tempe with more than 30,000 runners and walkers, and the night before at a welcome VIP event inside Mountain America Stadium, teammate Zack Walz reflected on the man Tillman was and what it was like to be around him.

A linebacker from Dartmouth, Walz was picked one round before him with the 158th overall choice in that ’98 draft and he jokes (maybe) that it was an example of the team’s poor personnel evaluations.

And Walz had this to say about why playing four years in the NFL wasn’t ever going to be the highlight of his friend's life:

“For all of us, it was like the pinnacle of our achievement. That's where my career ended. For him, it was just a stepping stone to do something higher and greater. And that's how he carried himself. Yes, he took it very seriously and he worked harder than most people I've seen working. He always had a chip on his shoulder. He was such an intellectual. He was a consummate learner. But it was like, that was not the end-all.

“And that's really what you come to appreciate with him. And it is important to carry on his story. When you talk about carrying the message on to our younger generations, I think parents, if they're not telling their children who he was and what he stood for and what he embodied, they're doing their kids a disservice.”

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EXTRA POINT

It happened again!

With the Masters running from Thursday to Sunday, I put down the novel I’d been reading to watch the golf. I was all set to pick it up yesterday when an out-of-the-blue email delivered notification that a book I’d had on hold for probably six months had finally come available in the Vermont state online library. And so I did the same thing I did about three weeks ago, asking an AI engine to craft a summary of what had happened in the novel I was reading – but only up to the last chapter I had finished. In addition to making sure it didn’t include any spoilers, this time I requested a brief bio of each of the main characters.

Now I’m going to dig into the new book on my Kindle confident that when I finish it I can pull up the AI-generated capsule summary of my previous book and pick up right where I left off.