Saturday, April 23, 2022

Saturday Stuff

UConn held its spring game last night and former Dartmouth offensive lineman Jake Guidone, now a grad transfer center for the Huskies, was ready:

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Here are a couple of 1996 highlights from two of the stars of the 1996 team who went on to play in the NFL.

Zack Walz was a sixth-round draft pick of the Arizona Cardinals. I wrote a piece about Zack and his late friend Pat Tillman HERE. Check out the second play in particular:


Safety Lloyd Lee made the San Diego Chargers' roster as a free agent. He would later serve as linebackers coach for the Chicago Bears. Here he is returning a punt in '96:



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A website called At The Buzzer has a posting under the headline, 20 Sportsmanship Quotes You Should Tell Your Children. (LINK)

Talk about being in elite company ;-)

No. 20 is “Winning isn’t everything, but wanting to win is.” – Vince Lombardi 
No. 18 is from Knute Rockne
No. 16 from Jack Nicklaus
No. 14 is from Cal Ripken Jr. 
No. 13 from Mickey Mantle
No. 11 is from Ralph Waldo Emerson 
No. 12 from Muhammad Ali
No. 8 is from Sophocles
No. 6 is from Michael Jordan
No. 3 is from Martina Navratilova

And No. 5 is from . . . wait for it . . . former Dartmouth Athletic Director Harry Sheehy:

“It is your response to winning and losing that makes you a winner or a loser.”

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The Indianapolis Business Journal, of all places, has a Mike Lopresti column headlined, The 2022 Indians, not your garden variety Triple-A story about Indy's minor league baseball team. The lede to the story includes this:

You could go down the lineup the other night and find all manners of unique journeys to Victory Field.

One of those"unique journeys" belongs to Dartmouth grad Beau Sulser, who has a 2.13 ERA after three starts with the Pittsburgh Pirate' top farm team. From the story (LINK):

Not many Ivy League pitchers of the year are out there in professional baseball, but he is. His older brother Cole attended Dartmouth and was drafted by Cleveland, so Beau followed the path, figuring it’d make a fine Plan B if his baseball hopes went bust.

“The idea of having an Ivy League education if baseball doesn’t work out is what sold me on it. It kind of sets you up for life afterward,” he said. He double-majored in psychology and public policy—improving his time management was the biggest challenge—and he has already started two sports-related businesses. One was a consulting service for college recruits, the other a soon-to-be-launched app for young athletes to find instructors who can study videos and provide feedback. Sulser’s Dartmouth years at work. But he still would like to pitch a while.

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EXTRA POINT

There's relatively new van building business in the little town adjacent to ours and yesterday I drove our '84 Volkswagen Westfalia camper down to their shop to ask if they might do some work on the camping systems that we've kind of let go the past few years. That would be the propane for the stove, the three-way fridge and the water/faucet. The fellow I spoke to said they'd done some of that in the past and probably could help us out.

When we went outside to look at the VW, I asked about treating and then painting over the minimal "seam" rust that we'd like taken care of, and he thought they could do that as well.

GREAT!

After giving the fellow a tour of the interior, explaining how it started on the first turn of the key after its winter hibernation in our garage, I thanked him and he headed back inside. I hopped in the driver's seat feeling pretty good about things.

And then I wasn't.

I turned the key and bubkes. Zippo. Nada. A click and nothing else.

I pulled out an old Haynes Vanagon repair manual I bought online a few years back and quickly put it aside. Who was I kidding? I know where the gas goes and that's about it.

I waited a few minutes, tried to start it again and got the same result. Click.

Here's the thing about old VW buses. They are going to break down. It's a fact of life.

I went back into the van business and the fellow who had helped me tried one of those portable jumper things in case it was a battery issue. Click.

I hope the van builders will be able to help us with the "systems," but if they do, it won't be for a while. First the VW is going to get a piggyback ride back to our "bus whisperer." Once he gets it running we'll pay a little extra to have him check all the hoses and belts and usual suspects to give us the best chance to make it through the summer without another issue.

As disappointing as it is that the VW broke down, I choose to see the bright side. I'm über thankful it happened in a parking lot 10 minutes from home and not during our drive out to Colorado and back two years ago, when we would have been, uh, up the creek?

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