Sports!

I've never been a big auto racing fan, which means I guess it's kind of ironic that I spent an entire career in sports journalism  – more than 40 years, if you're counting – just an hour away from the Charlotte Motor Speedway and the beating heart of NASCAR.

There could be any number of reasons why auto racing has never appealed to me: To begin with, I'm not a motorhead. I open the hood of a car and I don't know what I'm looking at; I wasn't born into the NASCAR culture, so it's kind of foreign to me anyway; I never saw the point in driving in circles; and auto racing is loud. Very loud. And sometimes, people get killed.

And it's not just NASCAR. I never got into the Indianapolis 500. Or Grand Prix racing. Or go-karts. Or whatever. It's just me, I guess.

So how come I can't wait to watch today's Darlington 400 (at 3:30 p.m on FOX)?

I know why. Because it's sports. Live sports. On television. I think the last live sporting event I watched on TV was the ACC Tournament, which was halted in mid-stream in early March because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Since then, our televised sports has been a vast wasteland of recycled championships in nearly every sport. I can't watch something where I already know the outcome. That's why I never record a sporting event. If I know who wins, what's the point?

And it's not only auto racing. Golf, of sorts, also returns today with the TaylorMade Driving Relief event (2 p.m on NBC), featuring Rory McIlroy, Dustin Johnson, Rickie Fowler and Matthew Wolff in a charity skins game to raise funds for the American Nurses Foundation.

So today, there will be real-time sports with outcomes in doubt. I suspect genuine, in-the-moment competition could feed my empty, aching sports soul with sheer joy. We'll see.

The PGA Tour plans to return in full on June 11-14 with the Charles Schwab Foundation in Fort Worth, TX. Stay tuned.

All of this will be interesting not only for the competition and live action, but also to see how golf and auto racing will play out in a pandemic world. No fans will be allowed at either event, which will be strange. Nobody yelling "In the hole!" or "Yudda man!" the precise moment a putt is launched.

And I'll be curious to see how social distancing will be accomplished on the golf course and on the race track. No hand shaking after dropping 35-foot putts. Remote interviews only. During pit stops, will drivers get a dose of sanitizer along with their Gatorade? What happens with pit crews? Are they all considered essential workers? What about the guy who cleans the radiator intake? Is he expendable?

And then there's major league baseball.

MLB is hoping to begin play in July with a schedule cut in half and in empty stadiums. No spitting allowed. And can you really argue with an umpire from six feet away while wearing a face mask?

Baseball already is making some innovations, like combining the American and National leagues into three 10-team divisions: the West will see the Dodgers, Angels, Giants, Athletics, Padres, Diamondbacks, Rockies, Rangers, Astros and Mariners, while the Central will include the Cubs, White Sox, Brewers, Cardinals, Royals, Reds, Indians, Twins, Braves ad Tigers, and the East will feature, the Phillies, Pirates, Mets, Yankees, Red Sox, Orioles, Nationals, Blue Jays, Rays and Marlins.

I already like this setup. It could be a keeper. Look at all the natural rivalries. Travel distances will be cut significantly. And as much as I love baseball, the shorter season has some appeal. This also would be a good time to experiment with speed-up rules, too.

We might be getting a glimpse of the new normal today and in the coming weeks as well. There's still a lot of tweaking to be done.

We're already in the early stages of reopening the country, but if numbers spike in the next couple of weeks, it could all go back to full quarantine again. You never know. We better enjoy today while we have it.

History lesson

Because I keep looking for stuff to do while staying in place in the middle of a pandemic, I find myself doing a lot of reading.

I like to read. I probably have 200 books in my home library, nearly half of those about the Civil War, and fully two-thirds of my collection about history in general, with the rest mostly about sports.

Because of the lockdown, I'm reading some of my books for the third, maybe even fourth time. I can't wait for access to the Davidson County Public Library again.

Anyway, my wife's boss, Mac Parrott, let me borrow one of his books: "Centennial History of Davidson County North Carolina" by (Rev. Dr.) Jacob Calvin Leonard. It has a copyright date of 1927, even though the actual centennial of Davidson County would have been December 9, 1922 when, 100 years prior, an act of the North Carolina General Assembly carved out Davidson County from the enormous and far-ranging borders of Rowan County (Named for Matthew Rowan with borders ranging from present day Anson County to present day Burke County, if I understand correctly).

Consider 1822 was only 33 years after the United States Constitution was ratified and put into effect. Davidson County, as a governing entity, was nearly as young as the entire country.

I guess it took Dr. Leonard several years to accumulate his information and then assemble it into a 523-page work. Some of it is dry reading, as history usually is, but Dr. Leonard occasionally injects a little bit of himself into his tome, which can liven things up a bit for the curious reader.

I'm guessing a good number of current Davidsonians know that Davidson County was once a part of Rowan County. Maybe fewer know that colonial North Carolina saw its own western border reach the Mississippi River.

Look how big the colony of North Carolina was.

 Here's where it gets kind of interesting. Davidson County was named for Rev-olutionary War hero General William Lee Davidson, who was actually born in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.

He was wounded in the battle of Colson's Mill, SC, while a major of the Fourth Regiment of North Carolina Troops.

Then, sadly, while serving with Gen. Nathanael Greene, Davidson – now a brigadier general promoted for his conspicuous bravery – was shot through the heart and killed during the battle of Cowan's Ford on the Catawba River in May, 1780.

Then there's this (from Dr. Leonard's book):

"Davidson County ... is the second North Carolina county of the same name. This information was called to the attention of The Dispatch in a letter from Major W. A. Graham, Commissioner of Agriculture, who recalled that one of the early sessions of the Legislature of North Carolina saw the creation of the county of Davidson, with Nashville as its capital.

"Shortly after the creation of Davidson County the territory of the west seceded and formed the State of Franklin. In 1784 North Carolina ceded this territory to the Union as an independent state. The name was then changed to Tennessee, after the river that winds itself across the State several times and which got its name from the Indians that still roamed the country toward the Mississippi.

"Davidson County, Tennessee, still remains and Nashville its county seat, is the capital of the State. It was named after General William Lee Davidson, who fell at Cowan's Ford on May 1, 1780. Nashville was named for General Francis Nash, another distinguished North Carolinian. ..."

So, apparently, there was a Davidson County before there was a Davidson County. According to Dr. Leonard's book, "From 1749 to 1822 Davidson County was included within the limits of Rowan County." I'm not sure how that could be, but Dr. Leonard (who was a pastor of First Reformed Church of Lexington) continues by writing, "In 1749, Rowan was constructed out of Bladen. Rowan at that time covered the whole of Western North Carolina and Tennessee, such distinction continuing until 1770, when Surry County was formed. Rowan was truly a great county. In the year 1822 Davidson County was erected from the portion of Rowan east of the Yadkin River."

The book is filled with all kinds of tidbits like this, and there are plenty of pictures of faces with familiar last names like E. Odell Hinkle, William Moffit, John W. McCrary, Emery Raper, George Mountcastle, William Holt, B. Cabell Philpott and Irvin L. Sink, to name a few. No women, though. Times change. That's what history is about.

Clearly, I need to get out of this quarantine.

My friend Donnie

By 1990, I'd been at The Dispatch for 14 years. I only had 16 more to go.

But in that 14-year span, the newspaper had already gone through four photographers: Gareth Wetherill, Scott Crowder, Glenn Roberson and Scott Hoffmann. For some reason, during my tenure there up to that point, The Dispatch had been blessed with exceptionally talented photographers. They stayed at the paper for an average of 3.5 years. Each.

The photojournalist at work.*

And for some reason that I can't quite fathom, I'd managed to become fairly good friends with all four of them, even though my interest and knowledge in photography approached something akin to zero. I was a sports writer and I guess maybe they liked sports well enough, so maybe that was a connection. That, and the way that disparate personalities can somehow seem to interact with one another on the sly.

So when photographer No. 5 showed up, I was more than a little apprehensive. Could we work together? Could we be friends? Or would we simply be workplace colleagues?

Turns out, I was worried about nothing. True enough, Donnie Roberts was a baseball fan – he even played the game in high school and he followed the Cincinnati Reds (I followed the Philadelphia Phillies) – but as time went on, I learned he had a taste for music that ranged from Pearl Jam to Underhill Rose, a sense of humor with a twist for thoughtful, offbeat eclectic comedy, a sharp nose for news and a photojournalist's eye for the precise shutter click that told the story. He also had an artist's touch with his camera.

Photojournalism at .7 of a second. One of my favs. How did he do that?**

So we became friends. There was a span of several years – I think I was already retired – where we played golf together once a week. We did that until a shoulder issue took him out of the game.

My wife, Kim, and I had him over to the house every Super Bowl Sunday for a run of several consecutive years, maybe a decade's worth. Kim would make the chili and chocolate mousse, Donnie would bring the craft beer, and I provided the television. Or, when he finally got an HD TV (and I didn't), Kim would still bring the chili and mousse, but we'd watch the game at his place.

Kim said he was always smiling. His smile remains his signature to this day.

What was evident throughout all this was that Donnie was continuing The Dispatch trend for exceptional photojournalism, whether it be in sports or hard news. He developed (OK, so maybe that's a deliberate pun and throwback to the pre-digital darkroom days) a rapport with many of his subjects, earning both trust and confidence. It was local journalism at its best and I bet he won more than 50 press awards in his time with the newspaper, maybe even more.

Photojournalism as art.**

And it could never end.

But a little more than a week ago, Donnie emailed me that, after 30 years with the paper, his job was being eliminated by Gannett/Gatehouse, which owns The Dispatch, along with 240 other newspapers in its conglomerate, including USA Today. The cuts were nationwide.

Donnie's last day was Friday. It leaves The Dispatch without a photographer, perhaps permanently. It leaves our community with an enormous void.

All you have to do is go to his Facebook page and read his farewell story. Then read the comments. There's more than 100 of them, from colleagues, friends and subjects, which tells you more about the impact a single man can have on his neighbors than almost anything else.

I don't know what lies ahead for my friend. He's hinted that, at age 59 and after 30 years, he's not really interested in going back into newspaper work, or even freelancing. As a 30-plus-year veteran of journalism myself, I can understand that. The Nikon might feel more like an albatross around his neck these days, I don't know. Maybe he can teach his craft somewhere. Or maybe something totally different and rewarding will appear for him out of the blue. I hope so.

Donnie had a remarkable run at our little newspaper, and because he did, so did we.

Thank you, my friend.

Kim, myself and our friend.***

* Photo by Brian Westerholt/Four Seam Images

** Photo by Donnie Roberts (Who else?)

*** Photo by Melissa Egelnick

Now what?

With all the pandemic news flying around, I bet this little nugget slipped under your radar:

According to Space.com (and other sources) a "giant potentially hazardous asteroid will fly safely by Earth in April."

Huh? Whut?

The asteroid, known affectionately as Asteroid (52768) 1998 OR2, will approach within 3.9 million miles of Earth before moving on with its orbit (yes, it will be back). It's been measured to be about a mile wide and two miles long, traveling at about 20,000 miles per hour, and it will be making it's closest approach to Earth on April 29 at 5:56 a.m. – or about the time you're headed to work, if you happen to be essential. (See here)

The good news is that despite its size, speed and orbit, it is not – repeat, it is not – on a collision course with Earth. Even so, I'm still trying to justify "potentially hazardous" with "fly safely by" in the same breath. I guess "potentially" is the key word here.

It turns out the flying rock has been classified "potentially hazardous" by the Center for Near Earth Objects (yes, there is such a thing) because it meets its guidelines of a deep-space object coming within 19 lunar distances from Earth. A lunar distance is how far the moon is from the Earth (about 260,000 miles). OR2 will come within 16 lunar distances. You might feel the breeze as it hurtles by.

And in case you miss it (or if it misses us), OR2 will be back in 2079, coming within a hair-raising million miles of Earth (or a chilling four lunar distances). The fact is, OR2's orbit has been charted for the next 200 years. So there.

Is Asteroid OR2 wearing a face mask? Looks more like a bra.

 But apparently you can't relax. Wikipedia tells us there are 22 Potentially Hazardous Asteroids out there, just biding their time, taking up space. None is calculated to be on a collision course with our hopes and dreams any time soon.

The current global COVID-19 pandemic also is a factor here. Snopes.com, a fact-checking Internet site, has had to quell a Facebook rumor or two that the pandemic actually was created by conspiracy-minded deep staters as a distraction from the fears of an impending extinction collision.

Fighting panic with panic, I guess.

And there's actually a digital image of OR2, apparently in profile, showing slipstream flares, that has been interpreted by some as the asteroid is wearing a face mask. I'm not even going there with that one. Paranoia strikes hard.

And, besides, is there a slipstream in the vacuum of space? That's beyond my pay grade.

In the meantime, wear your face mask. And wash your hands.

Quality quarantine

Kim and I went for a walk last evening, as we have usually done during the stay-in-place mandate as we endure the COVID-19 pandemic.

It's a way for us to get some exercise, to get out in the fresh air, to enjoy quality time together, to break our cabin fever, even though we walk less than two miles and less than 45 minutes. Sometimes we only do a mile or so and maybe it takes 20 minutes. Depends. Our walks usually take us down Main Street, but it also incorporates two significant hills: Post Office Hill on Second Street (which I named for the Post Office) and Judy Hill, on Payne Street (which I named for a friend of ours who lives near there).

Those hills don't look like much when you drive them in a car. But when you actually walk them, they become cardio events.

Anyway, the point I'm getting to is that I've noticed the world – even our small two-mile portion of it  – seems to have gotten, umm, friendlier?

People, some complete strangers, wave or talk to us from their porches. People, some complete strangers, wave to us from their cars. People, some complete strangers, say "hi" to us when we pass them on the sidewalk. This is unusual stuff. I'm pretty sure this didn't used to happen back in the good ol' days when we had to dodge cars, bicycles or skateboards that were trying to beat pedestrians to an intersection.

I know I'm not imagining this because Kim has commented on it, too. "People seem to be friendlier," she said, confirming my suspicions.

I'm not sure how a pandemic figures into this new etiquette, especially when nearly 40,000 Americans have died in the past six weeks as a result of the coronavirus. And maybe that's it. Maybe we see more clearly that our time is measured. Or maybe social distancing – keeping people away from us – is actually bringing us closer. I don't know. Call it pandemic perspective.

One thing that's amazed me is how quickly the planet seems to be healing itself of pollution. Before-and-now comparison shots of Los Angeles or New York are revealing. City dwellers are saying the air quality has improved so much, they can tell the difference while breathing clean air through their face masks. People in India can see the Himalayan mountaintops from more than 100 miles away for the first time in 30 years. If anyone needed empirical evidence that climate change is, at least in part, man-made, then this might be it.

The question remains, once the pandemic is gone, do we revert back to our pre-pandemic ways? I suspect so, human nature being what it is. But I hope when we see an open door ahead of us offering new opportunities for social justice, economic reform and planetary stewardship that we're wise enough to walk through it. We'll see.

 •   •   •

Just a comment about the One World concert last night honoring healthcare workers.

I thought Paul McCartney (age 77) and Elton John (73) sounded like the old men they are as they performed in unenhanced musical environments (this is just an observation. I can never be critical of Paul McCartney).

Conversely, Mick Jagger (76), Keith Richards (76), Ronnie Wood (72) and Charlie Watts (78) sounded like they missed the time machine altogether while singing "You Can't Always Get What You Want."

I thought Stevie Wonder's (69) performance of "Lean on Me" was strong, too.

And Keith Urban's three-part harmony with himself singing "Higher Love" (although probably counter to the "live" aspect of the evening) was pretty impressive.

It all went well with my wine.

Day 623

It's getting a little weird now.

I feel like we're deep into the COVID-19 quarantine, even though "stay in place" has been, what, three weeks? Maybe four?

See? I can't even tell you. It seems like it's been years. Every day has blended into the same day (Groundhog Day?), unless you happen to be deemed essential, in which case you go to work looking over your shoulder wondering if that's the virus that's shadowing you instead of your child.

If you still go to your work station, I'm going to guess that you know what day it is. I'm not sure about working remotely. You're home, but you're conducting business, so there might be a sense of normalcy for you – except for the fact that you're working from home. That's not normal.

But for a guy like me, the routine that marks the time has become too much routine and, consequently, time is passing, not marking. I have to think what day of the week it is. I mean, there's no church. There's no school. For many of us, there's no work.

So we putter around in the garden. Go for a walk. Make the occasional run to the grocery store or pharmacy, wearing a face mask to hide our faces. Our faces are our individualizing trademarks, and now we cover them up. We talk to our neighbors from across the street. We're social animals who can not be social.

And it's every day. Evvvv-errrr-reee day.

But we cope.

My room-rater backdrop

 I'm kind of getting a kick out of watching live TV shows where most guests are shown speaking remotely from their homes instead of from the broadcast studio. Inevitably, it seems, the remote guests are sitting in their home library, in front of book shelves. I find myself cocking my head sideways to read the titles of the books behind them. Sometimes, I find, we've read the same books.

So, to give you a sense of perspective and, hopefully, a little humanity as you read this blog, I used my book shelf as a comforting backdrop as I write to you.

I actually have read all of those books behind me. They're books about the Civil War, a field of history in which I have an interest. I have more than 100 of them, and some of those books I've read more than once.

And now, in quarantine, I'm reading some of those books again.

Man, I miss going to the library.

I think I understand now why prisoners marked each day of their incarceration with daily slashes on the walls of their jail cell. I understand the desperation of that.

One thing I've noticed on Facebook is some of my favorite musical performers are live streaming from their homes. The technology to do this is amazing, and I'm grateful for it, but again, the musicians are performing at home. If they are in a band, they are now soloing. And while familiar songs can be comforting, distinctive harmonies are missing.

But we do the best we can.

These are weird times. Wash your hands. Stay safe.

Pandemic paranoia

My paranoia has reached epic (or epidemic) proportions.

I saw this musing on Facebook the other day, which made me feel like I wasn't alone: Every time you cough or sneeze, does the thought suddenly flash through your mind: "Oh my God! Do I have it?" (The 'it,' of course, being COVID-19).

Apparently, I'm not the only one who feels this way. It's kind of ironic how in this time of quarantines and lock downs meant for the sole purpose of isolation that you can feel so much a part of a community. Alone together.

My paranoia (I'm thinking this is a kind of paranoia that even psychiatrists might approve) reached the point where I learned how to make my own cloth face mask out of a bandana and elastic hair ties. It was easy peasy. The one I made for Kim kept slipping off her left ear, so I connected the elastic ties with a chain of paper clips, and that seemed to work.

The cloth face mask likely will not prevent you from getting COVID-19, but it might help prevent you from contaminating someone else with sneezes and coughs, which seems to be the whole point.

All of which leads to other musings.

A month ago, we were told face masks for non-essential healthcare personnel were unnecessary. Now the Center for Disease Control has reversed itself, recommending each time you go in public to wear a cloth face mask. I guess this has become a learning experience for everyone, including the CDC.

These are confusing times.

But the fact that we have to make our own cloth masks, months into the pandemic, living in the richest nation in the world, is perplexing. Why can I not get an N95 mask for myself without competing with the healthcare community? Where's my Lysol? Where's my Purell? Good Lord, where the hell is my toilet paper?

And if these things are being mass produced 24/7, then where did they get lost in the supply train? Why are grocery store shelves still empty of these things?

Why must states bid against each other for ventilators and personal protective equipment (PPE), driving up prices in the middle of a pandemic? Who's profiteering off that policy? A 70-cent face mask is now $7. A $20,000 ventilator is now $50,000, and rising.

No wonder I'm paranoid. Things I need are not readily available.

I'm getting myself worked up. I need to stay calm and watch another old movie on TCM.

Wash your hands. Practice social distance. Right now, it appears those are the only things we've got in supply.