Tuesday, September 16, 2014
Sunday, September 14, 2014
Baseball. Boys. Sunflower seeds. A field. And dreams.
The Sweet Season
Part IV
Miles from Williamsport, Pa., where Chicago’s Jackie Robinson West baseball team recently captured the national Little League World Series title, each year boys—and girls—play the game on local diamonds in seasons filled with life's lessons, with hopes and dreams.
We, the media, keep missing the story
This is the fourth and final part of the series
This is the fourth and final part of the series
Ours
the soulless brown eyes staring back without remorse. Too often, ours is the
story of our supposed propensity toward criminality in a world in which a
racist and unfair justice system holds different rules and different outcomes
for males of color.
Ours
a jaded portrayal overall by the media at large who help make every black male,
all 19.9 million of us—even in a “post-racial” America—all potentially guilty
by genetic association.
America’s
most hated. Most wanted. Most feared.
Friday, September 5, 2014
Baseball. Boys. Sunflower seeds. A field. And dreams.
The Sweet Season
Part III
Miles from Williamsport, Pa., where Chicago’s Jackie Robinson West baseball team recently captured the national Little League World Series title, each year boys—and girls—play the game on local diamonds in seasons filled with life's lessons, with hopes and dreams.
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The Matteson Olympia Fields Cubs pose at season's end after the title game. |
Baseball principles teach kids not to give up
This is the third in a series
By John W. FountainThis is the third in a series
In the bottom of
the 6th and final inning, the tension was thick like molasses. Win
or lose, the season for the M.O.F. Cubs was already a winning one—and baseball
a game of life, the field just a classroom for lessons by their coaches to help
these little boys someday grow into good men.
Dominique, a
short, stout kid with a mean fastball and in a good groove on this warm evening
in July, stood at the mound, time ticking on the last game of the season for
these boys of summer. An inning earlier, they squandered a lead, looking on the
verge of a complete meltdown. It’s not like it hadn’t happened before—this
season.
But it was soon
clear—after Aiden, Dominique’s little brother, had run off the field with tears
streaming down his face in frustration over an error—that the Cubs had learned to fight.
Clear that the boys had absorbed the principle of teamwork, of never giving up,
of cleaving to the words and faith of their coaches. Clear was that
this group of unlikely champions wanted not just to learn to play baseball but to
win.
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