Anniversaries

This has been a week of anniversaries for me that haven’t provided the best memories.

Four years ago today, Oct. 24, 2017, I was laid off from the newspaper where I worked as a reporter for nearly 20 years. News writing was all I knew how to do and suddenly I was dumped. It was disorienting.

And 30 years ago Thursday, Oct. 21, 1991, I quit my pursuit of a PhD in English at Texas Tech University, left Lubbock in the wee hours of the morning and headed to my mother’s house some 13 hours away to regroup. A girl I was seeing back then in Arkansas was accepted into a master’s program at Texas Tech and urged me to go with her. I bluffed my way into the English program and went with her.

She said she wanted to get married. She did. But to another guy.  She was a vegetarian; he was the son of a huge cattle farmer. I didn’t see it working out based on their dining preferences alone, but who was I to question their growing romance? (Sure I was bitter. I envisioned her strolling down the aisle of their outdoor Texas wedding and stepping in a steaming cow pie left by ol’ Bessie.)

Two times I was dumped. Twice I was told I wasn’t needed.

But this isn’t a tale of me whining about life and lost chances and all. It’s a story about how sports and how a sports replay game that involves cards and dice came to the rescue like they always do.

I knew I was in trouble at Texas Tech before the girl pulled the chain. I was struggling in the program; my advisor told me I wrote too “journalistic” and gave me a “C” on a thesis I wrote entitled “A Psychoanalysis of Psychoanalysis of ‘A Scarlet Letter.’” If you had to read that title twice, join the club. We were studying various styles of literary criticism and we had to select a method to critique a criticism of a classic novel. A “C” in PhD school is akin to an “F minus” in undergraduate class.

I had as much a chance of earning a PhD there as I had of winning the girl’s heart back despite me not owning even one cow.

Meanwhile, as all this was falling apart, the Minnesota Twins were working their way through the post season playoffs. I grew up in Minnesota and have been a fervent Twins’ fan since I learned what baseball was.

I watched the playoff series against Toronto at a golf course bar in west Lubbock, in my tiny dorm room I shared with an 18-year-old kid and, once, on a coin-operated television set at the Lubbock airport while I waited for the girl’s parents to fly in for a visit before our relationship imploded.

I also ordered an APBA game and had the company deliver it to my mother’s home when I knew I was leaving school. I ordered the 1990-91 basketball season (I know, most APBA fans hated that game for its slow, plodding play, but I loved it.) While other students studied for exams the last week I was there, I began setting up schedules and rosters for the season to play when I got home. It helped me get through that lame duck last week of school there.

The Twins won their contest over Toronto and then faced Atlanta in the World Series. I actually dropped out of Texas Tech between Games 2 and 3 so not to miss a game and drove home. I watched the rest of the Series at my mother’s home. I had planned to move into an apartment after Game 6, a Sunday, and begin a new job, thinking Atlanta would take the Series. But Kirby Puckett hit that 11^th inning home run and there was a Game 7. I stayed at my mother’s to watch Jack Morris pitch a gem, giving the Twins their second World Series crown in four years.

I moved the next day and that night, in the new apartment, that sense of disorientation took over again. A week earlier I was in Lubbock. Now, I was in a small apartment in Jonesboro, Ark., working at a weekly newspaper.

I took out the APBA basketball game, set it up on a kitchen table and began rolling games. The sense of loss faded as Michael Jordan hit his fade away jumpers and Charles Barkley bulled his way around the court and Hakeem Olajuwon grabbed rebounds galore.

My life may have changed drastically then, but the APBA game I grew up with, the one I was introduced to in 1977, was basically the same. It was the anchor in an otherwise unsettling time.

In 2017, I was riding high. I was doing well at my newspaper job. Holly had moved down from Chicago to be here and life was fun – until I went to my bureau office on Oct. 24, 2017, and saw my editor waiting outside for me.

He told me he was sorry, but I had been laid off along with 25 others at the paper. The publisher had other plans, he said, that didn’t include covering the beat I had since 1998. After the initial shock wore off, I was bitter again and hoped maybe Bessie had one more plop left in her to place at the entrance to the publisher’s office.

I called Holly to tell her I was coming home. I turned over my company cell phone and laptop to the editor and felt like I had spiraled out of orbit.

But, again, the game came to the rescue. I was doing a replay of the 1991 (ironically) baseball season. That night, while I began thinking of looking for another job, I rolled a few games and for a moment, the fear subsided.

That’s not to say I used the game as an escape and to avoid my responsibilities. Instead, the game helped focus me and take my mind off of being panicked.

I eventually got a job with the daily newspaper in town, the same paper I competed with for stories for the past 20 years. And I kept rolling the games.

It all worked out. Holly married me despite me being me. I finished the 1991 replay and am now working at the county prosecuting attorney’s office where every day is the same. I miss news coverage at times, but I also appreciate I’ll be home at the same time each night. It makes it easier to schedule games in the 1965 APBA baseball season I’m doing now

Two troubling times. Two times sports and the APBA game we love helped out. I’ve said it so many times before, but most of us were indoctrinated into the game as children and it’s made the voyage with us into adulthood. It’s one of the few constants in a life that’s constantly changing.

The game was good for me and it kept me from really hunting down Bessie for any revenge cow pies.