Signals at key moments could make our lives a lot easier

One of the books I got for Christmas gave me an interesting idea.

It was Neil Patrick Harris's "Choose Your Own Autobiography," and it was a mixture of fact and fiction, sort of like those interactive books where every few pages, you have to make a decision that will affect your future.

You choose, and sometimes it's the right choice and sometimes a mistake.

Wouldn't it be great to have that opportunity in real life? To be given choices and be told what they are?

I can think of numerous times in my life when I had two possible scenarios in front of me, but there were other times when I had choices and didn't even realize how important they were. It's one thing to decide where to go to college or which of two job offers to take. But there were other times I didn't even realize I had choices.

It wouldn't even be a case of knowing what the choices were. Even a signal of some sort that you were at a crucial point in your life would help.

An example:

1970

In 1970, I had my first real relationship with a girlfriend. We were together from December 1969 until the end of May, when she returned home to Connecticut for the summer. We stayed in touch for the first half of the summer but then she stopped writing and calling.

I figured we had broken up, but in early September she called and said she was coming back to school and wondered if I could pick her up at the airport. Over the next day or so, she told me it had been a difficult summer and she asked me if I still cared for her. I said I did and it looked like we were together again.

She went home for a week and returned for the start of classes. The first evening she was back, she told me we had to break up.

This is where I needed the signal, just something to tell me that the next few minutes were very important and I should think carefully about what I said and did.

Because I did everything wrong.

I made the huge mistake of doing everything I could to conceal what I was feeling from her, even to the point of insulting her.

Witness our final exchange:

"I hope we can still be friends."

"Sure, why not?"

"You're taking this really well."

"It's no big deal."

"Well, I think it's a very big deal and very sad."

"Maybe you're taking yourself too seriously."

The only thing I could have done to make matters worse would have been to punch her in the mouth.

Given what she was going through, if I had been nice -- hell, if I had even been honest -- we might have worked things out and gotten back together that same fall.

L.A. 2000

Of course that never happened. In the last 44-plus years, I saw her once. We shared a hug and a minute or two of conversation in the Staples Center in Los Angeles. I was a newspaper columnist and she was a delegate to the 2000 Democratic National Convention.

Now she's a judge in her home state after a long legal career.

It isn't as if I wish we had stayed together. With all the ups and downs in my own life, I doubt we would have made it through the '70s. But there is no question my poor handling of the breakup had a major negative effect on my life for years to come.

I had been struggling ever since graduating from high school three years earlier, but I had turned the corner that summer with an A and a B in two courses. I was really looking forward to the fall semester. My girlfriend and I had decided to take a class together, a class that I found almost impossible to attend after our breakup.

By November, I had pretty well gone off the track. Instead of going to classes, I went to matinees, some of them double features. By May I had flunked out and was heading into a period of about seven years before I would turn things around.

All in all, the time I wasted was probably the difference between having a good career and one that was just all right. I'm not complaining. My family life ended up being much better than my career, but it's still disappointing to realize that right choices at key times could have made me a lot more successful.

If only we really did get warnings ... or even signals.

Dean Smith was a great coach and an even better man

When an 83-year-old man dies, it can be either sad or a blessing.

When former North Carolina basketball coach Dean Smith died, it was a bit of both. For the last few years, Smith had been in decline from what his family described as a memory-related condition. They didn't say Alzheimer's, but I have come to see from my own experiences that there certainly are other diseases every bit as heartbreaking.

For 36 years, from 1962-97, Smith was Atlantic Coast Conference basketball to much of the nation. His team went to 11 NCAA Final Fours and won two championships. Fully 96 percent of his players earned their degrees, with some of them -- including Michael Jordan -- coming back in the summers to complete their final credits.

Dean Smith

Smith earned the highest distinction of all when you realize that the NCAA changed the rules of the game because of something he developed.

For many years, weak teams had used the stall to give them a chance to compete with better ones. But Smith's Four Corners offense was used late in games to make it even more difficult for lesser teams to compete with his Tar Heels.

The NCAA responded by going to a 35-second shot clock to keep teams from holding onto the ball.

As good a coach as he was, Smith may have been an even better man.

When he recruited Charlie Scott in 1967, Scott was the first African-American to receive an athletic scholarship at UNC. Smith also integrated restaurants and a Chapel Hill neighborhood. He was a liberal in a conservative state and spoke out for a nuclear freeze in the 1980s.

He was also a man who knew his limitations. North Carolina Democrats tried to recruit him to run against Senator Jesse Helms, a race Smith might have won, but he knew he was a better coach than he would have been a senator and turned them down.

He was a coach who truly cared about the young men who played for him, and most of them stayed in touch with him long after leaving Chapel Hill.

His most famous player was Michael Jordan, who played for him for three years from 1981-84. Jordan issued a statement about Smith Sunday.

"Other than my parents, no one had a bigger influence on my life than Coach Smith. He was more than a coach -- he was my mentor, my teacher, my second father. Coach was always there for me whenever I needed him and I loved him for it. In teaching me the game of basketball, he taught me about life. My heart goes out to Linnea and their kids. We've lost a great man who had an incredible impact on his players, his staff and the entire UNC family."

During the 18 years I spent as a sportswriter, I covered some great games involving the Tar Heels. One game at Carmichael Coliseum in 1983 between No. 1-ranked Virginia and No. 2-ranked Carolina was truly amazing. With a little more than seven minutes left, the Cavaliers had a 62-47 lead. The Tar Heels won, 63-62, with Jordan scoring the last basket on a breakaway dunk.

A year later, at the NCAA East Regionals in Atlanta, the team Smith considered the best of his 36 Carolina squads suffered a 72-68 upset at the hands of Indiana. Ironically, ACC rival Virginia beat Indiana in the next round to advance to the Final Four.

But where Smith impressed me the most of all was two years later in Ogden, Utah. It was the NCAA West Regional. It was four years since the Tar Heels had won the championship and four years since they had been to the Final Four. The national media was making a big deal out of the fact that this was the first of Smith's senior classes that had not been to a Final Four.

Carolina beat Utah in the first round, and the next day the four winners had a press conference. I asked Smith's seniors if they had been affected by the talk. Before they could answer, Smith intervened.

"That's not a fair question," he said. "How many other teams here have been in the last four years?"

My question never got answered.

The next day, Carolina crushed Alabama-Birmingham, 77-59, and when the press conference was over, Dean Smith came looking for me.

"I owe you an apology," he said to me.

I shook my head. "Coach, you don't owe me anything."

"There was nothing at all wrong with your question yesterday," he said. "It's just that I'm trying to do whatever I can to keep the pressure off my players."

Dean E. Smith Center

I told him I understood and I thanked him.

There was only one more time my path crossed Coach Smith's. In February 1989 I was covering Nevada-Reno and we came all the way across the country for a game with UNC.

It wasn't a great game. The Heels easily outclassed the Wolf Pack, but the thrill of it was seeing a game in the newest college basketball palace.

The Dean E. Smith Center.

Rest in peace, Coach Smith. You've earned it.

The real secret behind the naming of the Super Bowl

"Yesterday, when I was young(er) ..."

In January 1987, early in the two years I lived in Colorado and was sports editor of the Greeley Tribune, I was looking for a different sort of column about the Super Bowl.

This was what I found:

***

Exactly how did the Super Bowl get its name?

If you've read the official National Football League handout, there's some mumbo jumbo about Pete Rozelle walking in the desert one day and finding a burning bush. What he stopped to check out the situation, he heard a deep voice.

The Lord? It's possible, but more likely it was Charlton Heston.

"Call it the Super Bowl," the voice reportedly said.

"Yes, boss," Rozelle reportedly replied.

The rest, as the NFL would have us believe it, was history.

Being a dedicated investigative reporter as well as a sportswriter, I decided that this was probably not true. Since I had a little extra time this week, I figured I would look into it.

One phone call put me in touch with Marvin Potsterton, who worked for Rozelle was a public relations assistant in the mid-1960s.

"How did you get this number?" he asked.

I declined to answer. We dedicated investigative reporters never reveal our sources.

Sometimes just upgrading isn't really worth the effort, expense

Before I start this topic, I have to say something that will disqualify me with some readers. I'm 64 years old. And while I didn't go to school in a covered wagon, I'm still a geezer when it comes to the new technology.

That said, I got my first cell phone in 1995 and have had one ever since, with a hiatus of about 10 months three years ago. I stopped my 17-year association with companies that eventually wound up being part of Verizon, because a) I was retired, b) I didn't really need a cell phone, and c) Our house is sort of a dead spot for reception.

I didn't miss it at all, at least until I had to go to the airport in March 2013 two years ago to pick up my daughter and my year-old grandson. We missed connections, and my lack of a phone meant it took us about 90 minutes to find each other.

So I jumped back into cell phone ownership with a different company. And for the first time since the introduction in 2007, I got an iPhone.

I haven't been a big Apple guy. I've never used Macs except once through work. Most of my connections with the company have come through iPods, and even then I was resistant at the start.

The first MP3 player I had was Microsoft's failed Zune.

But I've been using iPods for a long time, for music, audio books and even an occasional movie. I have an iPod Classic and have about 130 gigabytes worth of music and audiobooks on it. I had to get a new one a year or so ago after walking into the Caribbean Sea with the old one in the pocket of my bathing suit.

Memories still abound from the last year I lived in Ohio

There are years from my childhood I hardly remember at all.

Then there's one I remember quite well. It was 1962, I was 12 years old and it was the last year before we left Ohio and moved to Virginia.

If there's one thing some people have and others don't, it's a sense of being from somewhere. I have a cousin who has lived his entire life -- nearly 63 years of it -- in the Columbus, Ohio, area. Then there's me. Starting with Ohio, I've lived in nine different states and one foreign country. There are three places I've spent at least 10 years -- Ohio, Virginia and California.

This was home in 1962.

It isn't always a question of how long. Sometimes years matter more at different times. I lived in Ohio for just 10 years, but they were 10 of the first 13 years of my life.

I lived in Los Angeles for 20 years, but they were from age 40 to 60. I think Ohio had a lot more effect on the type of person I became than anything in California.

In 1962 we were living in the house in the picture. My bedroom was upstairs at the left end at the back of the house.

The trees were a lot smaller then -- in fact, they had just been planted. We had been living in Huber Heights -- just north of Dayton -- since the summer of 1957. It was a nicer Levittown, a nice community where WWII and Korean War veterans were able to purchase homes and raise their families in America's largest community of all-brick homes.

I've written about Huber Heights before, and that's not the point of this piece. We moved into this house just before the end of 1961. My mother had her fifth child in October and seven people just wouldn't fit into the three-bedroom house we had been occupying.

The new house was 650 square feet bigger than the old one. My Dad was 36 and he must have been proud he was doing well enough to put his family into a home as beautiful as this.

It was the year John Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth, the year after the nearby Cincinnati Reds had been to the World Series and lost.

In March, southwestern Ohio became the capital of college basketball. The University of Cincinnati won the NCAA championship by beating Ohio State. We lived about halfway between the two schools, an hour or so from each.

But even better to us, the University of Dayton capped off a 23-6 season by beating St. John's at Madison Square Garden and winning the National Invitation Tournament.

That was the year I really started loving basketball. I had played youth ball in fifth grade and shown absolutely no skill at all. I tried again late in 1962 in eighth grade and had pretty good dribbling, passing and defensive skills. But I played five or six games before we left for Virginia and for some reason, I never even attempted to shoot the ball.

It was a strange year. A local bully had singled me out for most of the last four years, and I had done a pretty good job of avoiding him. But walking home from school one day that fall, I turned a corner and found him standing there with one of his minions. He could have given me plenty of trouble by himself, but he had his buddy hold my arms behind my back while he punched me in the stomach a couple of times.

I was just 12 years old at the start of eighth grade and small for my age. I seem to recall that puberty came late for me, and I had the misfortune to run afoul of another bully that fall.  He was the biggest kid in school, 6-foot-3 in the eighth grade, and he wanted to take my place at the ping pong table. I told him no way and yanked the paddle back from him.

He told me I would be sorry. "I'm going to kill you," he said.

All of a sudden, moving to Virginia made sense.

But the last memory I have is of two milestones in television history that occurred within a few weeks of each other. One comes to mind because Donna Douglas just died. She didn't have a huge career as an actress, but she did play Elly May for nine seasons on "The Beverly Hillbillies."



That first episode showed us that we weren't going to see great comedy, but instead a show that was far more risque than anything previously on network television. We saw the voluptuous Elly May popping the buttons on her shirt, just the beginning of nine years of innuendo.

Four weeks later, President Kennedy spoke to the nation about Soviet missiles in Cuba. My parents both worked at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, which would have been a prime target. We had canned goods in the trunk of our car in case we had to evacuate.

Of course we didn't have to go, but I remember that fall so well, and as I age, it's nice to remember anything that far back.

With time raging along, a warning to get serious about health

Another year ...

If there is one thing certain about getting older, it's that nothing is certain. I turned 65 earlier this month, an age about which there is really no doubt. People can tell you 60 is the new 40 or other such platitudes, but 65 is one of those numbers that doesn't bend.

When you're 65, you're eligible for Medicare and just about every senior discount there is. Of course along with that, you are definitely a Senior Citizen.

Not that there's anything wrong with that.

It's the stuff that comes along with it that kills you. Stephen King's short story, "My Pretty Pony," has a grandfather on his deathbed telling his grandson about the flexibility of time.

When you're 7 years old, a summer can last forever. When you're 70, years seem to pass almost overnight.

Time goes from slowly meandering river when you're young to raging rapids when you're older.

This past weekend Nicole and I went to Jamaica for the second time in 13 months. Last year our granddaughter Madison was 5 and our grandson Lexington was 2.

Maddie, 6, with her cousin

This time they were 6 and 3, which if you think about it makes the last year 17 percent of Maddie's life and 33 percent of Lex's. Of course there is now a third one. Albanie Yvonne is two months old today, so the next year will be incredibly long for her -- nearly 100 percent of her life to date.

And from today till Dec. 31, 2015, God willing and the creek don't rise, will be roughly 1 1/2 percent of my life.

The days they pass ...

Of course, some days pass slower than others. Days of difficulties, of problems that seem insoluble, seem to last longer, and with Nicole diagnosed with truly serious medical problems, 2015 could turn out to be a very long year.

Lex, 3, and Albanie

I suppose it all comes down to attitude. The old "when life hands you lemons, make lemonade" saying certainly applies here. My only goal now is to make the most of whatever time we have left together. Nicole has been having physical problems in addition to her serious one, and starting tomorrow, she and I will both start a serious regimen of diet and exercise. We'll eat healthy and do some sort of workout every day.

I'm hopeful it means 2015 can be a better year for both of us.

It's sort of a last chance.

Time doesn't go on forever, at least not for individuals.

Wonderful memories live on even if they won't be remembered

Think about the very best memories of your life and the odds are that they will include early days with the person you wound up loving the most of all.

1992

I have wonderful memories from 1970 of the first serious girlfriend I ever had, and truly special ones from 1974 with the woman who became my first wife.

But the good times from 1970 didn't survive to the end of the year, and the first marriage was effectively over by the end of the decade.

The memories are still in there somewhere, although they have been tangled up with ones far less pleasant. There are other good ones from the '80s, although that may have been the most confusing of all decades to me. I lived in six different states between the beginning of 1980 and the end of 1989.

Everything changed for the better in September 1992 when I met Nicole. She was the smartest person I had ever met, although I do have one male friend who would disagree. She was a lovely woman, a wonderful mother of two and a world-renowned scientist in her field.

She never bragged about it, but sometimes something would slip through. She would show me something that looked totally incomprehensible to me and tell me that aside from her, only one or two people in the world understood it.

Fifty-one days after we met, we married. Everyone who knows me knows that number, but one you may not know is 8,037, as in today was the 8,037th day of our marriage.

It wasn't one of the better ones. For the last few months, Nicole has been undergoing medical tests to find out what's wrong. Today the neurologist confirmed what we had first heard a month or so ago. The love of my life, the smartest woman I have ever known, will slowly be losing her intellect and her memory and slipping into dementia.

She essentially has Lewy Body Dementia, also known as Dementia with Lewy Bodies. It shares symptoms with Alzheimer's, although LBD has some symptoms from Parkinson's, some hallucinations and some problems with REM sleep.

If there is one thing you cannot get in a situation like this, it's specific information. In fact, other than a brain biopsy -- which no one does -- we'll never know for sure if this is an exact diagnosis. We just know what will almost certainly happen.

It will be heartbreaking, although I will do everything in my power to make things more comfortable for her.

It isn't, as some people might say, the least I can do.

Sadly, it's the most I can do.