MARSH MONSTER HIGH - Stand on the new green turf field with your foot on a soccer ball and as you look east up on the rise there she sits, Marsh Monster High School. The new Cape high dwarfs the landscape like an art one project out of perspective. What a hulking high school we are building, and with all that steel there will be no more early dismissals for weather including hurricanes.
Forget the Little Big House - you know the Bud Dome is coming down and I refer to the pole barn weight room and the ag trailer and perhaps greenhouse, as well making up a landscape I like to call country ghetto. Let’s not forget Mold Spore Row - the trailers occupying the outback behind the Little Big House.
You know your life is out of control and you are on the heap when your day pass to the wellness center takes you through the door of an old trailer.
CRIMINALLY INCLINED - I always told my students that most criminals in jail did not wake up in the morning and ask themselves, “So what should old criminal boy get into today?”
No, it’s more about bad decision-making or loss of control which is made easier under the influence of drugs or alcohol. I only say this because each year at tax time I am impressed and perplexed by my own financial liability to the government and I think, “Would I take a chance at a major score like cutting someone’s lawn in Wolfe Pointe for a million dollars cash over the summer and not declare it?”
Yes I would - I’d be a cheating somebody - you can put that in the piggy bank under your table.
And you’ll find no more an example of wasteful spending than signing an NFL defensive back to a seven-year, $70 million contract. Do you known who pays for all that? You do, with your NFL Sunday ticket and support of countless cable talk shows and purchasing of memorabilia and paying attention to all the disordered savants who can talk you through the first seven rounds of the upcoming draft while addressing each team’s needs.
And do you know how many government jets will do flyovers over the NFL season? More sorties over stadiums than over Iraq on Sunday. If we could declare one flyover in our home stadium as a deduction we’d have no tax liability at all.
KIDS AND COACHES - One of my many aliases only available to the public for the $25 criminal background fee is ‘Big Loser Boy’ as in, “Here stands Big Loser Boy on the clumpy sidelines of Bennett High School on a Monday afternoon having traveled 60 miles to watch a girls lacrosse scrimmage.”
Speaking of Easter, coaches and athletes are my peeps, they are the lifeblood of the community, the arena of sports, where old meets new. You can tell the old - they’re the ones who are stationary.
GENETICS - Talent is passed through the genes from musical and math aptitudes to running, swimming and sports of collision. Even voices are eerily similar as my wife just talked to one of her twin sons on the house phone and thought it was me. “I thought you were your father.” Sometimes friends think I’m one of my sons. “Zup, man?” “Zup, yo?” “Seriously zup?”
Seriously, zup? How can zup be serious? This can go on endlessly until I tell them, “This is Fredman,” and then they laugh, “Zup Fredman?”
GOOD OLD MR. WILSON - Cedric Wilson of the Pittsburgh Steelers is a Pro Bowl wide receiver on the NFL’s domestic batterers all-star team. Last week he walked into a bar, tapped his estranged girlfriend and mother of his 1-year-old daughter on the shoulder, and when she turned around he punched her in the face leaving a welt mark on her cheek.
Just last January the woman named Lindsay Paulat, held police at bay for 12 hours and Wilson is accused of calling her cell phone and suggesting she commit suicide. That is so rude! Can this guy please be drum rolled out of the league?
SNIPPETS - Terrelle Pryor, a quarterback and two-time high school Pennsylvania Player of the Year, called a press conference, slipped on a ball cap with a large letter O and announced to a room filled with media “I have made my decision. I will attend the University of Ohio State.” Now that’s great, but it’s Ohio State University, not the University of Ohio State.
There are 30 teams in the Arena 2 football league including the Scranton Pioneers. The league website is at af2.com. Drew Weatherly, former Sussex Central and University of Maryland wide receiver, is listed on the roster of the Scranton Pioneers. The Pioneers open the season Friday, March 28, at the Quad City SteamWheelers. Quad City is somewhere in the middle of nowhere centered between Chicago, Madison, St. Louis and Kansas City.
Spring sports at the beach is time to invest in a lightweight windbreaker that actually breaks the wind and doesn’t collect dog hair. The layered approach nylon over felt is the way to go.
After the final horn of the Woodbridge loss to Newark at the Bob Carpenter Center, the Blue Raiders’ Marcus Nock, a muscular forward who looks like a prizefighter, sprinted across the court so he could be first in the post-game handshake line. I was surprised and baffled and found that unnoticed display of sportsmanship inspiring. I emailed football coach John Parker and asked him, “What kind of person is Marcus Nock?”
“Great kid,” Parker wrote, but I think I already knew that. Way to go Geraldine, his mother!
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Sports Editor Emeritus
Email Fredman at fredman@capegazette.com
