Is the air up there thinner or am I just a bumbling buccaneer?

I write about sports at all levels and have done so forever. I‘m what’s called a real professional, maybe even consummate although that sounds sort of sexual. My instincts are usually on the money, like last Sunday after the running of the Classic Catering 5K I insinuated myself into a group of very tall women, all seemingly related across a couple of generations, and threw out the word basketball.

There was Samantha Kopp, 18, a 6-foot-3 player on the Iona roster. I had written New Bipolar in my notes but finally discerned it said Near Buffalo. Samantha scored 2,400 points and had 2,000 rebounds in her four years of high school. Laura Kopp, Samantha’s mother, played at Penn State, class of 1987. Debbie Connelly played for Saint Bonaventure, class of 1989, and Jill Haskill played for Houghton College. Another daughter who refused to get out of a bed she didn’t fit into is a junior at Temple. Seventeen members of the clan were vacationing locally for an entire week. Pirate Woody aka Captain Woodcock entered my interview - I’m often pushed aside or just ignored - just for an instant and asked the women if they were part of an Amazon tribe. I told them Woody’s profession was firing cannons and banging home boardwalk nails; I don’t get near cannons and don’t carry a hammer on the boardwalk. Speaking of stumbling, Woody shouldn’t get near tall women for interviews.

Default fitness - I am the closest to approximating fitness in mid-August; it’s like a biologically ingrained thing having something to do with football camp. I come from the day of heavy hanging practice uniforms left to drip dry in an open air funky cabin. I’m from an era when water was a weakness and contact was punishment, not running; no one cared if you could run long, only that you could get off the line quickly and explode your viciousness into another human being. Cross country people were oddities; they ran long distances because they were too skinny to be linebackers. Now everyone wants to run marathons and do triathlons and we diehard linebackers just want to forearm them to the ground. Soccer was big where I came from as Walter Bahr coached Frankford High School and Temple and played on a World Cup team in 1950, and his two sons Chris and Matt played in the NFL and earned Super Bowl rings and son Casey was on the U.S. Olympic team.. Every athlete could kick a fat football over a garage roof, but no one aspired to be a kicker, let alone soccer style. I played golf on a country club course because no one told me I couldn’t. The sport didn’t send me but I did enjoy using inappropriate language on a swing and a miss and playing miniature golf without a club.

Youth football - I can tell you that many to most stars of down low youth weight class football go on to fizzle as high school players. If there is a link it is missing, and that’s a joke in case you don’t get it. What’s good about youth sports, whether it’s football or soccer, running, swimming, baseball, softball or whatever, is learning how to be part of a team, learning to compete, to take responsibility, to be humble when you’re good and gracious in victory and to be happy when it’s not all about you. If all those traits can be harnessed, and focus and hard work maintained, the athlete grows up to be successful at sports and is better able to negotiate the uncertainties of most non-charmed lives.

Snippets - There are so many good girls’ teams at Cape that pretty good records are sometimes lost on the back pages, like the 2009 volleyball team that finished 10-5. Cape lost seven seniors but moves up players from a 10-5 junior varsity squad. A normal cycle of a sports athlete follows a path like Eddie Brown, a great quarterback at Cape then on to West Chester State where he started for three years and now he is a dad and coaching a Pop Warner team. I was telling a couple of guys the other night what a deadly combination Ed Brown to split end Bill Gibbs was. Recent history to me is 1986, a mere 24 years ago. Ksenia Lyubeznova, 22, who grew up in Saint Petersburg, a quaint Russian city with 4.5 million people, has recently been running in the Seven Sisters series and will attend the University of Maryland in the fall. The writer Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky called Saint Petersburg “the most abstract and international city in the world.” Ksenia must be slightly lost in downtown Dewey, land of concrete thinkers with enough blockheads to build a border wall. Wait, that’s been done before.