I am hoping Bobby can be put back together

There should be a rule that anyone who yells, “Get in the hole!” after a professional golfer tees off on a par five be immediately banished to a miniature golf course and forced to crawl through the windmill obstacle with the blade running. And announcers need to back down from the term “fescue” and call it what it is, tall grass or scrub.

And how many people know that Tiger is a nickname and that the first name of the greatest golfer in the world is Eldrick? Actually the United States Open television coverage in high definition has been a nice diversion from watching the Phillies get beaten up by the American League East and swept by the Blue Jays and Orioles. Those games were simply painful to watch.

WHAT ABOUT BOBBY? - About 15 years ago late at night way past visiting hours I was lying in a hospital bed at Beebe Hospital, a morphine drip in my right arm and fresh staples in my stomach. Bobby Jacobs was sitting on the end of my bed laughing like Dracula’s Renfield. He was dressed in a three-piece suit. I thought I was hallucinating.

Bobby, who always had a deep sense of humor, said, “Dink Peters.” All I could think of as a response was “Look who’s talking.”

“William ‘Dink’ Peters, 6-foot-9, 280 pounds from Potomac, Maryland,” Bobby said.

Bobby Jacobs had gotten by all security and nurses stations by identifying himself as Dr. Jacobs. Once he had me as a captive audience he became “summation man” giving me the strengths of 42 teams coming to the Slam Dunk tournament that year. The latest Bobby photo and news story of his cyber stalking with hard copy letters as his weapon where he looks mentally ill with hippie hair and 70 extra pounds reminds me of one of Bobby’s halftime acts, a guy named “The Amazing Christopher.”

Christopher performed as all the members of the Village People - five full-size moving dummies affixed to parallel bars - and Christopher was number six. Everyone rocked to “YMCA” and “Macho Man.”

I know Bobby is in there and I know he is forever wounded and hurt by what he sees as friends who turned on him. “Dishing the dirt” anonymously without corroboration, be it salacious, fictitious, scurrilous or scandalous is just so wrong, but the Amazing Bobby is controlling all the personalities we see.

“Stick by your friends when they go off the rails,” my grandmother told me. “And never take perverse delight when they unravel like a handmade eight dollar Haitian hardball.”
I am hoping Bobby can be put back together again.

BIG TIMING MAN - The last few years of the Slam Dunk tournament Bobby Jacobs used to ask me, “Fredman, why don’t people like me? Look at the national tournament I brought to Delaware and the list of NBA players.”

I always told Bobby, “You can’t big time people in a small state. Everything is on a handshake level. Better than no one, good as anyone is the way it works in Delaware.”

Any major player in Delaware who is full of themselves is just that because the rest of us aren’t playing gas station air hose to the success of others. Bobby got caught up in the hype of his own creation and the devil is in the details like finances, so the “baby blowed up” and later the Bay Ball tournament, a cheap imitation, did the same.

POWER CHAIR - I have gone from Philadelphia All-City power forward to power chair in a mere 45 years. I don’t own no freaking two grand and rated at 500 pounds powerlift recliner, but I did test drive one because of upcoming hip surgery. The saleswoman shook her head like “nice fit.”

I am a quality furniture type of guy, which means Mitchell’s in Laurel. I will rip the lever off some La-Z-Boy quicker than you can say, “Does this lever get pushed or pulled?” And so I sat in a rich leather monster recliner fit for a guy of my stature, fit for a guy who will grant audiences, not small talk with plebeian guests. My wife, whom I caught 40 years ago when I could still dunk, looked down at me and said, “That chair seems more to fit your head.” There is nothing more hideous than some size eight big-headed former stud athlete hobbled inside a cheap chair that wraps around him like bacon on a wiener dog.

SNIPPETS - Tyler Townsend, drafted No. 85 by the Orioles, has not signed a contract as negotiations are continuing. Casey Cooper, a Sussex Tech graduate now working toward a master’s degreee in athletic training at Shenandoah, is Tyler’s first cousin and a huge Orioles fan. Casey’s dream is to sit in the dugout as the trainer for the O’s and talk to Tyler in between home runs.

The Lewes 10-year-old all-stars play a home game at 8 p.m. Tuesday, July 23. Please send all Little League all-star information of schedules and results to
davefredman@comcast.net.

Fight the power!