Sports/Violence: It's a Small World After All

Woke up this morning and a story on the front page of the Los Angeles Times alluded to a 'killing field' in Egypt. The lead paragraph stated: "An Egyptian soccer match between two long-time rivals descended into a violent echo of the bloddiest days of last year's revolution as hooligans supporting the winning team stormed the field. attacking opposing players and fans in clashes that reportedly killed at least 73 people."

One player, interviewed by phone by a TV channel, said: "To hell with football if the situation is like this....Are people's lives that cheap?"

Before we in the United States jump to the conclusion that this could only happen in turmoil-filled North Africa, think again. In the past two years sports fan violence has spanned the globe, including the United States of America.


NORTH AMERICA

In my home town, Los Angeles, on March 31, 2011, San Francisco Giants fan Bryan Stow was brutally beaten by a couple of Los Angeles Dodgers fans. Stow was in a coma, and subsequently improved, but now requires six-days-a-week rehabilitation and around-the-clock care. 

EUROPE

On June 6, 2010, the final game of the Greek Basket League finals between ancient rivals Olympiacos and Panathinaikos degenerated when hometown Olympiacos fans, incensed at perceived poor officiating in some of the previous playoff ames, rioted, forcing police to use tear gas, and award the game to Panathinaikos. The next time the two teams faced each other, on January 12, 2011, Olympiacos won, and Panathinaikos fans fired incendiaries.

SOUTH AMERICA

In South America, in June 2011, major violence broke out  involving supporters of historic Argentine footbal club River Plate during and after their prootion/relegation playoff with Belgano. The first leg on June 22 in Cordoba wa delayed for 20 minutes after River Plate hooligans tore through a fence and stormed the field to verbally and physically attack River players. The second leg, on June 26 at El Monumental in Buenos Aires, had what was  reported to be the largest security presence for any match in the country's history, with over 2,200 police called in. However, it wasn't enough  to keep hooligans, angered at what became the club's first relegation from the top flight in their history, from rushing the field. Violence quickly spread with fires set in the stadium and battles erupting between hooligans and police, and looting in nearby areas. At least 35 police and 55 civilians were reported to have been injured.

ASIA

On August 18, 2011, another Chinese team, the  Bayi Rockets of the Chinese Basketball Association, was involved in a major scuffle with the touring Georgetown University men's team. After three quarters of highly physical play from both sides, the game turned ugly with the teams tied at 64 with 9:32 remaining in the final quarter. At that point, both benches emptied and the teams began fighting one another. One Georgetown player had a chair thrown at him by an unidentified individual, with reports differing on whether he was hit. Another Georgetown player who had been struck during the brawl picked up a chair in apparent self-defense. As the brawl progressed, some fans joined in the action, with one wielding a stanchion. Hoyas coach John Thompson III pulled his team from the court; the team had to dodge water bottles and other objects thrown by fans, and one Georgetown fan was reportedly knocked to the ground by a thrown bottle.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LhaWtnUdkT4


AUSTRALIA

And in the land down under, in 2009, violence erupted at the Australian Open tennis championships when dozens fought after the big-screen viewing of the third-round match between the Serbian defending champion Novak Djokovic and Amir Delic, who plays for the United States but was born in Bosnia. Djokovic lost a set for the first time in the tournament and had to fend off two more set points in the fourth set befor beting Delic. But moments after the pair had embraced at the net and waved to all parts of the Rod Laver Arena, water bottles and plastic chairs were hurled between the Bosnian and Serbian fans who had been watching the match in a garden adjacent to the arena. Two men were arrested and another 30 were ejected after they began trading punches and kicks. One Bosnian woman was knoclkd out after being hit on the head by a chair.

Engaging the past and uncovering the present via LinkedIn

Early this morning, I logged into my LinkedIn account to find an invitation to be connected from a stranger from Pakistan.

For now, my rule is not to accept an invitation from a person I haven't done business with or who, logic suggests, I am highly unlikely to ever do business with in the future. I then saw a photo pop up on my screen of 'People You May Know", and it brought back a flood of positive memories I had at my very first corporate job after grad school. It got me thinking about some of the people at that company, and what had become of them. I typed the letters G, I, L....and upon fully spelling his first and last name learned he was no longer a salesman but now a systems engineer at Microsoft. Then I thought of another colleague, Charles Fedorko. He was a satellite network manager from the east coast who had a certain charm and sparkle about him. He ended up courting and marrying a woman at the company who was a former broadcast TV journalist in Los Angeles who had shifted careers to come to Hughes Communications. I wondered what had become of Charlie. I typed out C-H-A-R-L-I-E-F-E-D-O-R-K-O. A couple of  profiles came up, but none of them were the Charlie Fedorko I knew. The ones that came up were far too young in age. So I typed C-H-A-R-L-E-S-F-E-D-O-R-K-O. Again, a couple of profiles came up, but they weren't the Charles Fedorko I had worked with in El Segundo. I opened up another browser on my laptop and went to trusted Google to type in 'Charles Fedorko, Los Angeles'. Up popped a link to an L.A. Times article written on July 21, 1994.

The headline read: 'Golden State Freeway Tragedies Investigated : Truck: Why pipes fell off the trailer still isn't known. Victim was from Santa Clarita area.'

Oh, no, I thought. My god, no.

Then the next two paragraphs verified what I didn't want to be true.

"Charles Fedorko left work a little early Tuesday afternoon to get home to his teen-age son, who he had been raising on his own for the last two years. Through no fault of his own, Fedorko's anxiousness to get home cost him his life. Fedorko, 46, was traveling north on the Golden State Freeway near its intersection with the Foothill and Antelope Valley freeways at about 4:15 p.m. At the exact moment he drove under an entrance ramp, a load of 30-foot iron pipes, each weighing about a ton, fell from a big-rig truck on the ramp, according to police."

I continued to read about what happened that day, but also about Charlie's life.

Fedorko lived in the Stevenson Ranch area with his 14-year-old son, David. He was vice president and general manager for the western region of Keystone Communications, a Salt Lake City-based company providing satellite uplinks for television broadcasters, with an L.A. office on Sunset Boulevard. Fedorko had formerly been a radio broadcaster, according to a statement released by Keystone, before moving on to television positions. He had worked as a satellite system engineer for NBC and a satellite operations manager for Hughes Communications.

"He was a very elegant, successful man," said Priscilla Wright, who used to baby-sit David Fedorko while his father was traveling for business.

Fedorko loved airplanes, according to friends, and he collected gauges and other aviation equipment.

"The officer at the scene said he at first thought he was a pilot because of all the equipment in his car," said Rob Schwenker, a classmate of Fedorko's son.

I remember Charlie because he was so versatile and friendly. He had a great sense of humor, was outgoing. Always issuing a hello followed by an arm around your shoulder.

He courted a former broadcast TV journalist who had tired of that business and had joined Hughes Communications. Charlie was smitten, and charmed her quickly, and they were soon after married. 

Charlie had said he thought this time, he'd get marriage right. He had been married before, had a couple of kids.

According to the article, Charlie was raising his 14-year-old son David alone for two years. At the end of the article, the reporter wrote that David's mother would be coming from Florda to see her son.

Why did the marriage dissolve?

What has happened to Charlie's son since that dreaded day in 1994?

And what about the man, Harold Haines, of Aumsville, Ore., who, back in 1994, was 56 years old, driving the truck that carried those lethal pipes? Did the CHP end up charging him or determining it was an accident that could not be prevented?

I started my early morning logging in to LinkedIn to get focused on business-related matters, only to allow my non-business-related curiosity steer me to an entirely different place.

LinkedIn isn't just a tool for business networking. For those of us with a curiosity that won't quit, LinkedIn can help you re-discover people you once worked with...and a whole lot more. 

Say 'When'

Many of us have memories being kids seated at a snack table in kindergarten and a teacher, filling apple juice into each of our dixie cups, provided us the power to say 'when'. 
I posit many  -- not all of us -- because some of us simply have poor memories...and worse. Consider Arizona Congresswoman Gabby Giffords, recovering from a gunshot wound to the head, and Tennessee Volunteers womens basketball coach Pat Summitt, who last year was diagnosed with having symptoms of dementia.

In Gabby Giffords case, she concluded yesterday that she needed more time to focus on her recovery, and that her constituents would be best served if she resigned from her job as Congresswoman. In Summitt's case, in 2011, she went public with her dementia diagnosis and decided to continue serving as head womens basketball coach at the University of Tennessee.

Being an effective representative in Congress takes considerable intellect and endurance. I support Giffords decision to resign her position and focus on her recovery. Being an effective basketball coach at the NCAA Division I level also takes considrable intellect and endurance. Had Pat Summitt decided to retire, I would have supported her decision. But Summitt decided that the final buzzer had not sounded for her. 

Some have argued that Pat Summitt should not be a head basketball coach -- that those who are head of anything need to be at the top of their game. Still, there are others that argue that the players on Summitt's team might be better people for learning about empathy and patience -- that a leader can still be effective at leading despite being be fallable and vulnerable, especially when supported by staff who can correct their misactions.

What fascinates me in both the cases of Giffords and Summitt, is that there were no 'powers that be' that forced them out. Gifford and Summitt each demonstrated that when you have accomplished much in the past, in some cases in our society, you earn the right to control your own destiny, health issue or not.

Scary? Inspiring? Perhaps both.

Lamar Odom Returns to a Standing Ovation at Staples

What you see as a child affects your perceptions as a man.

The continuity of the Lakers rubbed off on me as a kid. Growing up in Los Angeles in the late 1960s and early 1970s, my heroes – year after year – were Gail Goodrich, Jerry West, Jimmy McMillian, Happy Hairston, and Wilt Chamberlain. They competed to their utmost abilities, and whether they won or lost, I watched them play their hearts out in playoff games against the Knicks, Celtics, and Bucks. Eventually they attained the ultimate prize – world champions in 1972.

Fast-forward to just before the start of the NBA season in December. Lamar Odom -- after contributing to Lakers team championship rings in 2009 and 2010 and being voted the best sixth man of the NBA during the season that the Lakers would lose in the playoffs to the Dallas Mavericks -- learned from the media that the Lakers were trying to trade him to obtain star point guard Chris Paul. The trade didn't go through, but Odom expressed bewilderment that he was on the chopping block and not informed by Lakers of the team’s intentions. Odom subsequently asked for a trade and soon thereafter the Lakers sent Odom to Dallas. 

This evening, Odom returned to Los Angeles as a Maverick to play against the Lakers. In a Los Angeles Times interview this morning, Odom, who is a power forward with a soft side to him, lamented, “The day you get traded, you walk into the team’s office and you see people walking around and they’re acting like your name is Lazarus instead of Lamar. You’re looking to get an insight into somebody and they’re eating food and stuffing their mouth and saying hello and goodbye at the same time. They won’t even look you in your eye. There was a lot of things that some people in business would consider cowardly.”

Lakers Center Pao Gasol, who himself was to be sent to Houston as part of the complex deal to get Paul, until NBA Commissioner David Stern nixed the deal,  lauded Odom: “(Lamar) is an unselfish, versatile guy that sacrifices himself for the benefit of the team always, and that’s the kind of player you like to have on your side.”

Yes, sometimes difficult decisions are brought on by tough economic times or business dynamics that require changes be made within an organization. But there are ways to ease the blows and make an individual feel that they were, and always will be, appreciated. While many will continue to argue if trading Lamar Odom helps or hinders the Los Angeles Lakers, few can argue that the way Odom was treated by the Lakers when they attempted to trade him for Chris Paul lacked dignity and respect for an athlete who was committed to the city in which he performed well.

When Odom was sent to Dallas, former Lakers coach Phil Jackson called Odom to say, “Get yourself together and defend your name.” 

Sputtering in his first season with the Mavericks, Odom is trying to heed Jackson’s advice. 

But it's difficult for Odom. Poking at his food while talking with the Los Angeles Times reporter as part of a breakfast interview, Odom showed an uneasiness with how he was treated by the Lakers management.

Richard Funess, a PR executive I once worked for when he headed up the Manning, Selvage & Lee office in Los Angeles, now a senior executive at Finn Partners,  heeds the words of Maya Angelou.  “I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel."

Clearly, the Lakers made Odom feel like dog excrement. 

While Lamar Odom makes millions of dollars and most American workers will never make a six-figure annual salary, I still feel for the individual – no matter the amount of their paycheck – who gives their all and is treated, in the end, like garbage.

Fortunately, for Odom, when he entered tonight's game between the Mavericks and the Lakers at Staples Center, he received a standing ovation from fans, while the television cameras fixed upon an applauding Lakers General Manager Mitch Kupchak, who was responsible for the Odom trade.

The Lakers’ Odom transaction was not the first time a loyal team member was shafted by a professional sports organization. In 1977, Ross Porter began his first of 28 seasons broadcasting for the Los Angeles Dodgers. On June 3, 1989, Porter set a record when he broadcast 22 straight innings without any replacement in a Dodger game against the Houston Astros at the Astrodome. The broadcast was heard on KABC Radio and was simulcast through KTTV. Following the 2004 season, after denying Porter a contract extension, the Dodgers hired former Yankee announcer Charley Steiner. Vin Scully – Porter’s longtime broadcast partner – did not resign in protest. But four months after Porter’s final inning with the Dodgers, Porter was inducted into the Southern California Sports Broadcasters Hall of Fame, and at the luncheon honoring him, Scully bowed his head slightly, and said, “Ross, I have not had this feeling since Jerry (Doggett) left us in 1997.”

Doggett died in 1997, and subsequently the Dodgers under the new owner at the time in 2004 -- the now infamous Frank McCord -- killed Ross Porter’s distinguished career by not renewing his contract. 

Could Vin Scully have saved his broadcast partner Ross Porter? Similarly, could the superstar that makes the Los Angeles Lakers franchise, Kobe Bryant, have stopped Lamar Odom from being traded? What did Scully and Bryant know about Porter and Odom, respectively, and when did they know it? 

Would protesting against how their colleagues were treated really have been the equivalent of occupational suicide? Could either Scully or Bryant – men whose finances are a-ok without either having to make a single more dollar -- have done more to stop their bosses from dismissing a colleague? At what point, when you see something distasteful occur in the workplace, is it imperative to speak up or even quit?

Sub-par

The customer asked the female teen worker behind the counter at Subway, “Can I have a couple of more pickles?”

With a smile, the ‘sandwich artist’, her left hand covered by a plastic bag, grabbed a few more tiny pickle chips and tossed them on the customer’s tuna 6” sub. At the end of the sandwich processing line – at the cashier position – the owner of the store, a shaven-bald, mustached man in his 50s, grimaced, and rung up the order. As the customer took her food to a table to eat, the owner walked to his employee on the sandwich assembly line, winced, and said, perfunctorily, “Don’t give ‘em extra anything.”

Does a little extra of a single sandwich ingredient break the back of a Subway franchise’s business? Or, might it enhance customer satisfaction and boost return visits?

Without that freedom to have a little extra of that sandwich component, competitors like Jersey Mike’s and Quizno’s just might have the edge on Subway. In any case, isn’t it well understood that a business owner should take an employee aside in a private area to provide operational guidance?

With a bitter after-taste in my mouth after witnessing the Subway franchise owner, in front of patrons, teach his worker to scrimp on sandwich ingredients, in walked an obese teen wearing a Carl’s Junior uniform, his headset with microphone draped around his neck. I thought about taking a picture of that via my cell phone and sending it to Subway Corporate, which would relish a real-life photo of an order taker from a fast-food competitor standing in line at Subway.

“Dad don’t; no photo”, my daughter, rightfully advised, “It’s an invasion of privacy and, worse, might get him fired.”

It was time to leave Subway and head west on the I-10 freeway. We had several more hours to drive before returning home, where a warm meal awaited us.

"History will remember..."

This week, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s Prime Minister, bashed Syrian dictator Bashar Assad: “Bashar Assad should see the tragic end that meets leaders who declare war on their people. Oppression does not create order and a future cannot be built on the blood of the innocent. History will remember such leaders as those who fed on blood. And you, Assad, are headed toward opening such a page.”

The violent tactics of Bashar Assad's regime against Syrian civilians -- in order to remain in power -- are indeed ugly. But anyone with an understanding of 20th century history has to find condemnation from the Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan awkward at best.

Yes, Turkey is a predominantly muslim-populated country neighboring Syria and has interest in how the Syrian government treats or mistreats the Syrian population. Still, Turkey's record of denying that a systematic slaughtering by the Turkish government of the Armenian people took place renders its condemnation of Bashar Assad hollow.

"The overwhelming opinion of scholars who study genocide — hundreds of independent scholars, who have no affiliations with governments, and whose work spans many countries and nationalities and the course of decades — is consistent," the International Association of Genocide Scholars stated in a 2005 letter to the Turkish government. "The scholarly evidence reveals the following: On April 24, 1915, under cover of World War I, the Young Turk government of the Ottoman Empire began a systematic genocide of its Armenian citizens — an unarmed Christian minority population. More than a million Armenians were exterminated through direct killing, starvation, torture, and forced death marches. The rest of the Armenian population fled into permanent exile. Thus an ancient civilization was expunged from its homeland of 2,500 years."

"Denial is the final stage of genocide," says Gregory Stanton, president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars. "It is a continuing attempt to destroy the victim group psychologically and culturally, to deny its members even the memory of the murders of their relatives. That is what the Turkish government today is doing to Armenians around the world."

Stanton, a former U.S. State Department official who drafted the United Nations Security Council resolutions that created the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, spoke in 2008 at a United States Capitol ceremony honoring victims of the Armenian genocide — a ceremony held four months after the bill to commemorate the slaughter was shot down. "The U.S. government should not be party to efforts to kill the memory of a historical fact as profound and important as the genocide of the Armenians, which Hitler used as an example in his plan for the Holocaust," Stanton said before an audience that included three survivors of the Armenian genocide and more than 100 representatives and senators.

The Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity issued a letter condemning Armenian genocide denial that was signed by 53 Nobel laureates including Wiesel, the famous Holocaust survivor and political activist. Wiesel has repeatedly called Turkey's 90-year-old campaign to cover up the Armenian genocide a double killing, since it strives to kill the memory of the original atrocities.

The U.S. government has thus far put strategic military interests above its tradition of condemning state-sponsored violence against unarmed civilians -- tolerating the Turkish government's stance . The Southern Poverty Law Center in 2008 provides a cogent analysis of the conundrum: http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-report/browse-all-issues/2008/summer/state-of-denial

The Republic of Turkey's formal stance is that the deaths of  Armenians during the "relocation" or "deporation" cannot aptly be deemed "genocide", a position that has been supported with a plethora of diverging justifications: that the killings were not deliberate or were not governmentally orchestrated, that the killings were justified because Armenians posed a Russian-sympathizing threat^[138] as a cultural group, that Armenians merely starved, or any of various characterizations recalling marauding "Armenian gangs."^{[139][140][141]} Some suggestions seek to invalidate the genocide on semantic or anachronistic grounds (the word "genocide" was not coined until 1943). Turkish World War I casualty figures are often cited to mitigate the effect of the number of Armenian dead.^[142]

According to the retired ambassador of Turkey to Germany and Spain; Volkan Vural, the Turkish state should apologize for what happened to the Armenians during the deportations of 1915 and what happened to the Greeks during Istanbul Pogrom^[143][144] He also states that, "I think that, the Armenian issue can be solved by politicans and not by historians. I don't believe that historical facts about this issue is not revealed. The historical facts are already known. The most important point here is that how this facts will be interpreted and will affect the future."^[143]

The Play's the thing...

This coming Saturday, November 19, my alma mater, UC Berkeley (Cal) plays arch rival Stanford, and once again memories of “The Play”, 29 years ago, are in the news.

It was Nov. 20, 1982. The Big Game, Cal vs. Stanford, was being played that year at Cal's Memorial Stadium in Berkeley, Calif.

It was a quarterback shootout of sorts between Cal sophomore Gale Gilbert and Stanford senior John Elway. When Elway completed a fourth-and-17 to set up a supposedly game-winning field goal and the Cardinal went ahead 20-19, four seconds remained on the clock. The Play was a kickoff return that covered 57 yards, involved an impromptu five laterals, at least a couple of questionable calls (or non-calls) by the referees, and the entire 144-piece Stanford marching band, including an unsuspecting trombonist, who was run over by Cal player Kevin Moan, who scored the winning touchdown. It was the only Cal football game that I would ever attend.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfebpLfAt8g

John Donovan of CNNSI captured “The Play” in his wonderfully written piece November 21, 2002. http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/football/college/news/2002/11/21/the_play/

He weaves insights and commentary on some of the players and coaches of that day, and what they are doing now. As this week we learned of criminal behavior at Penn State University, one paragraph tackled my senses – paragraph 58 of Donovan’s 73 paragraphs.

The paragraph explains what happened to the player who made the fifth and final lateral to Moen. Writes Donovan: “The fourth player, (Mariet) Ford, who made the fifth and final lateral to Moen, is serving 45 years to life at the California State Prison at Solano for the 1997 murders of his 3-year-old son, his wife and the couple's unborn child.”

Fast forward to a March 2011  Sports Illustrated/CBS News investigation on the criminal background of college football players. http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/03/02/earlyshow/main20038160.shtml

Through an exhaustive series of background checks, the probe discovered that seven percent of the 2,837 players on the magazine's 2010 top 25 pre-season football rosters had been in trouble with the law. More than 200 players had either been arrested or formally cited by police. Thirty-nine percent of those who'd been arrested had been charged with serious crimes such as assault and battery, domestic violence, burglary, cocaine possession or DUI.

CBS reporter Armen Keteyian noted: "Another startling number…only two schools in our sample did any kind of regular criminal background check on their recruits."

Richard Lapchick, director of the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sports told CBS News, "I think as a general population, these are going to be stunning statistics to try to absorb, and policy changes will hopefully come about as a result."

Back to Mariet Ford. He had no prior convictions.

A San Francisco Chronicle version of the Ford conviction story focuses on Ford's financial woes, infidelity, and temper as setting the scene for the murders. http://panachereport.com/channels/hip%20hop%20gallery/Murderous1.htm. A blog assembled by investigative journalist Gabriel Baird suggests there is a possibility that someone else -- a drug addict-burglar -- committed the murders.

 http://marietford.blogspot.com/.

It is one thing to ponder if Ford's final lateral was illegal or not in The Play against Stanford 29 years ago; it is another to ponder whether or not he is guilty of murdering his wife and 3-year-old toddler and unborn child, then committing arson to cover up the crime.

In any case, while many Cal football fans will cherish the memory of The Play, it pains me to see what became of Mariet Ford and his family. Whatever the truth may be -- whether Mariet Ford is guilty or not, the ending of the story is so very, very sad.

Contemplating

Pre-Wikipedia, when I was age 6 and had time on my hands -- OK, I admit, when I’d go to the bathroom at my family’s house -- I’d read the World Book Encyclopedia, and went first to the very last page of the book “WXYZ”. I remember seeing a photo of Stephen Zweig, an Austrian writer, who sported a mustache similar to another Austrian who lived during his day and wreaked havoc on the world.  Zweig, a novelist, playwright, journalist, and biographer, at the height of his career in the 1920s and 1930s, was one of the most prolific writers in the world. A Jew by birth who didn’t consider himself a practicing Jew, Zweig nevertheless fled Austria in 1934, following Hitler’s rise to power in Germany. After stints in England and then United States, Zweig ended up in South America, where, in 1942, he and his second wife Charlotte Elisabeth Altmann took their own lives. “He and his wife committed suicide in Brazil because of their depression over world affairs” read perfunctorily one sentence of seven in the World Book Encyclopedia entry
.
Stefan Zweig’s pessimism, for the first two decades of my life, resonated with me as being romantic and pathetic at once,  but fathomable. When I married and had kids, however, I no longer viewed life’s many confounding and deflating moments with dire pessimism; instead, I have viewed life as a book with thousands of pages, containing twists and turns, peaks and valleys, and even full of blank pages that need to be written on the spot.

On-the-spot television spearheaded by Art Linkletter long before reality TV blossomed via MTV’s The Real World and Keeping Up With The Kardashians entertained millions of Americans. From his early days as an announcer on local radio and a roving broadcaster at state fairs, Linkletter showed a talent for ingratiating himself with his subjects and getting them to open up, often with hilarious results. He was particularly adept at putting small children at ease, which he did regularly on a segment of “House Party”, an amusing question-and-answer session that provided the material for his best-selling book “Kids Say the Darndest Things!”

Linkletter was genuinely curious to know what was going on in the heads of the people he interviewed. “You have to listen,” he said. “A lot of guys can talk.”

Linkletter, until he died at age 97 in 2010, was an active optimist, even as he faced multiple tragedies during his life. He and his wife, Lois Foerster,  had five children: Jack, who followed his father into television and died of lymphoma in 2007; Dawn, of Sedona, Ariz.; Robert, who died in a car accident in 1980; Sharon, of Calabasas, Calif.; and Diane, who committed suicide in 1969, an event that spurred her father into becoming a crusader against drug use.

I’ve been thinking about Stephan Zweig and Art Linkletter lately, as several suicides of young people have been in the news in the area where I reside in Southern California.

• 17-year-old Agoura High School student, Dan Behar, sent his classmates a text message that said goodbye and where to find his body, then he drove his car down an embankment in Malibu State Park.
• A few days earlier, Joshua Feinberg, 21, also a former Agoura High student, was found at the bottom of Rindge Dam in Malibu.
• In mid-October, David Barseghian, a 17-year-old senior from Northridge Academy High, died when he jumped from an 18-story building at the Trillium Towers Center in Woodland Hills. The teen was clutching a rosary when he jumped, police said.
• Calabasas High School student Amelia Schiff, 17, took her life the evening of the first day of school.

Everyday life can often be challenging. There clearly is good and evil, and a lot in between. I’m sure there’s a lot of  thinking and emotion propelling one to decide to take their own life. Thinking and emotion I may never be able to fully comprehend. In the simplest terms, however, suicide is a choice of despair over optimism

Zweig ultimately was a pessimist; Linkletter, an optimist.

Who impresses you more: Zweig or Linkletter?

We Could Be Heroes

On this Veteran's Day, we remember those who have fought for our country. I honor my mother's father, Benjamin Diamond, who I didn't have the privilege to meet, as he died several years before I was born. My grandfather received the Silver Star citation March 1, 1920: "Private Diamond distinguished himself by gallantry in action while serving with Medical Department, 320th Machine-Gun Battalion, 82nd Division, American Expeditionary Forces, in action during the Meuse-Argonne Offensive, France, 16 October 1918, in going to the aid of a wounded man during which act he was injured by a bursting shell."

My grandpa was 14 when he emigrated with his family from Odessa, Russia to the United States, and was in his late teens when he served in the U.S. Army during World War I. In a battlefied in France, where chaos reigned, he 'did the right thing', leaving the trenches to venture into the open field, to aid a wounded soldier, and in turn was injured by a bursting shell.

Doing the right thing is heroic when it entails, or possibly entails, great sacrifice. How we act or fail to act under pressure defines our character and how we are remembered.

Something to think about as 'doing the right thing' -- in legal and moral terms -- is the focus of discussion since a Pennyslvania Grand Jury conducted an investigation into reported sexual assaults of minor male children over a period of years by a football coach while he was at Penn State University and after he retired.

What did he know, and when did he know it?

My last blog post reflected on Rick Perry's "brain freeze" at the CNBC GOP presidential hopefuls debate earlier this week and also recollected a previous century when another Texan politician, Barbara Jordan, demonstrated profound oratory skills. Barbara Jordan arrived on the national scene when she served on the congressional panel overseeing the Watergate hearings. Her colleague, then Sen. Howard H. Baker Jr.,  acted as Vice Chairman of the Senate Watergate Committee. During the committee's proceedings, Baker asked: "What did the President know, and when did he know it?" Baker's post on the Watergate Committee was a bit awkward for him, whose 1972 campaign literature proclaimed him to be a "close friend and trusted advisor of our President, Richard M. Nixon." Fast forward to the scandal at Penn State University, and commentary from the university's own Malcom Moran, Knight Chair in Sports Journalism and Society at Penn State.


Moran's commentary, reported in the November 11, 2011 Los Angeles Times resonated especially for me, as I was about 11, when the Watergate scandal hearings took place.

"When you read grand jury testimony as deeply troubling as what we have seen, your thoughts go back to your roots," said Moran. "Before I entered the business of journalism I was a product of the Watergate era, watching hour after hour of the hearings. Throughout this week, I have thought of the twin quetions we all asked back then: What did he know? When did he know it?

Moran further offers that those two quetions can be asked of Joe Paterno and Grhama Spanier.  'What did they know? When did they know? What was described? How were acts characterized?"

Moran, had been invited to be part of a panel discussion at the Duke Law School in the wake of the scandal surrounding the men's lacrosse program. "One of the most powerful realizations was how little we all knew at an early stage of the process, when key decisions were made and assuptions were treated as fact. Until -- and unless -- this process reaches the point of witnesses testifying under oath, it may be very difficult to know what we really know."

Oops, you did it again, Texas

Wednesday night, for 53 painful seconds during the CNBC debate of GOP presidential hopefuls, when trying to list the three government agencies he wanted to eliminate, Rick Perry just couldn’t remember. As Los Angeles Times reporters Michael A. Memoli and Mark Z. Barabak put it in their lead sentence, "It was a night to forget -- literally."

Perry, elected Lt. Governor of Texas in 1998, assumed the governorship in December 2000 when then-governor George W. Bush resigned to become President of the United States.

The state of Texas needs to produce for the national spotlight more thought-provoking politicians with better oratory devices. 

Rewind to a different century. Texas did have an incredibly capable politician with profound communication skills, but in 1996, she passed a few weeks shy of her 60^th birthday. Twenty years before she died, Barbara Jordan, the first African-American woman to serve in the Congress from a Southern state, addressed the Democratic National Convention in 1976. No brain freeze, there.

Here are some wonderful Barbara Jordan quotes:

"A spirit of harmony can only survive if each of us remembers, when bitterness and self-interest seem to prevail, that we share a common destiny."

"This country can ill afford to continue to function using less than half of its human resources, brain power, and kinetic energy."

- Keynote Address, Democratic National Convention, July 12, 1976

"My faith in the Constitution is whole, it is complete, it is total and I am not going to sit here and be an idle spectator to the diminution, the subversion, the destruction of the Constitution.... It is reason and not passion which must guide our deliberations, guide our debate, and guide our decision."

- Testimony before the House Judiciary Committee, July 25, 1974

"What the people want is simple. They want an America as good as its promise."

- Harvard University Commencement Address, June 16, 1977

"Justice of right is always to take precedence over might."

"The imperative is to define what is right and do it."

- Remarks at "The Great Society: A Twenty Year Critique," a symposium sponsored by the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, April 1985

"If the society today allows wrongs to go unchallenged, the impression is created that those wrongs have the approval of the majority."

"The majority of the American people still believe that every single individual in this country is entitled to just as much respect, just as much dignity, as every other individual."

- Remarks at "The Johnson Years: LBJ: The Differences He Made," a symposium sponsored by the University of Texas at Austin and the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library, May 3-5, 1990

"American's mission was and still is to take diversity and mold it into a cohesive and coherent whole that would espouse virtues and values essential to the maintenance of civil order. There is nothing easy about that mission. But it is not mission impossible."

- Outstanding HISD Alumna Award Recipient, October, Annual Meeting of the Council of the Great City Schools, 1993

"Fairness is an across-the-board requirement for all our interactions with each other."

- Remarks at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California in conjunction with a special exhibit, "The Last Best Hope of Earth: Abraham Lincoln and the Promise of America," quoted in the Los Angeles Times, December 15, 1993

"I have faith in young people because I know the strongest emotions which prevail are those of love and caring and belief and tolerance."

- Article in On Campus, February 14, 1994

"How do we create a harmonious society out of so many kinds of people? The key is tolerance -- the one value that is indispensable in creating community."

"One thing is clear to me: We, as human beings, must be willing to accept people who are different from ourselves."

- Article entitled "All Together Now" from Sesame Street Parents, July/August, 1994

American justice

Kim Kardashian reportedly earned $6 million for her work in reality TV in 2010. According to the Sacramento Bee, the average annual salary of a California teacher in 2010 was $67,932.

Dr. Conrad Murray, Michael Jackson’s personal physician, was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter in the pop star’s death; Murray faces potentially a maximum sentence of 4 years in jail, and, even if he is jailed, he could be freed within months. For millions of Americans who have lost a job, had their home foreclosed and found themselves forced to file for bankruptcy – access to credit/capital is severely limited for 10 years.

PENN STATE Ugly

In a nationally televised news conference, Pennsylvania Atty. Gen. Linda Kelly described the allegations of child sexual abuse against a former Penn State assistant coach that are threatening the reputation of a program famous for cultivating both winning ways and men of character — and perhaps even threatening the legacy of its iconic architect, 84-year-old head coach Joe Paterno. The accused coach, Jerry Sandusky, 67, served as Paterno's defensive coordinator for 23 years before retiring in 1999. He was arrested Saturday on suspicion of sexually abusing eight young boys from the late 1990s to 2009.

The lurid grand jury report describes a predator who allegedly used the razzle-dazzle of big-time athletics — including his access to Penn State facilities — to lure male victims as young as 8 years old. "This is a case about a sexual predator accused of using his position within the community and the university to prey on numerous young boys for more than a decade," Kelly said.

Kelly noted another facet of the ongoing investigation that was "equally significant": the allegations that two top Penn State administrators — Athletic Director Tim Curley and Gary Schultz, a senior vice president for finance and business — lied to a grand jury about the case and failed to report suspected abuse, raising the possibility that the administration at the 44,000-student school sought to protect the program's vaunted reputation at all costs.

First and foremost all should be concerned with the emotional well-being of the kids involved, and also encourage that the facts come out, with those being charged with crimes able to present their positions. 

In the meantime, what can a parent of a child involved in youth athletics/programs take away from all of this?

In time, we'll learn about what happened and didn't happen at Penn State University. But we can immediately address issues tangential to youth sports that involve blindly entrusting kids to school and school athletic officials.

Systematic sexual abuse of children is an extreme example of corruption. But other forms of corruption in youth athletics abound that also hurt a child’s emotional well-being.  

Can anyone blame a student-athlete when he/she resigns from the program  after perceiving favoritism, when they see administration officials with power condoning parents cozying up to coaches? What is one to think, for example,  when coaches and administration not only allow but appreciate parents that give sizeable donations,  free meals, expensive gadgets, to even free dental work to coaches and staff?

Don’t be fooled by the length of time an administration official has been on the job. The  longer the administration has been in place, there's potential for heightened arrogance, and a desire to eschew conversations in confidence about  serious topics.  

And don’t necessarily count on other parents to support fair treatment. Parents who feel their kids are getting decent amount of playing time -- or who think that if they criticize the status quo their kids’ playing time will be diminished -- are frequently the first to turn away from friction/conflict.

I’m not recommending to be paranoid and to be suspicious of ALL involved in teaching/coaching. Certainly innuendos that can’t be substantiated with evidence can and should be dismissed. If, however, evidence is presented and a bona fide assessment of the facts is not taking place in confidence, don’t accept the status quo.

If you really believe that there is a wrong to be rectified, you must fight, or, sadly, flee from a toxic environment.

Hopefully as more information is revealed in what occurred or didn’t occur at Penn State, parents of youth will be more conscious about athletic programs and those who oversee them.