SEATTLE -- Anyone from North Carolina, Arkansas, Oklahoma or California can skip this column. Save your strength. As fans with teams in this year's Final Four, you already know whom you are rooting for. Besides, you have no time to read. If you are truly the robust, manly, college basketball fanatics America is so proud of, you are busy throwing up in a beer can.No. This is for the masses left behind. The fans whose schools were knocked out early in the tournament. (Did I say Michigan? Did I say Michigan State? I didn't say that! Did I say that?)
Good news from the Home Opener! We saw some impressive arms down at Tiger Stadium!Unfortunately, they were all throwing toilet paper.And pizza boxes. And little plastic magnets. And, oh yes, beach balls. There were, according to one unofficial count, 22 beach balls tossed onto the field in the first inning alone. They bounced around, the game was stopped, security workers scooped them up, and the bleacher crowd roared.Only in the '90s could beach balls become social protest.
She would not cry. She held back the tears as tightly as she once held her first basketball, cradling it all day, sleeping with it all night. Never mind this scary hospital, these sterile walls, these lousy blood tests; never mind what the doctor was telling her now, that she could die if she didn't have a bone-marrow transplant. She could die? But she was only 18! Never mind. Nekita Burnett, a college player the size of an eighth-grader, was used to laughing, clowning, cracking people up; she never was very good with the sad stuff.
So now they have a taste. Now they know what it feels like to want something so badly, to have the devil's foot on your neck and to grab that foot and struggle for your life. I salute the Pistons' courage and I salute their effort.And that's it for the nice stuff.
I've been on a few TV talk shows. This is how they work. You sit in a room, waiting to go on, and a person comes in to encourage you and the other guests to keep things "lively." This person is often a young, good-looking production assistant, smartly dressed, with an air of having done this a million times before.He or she will smile a lot, and use words such as "fast- paced" and "excitement" and "have fun out there" and "keep it moving."What they are saying, without ever saying it, is "don't be boring."At no time do they say, "Be careful."
ISHOULD SAY, from the start of this particular column, that it is not for outsiders. If you aren't from Michigan, you probably won't get it.And if you're not a hockey fan, you probably won't get it.And if you're a journalistic wise guy, one who thinks the only good use of newspaper space is critical and negative use of newspaper space, then you, too, will probably not get it.But most of you will. Because most of you saw what I saw these past few years, a hockey team that lifted the level of expectations in this city and then, remarkably, exceeded them.
When 80,000 mostly white, Christian men rallied at the Silverdome to pledge their family values, nobody complained.But when a few dozen white men marched in Skokie, Ill., there was national outrage. The difference? Those men were Nazis.Here is my point: It's not numbers or color that necessarily frighten people. It's hatred. Hatred that might be directed back at them.
Mitch Albom writes about running an orphanage in impoverished Port-au-Prince, Haiti, his kids, their hardships, laughs and challenges, and the life lessons he’s learned there every day.
