sl.blog

I’ve been away from the blog. My apologies to those of you who set your clock by it. I decided I needed to get away from my suck-ass job, so I spent two weeks in Florida working on my beer gut and sand angels. I may have gained eight pounds in fruity drinks and fresh shrimp. All to my hips! The beaches stunk with whatever Ernesto drudged up from the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, but the inactivity was pretty cool.

On the football front, the Lions have won three games in a row since we last spoke. By rolling up a total of 75 points against Lake County teams (the Chiefs from Chicago and the Steelers from Indiana), the boys even had the offense in the best shape of its season. It’s been an odd season with guys coming and going. But when team owner Frank Jordan (half-a-century-young) suited up, thus began the winning streak.

Of course there was a bit of yelling and screaming at halftime when we trailed the Chiefs by a point, but Mike Woodard helped get the running game in gear, and we rolled to a 34-8 victory. Yours truly made his first tackle on a late-game kickoff, even though official credit went to a player who hasn’t been here in weeks.

With a bye week over Labor Day weekend, I headed south and missed the second Lake County massacre. Can’t believe they won without me. When I returned, I saw our last “home” game was in a place called Attica. I feared we were playing a prison team, but was pleasantly surprised to see the visitors from Illinois, getting off their bus unchained. We won 21-12, but looked a bit sloppy late in the game. Still we’ll take that win, totaling four against three losses going into the last game in Indy.

For my Indy friends and family, I plan on lobbying this week in practice for at least one ball thrown to me. The plea is now officially part of the blog. Come on out to Heritage Christian and see us spar with the Indianapolis Sabers. What’s that? Lions and Tigers? Oh my.

On a sad note, my dog, Jack, died. He’d been getting old (16), and his legs and hips were worse than my hamstrings. He was losing interest in food and just life, I guess. When I got home Friday he was down to 17 pounds of fur, bone, and stink. I was worried about not getting a chance to say goodbye to him as he took a turn for the worse, so maybe he held on a few days for me.

He was a good sport. That’s him above, ever the underdog playing Sonny Liston to an underwear model’s Muhammad Ali. RIP Jack Kerouac. (He was named for a football player turned writer and drunk.) I know if there’s a dog spelled backwards in the great beyond, my best friend on four legs was somehow renewed, howling about the illegal block in the back that some fat guy flattened me with last Saturday. Peace.