Bits & Pieces

By Kim J. Harmon

There I was with runners on first and third with two outs in the bottom of the last inning and my team down 9-5 in the traditional Easter Wiffle© Ball Game. And what happens? I get called out on a chest-high slider thrown by my 10-year-old son.

Oh, the humiliation of it all! Sure, I can explain I was distracted by the shouts that dessert was ready, but I can’t explain why my five-year-old nephew (using his Mark McGwire model power bat) drove in most of our runs with a grand slam.

On top of that, I also finished the day with an earned run average of 27.00 after allowing all nine runs.

Oh yeah, it was a tough day.

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But Monday was a lot better.

The sun was out, it was warm, and somehow (don’t ask me how) I was able to watch part of a golf match (Newtown versus Joel Barlow), part of a tennis match (Newtown versus New Fairfield), part of track and field meet (Newtown versus Notre Dame, Foran and Jonathan Law) and all of the Waterbury YMCA’s Game Time Hoops championship game between And-1 (my son’s team) and some other team (hey, what’s in a name?).

I didn’t think there was enough time in one day to do all those things but I was wrong.

But now I’m very, very tired.

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Here is a discovery I wish I hadn’t made:

Tucked in the back of the right-hand drawer of my desk are the three scorecards from my (one and only) trip to Myrtle Beach back in 1994. We played Wild Wing (a Hummingbird course), Heathland (a Legends course) and Tidewater.

Wild Wing is a Scottish-style course, which means on any given tee you have no earthly idea which way you’re supposed to hit the ball. I shot a 106 that day.

Heathland is a more traditional course and, probably because of that, I carded my only birdie of the week and shot a medallist round of 94 that day.

Tidewater is a traditional course, but the fire ants were out (never hit the ball off the fairway in South Carolina is my motto) and I shot a 107 that day.

I’m going to stuff these back in my drawer, thank you.

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Roger Clemens is going to win his 300th game while wearing a New York Yankees uniform (he won No. 296 last weekend), but he will always be a Boston Red Sox to me. Hopefully, the National Baseball Hall of Fame will do the right thing when the time comes and make he wear a Boston cap.

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Seeing what the WNBA went through this past weekend, after their season was in danger of being canceled because of labor problems, I was reminded of what nearly happened to the Arena Football League a couple years ago.

See, players in the AFL were set to form a union and, bam, the owners turned around and said, go ahead, but the season would be flushed if they did.

And the WNBA was ready to pull the plug on its season, too, if a contract could not be worked out in time. A contract was worked out, but ownership – after conceding a little bit – basically got whatever it wanted.

The same thing is going to happen in the National Hockey League, too. The NHL said it lost, all told about $250 million last year. People are saying if the players don’t take the bullet after next year, there won’t be anymore professional hockey for a long, long time.

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This is my 1950s horror/sci-fi pick of the week: Donovan’s Brain, starring Lew Ayres.

It’s a pretty chilling movie about a doctor who manages to keep the brain of a deceased millionaire alive in a tank of fluid, only to find himself becoming influenced (in sometimes murderous ways) by the evil brain.