There is a void as this basketball season begins
Stefanik book has similar title and theme as volume from 1985
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It was while reading the sports section last week that I received this punch in the gut.
It was the kind of story you never want to read, so while it has no local relevance, I feel the need to write about it now, to share it with you to show how so many of us connect with sports and the athletes that play them.
Sports has always been a big part of my life.
For the past 10 years, I’ve followed my son around while he attended college and pursued his career. Sports was almost always part of any visit.
Not long after he started work in New Orleans, I watched a Tulane University basketball game on television. They had a cool bandbox of a gymnasium I immediately wanted to see in person, but the lasting memory was of a young man with bizarre hair.
Gregg Glenn was 6-foot, 7 inches tall and weighed in at some 240 pounds. It was his first year at Tulane and his play was raw and unrefined, but that hair, oh my, that hair.
This is the hard part to explain. When my late wife watched sports with me, it was rarely for the sport or performance of the athletes. Her most recent interests were in player hairstyles, especially now that the Afro was in vogue again.
While I marveled at an acrobatic catch, Gillian wondered how long the player spent on his hair.
While I wondered how a player produced a magician-like no-look pass, Gillian wanted to know if the players had locker room hairstylists.
It was obvious to me, she was trying to annoy me.
So when Gregg Glenn appeared that day with an Afro stacked high on his head and braids protruding like tentacles in all directions, I knew Gillian would appreciate this bit of barber brilliance. It was like Glenn had an octopus on his head.
It had to make him three inches taller.
New Orleans Times-Picayune sportswriter Guerry Smith once asked Glenn about his unique hairstyle.
“I’m from Florida, so it’s a natural,” he said. He (Tulane Coach Ron Hunter) is always talking about my hair flying all over the place and stuff. Honestly, it’s just me. I can’t really do anything about that.”
Eventually, I made it to my first Tulane basketball game and spent warmups sending photos of Gregg Glenn’s hairstyle.
I spent a a lot of time last winter in New Orleans and went to many Tulane basketball games. Glenn gradually got better and better and Tulane advanced all the way to American Conference championship game with Glenn averaging more than 10 points a game.
He was going to be the centerpiece of Tulane’s team this season.
That’s when I read the story last week that the Tulane basketball team was still reeling. Glenn died in an accidental drowning this summer while swimming late at night off the waters in Miami.
Smith later wrote that it was often Glenn who talked up during time outs on the sidelines. He wrote that the team was still struggling with the loss and the void left behind.
When he first came to Tulane, it was his hair that stood out, but last year it was his play. He would have been a presence this year.
I thought about what might have been while watching Tulane play an exhibition game last week. It bothered me we no longer had Glenn there to appreciate, not only his play, but his style.
Loss is always hard to deal with, but the death of any young person is always tragic and hard to accept. An athlete dying young seems just a little bit worse, or maybe it is just more public because those of us who watch them play, who appreciate their talents, look at them as something more.
It’s like we know them.
Like we have a relationship.
I didn’t know Gregg Glenn, but I’m feeling his loss. Does that make any sense?
Tulane opens a new season tonight in its small gym on campus.
Life goes on.
And I’ll be there.
More “Poisoned Ivy”
After reading about Elise Stefanik’s new book Poisoned Ivies, an alert reader pointed out that a Dartmouth College graduate wrote a book called Poisoned Ivy on a similar subject in 1985.
Benjamin F. Hart’s book recounts the author’s time as student publisher of The Dartmouth Review, a conservative publication that set out to “lampoon, ridicule, vilify and denounce the reigning orthodoxies of the college administration, faculty and activist student organizations.”
Stefanik’s book tackles the same subject, only describing it as “moral rot” at the most elite universities in the country, including the one she graduated from.
The 1985 version also had a foreword by conservative commentator William F. Buckley.
DoorDash shooting
You may remember the story of the DoorDash driver who was shot by the Orange County highway superintendent John Reilly III last May.
The Times Union reported this week that his wife, Selina Nelson-Reilly, was arraigned on charges of hindering prosecution for erasing the Ring doorbell video that showed her husband shooting a lost West African immigrant while trying to make a food delivery.
Reilly has pleaded not guilty and will stand trial in February.
The DoorDash driver suffered severe injuries that have required multiple surgeries.
Boo LSU!
Following up on Saturday’s story about the firing of the LSU football coach and athletic director, LSU graduate and longtime Democratic political operative James Carville weighed in.
“I plan on burning all of my LSU gear, both of my diplomas and both of my daughter’s diplomas,” Carville said on Friday’s episode of the sports podcast The Tony Kornheiser Show.
While it sounded like a joke, Carville said he wasn’t kidding and planned on filming the burning.
What’s affordable?
Developers have characterized their plans to build townhomes on the former Mead Nursery property in Queensbury as “affordable.”
The development, according to The Post-Star, will include 16 buildings with four units apiece as well as a community building and trail paths.
“We’re looking to basically take the existing approved project that is ready for construction, and rather than build them as rentals, we’d like to sell them as individual townhomes that we feel is an affordable price in the town,”Joe Leuci explained to the Queensbury Town Board during a workshop. “We see an affordability issue within the town and a lack of newer construction units below the $500,000 and $600,000 mark; and we think that by offering these for sale, we can fill the void and help people get off their history of renting.”
So what do the developers consider affordable? They estimate in the low $300,000 range.
The Queensbury Town Board praised the project.
Wash. Post conflicts
National Public Radio media writer David Folkenflik pointed out that at least three times over the past two weeks, the Washington Post has run editorials supporting positions that benefit the financial concerns of the newspaper’s owner, Jeff Bezos.
In each instance, the editorial board failed to identify the conflict of interest.
The most recent example was an editorial defending President Trump’s tearing down of the East Wing of the White House to build a ballroom, without revealing that Bezos contributed to a fund to pay for the project.
“This latest series of missteps raises even more questions about the Post’s opinion page,” the Poynter Institute’s Tom Jones wrote. “Earlier this year, Bezos announced the opinion section would concentrate on personal liberties and free markets, and that `viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.’”
Folkenflik wrote, “For the newspaper’s owner to have outside business holdings or activities that might intersect with coverage or commentary is conventionally seen to present at the least a perception of a conflict of interest. Newspapers typically manage the perception with transparency.”
That was not the case here.
Reporters removed
Brian Stelter, the CNN media writer, pointed out this week that two student journalists from the University of Maryland were barred from immigration court unless they get permission from the Trump administration to attend.
The problem is that the Department of Justice employee who processes those requests is on furlough due to the government shutdown.
Running for president
Marjorie Taylor Greene’s recent actions, from standing up to President Trump regarding the government shutdown to the announcement this week she will appear on ABC’s The View, seem to be a clear indication she views herself as presidential material.
The View, a traditional home to liberal viewpoints, has said it wants to book more conservative guests. This fills the bill.
She also appeared this past week on Bill Maher’s Friday night show Real Time With Bill Maher.
Ken Tingley spent more than four decades working in small community newspapers in upstate New York. Since retirement in 2020 he has written three books and is currently adapting his second book "The Last American Newspaper" into a play. He currently lives in Queensbury, N.Y.
Elise Stefanik is a sniveling, moral coward.
It is appropriate that she write about moral rot.
Thank you to your reader who sent you the similarly-titled book from the eighties, and for sharing that info. I repeat this is her version of the Vance "Hillbilly Elegy," but I hope not the same springboard effect. It offers proof that this approach of trying to smear the institutions of higher learning has been a tactic of the conservatives for awhile, and everything old is new again, except for Stefanik, in which case everything young is old again. Her once youthful Harvard exuberance is now rotten grapes. Interesting she and Vance vilify where they came from and embrace a felon-pedophile who embraces violence and gassing citizens and they think that is acceptable and a better choice? She and Vance are living proof of her book's theory, but I'm not sure that is what she was aiming for.