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Remembering a failed interview with the X-Man
Here’s Xavier McDaniel in a Seattle promotional poster. The dog was not with him at the interview :) Xavier McDaniel will be inducted into the National Collegiate Basketball Hall of Fame tonight. This brings back memories of my first summer in Wichita, Kansas … and having the NBA player basically kick me out of his gym. I moved to Wichita for the summer of 1992 to take on a sports reporting internship at the Wichita Eagle newspaper. I covered a little of everything that summer – minor league baseball, the annual NBC amateur baseball tournament held in Wichita every year, professional tennis {Martina Navratilova was on a visiting team},…
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2013 Final Four: lessons learned on buying tickets for big games
This is the second of a two-part guest post from Lee about our amazing road trip to follow one of our favorite teams to the NCAA Championship … something neither of us were sure would happen in our lifetime! Read his first post if you missed it. ~~~~ Yes, I was disappointed when Wichita State lost to Louisville in the 2013 NCAA national championship semifinal but the ride had been more than I ever expected. Five months of all the ups and downs with the Shockers can be frustrating but when they made it to the Final Four I had to go. When your team finally makes it to a…
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2013 Final Four: a tale of two road trips
This is the first of a two-part guest post from Lee about our amazing road trip to follow one of our favorite teams to the NCAA Championship … something neither of us were sure would happen in our lifetime! ~~~~ The road trip to Los Angeles was 25 hours – and I had seriously considered making the drive to watch the Wichita State Shockers in the NCAA’s Western Regional. So when the Shockers won that regional and advanced to the Final Four, I had no qualms about driving 15 hours to Atlanta. I’ve always enjoyed driving and we would have enough time to break it up and not drive all…
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Tripping: America’s oldest ballpark featured in Jackie Robinson movie “42”
Last week while on a road trip from Wichita to Atlanta, Lee and I heard about a baseball field we needed to see in Birmingham, Ala. As America’s oldest ballpark, Rickwood Field is on the National Register of Historic Places. As we stepped onto the field and had the chance to talk to a groundskeeper prepping the field for high school games that afternoon, we learned that Rickwood is more than a ballpark; it’s a living history museum that transports you back in time, and it’s starring in a movie that opens tomorrow. Opening day for Rickwood was in 1910, two years before Boston’s Fenway Park and four years…
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Pardon the interruption – I got lost in the wheat
Well it’s been a crazy start to April & I’ve yet to make a post this month. The more activity in my life (which means more blog material), the less time I have to actually blog! It has been a good learning experience, too, that it can be tough to blog while traveling. I did a decent job of sharing the trip on Facebook in real-time but I couldn’t go into much detail there. For those of you living in Lawrence, Kansas, you may not have noticed this great basketball tournament going on! The Wichita State Shockers made a historic run to make it to the Final Four so the past…