Angst Along the Appian Way

When my wife and I went to Italy two years ago we had the good fortune of hooking up with a great driver — Giuseppe Mirossi, a.k.a. “Beppe.” He took us all over Tuscany and, trip of trips, all the way up to Campi, a mountain village in Northern Italy that was the native home of my wife’s great-grandmother.
How that woman ever got off that mountain and down to Genoa to sail to America is the wonder, not the voyage itself. It took us hours to get up there and we were dealing with paved roads. We are forever beholden to Beppe for his driving skills and translation services.
Suffice it to say, I got to know Beppe and his passion for soccer, which occasionally drove him to take both hands off the steering wheel. (You know how Italians are always talking with their hands.)
I keep in touch with Beppe, and the e-mails started flying once the World Cup started and the Americans advanced out of pool play while the hopes of defending champion Italy hung in the balance...
*
Ciao, Beppe!
Hey, are you guys going to win a game any time soon?
I will be rooting for Italia today against Slovakia.
That way, your team can join the United States in the next round.
Your favorite American,
Bryant Carpenter
*
Hi Bryant!
How is Laura? I guess she does not care of soccer. Does she???
Italian team is not very good this time. Here there are lot of complaints because we have not been able to win a game up to now and we say that our forwarders are tired as they are coming from a very fighting national tournament (we call it "serie a"; a sort of premier league).
Then other players are too old (over than 33 years old).
It will be not very easy to win with Slovakia; the game will start at 16:00 Eu time today.
If we win Italy will play vs Holland in the next round.
Ciao,
Beppe
*
Beppe!
Laura and I are sorry Italy lost to Slovakia today.
Laura does watch soccer (she wore blue today) and she has a question: Why did Italy play with no passion until it was too late?
If the Azzurri had played as well as they did in those last 20 minutes throughout the tournament, they would be getting ready to play Holland rather than catching an airplane home.
That one goal should have counted -- not the offside one, but the goal earlier that struck off the defender's knee. His leg was behind the end line.
But no matter: The Azzurri have only themselves to blame. This year's Italy team did not play up to Italian tradition.
The rest of the tournament will not be the same without them.
But look on the bright side. At least Italy wasn't as bad as France.
Your favorite Americans,
Bryant and Baby Laura
*
Hi Bryant!
Here it has been almost a tragedy.
The worse team ever played...
Much better to give up and keep going.
A new coach (his name is Cesare Prandelli) will be presented on July 1st. Let's hope better than Marcello Lippi.
Ciao,
Beppe
*
Yes, you’re right, Beppe.
It’s time for Marcello Lippi to go.
Maybe you could take him for a very, very long drive somewhere and just leave him there.
You might be considered a national hero.
Ciao,
Bryant

To err is human, to review hardly divine

I don’t mean to be flip about a topic that generated so much serious commentary from sports observers across the land, including those in high office, but Jim Joyce’s blown call that cost Armando Galarraga a perfect game Wednesday night reminded me of the scene from “Animal House” when Boone, Otter, Pinto and Flounder return from their weekend road trip with the car entrusted to Flounder by his big brother in shambles.

“Flounder, you can’t spend your whole life worrying about your mistakes,” Otter says. “You f***ed up; you trusted us.”

The point being: We all make mistakes; we all occasionally go against our better judgment. The consequences are relative. On one hand, you can bust a pitcher’s perfect game. On another, you can bust an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico.

The way you respond is also of great import. You can fess right up and make immediate amends, as Joyce did, or you can bumble around British Petroleum-style while millions of gallons of crude pour daily into the ocean.

In the wake of Joyce’s mistake, a predictable cry went up for expanded replay review in baseball and a reverse of the call. Major League Baseball did right in brushing aside the latter pitch. Reversing the call would set bad precedent, plain and simple.

Hopefully, MLB will also resist the urge to expand replay review beyond home run calls. Does replay weed out human error? Of course it does, but it also sucks the life out of human endeavor, which by definition makes it a little less than human.

And that’s what matters most. We could put all our swell technology to use and eliminate all human error from our games, which by definition ultimately means eliminating human presence entirely because there is a little Flounder in all of us. And so, in the end, we would reduce human competition to — what, video games?

A science fiction writer could have a field day. Any worker displaced by machine will say it’s all too real.

The true humanist looks at what happened in the wake of Joyce’s admitted mistake and Galarraga’s graceful acceptance of it and says there is the best solution you can ever hope for.

Joyce will be haunted by his mistake for the rest of his life and he knows it, yet the very next day he was back in the arena. Galarraga, with his empathy, won’t get his perfect game, but is likely to be remembered equally, if not more so, than the 20 pitchers who did.

Two Roses and a Mint Tulip

My politics are a tad left of center, but when it comes to money, I’m a conservative son of a gun. Multiple savings accounts, credit cards with no carried balance, 401K top heavy with steady blue-chippers (or what used to be considered blue-chippers).

I’m not a tightwad. I just play it safe.

Consequently, I do not gamble. I think not of the money I stand to win, but the money I stand to lose, and that’s hardly the attitude to take to the table.
But my little bambina may get me to bend on this.

Little Miss Laura Agatha, who happily chirps away in her stroller as we wheel into the bank each month to buy a bond and make a deposit into her passbook savings, who humors me when I show her the quarterly statements from her college fund (already knowing it may cover the Bachelors, but definitely not the Masters), just might show me a way to rapid and independent prosperity.

My little Bean, at a mere 10 months, has a nose for the horses. On Kentucky Derby day, she picked Super Saver to win-place, Paddy O’Prado to win-place-show and collected on both.

These picks were all hers, conveyed via plastic shapes from her toy box: green square for the horse with the Irish name, orange star to match the insignia Super Saver jockey Calvin Borel wore on his helmet and jersey.

This horse sense Laura gets from the maternal line. Her late great-grandfather Dan was such a frequent visitor to the Southampton, New York OTB that he could have sold his own line of miniature pencils.

(Fortunately, he fared well enough with the trifectas to avoid such a fate.)

And it was his daughter Linda — a.k.a. Lucky Linda and, for 10 months and counting, Nan Linda — who placed the Bean’s bet at the very same parlor.

(Nan Linda also handled the wagering for the Derby pool she runs at the Catholic school where she teaches; Line of David being a popular, but fruitless pick there.)

I don’t know how many grandmother-granddaughter betting tandems are out there, but I’m willing to invest in this one. Lucky Linda and Lucky Laura: I like the shape of things to come.

Southington football: A necessary turn of the page

I could spend time here speculating on Bill Mella’s resignation Monday as head coach of Southington football.

I could just take it at face value: Mella, a college assistant at Trinity before he came to Southington in 2005, got an opportunity to do the same at Wesleyan and, as he said, it was too good to pass up.

I could also wonder if he was pushed in that direction.

Maybe that was the end game always in sight from last year’s brouhaha, when the Southington football coaching staff imploded.

You know the story. Long-time assistant coaches Frank Stamilio, Mike Prairie and Tony Mazzarella Sr. raised questions over Mella’s handling of fundraising money and resigned. School officials investigated. So did the police. An independent audit was done.

Mella was exonerated, but the football program’s finances were brought under tighter oversight. Two independent checking accounts were closed. In the end, no money went unaccounted for. It just wasn’t where it was supposed to be.

The appearances are what looked bad. The amount — $4,000 — didn’t warrant booting Mella, the father of three young children, from his teaching job, though perhaps union shall and shall-nots factored into the equation.

When it came to the football position, though, that was probably another story. A lack of trust, a sense that here was a guy who played by his own rules, may have settled in some minds, and so Mella had to go.
But all this is just speculation and so it will remain, because even if I’m hitting nails, who would confirm it publicly?

All I can say with any certainty is what I know from being around Southington football for the past 12 years on a pretty intimate basis. While I have good relationships with all the football teams I cover, I came in the door during Southington’s 1998 state championship run, lived with the team for a week in 1999 for a feature story and easily fell in with the family atmosphere former coach Jude Kelly instilled in the program.

Not that that atmosphere went out the door the minute Bill Mella came in. In fact, I was impressed at how well Mella and the coaches he inherited from Kelly’s staffed blended together.

Because that was the arrangement: Mella was in, but the old-guard assistants were to remain.

Normally, a new guy is entitled to have his own people, but guys like Stamilio, Prairie and Mazz Sr. helped Jude Kelly build the Air Raid version of Blue Knights football. They are men of value, and for Mella’s first two years they helped him piece together two straight undefeated runs to the state finals. And even though Southington lost both of those games, there was a good thing going.

Of course, winning smoothes out rough edges, and those edges became rougher with time and diminishing returns on the field, culminating with Southington’s failure to make the postseason in 2008. Then came the messy divorce in May 2009.

I told both camps I was surprised the marriage lasted as long as it did and that by hanging in there and making it work, the football players of Southington benefited.

Which brings me to the only point that matters in all this. By the end of the 2009 season, the Southington football program was a shell of itself. Not because the team went 5-5, but because all the joy had seemed to run out of it, and that was painful to see.

I’m not going to just dump that on Mella. The guy had gone through a lot. The season was just the natural fallout of controversy and fractured relationships.

So, in the end, this had to happen. Southington football had to go back to a Square 1.

No one really loses. Mella still has his teaching job and he continues coaching, back at the college level, where he’s arguably best suited. Stamilio and Prairie are coaching over in New Britain, still involved in the high school game, where they are arguably best suited. And the next wave of Southington players comes of age under a fresh regime.

If behind-the-scenes maneuvering produced all this, it did OK in my book. The challenge now is to make a good, strong hire to continue a good, strong tradition.

The cost of a few shekels more

Must we, for the sake of money, ruin everything under the sun?

The rim had hardly ceased reverberating from Gordon Hayward’s near-miraculous shot at the buzzer for Butler against Duke in the men’s basketball final when NCAA vice president Greg Shaheen was outlining a proposal for expanding the tournament to 96 teams.

Long rumored, a tournament of that size would feature first-round byes for the top 32 teams and third/fourth rounds on the Tuesday and Wednesday after the opening two.

There’s no mystery why this baby was put on the table. More games, Shaheen said, means more revenue for the NCAA.

In the big picture, I’ve often wondered: With all the cash the NCAA reaps from its major sports, with all those multi-millions from TV contracts, why does anyone have to pay to go to college or, more reasonably, have to still be paying for it 10 years after graduation?

As for the tournament: Why mess with it? The NCAA Division I basketball postseason is matched only by the Major League Baseball and NFL playoffs, multi-tier systems that span multiple weeks and accrete in drama as the field narrows.

This year, from the moment Ohio knocked off Georgetown in the opening round through Northern Iowa’s upset of Kansas to Butler’s classic final with Duke, the tournament was nigh perfect.

The NCAA D-I men’s basketball committee and board of directors could approve the 96-team field. It could suck up more money. But it would water down its product and cheapen the magic.

Papi, Pap, Josh: What's It Gonna Be

I went back and forth over the hot stove season.

At first, I was alarmed by Boston’s offseason moves — who the Red Sox initially acquired, who they let go, who they were talking about letting go.
That changed when the Sox signed John Lackey, given the added potency he leant to the starting rotation, and stuck with Jacoby Ellsbury. That’s when I started buying whole-heartedly into all that conventional wisdom about the defensive upgrade wrought by the addition of Marco Scutaro, Adrian Beltre and Mike Cameron. Shoot, given our shortstop situation last year, Scutaro can’t help but be better.

But, you know, it never pays to go with the crowd and simply join the chorus. Here at the dawn of the 2010 season, I find myself quivering in the middle like a tuning fork. As I see it, Sox success will be determined primarily by the guys they already have.

To wit: Will Jonathan Papelbon be the lights-out closer he’s been or the high-wire act he was last year? Pap may have had 38 saves in 41 opportunities, but his collapse in Game 3 of the ALDS against the Angels was more indicative of the steady flirtation with disaster that was his 2009.

Same with Josh Beckett. For a 17-game winner, his work last year was very uneven and followed on the heels of a sub-par 2008. We need a return of Revolver ’07.

If the Sox get that in combination with Jon Lester, who I believe to be the true team ace, and Lackey, well, that’s one hell of a 1-2-3 punch. Winning contributions from Clay Buchholz, Dice-K and Tim Wakefield would be rich gravy. (Respect Timmah, pulling for Clay — he needs to break out now — and still far from sold on Dice, though his head seems to be finally in the right place.)

The other pitching variable is the catching. This is the season Jason Varitek cedes ground after manning the Sox plate for a decade. His bat may have faded years ago, but his ability to handle the pitching staff has not, and that’s the most important part of the job. That’s where Victor Martinez, who can belt the ball, must truly deliver.

As for the offense, which took the biggest hit with the departure of Jason Bay, the biggest linchpin, it seems to me, is Big Papi. There’s no question the larger-than-life role he filled in the middle of last decade has passed for reasons either natural or unnatural. But he’s still a key cog in the wheel and we can’t be sitting around till Memorial Day waiting for him to hit his first home run and get over the Mendoza line.

Not with the Yankees to chase and the Rays to reckon with in the East, and the Twins, Angels and even Rangers to confront on the rest of the AL game board. But we’ve gone to the postseason six of the last seven seasons. Why should we expect that to change?

Handicapping the Huskies

I suppose I’m as much a homer as the next guy and granny. I want to see the UConn women’s basketball team run the table and rack up an undefeated national championship for a second straight year.

Who inside these state lines doesn’t?

But, really, can’t the Huskies make it a little more interesting? They are so dominant their games are now like watching Brady Bunch reruns. Marcia’s boyfriend is always going to steal Greg’s playbook and UConn is always going to win big.

So you get to thinking about where else your entertainment hour and dollar can be spent.

That’s the irony of excellence. After a while, it’s taken for granted and becomes a status quo — a status quo miles beyond the rest of the realm, to be sure, but a status quo all the same.

Knowing that Geno Auriemma and his Huskies would never be content with status quo, knowing they are always looking to raise the bar, perhaps it’s not too late to throw in some added challenges that maybe should have been in place all along this season.

Call them the Husky Handicaps.

* UConn has been winning by nearly 36 points a game. Perhaps, then, the opposition should be spotted, say, 30 points before the opening tap. The scoreboard would read OPP 0, UCONN -30 and the Huskies would spend much of the first half just getting to ground zero.

Had this Husky Handicap been in effect for the opening rounds of the NCAA tournament, UConn still would have won by rout — 65-39 over Southern and 60-36 over Temple. UConn’s overall record would be 23-12, the Jan. 18 game at Duke would have been a 51-48 barnburner won by UConn and West Virginia would have won the Big East championship game 32-30.

* In practice, the Huskies often go against an overloaded defense — 5 on 7, 4 on 6, that sort of thing. The coaching axiom is you play like you practice, so why not give this a twirl? Opposing coaches would have the option of going with six or seven.

* The photo you see there of Tiffany Hayes and Lorin Dixon slapping hands with UConn fans after the Temple win — selected with the help of Cub Scout Pack 10, Den 2 out of Meriden’s Thomas Hooker School on a visit to the Record-Journal — prompted another thought. Opposing teams could select a six- or seven-player rotation or go into the crowd and hand-pick a few ringers. They could also choose to suit up assistant coaches.

*All opposition field goals would count as 3-pointers. If that Husky Handicap had been effect all season, UConn would still be outscoring opponents by an average of 82.1 to 59.7 a game.

And, if that 22.4-point differential was made the pre-game spot, with the Huskies down zero to negative-23 at the opening tip — rounding UP, for Pete’s sake — they would still be 28-7. That College Game Day date with Notre Dame would have been a riveting 47-46 UConn win, with the contest tied 19-19 at halftime.

UConn would have also won the regular-season finale in South Bend 53-51. ND coach Muffet McGraw can take solace, though. Her team would have thumped UConn 44-36 in the Big East semifinals. Against these Huskies, one out of three ain’t bad.

Tiger's Tale

So, on Friday, Tiger Woods became the latest in a long line of rich, powerful and/or famous men to apologize for being found out for indiscretions of the flesh brought on by temptations made available to them by their wealth, power and/or fame.

Tiger wasn’t the first. He won’t be the last.

He’s had congressmen, governors and preachers go before him. He’s had a sitting President. (Babe Ruth and Warren G. Harding lived at a time when philanderers didn’t have to say, “I’m sorry.”)

Who will be next to sidle up to the Podium of Shame? Glantz-Culver should issue a line, right below the sport spreads and right above the Oscar odds.

It makes for must-see TV. No doubt you heard Tiger live, for it seems all the free world stopped at 11 a.m. Friday. No doubt you’ve watched and read punditry’s take on Tiger’s degree of contrition.

But none of that jabber, this column included, means jack. The only opinion that matters — and I agree with Tiger here — belongs to Elin Woods. But it doesn’t look good for Tiger on that end because Elin wasn’t in the Audience d’Apologia on Friday.

His mom was. I felt for that woman. Kultida Woods had a front-row seat for her son’s abject admission. She kept her eyes glued to the floor — until the end, when she embraced her boy.

And that, I’d say, was the only moment in Friday’s production that was fraught with genuine emotion, with genuine contrition and sorrow and a desire to make right. The rest came off as completely staged, so you can’t help but wonder how sincere Tiger is.

It smacked of so much damage control, just like back in late November, after the early-morning crash, when Tiger declined to talk to the police and retreated behind his gates because, well, he’s Tiger Woods.

Look, the day will come when Tiger Woods is back playing pro golf and making god-zillions. Whether he ever returns to his family’s embrace is their affair. Their pain or their healing: It’s the only game that matters. You hope he truly understands that.

But he’ll be back playing golf because Tiger is the game’s cash cow. And those sponsors that ditched him while the slime was oozing will eventually sign him back up and peddle new-and-improved products with a new-and-improved Tiger.

Just another round in the American art of image construction, destruction and resurrection. A lucrative pursuit, with plenty of room around the Podium of Shame if you can act a good game when the curtain and/or your pants are caught down.

Asking Absolution on the Half Shell

A belated point to make, but with pitchers and catchers reporting to spring training this week, it’s worth pointing out again: Mark McGwire and that little confession of his last month about using performance-enhancing drugs?

Man, he’d never cut it as a Catholic.

See, you’ve got to be “heartily sorry.” That’s the operative phrase. That’s all it takes to wipe the slate clean, and McGwire whiffed completely.

No surprise. McGwire wasn’t sorry about juicing so much as he was sorry about what the lingering black cloud would keep him from becoming.

His unspoken preface was essentially “in order that I may coach with the St. Louis Cardinals, in order that I may generate Hall of Fame consideration so sadly lacking in my first two years of eligibility, I hereby confess...”

One act of contrition and a few days of heat in the media, he figured, and the whole chemical business that defined his career would be in that convenient little closet called “the past,” which, as Big Mac once so awkwardly told Congress, he doesn’t care to talk about.

That seems to be standard operating procedure for most pro athletes who transgress these days. Guns, gambling, philandering: The vices vary. The one constant is that once caught — and they’re always caught; in this high-tech I Spy, YouTube world there is no place to hide — we are subjected to the quick admission and ghost-written apology.

That’s to close the door. The catch-all “I’ve moved on” is to keep it locked, as if their say-so holds sway over justice and absolution. Perhaps we’ve empowered them to do so when, really, we should barely have a passing, never mind rooting, interest in these guys. If they were neighbors, we’d tell the kids to steer clear.

As for McGwire, even if his admission was sincere, he undermined its legitimacy by insisting performance-enhancing drugs had nothing to do with his freakish home run totals of 1998.

And 1+1=1.

Who knows, maybe he’s one of those people who build up altered realities in their conscience, who truly believe what they’re saying and, therefore, aren’t lying. But what does that matter when virtually all proof and reason scream otherwise?

Major League Baseball, with its drug policy now in place, would like to think the Steroid Era is in the rearview mirror, but who can swallow that? Not with the track record of performance-enhancing drugs staying one step ahead of the tests to detect them. Not with the record book pocked with needle marks.

I suppose there’s no helping that, just as there’s no escaping all those gaudy pitching records passed down from the days of legal spitballs and the Dead Ball Era.
In a perverse way, you could call the Steroid Era the second Dead Ball Era. And that’s the irony. McGwire said he juiced to stay healthy, and for a while it worked. But in the long run, it put him prematurely on the shelf.

And that’s the only shelf he should remain on. If Tony LaRussa wants to employ him, fine. (The professed ignorance of steroids among the managerial ranks, especially from a super-sharp guy like LaRussa, is a whole other underbelly to this sad story, but one left for another day.)

For now, forever, there should be no Hall of Fame talk for any of these guys — the McGwires, the Barrys, the Mannys and all those not content to simply ride their vast God-given talent.
Steroids damned the game. A check swing of an apology shouldn’t throw open its pearly gates.

The Bambina Steps to the Plate

Well, my little bambina Laura Agatha Carpenter is a Red Sox fan after all. This comes as no surprise, but with relief all the same.

You just never know how these things are going to work out. In utero, you go in for ultrasounds and you’re just peering into the murmuring woosh to see which chromosome has won out.

You might get the occasional hand or arm as a bonus, but no indication as to which banner they will wave.

Nor did I get any clues at birth. There was no cap on that full head of hair, no numbered Varitek jersey like the one her mother owns. Just the birthday suit and a whimpering cub-like cry.
Cubs? Cubs! Certainly she wouldn’t grow up to root for that cursed franchise. I dwelled upon this from time to time for the first six months of her existence.

Then, the other day, I woke up and found my girl decked out as you see here.
Whew.

Immediately we began talking Red Sox hot stove in between episodes of Elmo’s World.

I confess I’m starting to think they’re one in the same. Because I don’t get it: How is that Red Sox ownership, pockets deep to begin with and selling out Fenway Park night in, night out since long before my little bambina was a gleaming, get so penny-ante over eight-figure contracts?

It’s how we failed to land Mark Teixeira, who proved to be the linchpin of New York’s 2009 success by catching every ball throw in his vicinity at first base, smacking three out of every 10 pitches thrown over the plate (ignoring all the rest) and, in both capacities, making everyone around him better.

“Sure, the Yankees bought the 2009 World Championship, but that’s the name of the uncapped game, and we got chintzy over relative nickels while the Yanks played for keeps in their new stadium. You get what you pay for, whether it’s a Bumbo seat or a banner,” I babbled to my bambina.

She gave me a “where is this going?” look.

“Jason Bay, of course. The Mets are paying all of six million more than the Sox were willing to pay to the guy who made us forget about Manny Ramirez.
“Well, on a lot of nights,” I hastily added. “He sure was a heck of a lot more enjoyable to root for. But it had to be clear to him by the All-Star break where the Sox would come down in negotiations. It seemed to show in his play.”

Bambina, having broken into her bin of plastic circles, squares and other shapes, gave me a “at least we still have Jacoby Ellsbury” giggle, then began gnawing in earnest on a green diamond.

“Yeah, but one of the fastest guys in the league is now in the smallest of left fields, giving way in center to an aging veteran who will be in and out of here in a year.
“And I still can’t believe the pundits who were saying Ellsbury was expendable when the Sox were trying to land Adrian Gonzalez from the Padres. Clay Buchholz? Ummm, OK, maybe. Ellsbury? That’s high. Mr. Noodle might as well be running the show.”

By then my bambina’s attention was back on Elmo. Elmo was talking to his pet goldfish Dorothy. I couldn’t help but notice Dorothy had one active imagination. I found her effect on me to be quite calming, certainly more so than Tom Carron’s caffeine chatter.

“Well, bambina, John Lackey was a great pickup. We’ve got an awesome rotation, and it is true that pitching and defense win championships. We’ll stop a lot of balls and make a lot of people miss. We just might not hit too many ourselves.”

And that might not be so bad. It will make for shorter games and leave more time for greater loves.

Beyond Agincourt

This day is called the feast of Crispian.
He that outlives this day and comes safe home
Will stand a tip-toe when this day is named.

Henry V, Act IV, Scene III. King Henry rallies the British troops before Agincourt. We few, we happy few, we band of brothers. It’s sort of the “win one for the Gipper” of Shakespeare.

And it’s the toughest monologue a kid can choose to re-enact when my wife does her Shakespeare unit in her Language Arts class at Griswold Middle School in Rocky Hill.

There’s never a lack of Macbeths. Act IV, Scene IV: It’s the shortest you can pick. Kids are up before the class as briefly as the candle of which Macbeth speaks.

Henry’s a much tougher nut, so much longer and nuanced. You’ve got to invest more than just memory to pull it off.

A couple years back one student did it with such flair he was asked to repeat the scene before the Board of Education.

That student was Vikas Parikh, the 16-year-old boy who died last Saturday when the bus he was riding to a robotics competition crashed on I-84.

By now, you’ve heard about how Vikas was a gentle soul. His faith was Jain, a dharmic religion from India that prescribes non-violence toward all living things. Vikas was a strict vegetarian and he literally would not hurt a fly.

And you’ve heard about his academic acumen. He went to Rocky Hill High, but also took classes at the Greater Hartford Academy of the Mathematics and Science, the school he was representing the day of the fateful crash.

He was a math whiz. He was also one heck of a King Henry.

He'll remember, with advantages,
What feats he did that day.

The point here is not to sift through the terrible confluence of events that took the life of a young man who had accomplished so much and whose promise bespoke of so much more to come.

Rather, it’s to issue a reminder to we few, we happy few, who will have the gift of to-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow, to embrace all that we may with the same verve and discipline as Vikas, and to stand a tip-toe when challenge and opportunity arise.

Jewel of a Gentleman

I’m bringing back Papi & Circumstance prompted not by the new year or new decade, but the loss of Southington’s Jim Wallace shortly before Christmas.

Jim Wallace was the sort of man whose passing reminds us even the best eras must end.

Mr. Wallace was still involved in American Legion baseball when I returned home in 1998. He was one of those old-guard Southington guys I always enjoy seeing — the Ray Walshs, Bill Snows, Joe LaPortes and Joe Orsenes of our corner of the world, gracious gentlemen with a selfless air of class and an appreciation for things done right.

Now and then, Mr. Wallace would let me know he’d enjoyed something I’d written. It was usually a piece that had involved extra thought, extra creativity, extra patience.

“I write for readers like you,” I replied to one of his e-mails.

Most Southington folks are familiar with Jim’s legacy, or they should be. Town councilman, Hospital for Central Connecticut incorporator, YMCA, Bread for Life — that’s just the start of it.

I find myself thinking the ultimate measure of a man lies in his children. What truer reflection of one’s values, character?

Southington folks my age had the pleasure of going to school with Ted and Sally Wallace, the youngest of Jim’s five kids. Sally was in our class. She was smart, pretty and polished. She did one of her senior English papers on Faulkner’s “Intruder in the Dust,” if I recall correctly. Simply miles ahead down the road.

Ted, who eventually went to the Naval Academy, was a year older and, in our days at St. Thomas Junior High, part of a tremendous class of athletes. In basketball, he, Rob Dibble, Barry DePaolo, Kevin McCarthy and Pat Kelly comprised a starting five that rolled over most opponents and geared up for it by rolling over younger teammates in practice.

Coach Dave Valentine would wind the scrimmage clock to 30 minutes and, man, even on running time that was an eternity.

One night I managed to do something above average to net two textbook points for the scrubs.

Pick-and-roll? No-look bounce pass?

Can’t recall. I just remember Ted running back down court alongside me saying, “Nice play; now don’t get cocky.”

That was the most influential advice I got all season. I now recognize the influence behind it. Shape your sons well and you’re bound to shape the sons of others.

I’m not sure if Mr. Wallace coached Ted or his oldest boy, Jim, in sports. He was better known for refereeing midget football games and umpiring Little League games. Late in life, he was the scorekeeper for Southington Legion baseball.

Shape the sons of others and you’re bound to shape a corner of the world.

And that, I’d say on second thought, provides the true measure of a man in the eyes of scorekeepers Great and small.