1. Through newspaper articles I found online and through a story from Don K. that I'd also heard at Corby's a few weeks ago from Jake, it's confirmed that our former basketball coach, Em, worked on Jim Padgett's coaching staff at what was then called the University of Nevada at Reno after he left Kellogg. Some of us have faint memories of Em saying that he played basketball in California out of high school. At the time Em graduated from high school, Jim Padgett coached the men's basketball team at San Jose City College. Now I'd love to find documentation that confirms my speculation that Em played at San Jose City College for Padgett and then transferred to the University of Idaho. I'm not sure this documentation exists online, but I will keep clicking around.
2. With the weather so cold, I stayed close to home today, researching, spiffing up the house, getting laundry done, and writing emails. Seeing the snow was powdery, I decided it would not be too strenuous for me to shovel the sidewalks. (I also think that the amount of time that I am supposed to refrain from exerting myself after cataract surgery is running out.)
By 4:00, I was ready to settle in into the tv room and watch the basketball game I eagerly anticipated all day long between Atlantic Coast Conference titans Virginia and North Carolina. From tipoff to the final buzzer, each team struggled for forty basketball minutes to impose its style of play upon the other. It was a clash of wills.
For much of the game, Virginia had the upper hand, slowing down the pace of the game, playing a suffocating defense, and protecting the ball well enough that North Carolina had few opportunities to turn their greyhounds loose in the open court. But, about six minutes or so into the second half, having been straining in their starts, North Carolina's greyhounds cut loose and began to impose their will on Virginia: they forced Cavalier turnovers (what Jay Bilas calls "live ball turnovers"), began streaking to their basket and scoring lay ups and dunks off of fast breaks. Not only did it look like North Carolina had turned the game around, but, as a fan of Virginia, I feared that a rout might be on.
But, North Carolina's elegant senior guard Cam Johnson stepped on a Virginia player's foot and turned his ankle. He left the game. Suddenly the Tar Heels were without a marksman, an excellent defender, and a mature and calming leader on the floor. Virginia pounced on North Carolina's bad fortune. They exploited Cam Johnson's absence and slashed their way back into the lead. Kyle Guy hit a couple of crippling three point daggers and Virginia's defense clamped down on the Tar Heels.
Virginia escaped the deafening hostility of the Dean Dome with a 69-61 triumph in a game that epitomized the emotion, determination, and skill that so often defines basketball at the college level.
3. On February 7th, Albert Finney died of a chest infection. He was 82 years old.
After the basketball game, I was pondering some things Kathleen H. wrote to me earlier in the day about the parallels between athletic competition and Shakespeare's plays. My thoughts centered on exposure, how Shakespeare's plays so often, in moments of pressure and crisis, expose characters for what they are, in ways that range from generous to narcissistic, from cowardly to heroic; crucial moments in ball games similarly expose the best and worst in players.
Then I thought of Albert Finney and his role as an aged actor ("Sir") touring England during WWII with his ragtag troupe of mostly elderly actors, the young actors having been called to fight the war. It all happens in the 1983 movie, The Dresser.
The Dresser zeroes in on the run up to and the performance and aftermath of Sir's 227th playing of the role of King Lear. While the movie gives us bits of Sir's work in the play on the stage, the movie focuses much more on Sir off stage and his relationship with his dresser, Norman (Tom Courtenay).
And it's off stage where, like Shakespeare's King Lear, Sir's inward life is laid bare, is exposed. Just as King Lear rages at the pitiless storm and the pelting rain that comes to represent to him the injustices of life, those he's suffered as well as the ones he's engendered, and makes external the tempest in his mind and soul, for Sir, the bombs raining upon England come to embody all that is exhausting him and driving him mad. Performing demanding roles night after night in town after town, knowing that the theater where he made his debut in Plymouth has been bombed, fighting the barbarism of the bombing by performing the civilizing and (he hopes) comforting beauty of Shakespeare's poetry and drama, and suffering the early onset of some kind of dementia which tortures him with nightmares in his sleep and dark visions when awake have combined to strip Sir of his defenses and exposes him, as the movie develops, as a complicated and difficult man: tender, cruel, lecherous, loving, vain, sentimental, ungrateful, erudite, brittle, bombastic, defiant, indomitable, and defeated.
I loved watching this movie again. In my reflections, I've short-changed the movie because Sir is not the title character. Norman, the dresser, is. If one sees the movie as a story about him, it opens up a whole other discussion of what this crisis in Sir's life exposes in Norman.
For now, I'll let those thoughts marinate.
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