What If?

I wonder if everyone plays the "What if?" game from time to time? That is, what if this happened instead of what really happened and how that would have changed a complex series of events?  Like you start out your front door and then remember you forgot to bring the letter you wanted to mail and you go back to get it, just as a piano falling from the 12th floor crashes onto your entrance.  And would have ended your stay on this planet had you not returned for the letter. What if?

What a mysterious matrix of life we live in where every second of our existence has so many "What ifs?" that can change everything for so many other people.  A large What if? occurred for me in 1944 when I was 14 years old.  We lived next door to the Robinsons who had a son, Calvin, who was an only child two years older than me.  Calvin's doting parents gave him every toy a boy could wish for. Best bike. At a time when comic books were big he had them all.

One day I was in Calvin's room sitting in a chair reading comic books while he was across the room playing with a 22-calibre pistol he had received for his 16th birthday.  I heard him say, "Alright, Landers, your time has come."  I looked up to see him pointing the pistol at me and then the sound of the bullet exploding from the barrel as he pulled the trigger. It flew past my left ear and lodged in the wall behind me.

At the sound of the shot Calvin's mother, Effie, came running down the hall and immediately sized up the situation, seeing her stunned son sitting with the weapon in his hand and me sitting in shock next to the door. Effie's instinctive reaction was to turn to me and scream, "You go home right now."

She didn't have to tell me twice. I was out of there. Looking back I think of all the lives that would have changed, or not existed, If Calvin had been a better shot.  What if?

A 50th Year Anniversary

Whoever first observed that "time flies" nailed it. Yes it does on bumblebee wings.

The year, 2019, we now see in our rearview mirror, marks the time 50 years ago when I received a call from newly appointed University of Oregon Athletic Director Norv Ritchey.  "Let's have lunch," he said. We did and he offered me the job of public relations director for the athletic department. I asked him to give me three seconds to think it over.  He would later promote me to Assistant Director.

Goodbye Bon Marche feather merchant, hello player in the big time intercollegiate athletics game.  Plus, I would get paid to work there.  The next six years were the most fun I ever had in any work environment.  Who's to say what we accomplished 50 years ago did not lay the foundation for Oregon's current dominance in the Pac-12 star-lit universe? Some things just take time to kick in:

Football Conference Champion/Rose Bowl Champion

Basketball Champion-Men/ Payton Pritchard, Player of the Year

Basketball Champion-Women/Sabrina Ionescu, Player of the Year
Both men's and women's teams given #1 seed in March Madness regional brackets

(March Madness will play without spectators but still have bracket pools)

The friendships I developed in those years give me a basket full of name for dropping in conversations with fellow inmates in my current commune.  Let anyone bring up any sport and I have my list ready (c'mon memory, don't fail me now)..  And every name is attached to a half-dozen stories, while every story has a half-dozen variations.  That is, the protocol of sports stories dictates that you never let facts screw up a good yarn.

So get comfortable in your chair.  I'm going to tell you about that blazing hot Spring day in Husky Stadium where the Ducks were in a dual track meet with U-Dub. Wunderkind Steve Prefontaine would compete in the 5,000 meters on the artificial track surface that looped around the football field. The track had been heating up for hours and was at grilling temperature by the start of the race. After Pre won the event, he took off his shoes to reveal how his feet had been fried to a mass of bloody, burst blisters served up medium rare. His time for the win was excellent.