Chewing the fat about this and that:
Legendary Menard coach and math and religion teacher Wally Smith celebrated his 80th birthday and his and Becky’s 57th wedding anniversary a few nights ago. Smith, as tough a competitor as there is, is no longer able to run, but the retired track and cross country coach can ride a bike. He does it better than men half his age, as he set and achieved his goal to “ride his age” in bike miles on his birthday. He did concede that he didn’t do all 80 miles in one ride, but he split it up and got it done on the same day.
If that doesn’t impress you, how about this tidbit: he and Becky frequently write love letters to each other, and he says their marriage has gotten stronger with each year they’ve been together. Becky says she is often “finding out something I never knew” about Wally through the letters. Then again, in retirement, Wally has become a prolific writer, self-publishing nine books. He is the Cenla Authors Club “author of the month,” with meet-and-greet sessions scheduled this Thursday and next Thursday, respectively, at the Westside Regional Library and the Main Library, both from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. …
Carole Baxter texted me the other day that her and husband Lee’s prize Tennessee walking horse Jimmer Fredette had to be euthanized last month. She named the horse after her favorite basketball player, Brigham Young University’s former college basketball player of the year.
Although she and Lee owned several walking horses, this was their crown jewel. Jimmer, trained by Dale Watts, won two Tennessee Walking Horse national championships, the first as Reserve World Grand Champion 2-year-old in 2012, then as the World Grand Champion 4-year-old in August of 2014, when he was later voted Horse of the Year by walking horse trainers across America.
In addition to Jimmer’s stellar show career, he retired as a breeding stallion and produced a world grand champion filly out of his first crop of offspring.
He was 13. …
Watching some of the first round of the MLB draft, I was surprised to see so many high school players selected, including four of the top 10 and even the third pick of the draft behind LSU’s Paul Skenes and Dylan Crews: centerfielder Max Clark of Franklin (Indiana) Community High School.
Former Alexandria Aces manager Stan Cliburn, in his 50th year of professional baseball as both a player and manager, agreed that it was an uncharacteristically high number of prep players selected. Drafted himself out of high school (Forest Hill, Jackson, Miss.) as a catcher by the California Angels in the fifth round of the 1974 draft, Cliburn suggests some of that might have to do with college players “hanging around for transfer portal money.”
The Angels signed Cliburn for $22,000, “and,” he says, “I thought I was a millionaire.”