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What does sports mean to us? What do they mean to me?
The late George Bass, founder and long-time executive director of Mountain T.O.P., caught me wearing a Steve McNair Tennessee Titans jersey once during the days when I was on the board. George loved to provoke, to challenge, to make people explain themselves, and he started asking me why I would want to wear a jersey for a sport I don’t play bearing the name of a man I’ve never met. I had a good defense in my head, but I’m not sure I expressed it very well.
A week ago, after a historic upset by my alma mater, Oral Roberts University, in the NCAA men’s basketball tournament, I wrote a post in this space outlining my mixed emotions about my alma mater — or, more accurately, about the TV ministry which created that school and was attatched to it for decades. But I ended by saying that I was rooting for ORU in the tournament.
And I really did. I changed my Facebook profile photo. I dug out my old Badge-A-Minute machine and made myself a button with the ORU logo and “Class of 1984.” I posted about how much I was looking forward to tonight’s game against Arkansas.
I dug out my old yearbooks and my bound volume from the year I contributed to the campus newspaper. I have, in all seriousness, wanted to travel to Tulsa to see the campus as it looks today, and the…
