Sorry to all of you who may have looked for a posting from me last week. I was on the road and with inconsistent access to the Internet and to my other tools. I apologize for the disruption. I’ll save my blog posting on all things related to baseball for a later date.

Today’s St. Patrick’s Day, which for many Americans who aren’t vehemently Irish is a day of alcoholic celebration. At least it’s viewed that way, given all of the beer and alcohol commercials that pop up in the weeks leading up to this day. For many other Americans, St. Patrick’s Day is the ultimate expression of Irish heritage in the US and around the world, a celebration of ethnic pride and cultural endurance. St. Patrick, of course, was the apostle who spread Christianity throughout Ireland at the end of the Roman age. So there is much to celebrate for many around the world who are and aren’t Irish about the legacy of a culture and a people who’ve faced numerous hardships and overcome them despite considerable odds.

As for me, I’m Irish, too, at least in part. You don’t get a last name like Collins by accident. Somewhere in the past, before my late grandfather Fucius Collins (1899-1988) was born in rural central Georgia, some Irish — or more likely, Scotch-Irish — genes mixed with our primarily West African gene pool to create the interest range of diversity that is the extended Collins family. My grandfather’s skin and hair made him what we still call light-skinned in this country, and at least one of my aunt’s was nearly as light as he was. My father Jimme’s at the opposite end of the spectrum, and with the exception of his forehead, is as typically Black looking as anyone else who is Black in this country. Proving once again that looking at someone by itself is hardly enough to prove their ancestry or background.

On my mother’s side, the Gill side, it is said that my great-great grandmother (born 1880, died in ’76, and never got to meet) was half-Choctaw and half-Irish, growing up in Indian Territory before the Oklahoma rush of 1889 and the 1890s. She was my grandmother Beulah’s grandmother. And my grandmother does have features that are strikingly similar to Choctaw, not to mention that she is a dark-skinned Black. I’m less certain of my great-great grandmother’s exact ancestry, but she was obviously bi- or even triracial. In any case, I don’t doubt that she was somehow part-Irish or part-Scotch-Irish.

All of that says to me that I’m at least 1/20 Irish and three to five percent Native American. What does this mean in terms of my everyday existence? Not much. It’s not like most Whites in this country understand the difference between genetics and phenotype, care about multiple identities unless a person is of immediate biracial ancestry, or can see past skin complexion. But it does give me the sense that for all of the crap around race in this country, we are all related to each other, whether we are willing to admit this or not. That colorblindness in terms of race or ethnicity, if it does exist in this country, exists because many Americans are blinded by color and diversity.

Ultimately, my own multiracial heritage gives me reason to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day, to visit the National Museum of the American Indian in DC or to visit Oklahoma, or even to go to Ireland if I so choose. I for one plan to acknowledge my Irish heritage today by playing a bit of U2 and doing a jig. Beer, whiskey and green food dye will not be involved.

For many folks, spring training and baseball is part of their rite of spring transition from America’s game (football) to America’s past-time. Or, as I like to say, to a sport whose time has long past, regardless of how many people come out to watch. I’m an ex-baseball fan for many reasons, a fair number of which I’ve discussed in my postings at the end of ’07 and in February ’08.

Much of my disdain for the sport is because of its contradictory history around race. It’s not just what happened before Jackie Robinson and the ’47 Dodgers or with Hank Aaron in chasing down Babe Ruth or with Al Campanis’ horrible comments about Blacks as managers or in the front office on Nightline in ’87. No, it’s about the everyday nature of how many Americans see baseball that reshaped my thinking around the game between high school and graduate school

It all started with my own experience trying out for Mount Vernon High School’s varsity baseball team my junior year, in March of ’86. As much as I loved football and liked basketball, I really loved America’s favorite pastime. Having worked out with the baseball team in the fall had given me the confidence to pursue the week-long process of elimination. One of my student-athlete classmates spent some time encouraging me, although I didn’t doubt that she had doubts about me making the team. She was on MVHS’ swim team and was an excellent swimmer. This was in addition to the school newspaper, Meltzer’s mock trial team, the National Honors Society and a thousand other things she was into. Out of all of my classmates, there were few I knew who were busier — at least in school. Her day started around 5 am, with swimming at 5:30 or 6. As much as I thought that I couldn’t do what she was doing, I was often up at 5:30 or 6 am myself, ready to start the day.

Despite her ambivalent encouragements, I went for baseball as hard as I could for the most part. The second week of March was to be four days of constant competition followed by frustration. The tryouts were all after school, from three to five o’clock, in the indoor practice facility for the baseball and track teams. We did calisthenics and stretching, followed my more calisthenics and stretching, followed by defensive practice. Beyond the competition, the first thing I noticed was that out of the thirty-two of us, including the team, only four Blacks were a part of this entire process. All four of us were trying out. The team itself was all-White and virtually all-Italian. The coach was a fat Italian man in his late-thirties and not exactly the nicest guy in the world. If you made an error, even if you managed to work it out, he called you off the field immediately and tried someone else in that spot. None of us had much margin for error.

But I made two errors that week that stuck out for me. One was on Tuesday. The coaches took us outside to practice catching fly balls. I’d never practiced catching anything in the outfield, whether to run up on a ball or to back up, or even how to hold my glove. There was one hit directly to me, a line drive of a fly ball. It hit my glove fine, and then I allowed it to drop. As soon as I dropped the ball, the coach took me off the field. My second error was on Wednesday, but it did more damage to me. We were doing infield drills, and they had me at shortshop. I must’ve fielded eight or ten balls while I was out there, backhanding balls, spinning and throwing to first pretty good. One ball hit to me took a hop right off my balls. I caught it in my glove and threw it to first before I fell down and grabbed myself. It took about forty-five seconds before I felt the full force of the pain, which went away just as quickly. There was certainly a lot of laughter around that, drowning out the fact that I still made the play. The coach just shook his head.

The last day of tryouts was spent in the batting cage. Each of us were supposed to take whacks at an eighty mile-an-hour ball coming from the ball machine. When my turn came up, I had a total of four balls to swing at in the simulator. I was already over-thinking the scenario before I got in the cage. My mind went to a situation in gym last year, to softball on a humid upper-80s day. Before we started the game, I took some practice swings with a gym mate throwing the softball overhand as hard as he could. I swung as hard as I could and hit the pitch just about a hundred yards. My arms and hands, though, were numb, and my crooked left fingers in a lot of pain. I’d conjured up my own downfall. I was scared to make full contact with the baseball. And, for the first three swings, I swung and missed, swung and barely tipped the ball, and swung and missed again. I thought to myself, “This is ridiculous. If I want any chance to make this team, I have to make contact.” I slowed down the last pitch, swung and made contact, and it didn’t hurt. I wished that I’d done that sooner.

There was only one other Black guy trying out by the fourth day, someone I didn’t know, but was really athletic. He got in the cage and tore up the baseballs, making crisp, clean consistent contact with the balls. I knew he was a shoo-in after that. There was another kid, a kid I recognized from the neighborhood. It was the son of the pizza shop owner, the one whose pizzeria was just down the street from 616. This guy had missed all three days of tryouts, but was invited to batting practice on the fourth day. He too went in the batting cage and clobbered the baseball. At that point my heart sunk. I knew I wasn’t going to make the team.

Sure enough, the coach posted the names of the guys who made the team the following week, with my name not on the list. I was disappointed. “[The coach] says that you’re pretty good, but you’re also a danger to yourself,” my student-athlete classmate said with a bit of a giggle. I smiled, but I wasn’t in a joking mood. Of the thirteen people who were on the team, twelve were White, and eleven of those twelve were Italian. The one token Black guy was easily the best athlete on the team, head and shoulders over most of last year’s starters. And the kid, the one whose father owned the pizza shop near 616, the one who only showed up for tryouts on the fourth day, was among the guys on this year’s team. I may or may not have been good enough to make the team. I just felt that the Italian coaches had rigged the process, tainted it in some way to favor kids who were one of their own or played Little League with their nephew or second cousin.

The experience left me with a bitter taste in my mouth. “How is this even fair?,” I thought to myself as I looked at the list. “Mom really is right. You do have to be ten times better to be equal in this society.” I knew that there was a track coach and a basketball coach still interested in me, but the racial thing stuck out to me. To recognize that baseball was an Italian’s club while only Blacks played basketball and ran track, Whites did almost all the swimming and football was the only sport where the spirit of integration lived on really bothered me. I guessed that the “content of character,” or in this case, talent or potential meant little to these coaches.

That experience did not end my love affair with baseball. It did start me on the road to becoming an ex-baseball fan, though. Ironically, it was the Mets winning the World Series in October ’86 that accelerated the process. They were my ultimate team of underdogs, a team that most New Yorkers only cared about when they were winning, which wasn’t very often. Now that they had the best record in baseball and were officially world champs, all kinds of things started coming out about Darryl Strawberry’s alcohol and drug use and Dwight Gooden’s first positive drug test. That was bad enough. Hearing what folks would say about these guys on talk radio was even worse. They were “animals,” I heard many more than a few callers into the sports talk shows say. They make “way too much money,” or they “don’t deserve a second chance,” I heard others say. Mind you, this was the era of Steve Howe, a seven-time violator of the major league baseball drug policy.

In a league full of coke heads and beer bingers, the two star Black athletes were being beat up, not by talk show hosts, but by blue-collar White callers who longed for the good ol’ days of Ruth, DiMaggio, and Mantle, or the happy-go-lucky Willie Mays. At least two of those guys regularly medicated themselves with alcohol, but I guessed that was okay, because they looked more like the people who were calling into the New York area talk shows wanting Strawberry’s and Gooden’s heads.

Moving to Pittsburgh and going to college gave me a better perspective on major league sports, especially baseball and football. Outside of baseball crazy New York, most folks I met were crazy about football, basketball or soccer, whether as grade schoolers or grad students. Baseball was boring, plain and simple. It really was. I watched enough Pittsburgh Pirates games to understand that. Even when the Bucs — as they’re called in the ‘Burgh — were good, the games were about as exciting as a Champions Tour golf tournament in the middle of August. Even with them making the playoffs three out of four years in one stretch, the media and the fans hated Barry Bonds. Now, Barry Bonds has always made himself hard to like, or to put it another way, is a surly jerk. But so are so many other professional athletes that actually have superior talent. Like Strawberry and Gooden, Bonds was vilified on the talk radio shows by folks who wanted him to be more like his grinning godfather Willie Mays.

The next and final set of turning points came in the four years before the ’94 strike and lockout. When conservative columnist George Will published his book about baseball and its wonderfully timeless symmetry and treating the game as a science, it killed my interest in the sport. I knew as a spectator and as someone who actually spent some time playing the game how simple it really is. Reading defenses in football is hard. Figuring out which club to use on a windy day at Pebble Beach is difficult. Catching a baseball is pretty basic by comparison. Waiting forever for someone to hit a ball in your direction, that’s boring and excruciating. After reading the first ten pages, I wanted to burn the book.

By this time, I had started playing basketball to relieve the stresses of graduate school. I found myself gaining confidence in my jump shot and in playing pickup games with average Joe’s and with former Pitt basketball players. I found the follies of Greg Norman and golf more exciting than watching a great pitchers’ duel between Greg Maddox and Orel Hershiser. I always enjoyed football, playing and watching. By the time Joe Carter hit his World Series ending home run against the Atlanta Braves in ’93, I no longer had a real interest in baseball. I still knew its history, or rather, its mythology around its statistics, records and glory days. But I also knew way too much about its ugly history and its seedy underbelly to continue to follow the sport.

That was why when Ken Burns’ Baseball documentary came out in the fall of ’94 — right in the middle of the baseball lockout that would cancel that year’s World Series — I declared myself an ex-baseball fan. Watching sportscaster Bob Costas drone on and on about how he cried when he walked by Babe Ruth’s statue when he was seven years old made me gag. Hearing old and crusty White guys talk about their White greats when Blacks especially were shut out from playing major league baseball pissed me off. But most importantly, the complete whitewash of continuing to call baseball America’s pastime when the sport had been in decline since the late ’50s was just too much to swallow.

Today, I see it as an American sport supported mostly by White guys between the ages of thirty-five and seventy-five, mostly living in the Northeast corridor between Washington, DC and Boston, and mostly waxing nostalgic about the heroes they barely know or knew. It was baseball that taught me one of my more bitter lessons about talent versus collusion and ethnic identification. I hope, for my son’s sake, that he never falls in love with this sport.

There are many things that can motivate a person to change their life for the better. The sight of their newborn child, the witnessing of the abuse of a parent, or the help of a person in the role of mentor can all help someone choose a proper path for living their life well. Of course, being in love on some level certainly could also help. As for me, ’82 was the year where several motivating factors worked in concert to lead me to the path of education as my way of getting out of the poverty and violence that I grew up in.

I’ve discussed my first crush in any number of postings over the past nine months, but today I want to talk about her in detail. Tomorrow marks twenty-six years since I found myself head over heals. I guess that it’s a silly little thing to remember the day that Cupid’s arrow pierced my heart for the first time. Especially given that as far as I was concerned, she seldom gave me the time of day unless I managed to offend her in some way.

I was fascinated with her from the day that I walked into my gifted track program in seventh grade, but not to the point of emotional distraction. She was five-feet and four-inches of whimsical golden-brown skinned beauty to me even before I found myself in the land of infatuation. Everyone seemed to gravitate to her. She was smart, sarcastic, funny, had this craggy laugh that was somewhere between nerdy and geekish, completely belying how she looked. My first crush was also fierce in her own semi-tomboyish way, not the kind of person someone would want to face in a fight. But being the person I was in seventh grade, a fight with my first crush was almost unavoidable.

It was a fight that either involved me insulting her or one of her friends in some way. It was the week after Winter Break. A part of me still thinks that my fight with her friend Mr. OshKosh and my fight with my first crush is connected, at least in some cosmic sort of way. It was a short fist exchange, one where I found myself feeling every hit. She really knew how to throw a punch. I was surprised by how quickly we went from words to fists. But I was more surprised by how my fist landed as a soft thud onto her chest. It was the second time in six months I had a minor scuffle with a girl, and both happened to have breasts in full bloom. I stopped fighting with her immediately, embarrassed and completely enamored with her, and not just because of making contact with a mammary gland. Her friends had to pull her away from me, calling me “pervert” all the while. I just stood there for a moment, blinded by the light.

We had to do some sort of show-of-talent presentation in our seventh grade English class, either soon after or just before this fight. I don’t remember what I did for my presentation, but I vividly remember hers. My first crush apparently had been taking dance lessons for a few years, and gave our class a brief taste of her ballerina skills. Pirouette by pirouette, jump by jump, she had tiptoed, split, jumped, spun, and danced her way into my mind and heart. She was so athletic, so pretty, so wonderful to watch that I couldn’t get her out of my mind for the next three months.

I had never felt this way before about anyone. Matter of fact, I hadn’t felt much other than embarrassment or anger in a long time before the arrival of tweener love. Seventh grade had been a tough year up to my fight with the ballerina. My grades were well below the straight-A student I’d been from fourth through sixth grade. The whole becoming a Hebrew-Israelite thing was an obvious barrier to forming friendships of any kind with most of my classmates, even if my general weirdness wasn’t. We were slowly falling into working-poor poverty at home, and it was becoming clearer how wrong my mother was about my stepfather being a changed man.

My first crush was the catalyst of change in my life, as it motivated me like nothing else in my life could to find a way to impress her. The only way I knew back then was to be the best student I already knew how to be, to raise all of my grades to A’s or high B’s, to be more vocal in class, to be more open and joking with other classmates, to even chum some of them up just to get closer to her. I did all of those things, and yet she hardly noticed me or the fact that I was on my best behavior when I was around her.

I even had music in my mind and my heart while enthralled with my first crush. If U2’s “Beautiful Day” had existed as a hit song in ’82, it would’ve been my theme music for the spring and early summer of that year. The “sky falls you feel it’s a beautiful day” line from the song is a perfect description of my world between March and June of ’82. Given the music that most of my classmates listened to that year (not to mention my own eclectic music tastes), The Police’s “Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic” would’ve been most appropriate.

But recently I’ve rediscovered (for the third time in my life) Stevie Wonder’s classic double album Songs In the Key of Life, and I realized, reluctantly, that the song that stayed in my head the most when my first crush was around was his “As.” Especially the semi-spiritual referenced to eternal love — “until the rainbow burns the stars out in the sky/Always . . . until the day that eight times eight times eight is four/Always . . . until the day that is the day that are no more/Always . . .” It’s safe to say that I was in love with her as her and my image of her at the same time.

My next step was going to be to tell her that I really, truly liked her, either by note or by just saying it. But I lost my nerve after watching my stepfather knock my mother unconscious. By then I realized that I had nothing to offer my first crush. Nothing that someone as amazing and as awesome as this ballerina would want from me. I felt like crap for years after that. I had built an image of her in my mind that stayed with me far beyond the end of my crush or even when I realized that the person who was my first crush no longer matched my image of her. I likely was attracted to my second crush because I knew that she couldn’t be as wonderful as my first one, which made her more attainable. Despite all of that, it was that image of the wondrous ballerina that made my summer of abuse at home with my stepfather that much more bearable. It was my seeing my first crush as someone who would easily go to college that motivated me to use my smarts to get to college myself.

Only my wife and my mother have influenced me more from the standpoint of relationships with women than my sweet ballerina. I’ve been married eight years — just about anyway — but I sometimes see myself finding reminders of my first crush in my wife or in other women. It’s a reminder of beauty, of adoration and of regret. Ultimately, I wish that I had told her when I was still a child of twelve, before my life turned as ugly as it did. The fact that I did tell her at thirty-six helps the twelve-year-old in me heal a bit, but only a bit. It matters little when we’re both married with children and life has changed both of us, and in such fundamental ways.

I don’t regret my first crush’s influence on my life. That time of excitement, of stomach-churning attraction, reminded me that I was a human being with real emotions and a person who could achieve things greater than myself because of those emotions. To my first crush, with adoration and love, many, many thanks.

This was an extra-long month for Black History. We got an extra day, Leap Day 2008. Of course, this would normally be part of a joke I heard many Blacks tell growing up and even while I was in college and grad school. That of course we Blacks were given the shortest month of the year to celebrate our history. That we only really care about the contributions of Americans of Black African descent for one month out of the year. That Blacks will spend the remainder of the year as poster children for crime, drugs and poverty.

As many of you know, I generally do not trust authority figures. Why would I, given the amount of abuse — physical and verbal — I suffered at the hands of the authority figures that were in my life growing up? My stepfather, my father, my mother, my teachers, my high school guidance counselor. I went to college with the knowledge that only a couple of folks in authority were truly trustworthy. I don’t like the police — I’ve been stopped for “walking while Black”– I think most judges hide behind their robes, and I believe that most professors are nerds making up time for all of the harassment they endured in junior high and high school.

But despite all of that, I’m generally hopeful during election years. Hopeful that someone who isn’t a wimp would stand up to all of the corrupted, self-interested fat cats of national prominence and tell them all to take a flying leap while actually being elected into office. Hopeful that an underdog will pull off the presidential upset. Hopeful that someone will say that they care about the American ideals of freedom, justice, equality and “a tide that raises all boats” and actually mean it. For maybe only the second time in my lifetime, we may actually have that person in Barack Obama.

The first time in my lifetime actually happened just before I was born, although he died when I was three years old. Lyndon Johnson’s the only president we’ve had in the last four decades who represented all of my aforementioned ideals, and yet he was a flawed individual in practicing them. Between the crippled-before-it-started War on Poverty and Vietnam, his secret tapings of meetings throughout his White House term and his simplistic understanding of the Civil Rights Movement and its late ’60s evolution, to say that LBJ was a complicated and occasionally contradictory man would be an understatement. But I do think that he believed more in America’s ideals than most of our presidents put together. He managed to get more done — good and bad — in five years than most of the presidents that followed him put together.

It was “Run Jesse Run” time when I had my first chance to vote in a presidential election, Election ’88. Yeah, he had success in South Carolina, but the highlight of his campaign came that April, when he won Michigan. Yeah, I voted for Jesse Jackson when the primaries hit New York, knowing full well that he’s lose. Most Americans, regardless of their level of education, weren’t ready for a Black president then, and definitely weren’t going to vote for Jesse Jackson. His “Hymie Town” comments from ’84 hurt him in New York. But his lack of political experience — something many voters receive with glee these days — combined with an agenda that went beyond race and class cost him. Of course, Jackson was and is as deeply a flawed person as an icon can be.

So too was and is Bill Clinton, the only “underdog” that I ever voted for who actually won an election. I distinctly remember that in the fall of ’91, after he declared himself a candidate, how all of the pundits thought this podunk governor from Arkansas a fool for running against a president with an approval rating that at one point was over ninety percent. Of course, Clinton proved them wrong. Yet despite all of his rhetoric about “a town called Hope,” I didn’t buy into Clinton practicing the ideals he preached so much about. Between “don’t ask don’t tell,” “mend it don’t end it,” Lani Guinier “not meeting his center” — whatever the heck that meant — pawning universal health care off on his wife, Monica Lewinsky, NAFTA, WTO and inconsistent policies on China, Cuba and Rwanda, Clinton represented LBJ far less and Reagan far more than most politicos are willing to admit. He just didn’t seem particularly mean while doing it. So every time I hear that dumb Maya Angelou quote about Clinton being the first Black president, I’m reminded about how successful Clinton was at fooling many of us about his dreams and ideals versus his willingness to see them through.

Here we are, ten years removed from Monicagate and one month from the fortieth anniversary of LBJ declining to run again for president — the “I will not seek, nor will I accept” speech at the end of March of ’68. I still believe in American ideals and that the role of the American president is to ensure that this nation lives up to them to the best of their abilities. Through the authority of the executive branch, through collaboration with other nations and brokering deals on both sides of the congressional aisles, even at the risk of not winning a re-election. Taking half-measures like Carter or no chances at all like Ford or Clinton in his second time aren’t what this weakened democracy needs right now.

So, even though I’m not particularly moved by anyone’s rhetoric these days, I’ve decided to hope for the best, which in this case is Obama. Reading Dreams from My Father a year ago was helpful. I’d originally seen this book in ’95 when it was first published as a remaindered item (on sale for a fraction of market price because the book was selling so poorly) and thought, “not another book about the biracial Black child struggling with his or her identity.” But I finally did read it and realized that this is the first book I’d ever read by someone who was running for president and written long before they actually ran. Meaning that if I wanted to see some sense of honesty, that I’d see it in this book. And even though the writing in the first two sections varied from non-compelling to occasionally interesting, the last third of the book was as dramatic and emotionally honest as I’ve seen in any nonfiction book. I figured if someone could be this intimate with their feelings about their upbringing and ancestry, then they at least deserved a chance to run for president.

I must admit, though, that I’m concerned for his safety, not to mention the fact that many Americans are only colorblind because they are blinded by color. Obama’s made a point of distancing himself from racialized politics, both a shrewd and uplifting move on his and his campaign’s part. At the same time, I also wonder if this is a nationalized version of what occurred with Black mayors in the ’70s and ’80s, when many were elected to clean up decades’ worth of messes left by their White predecessors. With all that, assuming that Obama makes it through, my greatest hope is that he and his administration will put themselves on the line to make American ideals more real for all of us. That ultimately is what being presidential is all about.

Last week I finally saw the movie Love Actually, this weird and quirky British indy film covering about ten different vignettes of love, lust, romance and all that comes with it. I liked it so much that I watched it straight through a second time, watched the deleted scenes and then went back to scenes that I needed to make more sense of, all in two-days.

I was already in a semi-romantic mood, thinking of V-Day (or VD Day as I used to call it in the 80s) and trying to do something with my wife and son. So I made dinner that day (of course, I almost always make dinner), one that I hoped would be at least a notch better than fried chicken, roasted chicken, spaghetti, pork chops, or any of about a dozen meals I make over and over again. I made NY strip steak, slow broiled at 235 degrees and coated with spices and a butter and oil combination. With the steak, I made four-cheese mashed potatoes and steamed green beans. I went to a local bakery called Cake Love for Raspberry-Chocolate and other cupcakes and Double Chocolate V-Day cookies for dessert. I even broke out the Beringer’s White Zinfandel and mixed it with our family spritzer of 85 percent Seagram’s Ginger Ale. I even made Noah a steak, one much smaller than ours.

It’s amazing how something as small as a sit-down dinner at the dining room table can make a family more relaxed. Noah ate most of his steak, amazing considering how finicky he is about almost everything. It was easily the best steak I’ve made since before Noah was born — at least four and a half years ago. The dinner was great, we were all in a good mood. The only snag was that Noah ate all of the icing off of the raspberry-chocolate cupcake that I had set aside for my wife. What can anyone do with a four-year-old when it comes to sweets? Still, even with Noah at the table, it’s the most romance I’ve experienced in a couple of years.

The fact that I have a romantic side at all is as amazing to me as it might be to anyone that knew me between seventh grade and my junior year at the University of Pittsburgh. It’s always been there — in some of the music I listened to, even in some of my writing — but the harsh realities of my life made it hard to express for a while. Plus, as a late Black Pittsburgh journalist said on numerous occasions, “romance without finance is a nuis-ant-ce”. I would’ve been hard pressed to do anything more romantic than take someone to a movie or Mickey D’s prior to ’90.

I think that one of the lingering effects of my unrequited “love” for my first crush was the inability to express myself in terms of romance for fear of failure, hurt, embarrassment, humiliation, not to mention the loss of emotional control that comes with being in love, or at least, head over heels over someone. My second crush-turned obsession, of course, made all of these emotions possible anyway. So many years later, I realize yet again that it’s sometimes the simple act of giving and trying that makes romance possible and actualizes our love for a spouse or a loved one.

On the flip side of things, I have to say some more about the loss of love I experienced with baseball, as illuminated by Congress, Clemens, and others last week. There were many incidents that led to me becoming an ex-baseball fan between ’87 and the early ’90s, some of which I discussed in a blog post in December. But more than anything else, the constant obsession with the purity of the game and its vainglorious records and neo-con columnist George Will’s insistence on the game complexity and genius pushed me away from the sport. As far as I’m concerned, there never was anything pure about baseball except for the fact that for 47 years, it was a professional sport that only allowed Whites to play, manage and own.

So when I read, watch and hear journalists and columnists belly-aching about how tainted major league baseball is as a result of the steroids/HGH era, it really grinds my beans. The sport’s hallowed records are now tainted? Yeah, right! I know some folks have said this before, but it needs to be said again. Given the fact that folks like Satchel Paige, Josh Gibson, Buck Leonard and “Cool Papa” Bell were never allowed to play — or at least not allowed to play in major league baseball until ’47 — the purity of any records up until then are pretty questionable.

Babe Ruth only faced pitchers like Paige during exhibition barn storming events in the ’30s. If Josh Gibson had been allowed to play out his career with the New York Giants, would he have more home runs than Ruth? Let me put it like this. Since the good folks running major league baseball and the Hall of Fame saw fit to allow the home run, pitching and other records to stand and have allowed folks like Ty Cobb into Cooperstown, why should we care about Clemens, Bonds or anyone else? Until major league baseball confronts this tainted past and officially acknowledges the fact that it’s tainted, it matters not what they nor the sports writers do in the present or near future.

So I guess I’m saying that while I’m a hopeful romantic in general, my romance for a game whose time has long passed will remain in estrangement.

Given the amount of time I’ve spent talking about domestic violence and abuse over the past seven months, it would be safe to assume that I don’t condone violence on general principle. I don’t believe in pre-emptive strikes against people or nations unless they pose a true and eminent threat. I believe that folks should take the high road and exhaust all reasonable means of resolving conflict before turning words into fists and negotiations into guns and missiles.

But not in this country, and not just in Iraq or Vietnam, nor in Cuba or the Philippines (Spanish-American War, 1898 and its aftermath, 1898-1902). Our everyday activities in this country when it comes to conflict vary from the litigious to the malicious. Conflicts that were settled by guns prior to the ’60s usually involved racists, police and organized crime — sometimes a combination of all three — have involved kids as young as nine or ten for at least a generation.

As far as my growing-up years in the ’80s, despite or maybe because of the violence I saw and felt at home, I did find myself in fights. Most of my fights involved facing down muggers and potential muggers in Mount Vernon. Three involved girls, and two of those were with my first crush. I wouldn’t call the fights with girls fights though — two of them stopped because I realized that I was punching breast instead of chest, and the other one occurred in the middle of my first crush infatuation.

There were other fights that involved my identity as a Hebrew-Israelite (and as an intelligent human being) and whether I would survive in my uninviting, multicultural and cut-throat academic environment. One involved a gang-like attack two months in the gifted track, at the beginning of November ’81, when a group of Italian boys grabbed me after school and jumped me. It was ten-on-one, and with other classmates watching in laughter, I simply had to take it.

Ironically, it wasn’t a particularly humiliating moment, unlike the fight I had with my best friend from elementary school at the end at sixth grade. Upon my becoming a Hebrew-Israelite — symbolized by my white kufi — he stopped talking to me. Given that his father was a preacher man and he was his father’s son, it didn’t entirely surprise me that he didn’t accept this change. What did surprise me was that he refused to even talk about it, only saying, “you made your decision,” as if at eleven years old, I had a choice in religions. He won that fight, and even though we’d both end up in the gifted track program for the next three years, we only spoke once after that. Now that was humiliating.

But one fight from those tweener years that defined how I would respond was with my first crush’s eventual high school/college boyfriend. He symbolized early ’80s preteen White cool for any number of folks in our nerdy group. He was well traveled, spoke other languages, took Karate and played tennis, wore Osh-Kosh and sported a Sting-like (of The Police back then) hair cut from time to time. I was too naive back then to be jealous, but folks like him forced me to realize how poor my family really was. Between the cool factor, my other humiliations and the slights I faced because of my kufi and my not-so-smart mouth, and my academic struggles the first half of seventh grade, I was in need of an emotional pick-me-up.

The week before the mid-February winter break, our seventh-grade English teacher was home with the flu. Our substitute’s idea of managing a classroom was reading a newspaper while the class engaged in verbal and physical combat. It seemed that no one was safe from strife that week, including me. Mr. Cool decided that it was his turn to give me a hard time. A ten-second scuffle took place on Tuesday over the usual tweener issues of communism versus capitalism, or to use more sophisticated language, neo-Marxism versus Keynesian economics. He also didn’t like that I had corrected him the month before about Australia’s official language, which he said was “Australian.”

When I walked into the boys’ locker room for gym class that Thursday afternoon, I was greeted with two punches to my chin and face. He walked away and went through the double door to his locker, arrogant enough to think I wouldn’t respond. He muttered “stupid” as he walked away. I think it was the combination of being caught by surprise and being called “stupid” by Mr. OshKosh that got the better of me. Or maybe it was five months of enduring public humiliation combined with the sense that things at 616 were spinning out of control. Whatever it was, I finally snapped. I stared blankly at the red lockers, green doors, and depleted beige-colored walls for a couple of seconds, and then my mind exploded in violent colors. I threw my entire being into the boy as he had started to undress at his locker, knocking him to the floor. I choked and punched him until I had bloodied his mouth and made his nose turn red. He attempted to fight back to no avail, as I kept my weight on his legs while I head-locked him with my left arm and wailed away with my right hand. Just as I began to run out of energy, the gym teacher came in to break us up. He yelled at us and asked “Do you want to be suspended?”

I went into the break with an emotional boost, one that I hoped would lead to better things for me at school. I don’t condone fighting in general, but there are moments when fighting is necessary. Twenty-six February’s ago, that fight wasn’t just one to correct some of the humiliation I’d suffered over the previous year. It was a fight for my identity, as a boy becoming a man, a seventh-grader who needed to believe that he was as smart as any student in his gifted program, and as a human being capable of defending himself. That fight reminded me that I was still capable of feeling emotions and responding to those feelings in remarkably proactive ways.