DOBservations

My son, Reid, turned the corner Thursday night as we walked outside the Quincy Family YMCA and his eyes got wide.

“Dad, can I go run the bases?” he asked.

He had just played two games earlier in the evening at Geisler Field. We had wandered over to Tappe Field, the bigger of the two fields behind the Y, to watch a neighborhood kid play. But our car was parked near the other field. That gave him an extra chance to play.

When he asked me if he could go run, Reid reminded me of an 8-year-old DOB. I would have done the same thing. For a kid, there is nothing better than to run the bases. You don’t have a care in the world. All you’re worried about is trying to see how fast you can get from one base to the next and figuring out how dirty you can get your uniform with that slide into home plate.

“Of course you can,” I told him.

And off he went. He acted like he had just laced one into a gap and was off on a dead sprint. He zipped his way around the bases and did a belly flop into home, stirring up enough dust to cover himself in dirt. He popped up and dusted himself off with a wide smile on his face.

“Dad, let’s race,” he said to me.

Of course, I took him up on it. He’s much more athletic than I ever was — he can thank his mother’s gene pool for that — and easily beat me around the bases. Being 8 and athletic trumps being 42 and out of shape every day of the week.

I’ve never been one to subscribe to the whole “having kids helps keep you young” thing. But the older I get, the more I think that those people might be right. I think I feed off my kids’ energy.

It’s certainly fun to watch them enjoy life. Something we should all be reminded of.

During my sports writing days, I had the opportunity to go into many interesting environments to work on stories. I’ve been in big-league and NFL locker rooms, and more college and high school locker rooms than I care to remember. But on Wednesday, I went to jail.

I wasn’t booked or anything. I know better than that. I had an opportunity to go behind bars at the Adams County Jail for a series of stories that I’ve been working on. It’s not a pretty place, certainly not any place that I would ever want to spend a considerable amount of time. I asked the inmate that I am doing a story about what they did all day in there, he said they didn’t do much of anything.

“All I have to look forward to is my next meal,” he said.

Not exactly a glamorous life.

At least the Chicago Bulls will always have Game 1 in Miami. The NBA playoffs were fun while they lasted for this Bulls fan. Getting to the second round with a rag-tag collection of players is quite an accomplishment.

The Bulls’ playoff run will end Wednesday night when the Miami Heat eliminate them in the fifth game of the second round of the Eastern Conference playoffs. The Heat will go on to win their second straight NBA title. It’s a foregone conclusion. It won’t be a breeze for LeBron and Co., but they will stand above all others when the season is finished next month.

When the Bulls return in October, they’ll have Derrick Rose back. Luol Deng and Kirk Hinrich should also be healthy. I would like to see the team get some help off the bench. This year’s bench crew didn’t impress me. Nate Robinson had his moments, but is rather maddening to watch play.

I love watching Tiger Woods win. The only thing better to me than watching Tiger Woods win is watching Sergio Garcia implode while watching Tiger Woods win.

I will forever remember the 2013 Players Championship. Sergio, who I hate more than any professional athlete ever, and Tiger were deadlocked going into the 17th hole, which is home of TPC Sawgrass’ famous island green. Tiger had no problem with the tee shot and made off with a par. Playing in the group behind Woods, Sergio dunked his ball twice. That was part of a quadruple bogey-double bogey finish for the Spaniard. Woods, meanwhile, stayed out of the water and finished par-par to win the title.

I was so inspired by Sergio’s gaffe that I made a Vine about it. Check it out.

God bless, Charles Ramsey. He’s the guy who helped rescue the three kidnapped women in Cleveland. His brutal honesty in what happened during the rescue and his role in it was refreshing to see. I loved how Ramsey, who works as a dishwasher, deflected any talk that he should be rewarded for what he did. He told CNN’s Anderson Cooper that any reward money should go to the victims. I’m not so sure that I would do the same thing.

Ramsey has become an internet sensation, but he has also been goofed on with people turning his TV interviews into Autotune songs. Let’s celebrate Ramsey for doing the right thing and not clown on him because some of the things he said in his interviews play into certain racial stereotypes.

DOBservations update

Those of you who check in here daily saw yesterday’s post on Pittsfield native Brad Fox, an aspiring professional wrestler. He is part of the TNA GutCheck Challenge, which unknowns like Fox, try to make it into TNA, the No. 2 pro wrestling promotion in the U.S. behind the WWE. Fox, known in wrestling circles as Jake “Dirdey” Dirden, was the No. 1 vote-getter in his opening round of competition. He’ll be in the next round of voting, which starts on June 8. We’ll keep you up-to-date here on Fox’s progress.

Want to help a local guy make it to the big time? Then shoot on over to the TNA Gut Check Challenge and vote for Pittsfield native Brad Fox, aka Jake Dirden. It looks like you can only vote once.

Fox is trying to make it into the big-time ranks of professional wrestling. I wrote a column earlier this year about how he is trying to make like Glen Jacobs, the Frankfort, Mo., native who is known as Kane and is one of the WWE’s top stars.

Fox is honing his skills over in Japan right now and appears to be holding his own. Fox is doing a great job of updating his fans through his Twitter and Facebook sites.

Go vote today.

The last time I texted with Chip Gerdes, he wanted to know how the protest for Quincy’s Dancing Man was going at Quincy Mall. I was at a youth basketball tournament that day and told Chip I didn’t know what was going on.

“I should have run his protest,” Chip texted. “I would have had kids dressed as black panthers. Fist in the air Olympic style.”

And had Chip been in charge of that protest, he probably would have had kids dressed as Black Panthers, mimicking the famous black power pose struck by Tommy Smith and John Carlos at the 1968 Olympics.

Whatever Chip put his mind to, he did.

I first met him about seven years ago. Not long after that, Chip was ticketed by the Quincy Police Department for playing his radio too loud at the corner of 18th and Broadway. The song he was playing was Public Enemy’s “Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos.” Instead of simply paying the fine, which probably would have been $50 or $75, Chip fought the ticket and had a jury hear his case. He was found not guilty.

On Monday, I found out that Chip died. He was only 42, the same age as I am. I feel for his wife and daughter and friends and family who knew him a lot better than I did. Hansen-Spear Funeral Home is handling the arrangements.

I’ll remember Chip for his love of all things Quincy and being a big sports fan. I’ll forever be thankful for him giving my oldest son and I his Rams tickets so that my son could see his first NFL game.

He was a funny guy, who loved Alabama football. When my beloved Notre Dame Irish went up against the Crimson Tide in the national title game earlier this year, Chip let me know who was going to win. And he was right. Under his alias, Tookie, Chip wrote the Quincy City Desk blog, which touched on topics of local interest and had more than enough Alabama football chatter. The blog may have been NC-17 at times, but it was often funny.

Chip was a big behind-the-scenes player in political circles. He’s been remembered fondly by those folks with fitting tributes. Read more here and here.

How important was Chip on the political scene? I doubt that many of us will be remembered on the floor of the U.S. House after we pass away. On Monday, Congresswoman Ann Wagner read a tribute about Chip on the House floor.

I’m sure Chip has probably talked a little football with Bear Bryant by now.

Roll Tide.

Happy Monday. And a happy birthday to my wife, Stacey. She loves to read DOBservations. Well, she doesn’t have much choice since it is the home page on our home computer.

Finally had a chance to make it out to QU-Stadium on Sunday to watch the Quincy University baseball team play. This wacky spring weather we’ve had hasn’t lent itself to many trips to the park. Unfortunately, the Hawks lost both ends of a Great Lakes Valley Conference doubleheader.

It was my first trip to the park since the Quincy Gems wrapped up their season last August. The chain-link fence that was down both baselines has been taken down and replaced with a cinder-brick wall that goes about as high as my waist. People heading out to see the Gems this season are going to have to pay a little more attention to what’s going on or else they could get a baseball on their lap.

The Gems have several things they’re planning to do to spruce up the park by the time they open the season at home on May 29. The party deck in right field looks like it is getting a makeover. The team has also said it is going to do something different with the left-field box as well.

The field, itself, looks like it is in great shape. Thanks to all of the rain we’ve gotten, the field looked as green as I’ve ever seen it.

I’m anxious to see what the place looks like the next time I head out there.

While sitting around on Tuesday night, I checked my Twitter feed. Something really great happened during the St. Louis Blues’ playoff game — if I only followed hockey I would know. Anyway, a Blues fan tweeted out that it was “the best sports watching moment” of his life.

That got me to thinking what my best sports-watching moments were. I could probably rattle off a ton of events, but five immediately stuck out to me. These were all things that I watched on TV. I would have to make a separate list for things I was actually in attendance to see. Here is my top 5:

1. Illinois’ rally to beat Arizona back in 2005 to reach the Final Four. I actually went outside to scream after watching that comeback. I’m not the biggest Illini fan in the world, but I do like to see them do well. I was all in on the Illini then and hoped they made it to St. Louis and the Final Four. They came back from a huge deficit in the second half to beat Arizona and eventually reach the national championship game before losing to North Carolina.

2. Game 6 of the 2011 World Series. How many twists and turns can there be in one game? This has to be the best finish to a World Series game ever. Some sloppy play early on by both the St. Louis Cardinals and Texas Rangers kept it from being the best WS game of all-time. David Freese became a St. Louis legend because of his game-winning homer.

3. Paxson’s jumper to win the 1993 NBA title. I loved this shot so much that I bought a shirt at Navy Pier that summer that said “White Men Can Jump” and had a photo of Pax sticking the game-winning shot to beat the Suns. That moment triggered another need to go on to my deck at the apartment complex I was living at Eastern Illinois University to scream. Believe it or not, I was doing laundry at the time.

4. Jordan’s jumper over Ehlo in the 1989 Eastern Conference playoffs. A younger person asked me why that shot was such a big deal. It’s because the Bulls had finally won something. Until then, Jordan hadn’t won anything in the postseason. Had Jordan missed that shot, the Bulls lose the final game of the five-game series. Instead, he elevated over Ehlo and stuck the jumper. The rest is history.

5. Reggie Jackson’s three-homer game in the 1977 World Series. This is my first sports moment that I remember. I was all of 7 when the game took place. But my father had the game on and I was mesmerized by all of those home runs Reggie hit. I wonder how many games that I’ve watched since then.

I do not care that there is NBA player who has come out of the closet. I do not care if there are other NBA players who are in the closet. Same goes for any MLB, NFL, NHL, MLS, WNBA, NBA D League, minor league baseball player or college athlete.

I do not care about the sexual preferences of the guy who changes the oil in my car or the person who bags my groceries.

Whether or not Jason Collins, a journeyman NBA player who announced that is gay, should be seen as a hero for “coming out” is a debate I don’t care to get into. What Jason Collins does with his private life makes no difference in my life. It didn’t on Sunday when he was still “in” and it didn’t on Monday when he “came out.”

I don’t care if my neighbors are gay or straight. As long as they don’t let their dog poop in my yard or cook up a bunch of meth, we’re all good. Live your life how you want to live it. Knock yourself out.

The U.S. military used to have a “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy when it came to the sexual preference of its soldiers. My policy has been “Don’t Know, Don’t Care.” I’ve always tried to judge people in my life on who they are, not who they sleep with.

Maybe that makes me lazy. Maybe it makes me tolerant. I just think that it is normal.

NOTE: DOBservations is taking the day off Wednesday to run around the May pole or whatever you’re supposed to do on May 1. We’ll be back on Thursday.