This first ran in Sunday editions of The Times and The News-Star, August 4, 2019.

This mentions a couple of Sports Information Directors, now often called Associate Athletic Directors/Communications, but in a way it’s about all the people out there involved in this sort of role. The job is the same: publicize the student-athletes, coaches, teams, and opportunities in the University Athletics Department. But it’s changing constantly because of technology. Maybe a bit because of culture. And depending on the fan base, because of expectations. These crews are the offensive linemen of publicity, close knit and hard-working, pushing the heavy stuff out of the way to make the team look better. And if they’re doing it right, they’re helping to prepare the student-athletes for the day when no one will ask them to shoot a free throw or get a base hit anymore. 

About the busiest person on any college campus that offers intercollegiate athletics is the sports information director, whose job it is to dish out info on more than a dozen teams, serve the student-athletes and media, organize an able staff and its publications, soothe the egos of coaching staffs and media members, and deal with the expectations, often unrealistic, of avid fan bases.

It’s a great job if you like working year-round and having somebody always mad at you, usually for something you didn’t do.

Malcolm Butler just began his 21st year as Louisiana Tech’s SID, or Associate Athletics Director/Communications if you prefer the fancy title. Both titles mean you have a to-do list as long as a power forward.

He’s also the Voice of the Lady Techsters and one of my besties; I work in University Communications at the school and pitch in to help Malcolm when he wants. But since he is in charge and I am not, his job is a bit tougher, in the same sort of way that a pine tree is a bit tougher than a pine needle. With football season less than a month away, he and the men and women serving their colleges and universities in Malcolm’s role are classic one-armed wallpaper hangers and will be until spring sports are over. And I haven’t even mentioned that they are constantly being asked, “Hey, can you get me tickets to …?”

Another of our friends recently retired, which is the reason for today’s essay. After more than 30 years as the SID at Northwestern State, Doug Ireland — like Malcolm at Tech, he’s one of our favorite bachelors — quietly announced this spring that he was hanging up his ink pen and constantly buzzing Go Demons cell phone in May so he could devote more time to his true passion — mermaid research. That guy…

While his announcement was low key, there was nothing quiet about his Official Send-Off last month, an open-to-the-public “roast” that celebrated Doug’s career and helped raise money for an endowed scholarship in his name. The cost was $25 for barbecue and a chance to hear friends playfully hammer on Doug — and 300 people came. It was like having a funeral for someone who was alive and not even sick. People both made fun of the guy and praised the guy, and he had to sit there on stage the whole time.

The idea was Greg Burke’s, AD at NSU and a guy quicker on the draw than most of us. He thought of the event, organized it, pushed it, and now Doug has a scholarship in his name and 300 people have a night of laughter to remember. And that’s maybe the best thing: people laughed. Just relaxed and enjoyed themselves. A couple hours of hearing lots of people laugh is about the best medicine there is.

It’s a great idea, and the students who earn the scholarship are going to benefit because of all that Doug has done and because his friends recognized and appreciated it.

The attire was “Dougie Casual,” but I wore underwear anyway. (Joke.) I even wrote Doug a poem. It began, “We met in 1983, I think it was in Cell Block D,”… and then my iambic pentameter broke down, totally, as we often did long, long ago when we were sportswriters, losing rental car keys, rental cars, and billfolds all across both the Southeastern and Southland Conferences.

Once in a restaurant Dougie was told the Special of the Day was beef tongue he told the waitress he didn’t want to eat anything that came out of an animal’s mouth. “Just give me two eggs,” he said.

OK. So …

Our dear old friend, the late and great Dan Jenkins, once wrote that “It’s the laugher you can carry through the years that turn you old…” And it is. It doesn’t cure everything, but it sure helps get you down the road, lightens the load, and makes the journey a little less lonesome and a little more fun.

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This column originally appeared in The Times and The News-Star July 28, 2019.

Those of a certain age will remember Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom. It was heady fare.

It ran on television in the 1960s when I was growing up and was a must-see on Sunday nights. It won Emmys — I didn’t know that at the time or what an Emmy was. I just knew that Marlin Perkins and stud hoss in-the-field Jim Fowler would be tracking a bear or sticking their hands into an eagle’s nest or fording a swamp so we could get our wildlife fix for the week to counter the sad fact that Monday, we were going to have to learn how to use a compass, and I’m not talking about the kind of compass that Fowler surely carried to get both himself and some daring cameraman into and out of the nether regions and badlands of this most spectacular world we share.

Big doings for little kids. I think Jim got sunburn once on the Serengeti. Maybe a hangnail. Otherwise, invincible. And big TV doings for little guys like me.

When Jim was on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson and brought along a bird or a monkey or a panda, that was fine television too.

Now the show has been rebooted and is on Animal Planet.

Which is what my backyard has become.

Welcome to my world. Probably to yours too.

It started in the spring with The Plague of the Toads. Late spring actually. Seems like nature in the form of “the birds and the bees” arrived about six weeks late over here.

These are baby toads. Two could have coffee, comfortably, on a penny.

They are not big animals.

When you see a long black string in a body of water, that is probably a long, long string of frog eggs. At some point, they become the baby toads. How they get out of the pool is something Mother Nature knows but I do not.

Hundreds, hopping around. For weeks, our backyard earth would move with tiny black hopping dots. What a BB could do if it had hips.

They are gone now. Maybe eight frogs came of the entire batch and hung around. Things did not go well for us or for them.

They’d hop into the pool but could not get out. They’d ride the cord of the little cleaning machine. They’d get into the skimmer and either meet their watery doom or I would find them and dump them out.

They’d hop back in.

Somehow, a couple got onto the top of this little waterfall thing and — this is true as we saw it twice — cannonballed into the deep end. Jump, count to three, and splat! But then they were in Water Jail.

Twice I plucked three out and took them in a bucket down to a nearby pond so they could live regular frog lives. The one toad I have not been able to locate is the one who sings bass by the back window each night. That guy…

But then came the birds. Thank you Lord, for the birds.

This giant bush called a Katrina Rose grows in our yard hooked onto porch walls and roof in an upside down U. In the precise middle, 10 feet off the ground, the first nest was built. Two baby doves were born there. A week after they were on their own — and they’re still hanging around, just not there — two other doves, who I guess had sublet the nest, moved in and had two more baby doves came along. And now they are grown and gone but still hanging around.

Then in the west half of the same rose, five feet from the first nest, a second nest was built. After watching dozens of mom/dad shift changes through the weeks, two Cardinals were born there. They’ve moved along, possibly to other yards, maybe to the National League.

And that was it until I saw the nest way up in the parasol tree, 18 feet off the ground. Bigtime, penthouse birds. Those ended up being robins and by far the noisiest babies. But now they have flown the coop too, and Marlin and Jim missed it all.

Now, we are literally empty nesters.

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