Yeah, yeah, I didn’t rant earlier today. It was a lousy day, trust me. And I spent most of it in such a terrifically foul mood I nearly creamed some crappy little European two-stroke car out on I-81 that gets about 750 miles per gallon and has no business being on an American highway.
Seriously, the car was so small I not only couldn’t see it in my driver’s side blind spot as I was merging onto 81, but I couldn’t see it while swiveling my head. My Grand Caravan isn’t the biggest piece of armor on the road, but I would have crushed that Eurojunk like a New Coke can. But my wife and kids were in the van, so I just settled for throwing my Mid-Penn Conference hat on the floor and creating about 8 minutes of awkward dead silence.
Honestly, our grandparents, parents and uncles got carved up in Normandy and while coming up The Boot to save Europe from the vegetarian/house painter so The Continent could infest our country with Matchbox models that can’t even get up to 55 mph? We nuked the wrong place, it turns out.
See what I mean? Foul mood.
Anyhow, it’s April, and that means that things are fairly quiet on the PIAA sports front, both inside and outside the lines. It’s why I generally can’t stand April; it is the least active month (during the school year) for PIAA action. There’s not even a PIAA Board meeting that would allow me to catch up on my sleep.
Think about it: There’s more excitement in August just because football practice has started than there is in all of April. Nothing against the spring sports, of course. I grew up a huge baseball fan before crossing over to football and I’ve always kept my eye on the PIAA baseball playoffs. I learned to really enjoy covering track and field (when the temperature was above freezing) once my old boss Nick Horvath forced me onto a beat for reasons that are still unclear 20 years later.
On the other hand, some of the better lines I’ve heard have been spawned by track. An assistant sports information director at the University of Texas once cracked, “The only thing worse than track is field.” (A football guy, no doubt. But I have to say I love the jumps.) A former basketball coach once told me, “Ah, track. They shoot the gun and the fastest guy wins.” Only he didn’t say “guy.” It was a long, less-sensitive time ago.
Just the same, I always found April to be a ponderous month; the only thing marginally attractive about it was the gradually improving weather.
But I loved May. May always moved fast, in a sports sense. When I covered track, I did the Mid-Penn Conference, District 3 and PIAA meets on consecutive weekends, and it just flew by. I can honestly say I came to enjoy state track almost as much as state football and wrestling. Almost.
There’s no great point to this rant, other than to bitch about April. Well, actually, there is kind of point. The PIAA track records – boys and girls – are posted in The Record Book page of this site. I couldn’t think of any other way to promote them than with an anti-April, anti-wussy Europe rant. The Euros really are wussies now, although it seems my ancestral home of Belgium is hanging in there, despite the fact the Flemish and the Walloons refuse to agree on a common language and therefore are constantly pissed at each other.
To this day, I have no idea whether my native Belgian paternal grandmother was Flemish or Walloon, but man, when she and my Italian grandpa went at it, they literally spoke a whole new language. I was really young when I heard them spat a few times, but if I were to hear a recording of those firebombs today, I guarantee you I wouldn’t understand them any better.
Have to admit that I’m feeling a little better after all of this carping. And who wouldn’t? It’s almost May.
