Center and Guard: Burning The Olympic Flame At Both Ends

I fully admit that I am addicted to the Olympics. It’s not just the overwhelming sense of patriotism I get while watching the Americans win that draws me into the games. It’s the opportunity to become fully engrossed in a sport that I wouldn’t give the time of day if it wasn’t on the Olympic stage. A few good examples of this are cycling and women’s weight lifting, which were the bookends of my Olympic watching experience on Saturday.


I woke up a little before 9 a.m. (don’t judge me) and flipped straight to NBC for their Olympic coverage, which happened to be cycling. Even though I didn’t watch one second of the Tour De France just a few days before, I found myself glued to the television and buying completely into the story lines the announcers were feeding me.


In the end, some guy from Kazakhstan won the medal and hopefully he got to hear his actual national anthem.Earlier this year, at the Arab Shooting Championship in Kuwait, a Kazakh athlete had to stand on the podium and listen to the rather offensive version of the anthem taken from Borat, a movie that did for the nation of Kazakhstan what Deliverance did for the idea of southern hospitality, which was mistaken for the actual anthem. Thus ends the part of this column where I tell you everything I know about Kazakhstan.


The day ended with me falling asleep to the dulcet tones of women’s weightlifting, specifically the 48 kilogram class. Like most Americans, the metric system still gives me some trouble, as in I have no idea what kilos are in pounds, but eventually the announcers helped me with some of the conversions. While weightlifting is something that I rarely watch, or participate in for that matter, it’s pretty amazing to think that a 106 pound woman can lift more than 250 pounds over her head. Plus the names of the weight disciplines (the snatch and the clean and jerk) make me laugh every time.


Saturday’s viewing will most likely be a prime example of my viewing habits for the Olympics this year. There will be a lot attention in the Herschelman household to the popular sports like swimming and track, but there will also be time for water polo, judo and handball, which kind of looks like a sport my brothers and I may have created in our back yard.


And watching those sports is probably as close as I'm ever going to get to actually being in the Olympics, unless useless trivia becomes an event in Brazil in 2016. But I'm okay with that. Even the sports that look easy take years, if not decades, of practice and preparation. In the end, while it'd be cool to have a gold medal, I'd much rather spend all that time at home with my family, where we can share in thrills of victory and the agony of defeat from a comfy spot on my couch.

Running With The Big Dawgs

I admire the people that been bitten by the running bug. Many of these people aren’t super athletes or longtime runners, but each one has embraced the lifestyle of putting one foot in front of the other, a few miles at a time. I’m not one of these people. After my 5K adventure last April, I promptly dropped off the face of the map when it came to running. I can list off a ton of excuses (a hectic work schedule, the impending birth of Mary and I’s first child, alien abduction), but in reality, I just didn’t want to do it.

I had numerous people tell me that once I finished my first 5K, I’d want to do it again and again. That didn’t happen. It’s not that I didn’t enjoy my race and the journey to get there, it was just that my desire to continue running was knocked down and stomped on by my desire to stop running. I’ve thought off and on about trying to get myself back on track and try another 5K, but I’ve resisted the temptation so far. The strongest pull to lace up my Asics once again came recently with running of the inaugural Big Dawg Dare just outside of Litchfield.

The course for the Big Dawg is a nice easy 5K run, except it’s anything but easy. With competitors running up hills, through culverts, over walls and through water, the course resembles more of a boot camp obstacle course than your typical 3.1 mile jaunt. It also looks like a lot of fun. As I covered the race for the paper, I watched runner after runner splash through the final obstacle with a tired smile that conveyed not only relief that they were almost to the finish line, but also a sense of accomplishment. That’s one of the things I miss about running. I miss the thought that I accomplished something that depended solely on my abilities.

As hard as I tried to ignore the pangs of guilt for not signing up myself as I sat near the finish line, the nagging feeling that I should be out there as well kept creeping in. But I realize you can’t undo the past, although you can take advantage of opportunities in the future.

With that in mind, I’m here to say I will be participating in the second annual Big Dawg Dare, providing the event continues (and talking to race coordinators Brian Hollo and Jim Hewitt after the race, all signs point to the fact that it will go on). Hopefully I can convince my siblings to partake in the event with me. While Shane was busy at school, Mikaela and Daniel both ran the first 5K with me and the picture of all of us after the race is one of my favorites.

This pledge doesn’t mean that I’m all the sudden going to catch the running bug, although I will definitely do some training after watching people much more in shape than I suck wind after their run. It’s just an opportunity to prove to myself that I can do this. I can accomplish something far outside of my comfort zone. I can get off the porch and run with the big dogs.

Saying Goodbye To Ray Winder

Paul Allen, my friend and former roommate during our interning days in Little Rock, tagged me in this photo of Ray Winder Field, which is currently making the transition from  historic ballpark to less than historic parking lot.

After 81 years, a significant chapter of Arkansas sports history has come to a close. Ray Winder Field, the home of minor league baseball’s Arkansas Travelers from 1932 to 2006, is being brought down piece by piece to make way for a parking lot for the University of Arkansas for Medical Services.

I myself have mixed feelings about the former relic. In 2005, I spent seven months at the park as an intern for the Travelers. I remember cursing the fact that we had to pick rocks out of the infield and questioned why the playing surface was no where near perfectly level. I remember picking up peanut shells and scraping gum off grandstand seats that were 75 years old at the time. And I remember power washing – dragging a hundred foot of hose up and down ancient stairways to hose off the nasty things that accumulate after a few months of baseball.

But no matter how many bad things I recall about Ray Winder Field, I can’t help but feel saddened by its demise. The place holds so many fond memories for me that it will always hold a special place in my heart, even if the former field is on its way to becoming a slab of asphalt.

There was the time myself and another intern managed to wrangle a stray cat and her kittens out of the storage area between the stands with nothing but an old batting practice net and a wand off the power washer. There was the time that the relief pitchers took to the mound with pick axes and shovels just hours after their complaints that the mound was too low fell on deaf ears (the opposing pitcher nearly broke his ankle on the first pitch of the game just a few hours later). There was the time when I was doing donuts in the parking lot in one of the “Clunker Car Night” giveaways so the battery would stay charged enough to take it out on the field.

All of the fond memories I have of the park and the people that I worked with cloud out all of the negatives about that summer (the heat, the long hours, the unabashed stupidity of some people).

In June of 2010, I got what would turn out to be my last chance to see Ray Winder Field thanks to a surprise birthday trip planned by my beautiful wife Mary to go see the Travelers play in their new stadium in North Little Rock. After being out of commission for four years at that time, the stadium was obviously rough. Weeds and grass grew where the ball diamond once was and much of the paint was faded on the billboards that dotted the outfield wall.

But there was still something special about the place. You could almost close your eyes and hear the crowd cheering for that big hit as it cleared the 30-foot “Screen Monster” in right field and bounced across I-630. You could see the joy on the faces of the millions of baseball fans who had set foot inside the park to watch the next big thing come to the plate.

And now it's gone, but not forgotten. Someday though, when Mary and I take our daughter Grace down to Arkansas to see the Travelers for the first time, I'll drive past where Ray Winder FIeld once stood and remember all of those sights, all of those sounds and all of those memories.