Categories
Mentoring

Locker Room Lessons: Renowned Sports Writer Shares Stories with Lakehill Students

“Donnie and I met for lunch in Beijing.” It was just a set up line, but when you realize the “Donnie” in the story is Donnie Nelson, and the reason they’re meeting in a Beijing restaurant is that the 2008 Olympics are in full swing, and Nelson is coaching the Chinese Olympic basketball team, you know you’re in for a great story.

The story of this “surreal” lunch was just one of the many shared by Jaime Aron (the “I” in the story) with Tim Hagood’s Sports in Literature and Film elective class last Wednesday. Aron, father of Lakehill Preparatory School sophomore Zac, is the author of five books on Texas sports and was the Texas Sports Editor for the Associated Press from 1999-2012. Having reported on events on every continent where people play sports except Africa, including seven Olympic Games, Aron had time only to scratch the surface of his vast experience.

Nevertheless, being able to listen to a reporter (who was once almost punched out by Jerry Stackhouse) was a rare treat for the students. Aron was able to cover many topics, so the students heard about more than sports celebrities and their eating habits or rages. An example of such a topic was Aron’s story about a publisher’s request that he update his Tales From the Dallas Mavericks Locker Room, a book first published in 2003. A new publisher wanted to issue a new edition in 2011 during the Mavericks’ inspiring title run, but insisted that Aron bring it up to date while he was covering the Mavericks in the NBA finals for the AP. Game six was on a Sunday night and, with the Mavericks winning their first NBA championship, Aron did not get back to his hotel room until 2:00 a.m. While his colleagues were celebrating with the Mavericks, Aron was in his room working all night to finish the manuscript so that the publisher could get it Monday on deadline. Aron said he was “literally watching the sun come up over the Atlantic” as he was putting the final touches on the manuscript.

Such lessons about hard work and leaping at opportunities when they arise are at the heart of many of the best sports stories. Aron’s stories had the same salutary effect on the students, who left the class not merely enlightened, but also inspired.

By Tim Hagood English Department Chair, Grades 8-12 

Aron

 

Categories
Family

Remembering Mom

By Julie Riggs
English Department Chair K-7, Lakehill Preparatory School

When I was about eleven years old, I was in love with a book.

It belonged to my mother and had an inscription dated 1945, a gift from people I never knew. Somehow I had gotten it into my head that my grandfather had given it to her, and as I knew him only from pictures and stories she had told me, I thought of it as a way to be close to him. Now, so many, many years later, it is a way to be close to her.

No other book on our shelves—and there were not so many as I have now because we could not afford them– looked like it. A slim volume, it was bound in mottled green and brown faux leather, textured with veins and embossed with an art deco design. Inside, each page bore an oval cameo portrait of a poet, creators of One Hundred and One Famous Poems, collected and originally published in 1929.  The page numbers were written out as words at the bottoms of the pages –one hundred and eighty-six in all—and the appendix contained  prose such as The Gettysburg Address and the Declaration of Independence. The final item, “Rules for Choosing Books” instructed parents to censor their children’s reading to avoid reference to anything likely to engender bad habits and to choose those in which all the events were “wholesome, probable, and true to life.”

I am glad that my mother never followed that advice.

Through the ill luck of a late October birthday, I was not allowed to enroll in public school until I was nearly seven. By that time, I had learned to read through the power of persistence. Everywhere I went, I saw words and asked, “What does that say?” then housed my mother’s answers in memory. By the time I could go to school, I was far past my peers in the reading circle, so my first grade teacher allowed me to choose a book to read aloud to my class each Friday.  When I was in second grade, my mother enlisted the local librarian to choose novels for me, and I devoured them. The first time I read a book over two hundred pages long, I felt like a hero. And I wanted more.

When I was in fourth or fifth grade, my little sister had a “pram” style doll carriage about two and a half feet long, which I would wheel empty to the library and fill with books. I remember being scolded on several occasions for reading by a night light far past my bedtime, but my mother never discouraged reading itself. I remember her occasionally reading aloud to us from Carl Sandburg’s Rootabaga Stories, but not much else. She didn’t have much time because she was either a single parent going to secretarial school at night or the main breadwinner of the household. She was not a great reader herself, but she gave that treasure to me when we often had so little else.

Anna Jarvis campaigned for a day to honor mothers over a hundred years ago, and she was not thinking of chocolates, flowers, and brunches. In fact, she fought against the commercialization of the holiday because it meant so much more to her than such temporal gifts could ever convey.  On Mother’s Day, I’ll get out that book, now rather shabby from use, and read a poem or two in honor of the woman who patiently answered every time I asked, “What does that say?” and led me to my life’s work as—what else? An English teacher.

Originally submitted to The Dallas Morning News. Reposted with permission.