Goodbye Pat, describing America and hot dogs
The week’s news has been dominated by the loss of a legend. We said goodbye and Godspeed to Pat Summitt, the legendary University of Tennessee women’s basketball coach. She was 64.
It also raised three pertinent true-or-false questions:
She did more for her sport than anyone else ever did for another sport?
She did more for women’s sports than anyone else did ever?
She did more in sports than any other person born in Tennessee or at the University of Tennessee ever? I’ll say true to each one. And, as we move forward, I refuse to forget her fight against the disease that took her from us.
First, there’s the commemorative Pat Summitt T-shirt, and 100 percent of the proceeds from shirt sales will go to the Pat Summitt Foundation and its fight against Alzheimer’s. (More details can be found at patsummitt.org.) But let’s do more than that. Let’s name the women’s college basketball national championship after Pat.
Let’s continue raising money by asking every women’s college basketball program in the country to donate at least half of its ticket revenue from its home openers to the Summitt Foundation. It’s certainly a fair trade considering what she did to raise, nurture and grow the game of women’s basketball.
R.I.P., Pat. You will be missed.
MAKE AMERICA … WHAT?
Great feedback, gang, from last week’s column. Kudos to all of you, and please know the back and forth is the best part of sharing this space with you.
Last week my question was what word fits best in the ever-popular “Make America ____ Again” slogan?
Here is a small sampling of the responses we got: Thick-skinned Tolerant Respectable Classless Competitive Non-judgmental Meaningful Open-minded #1 Polite Feared Dominant Tough There were a ton of suggestions, so thank you. Here’s one more, and this one may have been my favorite, coming from Mary Lee Rice:
“Make America Respectful Again.”
JULY 4 FIREWORKS
No, this is not about the sky-filling shows around the area. (If you want more details on that, check out the detailed list online at timesfreepress.com.)
No, Monday will be the 100th Nathan’s hot dog-eating competition.
Yes, the hot dog-eating competition is older than the NBA, the NFL, air conditioning, the electric razor, the Slinky and the artificial heart.
Know this: The record for the 10-minute hot dog-eating contest was set last month by Joey “Jaws” Chesnut, who ate 73.5 hot dogs and buns on June 25, according to the majorleagueeating.com official standings.
To be fair, according to the Nathan’s website, each Nathan’s hot dog and bun contains 290 calories (150 from fat), 17 grams of fat, 6 grams of saturated fat and 710 milligrams of sodium. So a little more than a week ago, Chestnut plowed through 21,135 calories, 1,249.5 grams of fat and more than 52,000 milligrams of sodium. Oh my. Chestnut is the Michael Jordan of the competitive eating world. He holds the eating world records in apple pie (more than 13 pounds in eight minutes), asparagus (more than 12.5 pounds in 10 minutes), brats (70 Hillshire Farms brats in 10 minutes), chili (more than 2.1 gallons in six minutes), eggs (141 hard boiled eggs in eight minutes), Krystals (103 burgers in eight minutes), salt potatoes (13 pounds in 10 minutes), and Twinkies (a mind-numbing 121 Twinkies in six minutes).
Oh my, indeed.
SATURDAY’S STARS
We’ll start locally. The as-yet-unidentified man who went to his car, got his gun and saved the life of the female clerk at the East Ridge Marathon convenience store deserves a major tip of the visor this Saturday morning.
In a time when the FBI told this newspaper’s Shelly Bradbury that the hate-filled, homegrown terrorist of the July 16 attacks had been radicalized for more than a year, we all need to be more attentive and accountable for the safety of our country.
Along those lines, here’s a July 4 salute to the folks that fight ISIS on a daily basis in all corners of the globe.
Folks, feel free to email me all your complaints, but until we treat those who want to kill all of us as the true enemy they are, well, we are going to continue to mourn the loss of American lives.
Contact Jay Greeson at jgreeson@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6343.