The Owner's Box, Ep. 58.

AI recreates my first meeting with delivery magnate Cristoforo Cringlione.

Fifty years ago, I met a businessman in a very unusual way, and the result was a life-long friendship and decades of column material for my job at The Sun Chronicle.

The gent was a portly and ruddy-faced, but impeccably dressed, Sicilian man in his late 40s. He was driving from Toronto to Chicago in his spectacularly appointed gold 1974 Cadillac Eldorado convertible, trying his best to brave bad weather and slippery roads to make it to the Windy City in time for a meeting with the hierarchy of the Teamsters. The result of this very important meeting would determine whether his fledgling overnight delivery service would take the next step up to national and international prominence, or forever be consigned to small-route insignificance. 

He was weary from the long drive and his mounting business pressures, took the wrong exit and became disoriented in the heavy snowfall, and returned to the highway driving back the way he came. Realizing his error and succumbing to his fatigue, he made a last-second decision to turn into a rest area just outside of Ann Arbor, Mich., where he could get a cup of coffee, re-orient himself and maybe even just rest for a few minutes. But he entered the exit too fast for the road conditions, and skidded the huge Cadillac into a snowbank.

Only a few feet away was a 1968 Plymouth Fury with its occupant inside, also weary from getting a late start on his final drive back to Massachusetts from college in Chicago. He was dressed in the warmest of winter ski suits so he could keep from freezing to death while gaining a little shut-eye, but sleep did not come easily thanks to the 10-degree weather. He was easily snapped back into consciousness by the sound of the huge Cadillac barreling into the nearby snowbank. 

That was me. 

I surveyed the situation quickly and leaped out of my car, intend upon helping the Caddy's occupant. Almost as quickly, the businessman exited from his driver's side door and unleashed a torrent of Sicilian-dialect expletives that I did not understand.

"Hey, mister," I yelled. "Are you OK? Are you hurt?"

The man turned to me and shouted back in a thick New Jersey/New York accent, "Whadda you looking at, pal? Mind youse own business."

A more recent snapshot of Kringle.

It was the first time Cristoforo Cringlione and I spoke to each other. And while it didn't seem very promising at first, I managed to convince him that I only wanted to help and make sure he wasn't injured. He settled down quickly enough and I suggested that I might be able to help him get his car out of the snow, given that the pile was relatively soft from fresh plowing and that the Caddy did not appear to be damaged. After all, I was a strapping lad of 21 at the time and I believed all things were possible.

Well, they were. He got back behind the wheel and I dug in my boots behind the trunk of his land yacht, and I pushed and pushed and he spun his wheels a lot before the golden behemoth finally edged forward and emerged from its temporary trap. The artificial-intelligence generated photo at the top of this column depicts our first meeting surprisingly accurately from my recollections -- the second-best thing to having had an actual camera to record the moment.

Cold and exhausted, we agreed to meet inside the adjacent Howard Johnson's for warmth and coffee (although I really didn't like coffee at the time). It was then that I learned of Cringlione's rich history as am immigrant from Sicily at the age of 8, whose dogged determination to succeed in his adopted land led him to this pivotal moment in his life.

He offered to pay me handsomely for my efforts to free his car, but I refused. At the time, I thought this man was going to need every dollar he had to achieve his dream. Also, having seen "The Godfather" a few years earlier and noting the similarities in the stories of Don Corleone and my new friend, I simply said, "Someday I may call upon you, and that day may never come, to perform a service for me."

Cringlione chuckled and handed me his business card. "Call my girl when that day comes," he said. And them he was gone, heading in his Cadillac for the fateful meeting that would forever change the landscape of the international overnight delivery service.

A few years later, relatively new in my job at The Sun Chronicle, I called Cringlione's girl to ask my favor. Cringlione called back from his company's headquarters in Point Barrow, Alaska.

"Don Cringlione," I said, "I need your help. You have become synonymous with the Christmas spirit. They even call you 'Kris Kringle' now. But I have trouble getting into that spirit, and the newspaper expects me to write a holiday column every year. I just can't do it. Can you help as a means of repaying your debt to me?"

It took only an instant for Cringlione to agree to send me a holiday missive every year, for as long as I needed it, as long as he could offer his unfiltered perspective. I agreed, and for nearly 35 years after that, the "Kris Kringle column" became a staple of The Sun Chronicle's sports section at Christmastime.

Although I am no longer at the newspaper, I have maintained my friendship with Kringle, who is still active in the operation of the most successful holiday-time overnight delivery service on the planet. And for the first time since 2019, I managed to convince him to join me for an hour's worth of conversation on my podcast. His first appearance was in Episode 7, and now, he returns for Episode 58.

I hope you will enjoy it. Cringlione was animated and energetic for a man pushing 100, and he even sounds much younger and vital than he did in his last visit. Clink on the link below to hear a true American icon sharing his wisdom and experience. As he often said, "Ho ho yourself. I'm a businessman." And one hell of a friend as well.

The Owner’s Box, Ep. 57.

Marcus Vaughn, Del Malloy and some old man prepare to announce a high school title game.

Sometimes, there’s nothing better after a big dinner than to sit down at the mixing board and create an audio podcast.

That’s exactly when I did last night, as Episode 57 of The Owner’s Box was borne from the sedentary satisfaction of having stuffed myself with prime rib at my favorite beef restaurant in Mendon.

That followed a day at a basketball jamboree in Medfield that involved many of my area’s girls’ basketball  teams, so it was a good opportunity to get my “unofficial co-host,” Foxboro coach Lisa Downs, to spend a few minutes chatting about her team as it prepares to defend its two straight state championships. I also talk about the recently concluded high school football season, in which four of the teams from my region competed in the state Super Bowls. The North TV crew, pictured above, was there to announce King Philip’s game against Catholic Memorial, just as we were present all season long.

And finally — but for the first time on the audio podcast — I offered my thoughts about the results of the presidential election in November. I promise, it will be the last time.

It’s all for you in Episode 57 of the best little podcast in all the land. Enjoy.

The Owner's Box After Dark, Ep. 59.

 

I remain extremely proud to have cast my vote for Kamala Harris.

The election is history, and it didn't turn out as hoped by me and by millions of other Americans. So, given that I had implored everyone to vote for Vice President Kamala Harris as our next President in the previous episode of the After Dark series, I thought it was best if I returned to the camera and microphone to offer my reaction to the verdict at the polls.

Here's a warning to the supporters of the guy that won: This is not a concession speech. This is not a soulful acceptance of our fate and an attempt to reach out to the MAGA world with open arms. I'm not happy about what happened on Tuesday, what has happened to our country to result in this outcome, and what may happen to our country because of it.

If you don't like that, don't watch it. In fact, you are advised to stop watching or listening to any of my podcasts going forward. There's plenty of other crap on the Internet that will probably be more to your liking.

In the meantime, I will not abandon the ideals and matters of conscience that led me to vote the way I did.

If you can handle that, please watch Episode 59 of this long-running series.

The Owner's Box After Dark, Ep. 58.

We're back, baby -- with the traditional Election Day episode of After Dark.

Don't worry, I don't spend the entire hour ranting about why the Orange Man is bad. It's there, of course --- but in the last of three segments. 

First, I explain why I'm always wearing a hat these days. In a nutshell, I had a patch of skin removed from my scalp because of a less-threatening form of skin cancer. I should be OK, but it will radically alter my appearance for a while.

And in the second segment, I speak fondly of my old friend Carlo Imelio, former Patriots' beat writer for the Springfield (Mass.) Newspapers, who passed last week at the age of 88. For greater depth, check out my previous post from Oct. 30 here on Blogging Fearlessly.

And finally, I spell it all out -- why I was quick to cast my vote for Vice President Kamala Harris for President of the United States, and why you should too.

All here in the 58th episode for the video podcast to end all video podcasts.

Remembering Carlo Imelio, 88.

Carlo Imelio, right, listens to Patriots' PR chief Stacey James during a 2014 meeting.

This has been a very painful year, given the number of beloved individuals that have left this mortal coil. And today, I just learned of another passing that leaves a void in my heart.

Carlo Imelio had been a sportswriter covering the Patriots for the Springfield Newspapers for a long time before I covered my first day of training camp in the summer of 1977 for The Sun Chronicle. But given his gregarious nature, it didn't take long for him to become a friend and mentor.

Former Patriots' writer Carlo Imelio

Carlo graduated from Agawam High School in 1954 (the year I was born), and served in the U.S. Navy for two years after graduation. In 1966, he joined the staff as a sportswriter for the Springfield Union, the Springfield Daily News and the Springfield Sunday Republican, which all eventually came under the banner of The Republican in 2003. Not long after he joined the staff, he became the beat writer covering the Boston Patriots.

The Patriots trained during their early days at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, which was ideal for a writer based in western Massachusetts. But Carlo had to make the long trek from "Springy," as he called it, to Boston -- and then to Foxboro from 1971 on -- every day once the regular season began.

By the time I joined the beat in 1977, the Patriots were enjoying widespread media interest -- even without the benefit of being any good. Reporters covered the team from not just the Boston papers, but from Bangor and Portland from the far north, Concord, Manchester and Nashua from New Hampshire; Lawrence, Lowell, Salem and Lynn from the near north; Quincy, Brockton, New Bedford, Fall River, Hyannis, Milford, Framingham, Worcester and Attleboro on this side of Massachusetts; Providence, Pawtucket, Woonsocket and Newport from Little Rhody; and Norwich, Springfield and Hartford from the western hinterlands. And all were here on a regular basis. 

But by far, respect was afforded to the beat reporters that had covered the team the longest. It wasn't easy for a cocky young pup from Attleboro to crack that clique at first, but one of the first to extend his hand in friendship was Carlo. And that circle of friendship grew once The Sun Chronicle offered me a higher level of commitment by sending me on the road to cover the team.

Carlo was a solid journalist and fully versed in the day-to-day demands of covering a pro team, but above all else, he was a funny guy. He could tell jokes with the best of them -- and regardless of how bad the joke might be, he could find a way to get a few chuckles out of you from it.

Carlo could make Parcells laugh.

Carlo brought those moments of humor to the press conferences with the coaches of the Patriots over the years he was on the beat. Even Bill Parcells, who preferred his reporters to be serious in their questions to him, could be disarmed by Carlo's self-effacing quips. There were times when the Tuna would get a little testy when the electronic-media reporters would ask questions that he thought were too simplistic or seeking the "gotcha" sound bite, but Carlo always seemed to know when he could drop in something guaranteed to lighten the mood and get the press conference back on a less-contentious tack.

Carlo left the beat at about the time when Bill Belichick came on board, and I often wondered during the worst of Belichick's stonewalling of the media if even his cold heart could be warmed by a perfectly-timed Carlo malaprop. I suppose I'll never know the answer, but I'd like to think that even Belichick's formidable defenses could be breached.

It was on the road where the veteran beat writers had the most fun. We went to the best restaurants and visited the best attractions -- as long as the expense accounts held out -- and that left us with many stories to be told and re-told and embellished over the years.

One particular story was of the night at the Amherst Marriott on the outskirts of Buffalo, where most of the media stayed before a game against the Bills. It was on one of those Saturday nights, early in Robert Kraft's ownership of the Patriots, when his wife, Myra, joined several of us in the hotel lounge for an impromptu getting-to-know-you bull session. Carlo, Ron Hobson of The Patriot Ledger, the late Dick Cerasuolo of the Worcester Telegram, myself and a few others pounded down the adult beverages as Myra proved herself quite capable of holding court with the boys.

There's another story -- or "starry" as Carlo would pronounce it -- that I'll have to clean up a little.

We were all in Chicago early in the 1985 season (yes, the season of Super Bowl XX), and most of the media arrived at the downtown hotel at the same time. So once we got our keys, and with me having spent a lot of time in that area of Chicago during my college days at Northwestern, I asked a young woman reporter from one of the Boston TV stations to join me for a walking tour of Michigan Avenue.

We spent quite a bit of time together that day, and had a terrific time. We even ran into the former TV and radio voice of the Chicago Cubs, Jack Brickhouse, as he sat with his wife and enjoyed afternoon drinks at the Drake Hotel's sidewalk cafe. But somewhere along the way, Carlo and the guys noticed that I wasn't around for thje usual evening festivities.

The next morning, I joined the others for something that was a tradition during the Billy Sullivan ownership. Sullivan would reserve a meeting room for a pre-game breakfast with the regular beat writers, and he would usually invite leading Catholic clergy from the city to join us. I was a little late to the gathering on that particular morning, and all my fellow reporters were already seated, although Sullivan and his other guests had yet to arrive.

As I took my seat, and knowing that I was out with the young lady from Channel 7, Carlo had his opportunity. He shouted out something that I can't quote here -- basically, a somewhat shocking inquiry into whether I had found a way to spend the night with the woman (I didn't, by the way). It got a huge laugh -- but for reasons neither Carlo nor I could anticipate.

I don't think Billy got the joke.

You see, Carlo was seated with his back to the door that led to the hallway. What he didn't know as he blurted out the somewhat inappropriate query was that in that very moment, Billy Sullivan and his guest -- Joseph Cardinal Bernardin, archbishop of Chicago -- entered the room.

Nothing was said. It probably wasn't fully understood by either of the new arrivals, as Carlo didn't use graphic language in his query. But for years thereafter, that moment became the stuff of legend on the Patriots' beat.

Readers of The Sun Chronicle owe Carlo a debt of gratitude for something they enjoyed for more than three decades. In the late 1970s, Carlo created the "Beat Carlo" contest where readers of the Springfield Newspapers could make their own picks for the weekend's NFL games and compare them with Carlo's picks, winning prizes if they bettered his results. Seeing how wildly successful that game was in Western Mass., other beat writers asked if we could borrow (or steal) the format for contests of their own. Neither Carlo nor his newspaper objected, so similar contests popped up all over New England -- including The Sun Chronicle's "Beat Fearless," which became a staple of our pro football coverage for decades.

For many years after his retirement, Carlo remained active on the Patriots' scene as a member of the Patriots Hall of Fame Nomination Committee. His perspective as one of the true veterans dating back to the pre-Foxboro days was invaluable, and his humor was much appreciated. But a few years ago, he stopped making the ride from the other side of the Connecticut River. 

There aren't many of us ink-stained wretches left from the days when the Patriots were the chaotic frontier of Boston sports instead of the gold standard, and we are now poorer for having lost another one.

Carlo joins his beloved wife Midge, who had passed on April 12, in the afterlife. He is survived by his son Nicholas and his daughter Joanne, their families and a legion of friends. 

Mark Farinella covered the Patriots for The Sun Chronicle, The Patriot Ledger of Quincy, and the Associated Press, from 1977 through 2019. Respond to his commentaries here or via email at theownersbox2020@gmail.com

Remembering Allan Johnson, 88.

Allan Johnson, 88.

Many years ago -- it seems like a century in length, but it was actually a little more than half that – I became part of the journalism world when I first walked through the front door of the offices of the long-defunct Mansfield News and asked the editor for a job covering Mansfield High School sports.

That marked the beginning of a 55-year odyssey that included professional residences at one weekly and four daily newspapers, that took me to all four corners of the country and back, and continues today in another form of media that adds moving pictures to the words.

But as with many other walks of life, sometimes the most lasting and cherished memories stem from the earliest days of one’s career, and those include the people that helped guide and shape it.

Allan Johnson was one of those people for me.

Johnson, who died this week at the age of 88, was the former Attleboro Sun’s Mansfield correspondent when I first started work at the Mansfield News in 1969, following my sophomore year in high school. Like many people that worked at small newspapers, Johnson was a jack-of-all-trades, a reporter that had to be versatile enough to handle a multitude of disciplines, covering meetings of the selectmen and school committee, snapping photos of breaking news around town, even supervising delivery routes of the newspaper – and yes, occasionally covering high school sports as well.

My boss at the News, an old-school New England editor named Howard Fowler, commanded me to keep an eye on Johnson. It’s not that I would be competing with him for news gathering, but Fowler wanted to make sure that the News didn’t miss anything on the sports side if he was going to make a commitment to hire me, and the best way to ensure that was by making sure I respected the competition.

So I paid attention, and I benefitted from it.

Johnson would usually get the assignment of covering Mansfield football games on Saturday afternoons, and I would be sure to pick up the Monday edition of the Sun to see what he did. The first thing I noticed was that he kept statistics, and that those appeared at the end of the story to enhance the information contained within it.

As a 15-year-old kid that got his job more on the basis of bravado than proven ability, I had a lot to learn. I had no idea how to keep statistics. I had to learn on my own, but at least I had Johnson’s weekly stories to provide me with a blueprint.

Another thing that impressed me was how quickly Johnson had to compile the material. There was no Sunday edition of the local daily in those days, but my newspaper didn’t publish until Thursdays of every week, and I still thought the Tuesday-evening deadline for my copy was too short a time for me to get the job done. Eventually I understood that Johnson got his story and stats done in mere hours after a game, and I made it my goal to match that performance, if not to exceed it.

It took a while, but I got there.

Johnson was a very busy man with all of his responsibilities, working out of a two-room office on North Main Street that looked more like a shed than anything else (and now is just the site of a gravel parking lot), so our paths did not cross that often during my youth. But that changed a few years later.

In 1977, not long removed from Northwestern University and reporting jobs at the Westfield Evening News and Taunton Daily Gazette, I was hired by The Sun Chronicle as a news reporter – first to cover the towns of Foxboro, Wrentham and Norfolk, then to cover Norton. My sports background didn’t kick in immediately, but once it did, I had a full appreciation of the efforts that were necessary from our network of town correspondents like Johnson. I was always on the go, always trying to track down one news tip or another, always committed to covering a multitude of municipal meetings – while, at the same time, sneaking into the sports department to take some of the load off Peter Gobis.

When I became sports editor in 1980, I found that I suddenly had sway over assigning members of our news staff and correspondents to football games in the fall, so I took full advantage of it. Johnson still did the Mansfield games, Vin Igo the Foxboro games, reporters Henry Reiley and Rick Foster went wherever we needed them – even our former publisher, Paul Rixon, could be found on the sidelines (under a pseudonym) if necessary. Small newspapers are and have always been a team effort.

Eventually, the newspaper grew beyond the need to take an all-hands-on-deck approach to weekend sports coverage. We were able to look beyond our doors for young and budding talent, developing a core group of part-time writers to cover local games – and more than a few of them went on to careers in sports journalism of their own, some whose names you’d recognize from your daily sports-news consumption.

The Sun Chronicle gradually lessened its use of part-time news correspondents, preferring to station full-time staff writers in the communities they covered. But that didn’t end Johnson’s career with us; his expertise at coordinating newspaper deliveries made him the perfect choice to become an assistant manager of the Circulation Department, rounding out his 51 years of overall service to the newspaper.

During that time, Johnson would frequently stop by the sports desk and chat about how the Hornets were doing, or he’d bring up one of his favorite topics – the expertise of Bill Belichick as a football coach, which he came to admire long before Belichick took the Patriots’ reins in 2000. Whether as the defensive coordinator of the New York Giants or as the head coach of the Cleveland Browns, Belichick’s potential greatness was recognized by Johnson long before Robert Kraft came to the same conclusion.

We’d have spirited debates about Belichick’s merits over the years. One of Johnson’s happiest moments, I believe, was when he delivered the appropriate “I told you so” palaver upon my return from Cleveland following an AFC playoff loss by the Patriots to the original Browns – the game in which Belichick’s Browns bested the team coached by his former mentor in the Meadowlands, Bill Parcells.

Johnson grew up in Foxboro and graduated a Warrior, but he clearly found a welcoming professional home in rival Mansfield for much of his life. He served in the Mass. National Guard and the U.S. Air Force for a total of six years before he entered the workforce, first with Raytheon and then with the Attleboro Sun.

As a writer for the predecessor to today’s Sun Chronicle, his job included not only all of the aforementioned duties, but he also wrote a weekly opinion column that did a pretty good job of skewering the public officials of Mansfield when they deserved it. Johnson created a mythical recurring character named “Tontoe,” not-so-loosely based upon the Lone Ranger’s Native American sidekick, to voice the critiques of public policy that might sound like bias if spoken by him.

The character may have been a little politically incorrect by today’s standards, but in the 1960s, “Tontoe” got his message across while bringing a few chuckles to the reader at the same time.

As I said, it was a different time. But the demands of newspapering were a lot different in those days. Allan Johnson was an individual that gladly accepted the challenge of mastering a multitude of disciplines in order to help produce a newspaper that became a fixture in the lives of its readers. And in that, he became a worthy role model for the next generation of reporters to follow.

Mark Farinella wrote for more than 40 years for The Sun Chronicle of Attleboro, Mass. Respond to his commentaries at theownersbox2020@gmail.com.

Ponderous thoughts I was pondering ...

Patriots' head coach Jerod Mayo: Should he talk more, or talk less?

Ponderous thoughts I was pondering upon finding a big truck blocking my driveway this morning as its owners attended to paving a driveway elsewhere on my street ... 

* I am so glad that I no longer cover the New England Patriots on a regular basis.

Don't get me wrong -- it was an honor and a privilege to have that responsibility for 42 years, 39 at The Sun Chronicle, two at The Patriot Ledger of Quincy and another 33 as a part-time writer for the Associated Press, including the last year of my career on the beat. I got to see the worst of times (the fall of the House of Sullivan and Victor Kiam's subsequent reign of terror) and the best of times (20 years of Bill Belichick and 18 of Tom Brady, in which I personally wrote about five of their six Super Bowl championships). I'm proud of my work during that time, and I can say without hesitation that my readers got my best effort at all times.

It wasn't all sweetness and light to be a reporter during those times, though -- even when the Patriots were at their best. In fact, there were times during the dynastic period when the job was just plain miserable because of Belichick's total disdain for the media corps.

Well, now the media has a coach that's far more open to the media -- and it's driving reporters nuts.

Jerod Mayo talks. Sometimes too much, some people think. That should be good for story-hungry reporters, who were left with nothing but crumbs by Belichick, who wouldn't reveal even the simplest and most harmless of information because he saw the media as vermin whose only purpose in life was to undermine his team.

Ain't it a hoot, then, that Belichick is dabbling in a host of media ventures as a new season approaches -- after he couldn't get hired to coach another team in the most recent offseason. I imagine he'll be a big hit at it as he offers his insight directly from the horse's mouth -- or horse's ass, depending upon your point of view.

The classic "Angry Bill" face 

But I digress. Belichick did a wonderful job of beating down the local media corps over his tenure with the Patriots. After a while, reporters wouldn't ask the simplest of questions because they knew the dismissive responses they'd get. And as the roster of aging scribes turned over through attrition and either they were replaced by newer ones, or news organizations stopped sending reporters because of declining circulation and income, the new kids on the block really didn't know how to challenge Belichick on anything.

There are still a few veterans on the print beat -- Karen Guregian, the former Boston Herald writer and columnist, who took her talents to the mostly-online MassLive operation out of Springfield, and Mike Reiss, the talented and trusted veteran at ESPN Boston, whose work transcends both online print and broadcast. Others like former print writer Tom E. Curran, have converted primarily to broadcast work. And I particularly trust Boston Globe beat writer Christopher Price, whom I worked alongside for many years and who has also written a very popular book, "Bleeding Green," about the heyday of the Hartford Whalers. But to be honest, I hardly know anyone else covering the team these days now that I'm five full seasons removed from it.

I have to admit, there are times I think that Jerod Mayo, in his first year at the helm, is suffering terribly by comparison to Belichick. He didn't deal very well with the contract complaints of former linebacker Matthew Judon, who took his pissing and moaning public -- something Belichick would have stopped after the first such instance.

Fancying himself as a player's coach, Mayo let Judon have his forum -- until it started to infect the locker room and other players openly complained about not being paid enough. It forced the Patriots' hand to trade Judon away -- and I have to give new GM Eliot Wolf credit for getting a third-round draft pick from the Atlanta Falcons for a player that talked a better game than he actually played.

More recently, Mayo's comments have been all over the map in explaining why Jacoby Brissett, and not No. 3-overall pick Drake Maye, is the starting quarterback. Mayo openly said that Maye was the best QB at the end of the preseason, but still, it was his decision (he first said "our decision," but backtracked and used the personal pronoun instead) to start Brissett.

The actual answer is plain to see. The Patriots' offensive line is horseshit. Maye would likely be at risk of serious injury if he was to start right now. Brissett is expendable. But Mayo's flip-flopping and disjointed answers about the situation project the image as if it's amateur night in Foxboro.

Admittedly, I'm not in attendance at the press conferences and I don't watch them on the Internet. I'm happily done with that. But I still peruse the coverage, and I get the feeling that a lot of writers just don't know how to approach covering a coach that babbles as opposed to clamming up.

Anyway, we're on to Cincinnati. One way or another.

* Speaking of media madness, there's a lot of buzz in WNBA circles about how, prior to a national broadcast involving Caitlin Clark's Indiana Fever and the Dallas Wings, former Texas Tech star Sheryl Swoopes was replaced on the telecast by all-time women's hoop great Nancy Lieberman.

Sheryl Swoopes in her playing days.

Swoopes, who led the nation in NCAA scoring in 1993 (the same year that Foxboro's Sarah Behn was in the top five while at Boston College, if memory serves), achieved WNBA stardom in its formative years with the Houston Comets and Seattle Storm. She was fired from one college coaching job in her post-playing career, but has since dabbled in broadcasting for Texas Tech and WNBA gigs.

But Swoopes has also been ultra-critical of Clark, the fabulous former Iowa star who has dazzled the WNBA and created a sudden surge of national interest in a league that literally nobody cared about beforehand. Swoopes apparently feels that Clark's sudden popularity somehow denigrates the great players that preceded her -- which, of course, is ridiculous. The WNBA was begging for a breakthrough star and it finally got one, but the jealousy of her from both former and current WNBA players is incredibly embarrassing for the league.

In some past broadcasts and on podcasts, Swoopes mischaracterized Clark as a five-year player at Iowa whose scoring totals were illegitimate. Other broadcast and print journalists took Swoopes to task for the inaccuracies and her obvious disdain for Clark. So when the Fever-Wings televised game came to pass, the local producers took the easy out and put Lieberman in the analyst's seat for the game, claiming that because Swoopes and Lieberman work for them on a rotating basis, it was Lieberman's turn.

Uh-huh. 

I hate to say this, but I can't help but think that there's something more than performance envy behind this situation. It's not simply a coincidence that many former players that happen to be African-American have also expressed similar sentiments about Clark, who is white.

And it's a shame. Maybe it's wrong that people didn't care about the WNBA before Clark burst upon the scene, but at least now the league has a generational star to shine light upon all the wonderful players in it. 

* Racism may also be at the root of the debate over whether Clark or Chicago Sky forward Angel Reese, the former LSU star, should be Rookie of the Year. Both have set several league records in their debut season, but a quick look at social media exposes an unfortunate schism between the races over who should get the honor-- particularly a lot of Black posters who accuse anyone that prefers Clark of being racists.

Chicago rookie Angel Reese.

Reese is a very good player, no doubt. She has set a league rebounding record in her first season. But many of those rebounds have been offensive caroms resulting from her own missed layups. She is averaging only 38.5 percent on her field-goal attempts -- 48.4 percent from 0-3 feet out and 24.8 percent from 3-10 feet. Yes, she is relentless at rebounding her own misses, but until she gets more of those short-range bunnies in the basket on the first try, she can't be regarded as a dominant player.

For all of Clark's impressive skills, the one thing she does better than anyone else is making other players around her better while still being able to post 20 or more points of her own. I've talked to a lot of coaches that have been watching Clark's efforts with great interest, and they agree with me that her ability to find the open player may be her greatest skill.

One of my friends also said that Reese should spend less time working on her eyelashes and her fashion sense, and more time working on her layups. Can't say I disagree.

Bottom line for me? Clark has taken a bad team and spurred it to a 17-16 record and the No. 6 seed. Chicago is 11-17 and Reese was padding her stats during garbage time of a recent loss to the Fever.

Clark is the Rookie of the Year. Hands down. Reese can and most likely will be a great player down the road, but she's not there yet.

* My first football game of the year is Friday, King Philip at Walpole, a 5:45 p.m. start at Turco Field that will be televised live on North TV's Community Channel, which is Comcast Channel 6 in Plainville. It can also be seen online at community.northtv.net.

Now, if only I can get rosters of the teams, I'll be all set.

Mark Farinella is wondering if this is the year that he'll be more interested in Boston College football instead of the Patriots. Comment on his opinions at theownersbox2020@gmail.com.

Two more steps on a long journey.

Connecticut's DiJonai Carrington (21) drives to the hoop at TD Garden.

I have a new TV. Its picture is 10 inches bigger diagonally than the old one's was and it does a lot of things, only a fraction of which I've learned how to do. I think it can project two stations on the screen at the same time, but I don't have the patience to find out.

So there I was sitting before the big TV on Tuesday night, also employing my eight-year-old iPad to view a second station simultaneously -- and I am not at all ashamed to admit that I spent most of the evening with tears in my eyes.

On the big screen was the Democratic National Convention, a celebration of hope, optimism and inclusion that has been a refreshing contrast to the doom-and-gloom tone of its Republican counterpart about a month ago. On Tuesday, there were great speeches by former President Barack Obama and former First Lady Michelle Obama, and one of the most unique roll call votes in convention history to confirm Vice President Kamala Harris as the second woman to be nominated for the presidency and the first of Black and Asian descent to be a party's standard-bearer.

And on the smaller screen was a basketball game at the TD Garden in Boston, a first for that iconic arena -- the WBNA's Connecticut Sun playing host to the Los Angeles Sparks in the first game from that league to be played in Boston. The game drew a sellout crowd of 19,125, and it was rewarded with a come-from-behind, 69-61 win by the Sun over Los Angeles. The crowd was raucous, involved, enthusiastic and it even employed the classic "Beat L.A.!!" chants borrowed from the great Celtics-Lakers rivalry games of the past.

And I cried. Like a baby. 

Kamala Harris accepts the nomination.

On my screens were two events of great importance, one national and international in scope and the other long overdue in a city that touts itself as a bastion of liberalism but has not welcomed the WNBA into its city limits in the three decades of its existence. And since it's well known that I devoted almost 70 percent of my life doing as much as I could to promote women's equality in sports in this little corner of the world, I did feel at least a little invested in what happened on the basketball court and in the stands at the Garden.

And as for the nomination of Vice President Harris, I've always been one to support candidates of merit regardless of race, gender, party, sexual orientation or whatever. Despite my liberal leanings, I am not a registered Democrat. I'm what we in Massachusetts call "unenrolled." I have voted in 13 Presidential elections, choosing 11 Democrats and two Republicans. I've been a winner eight times and a loser five times. America has survived through all of them.

I was a proud voter for Hillary Clinton in 2016, and I will not play coy with my 2024 choice. I will be voting for Harris and her VP nominee, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. I think the Democrats need to yank any semblance of control over the government from the despicable MAGA movement, which embraces racism, misogyny and xenophobia to support the notion of its leader of what a "great" America is. I am pleased with the direction in which Harris would take America because I believe liberalism equals compassion and progress as opposed to the constant refrain of hatred, grievances and retribution from the disaster that the Republican Party has become. 

In fact, I believe that anybody that identifies as Republican but does not support the extremism of Trump and his Nazi-like minions should be fully ashamed of themselves for not taking stronger stands against Trumpism. They are just as complicit in Trump's rise to power as anyone that marched in Charlottesville, Va., holding tiki torches and chanting Nazi tropes.

Donald Trump destroyed the USFL.

Harsh? Maybe. But I'm not the one that has to look in the mirror. I've despised Donald Trump since the 1980s, when he seized control of the United States Football League and promptly destroyed it because he couldn't mastermind a merger with the established NFL. I did not cheat on three successive wives, the latter a mail-order escort from Slovenia that was fraudulently given American citizenship and was not spared her own embarrassment when her husband had a well-publicized sexual tryst with an actress in pornographic films. I'm not the one that was found guilty of 34 felony counts in connection with covering up hush-money payments to that porn actress. I'm not the one that paid off several families under accusations of molesting underaged children. I never flew with Jeffrey Epstein to his "pleasure island" in the Caribbean. I never instigated an insurrection against the rightful United States government.

Should I go on? If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem.

So I watched the DNC every night -- choosing the C-SPAN telecasts instead of legacy media so I could watch without the coloring influence of analysis. That was refreshing. I even passed on the love of my media life, CBS Evening News anchor Norah O'Donnell, to not shade my opinion of the proceedings in either direction.

I'm sure some conservatives would say I was suckered into embracing the liberal line. Indeed, I've been waging that war on social media against people that absolutely cannot understand the differences and the veracity of what they see and hear from the two parties. But aside from the fact that the Democrats used complete sentences and did not invoke the example of a fictional serial killer to make a point, the messaging was so different, and so hopeful, that I could not help but be swayed.

Yes, there were excesses of "joy." The DNC often came off as a four-night variety special, and that musical roll call of the delegates was a shock at first. The issue was already settled because Kamala Harris had secured the needed number of delegates in a virtual roll call, but it grew on me after a while. After all, everyone was having fun -- and after having watched a Republican convention in which I was told that America is a shithole country that's going down the toilet and the only man that can save it is a silver-spoon-fed geriatric that has sucked on the teat of inherited wealth all his life and is about to be sentenced on those aforementioned felony convictions, well, I had my fill of negativity for the remainder of my life.

What was most striking about the DNC was the full commitment the party has made to ensure women's reproductive rights. I was touched to my very core by the stories of women who could not receive emergency care during failed pregnancies because the states in which they lived took the opportunity to pass harsh and draconian laws restricting abortion and related healthcare in the wake of the devastating reversal of Roe v. Wade by Donald Trump's conservative-stacked Supreme Court.

I have always applied one standard for forming opinions about issues such as abortion and LBGTQ+ rights, even though as a 70-year-old white heterosexual male, I can't really experience any of these issues first-hand. My reasoning is always to attempt to walk a mile in their shoes -- to try to determine how I would feel if I was experiencing the hate and discrimination felt by others.

The MAGA view of a "great" America.

I grew up in an era when the Southern states still openly discriminated against Blacks. My mother was from the central Florida hamlet of Williston, which our family visited annually in the 1950s and 1960s to see her aging parents. I don't believe my mother was a racist -- she certainly didn't raise me to be one -- but by the time I was 8 years old and able to understand the ways of the world, I knew that her hometown was definitely hostile to its African-American residents. I saw first-hand the "colored only" water coolers and entrances to public buildings, and even as a pre-teen, I knew enough to form my opinion by inserting myself into that plight. 

Now, more than 60 years later, I hear a former President talking about making America great again, and knowing that he means bringing the country back to a 19th-century mindset where people of color and all women were marginalized and subservient to white males, and it makes me sick to my stomach.

I am a fan of empowerment, especially of women. Practically every woman with whom I have had close relationships in my adult life have been smart, independent and motivated to make the most of the equality that was promised them -- if not entirely realized -- by the women's movement of the 1960s and 1970s. And most of them have been disappointed time after time by men that have denied then equal pay, equal opportunities, and equal rights to control their own bodies.

I vowed a long time ago to not be one of those men.

Jackie Cross, left, plays in a girls-boys
exhibition game in February 1971.

I've told the story before of how my high school sweetheart was the starting center of the Mansfield High girls' basketball team. She was 5-foot-11 and a very good athlete, and probably would have been even better if she had been able to benefit from the post-Title IX improvements in coaching and training methods that followed just a few years later. I was a part-time writer for the town's weekly newspaper and I covered all of the boys' sports, and one day, as Jackie and I were shooting some baskets, she asked me why I never covered any of her games.

I could have answered with the truth, that her games were in the afternoons at the opposite site of the boys, and I had to hitch rides on the team bus to cover the boys and thus fulfill the demands of the newspaper's editor. But I didn't.

Instead, I said, "It's only girls' basketball."

Big mistake. And to this day, I have not forgotten the look on her face. I had just marginalized the person that supposedly meant the most to me on this earth, and it was indicative of a complete lack of understanding and respect of something incredibly important to her. Not surprisingly, our relationship did not last beyond another two years.

She died of breast cancer in 1986, leaving behind a husband and four children. 

Meanwhile, in my first years at The Sun Chronicle, I carried on a flawed policy of cursory coverage of girls' sports before a pair of local coaches, Oliver Ames' Laney Clement-Holbrook and Seekonk's Dorene Menezes, cornered me in separate phone calls to tear me a new asshole over what they believed to be intentionally dismissive coverage of girls' sports. And at some point, their emotions transcended their words, and those emotions forced me to look at the situation from the viewpoint of someone being discriminated against, and not as a beneficiary of male privilege.

It took some convincing, but Peter Gobis and I embarked upon a quest to equalize the coverage of boys' and girls' high school sports. It was basically doubling our workload, as well as the space we commanded in the daily newspaper, but for many of my years at the paper, it was beneficial to us to have opened the pages of The Sun Chronicle's sports section to another 51 percent of the readership.

We caught holy hell at first. Some knuckle-dragging male readers thought we were taking something away from the boys' teams, when we were actually adding new content. I took the point in covering the girls' teams, and I got called every name in the book for it -- a pedophile, a stalker, a child molester, you name it -- just because I covered girls' teams and gave them my best effort. Oh, I also covered pro football, the manliest of manly sports, for 42 years. That didn't wash with the thick-skulled male chauvinists -- until they had daughters, and not sons, and were suddenly all-in on our policy of inclusion.

No, I didn't teach Sarah Behn my basketball skills.

I don't regret a thing. It was the most meaningful thing I've ever done in my life. I didn't have the opportunity to cure cancer or accomplish anything truly memorable, but I can say that at a time when women athletes were begging for respect and opportunities, they found an ally in me. 

I watched that game at the TD Garden knowing that I had nothing to do with its success. But I'm glad I lived long enough to see something like this happen in a city where it should have happened a very long time ago. It has been a personal goal to be able to see that level of acceptance of women's sports and to be able to stick in the faces of the morons that mocked me and the wonderful athletes I covered.

Unfortunately, they're not gone yet. One look at the reader comments under the Boston Globe's coverage of the Sun-Sparks game drove that point home. Ignorance is not in short supply in today's America. If it was, Donald Trump would have been cast upon the scrap heap of history long before he ever became President.

But it's another step forward.

I've said all along during this election cycle that women will be the salvation of the nation. Angry at the vacating of Roe v. Wade, they can turn the tide and erase the effectiveness of Trump's redneck base for that reason alone. And regardless of what you may feel about the process that took President Biden off the ballot, the Democrats put a talented and feisty female prosecutor in his place to seize the moment. Trump has no idea in the world how to run against Kamala Harris, so he resorts to his usual despicable and childish tropes -- mispronouncing her name intentionally, blaming her for everything wrong in the country, and of late, even re-tweeting scurrilous memes that purport her to be a transgender male.

If there is a God, Donald J. Trump will be burning in a particularly torturous corner of hell for all eternity. But since that can't be guaranteed here in the land of the living, the best we can do is throw him in jail when he is sentenced for his felony convictions in early September, and then throw him out of public life at the ballot box in November.

Oh, and Taylor Swift, if you're paying attention -- a few well-chosen words from you will also help. A lot.

Mark Farinella is still awaiting delivery of his Harris/Walz bumper stickers. Comment on his opinions at theownersbox2020@gmail.com.

Ponderous thoughts I was pondering ...

King Philip football will again be coming your way on North TV this fall.

Ponderous thoughts I was pondering while trying to find something other than gymnastics on my TV set this past week ...

** It's now officially less than a month before I'll be back behind the North TV microphone for another season of high school sports coverage, starting with the King Philip football team's visit to Turco Field at Walpole High School on Sept. 6, a 5:45 p.m. start.

This will be my seventh season at North TV and sixth doing play-by-play. My, how time does fly when you're having fun. And to think, I wasn't even collecting Social Security when I started doing this gig.

I got a tentative schedule from the bosses a couple of weeks ago, and in addition to my usual fall forays into field hockey, soccer and volleyball, I have a substantial schedule of games involving the defending Division 2 state champion KP football Warriors as well as one game apiece at Bishop Feehan and Tri-County.

Here's the tentative football schedule I'm looking at: Sept. 6, KP at Walpole (5:45 p.m.); Sept. 13, Marblehead at KP (7 p.m.); Sept. 20, KP at Norwood (6 p.m.); Sept. 27, Foxboro at KP (7 p.m.); Oct. 5, Diman at Tri-County (1 p.m.); Oct. 18, Taunton at KP (7 p.m.); Oct. 19, Bishop Fenwick at Bishop Feehan (1 p.m.); Oct. 25, KP at Milford (7 p.m.); Nov. 1, KP at Attleboro (6:30 p.m.); Nov. 8, 15 and 22, MIAA Football Playoffs, time and sites TBA; Nov. 28, Franklin at KP (10 a.m.). And if KP makes it to its fourth straight Super Bowl berth, I'm pretty sure we'll be at Gillette Stadium to bring you the call.

The only KP football game we don't have on the docket right now is the Warriors' Oct. 10 game at Sharon (a Thursday due to the Jewish holidays), but I'll let you know if that changes. 

Some of these road games may pose a few problems for the North TV telecasting crew, in that most of these fields don't have large press boxes that can accommodate visiting media. We've been at some of the fields before in the past and have made adjustments by sitting in the stands (all the while praying for good weather to protect the electronics from harm). The last time we broadcast a game from Walpole, in fact, we didn't even do the game; it was in 2018, my first year with the North TV crew, but we picked up the Walpole Cable telecast (featuring former Sun Chronicle sports correspondent Rick Brown on the play-by-play).

In preparation for the challenges ahead, I visited all of the potential road sites a little more than a week ago to scout out possible broadcast locations where we can access electrical power (very important). And of course, I'll try to employ my well-known charm (ha!) to coax athletic directors of the host schools to look fondly upon our requests.

There are bulges in the boards.

I also have to get in touch with the folks at Tri-County to see if indeed they still have a press box. 

Last year, Alex Salachi and I did an early-season game against Case High at T-C, where there is a wooden press box with a great view built atop a berm behind the stands. But it has felt a little creaky in recent years, and a week after we did that game, Tri-County condemned that structure because there were bulges and holes in the front wall, as the accompanying photo shows.

Oh, well, if there wasn't an element of challenge to the job, it wouldn't be hardly as much fun.

** As the opening salvo of this column indicated, I'm a little fatigued by all of the gymnastics coverage NBC puts on prime-time TV in the Olympics.

Simone Biles is the GOAT. Now, 
what else is happening in Paris?

By noting that, in no way do I mean to disparage the outstanding performances of the U.S. team, which will be bringing tons of glory and gold back home. And if anything, I feel really good about their success, because the 2024 U.S. team is made up of mature women and not the tiny teens of olde who used to be force-fed puberty-blocking drugs to keep them in their waif-like forms. Simone Biles is 27 years old and still the best in the world, and I wouldn't be surprised at all if she finds a way to be ready for the Los Angeles games in 2028. That feels a lot more normal.

But my beef is that NBC seems to think that there are no sports worth watching in prime-time other than women's gymnastics. Now, even as I typed that, I know it wasn't entirely true -- we got a lot of swimming this past week, and I'm glad we did, because Katie Ledecky's ongoing successes are simply wonderful to watch. 

We even got to see Stoughton native Frederick Richard compete at a high level for the men's gymnastics team. And once the track and field competition began, NBC grudgingly carved out a few minutes for it.

But what about men's basketball? Women's basketball? Women's soccer? High-profile sports guaranteed to have a lot of built-in interest for the American audience? They've been relegated to the USA Network (I was amazed it's still on TV) or streaming service Peacock. I don't have to pay extra for Peacock because it's part of my Comcast/Xfinity cable subscription, but a lot of people must pay for it -- and I've heard my share of complaints about that, especially since NBC has started to put some NFL telecasts exclusively on its streaming partner.

Of course, I'm a 70-year-old white guy. I'm not NBC's target demographic for prime-time telecasts of any sort of entertainment programming, let alone the Olympics. So I know that these complaints are basically an exercise in pissing into the wind. But I just wanted to get it off my chest so I can get the blood pressure down a few notches.

** I watched the introduction of Vice President Kamala Harris' running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, if for no other reason than to find out exactly who the guy was. Can't say I knew beforehand.

But I've got to admit, I was impressed.

The Dem ticket: Gov. Walz and VP Harris.

Some might have been concerned because the VP passed on other, more famous possibilities such as Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly, a former astronaut, and Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, who gave one hell of an introductory speech before the announcement in Philadelphia on Tuesday. And some look askance at Minnesota voters because, you may recall, they also elected pro wrestler Jesse Ventura as their governor years ago.

Gov. Walz (pronounced Walls), however, is a real slice of middle America with a huge conscience.

He's 60, bald, and looks a lot older than that (actor Brad Pitt is actually older), but he jokingly credits that to his many years as serving as a middle school lunch hall monitor during his teaching career. He was a social studies teacher and football coach at a school in Mankato, Minn., and he has the distinction of having been the defensive coordinator for a team that went from a winless finish to a state championship in one year's time. Many of his former players have already come forward to praise him for being not just an inspirational coach. but also a concerned and committed teacher that served as a positive role model.

As an aside, the company in Wisconsin that owned my former newspaper, The Sun Chronicle, also owned a television station in Mankato, Minn. About all I know about that is that a lot of the money we made in Attleboro back in our fat-and-happy days helped keep that TV station afloat for many years.

Coach Walz also became the first member of the school's faculty to serve as advisor to the school's Gay-Straight Alliance, which further illustrates the depth of his commitment to the well-being of his school's students.

A long-time member of the Army National Guard that was deployed overseas after 9/11, former Sergeant Major Walz was a U.S. congressman from Mankato's district (usually notoriously Republican) for 12 years. He was known at the time as a relatively conservative Democrat that was willing to work with his GOP counterparts to get the business of the country done. And as governor, he helped codify women's reproductive rights into state law, and he was a staunch defender of transgender rights. He helped ensure free meals for students in Minnesota public schools.

And he's getting some flak from MAGA trolls for another of his accomplishments -- free distribution of sanitary products for women in the state's high schools. 

Let me tell you why this resonates with me. 

No, I've never menstruated. But one of my closest female friends used to, and there was a time in her life when she would use nothing but the "all-natural" cotton tampons from a famous manufacturer because she feared the dangers of using tampons that were made from synthetic materials. Unfortunately, the major manufacturer decided to phase out the "all-natural" product, and they rapidly disappeared from supermarket shelves around here.

The phase-out was gradual and regional, so on one of my Patriots road trips (to Cleveland, in fact), I embarked upon a "quest for tampons" for my friend. I must have hit every Wal-Mart, KMart and supermarket within a 50-mile radius of Cleveland on the day before the game, and I bought every box of the "all-natural" product that I could find -- so many, in fact, that I had to buy another duffel bag to pack them for my return flight home.

Now, who does that? But anyone with a beloved female friend, or with daughters, might actually understand how important it is for them. Gov. Walz obviously understood that high school is a very sensitive time for girls that have just reached sexual maturity, and that the least he could do was to make sure they had the product available to them in case of need.

The Repugnicans are calling him "Tampon Tim" because of that action. That's just another example of how, during the Trump era, the Grand Old Party has become an engine of hate and intolerance -- especially against women.

Anyway, Gov. Walz gave one hell of a speech Tuesday, and I have to admit, I would have been willing to run out onto the field ready to play football for him -- even at my advanced age, with my excessive girth and two bad knees. But more importantly, I'll vote for him.

It's true, I probably would have voted for a loaf of bread before I'd ever vote for Donald Trump and his sleazeball VP nominee (who, rumor has it, has been barred from all Bob's Discount Furniture stores). But I'm feeling really good about Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, and I hope my fellow voters of good conscience will as well. It is time for the MAGA movement to be repudiated in totality.

** I saw someone driving a Tesla Cybertruck around my hometown the other day. I wanted to pull up aside and ask the driver why he (or she, I didn't know) wanted to buy anything made by Elon Musk, whose true colors have come out of late with his unabashed conversion to the MAGA movement. But discretion proved the better part of valor.

Seriously, I've always wanted to make the personal conversion to electric. I've owned two hybrids in my lifetime, a Toyota Prius and a VW Jetta, and I was quite pleased with the higher gas mileage and the knowledge that I was using less fossil fuels.

Cybertruck: Truly, a steaming heap of shit.

But I'm a little bit of a hypocrite. At this stage of my life, I own two members of the Mercedes-Benz family, a GLC 300 SUV and a C 300 cabriolet. They are both pre-owned, they both have the same 4-cylinder engine, they both get around 25 MPG and I don't drive either anywhere near as much as the cars I owned when I was fully employed. If I make it to 10,000 total miles a year these days (as opposed to 20,000 back in 2018), it's more than I expected. Besides, I'm worth it.

I actually did consider a Tesla in my last round of frenzied buying, but the price for a new one was still prohibitive, and I still have concerns over the mileage range and how adverse weather affects the life of a charge. Plus, as I have learned of late, Tesla build quality is notoriously poor, with uneven trim gaps and a multitude of interior upholstery problems, and even the slightest glitch can lock you out of your car and shut down all functions, making it practically impossible to get to a service facility. 

And the Cybertruck? Well, it's just a piece of shit. 

No thanks, I've had it with Musk. He absolutely ruined Twitter, turning the renamed "X" into a sanctuary for hate speech -- including his own. He recently posted a comment saying that civil war in the U.S. was an "eventuality."

Well, fuck him and the Cybertruck he rode in on. If I'm still driving when the Benzes have worn out, I may yet consider an electric car -- but the last company to get my business and hard-earned dollars will be Tesla.

** One last summer basketball league session for me, and that's tonight (Wednesday) at Franklin High. I'll be watching Mansfield playing Medfield at 7 and Foxboro taking on Franklin at 8. 

Kudos to FHS coach John Leighton for running an excellent league this year. Can't wait for the season to begin -- but I'm not ready to give up the warm weather quite yet.

** As I prepare to close this column, I'll leave you with one thought. I now know why high jumper Dick Fosbury created the "flop" method of jumping so many years ago. 

He never would have known this, of course, but going over the bar back-first definitely prevents the fate that befell French pole vaulter Anthony Ammirati when he was denied an Olympic gold because his "junk" dislodged the bar.

Does it really pay to advertise? 

Mark Farinella still wishes that Caitlin Clark was on the U.S. women's basketball team. Contact him at theownersbox2020@gmail.com.