The Ann Arbor Chronicle » Entertainment

Sunday Funnies: Bezonki (The End)

Alvey Jones — Sun, 31 Aug 2014 13:04:33 +0000

Local artist Alvey Jones is a partner in the WSG Gallery, at 306 S. Main in downtown Ann Arbor. This is the final installment of his Bezonki comic strip, which The Ann Arbor Chronicle has been proud to publish monthly since September 2008.

Sunday Funnies: Bezonki

Alvey Jones — Sun, 03 Aug 2014 13:09:13 +0000

Local artist Alvey Jones is a partner in the WSG Gallery, at 306 S. Main in downtown Ann Arbor. The painting in the first panel of this month’s strip is on exhibit at the gallery through August. The Chronicle relies in part on regular voluntary subscriptions to support our occasional features like Bezonki, which in turn help support a local artist. Click this link for details: Subscribe to The Chronicle. And if you’re already supporting us, please encourage your friends, neighbors and colleagues to help support The Chronicle, too!

Column: Greek Drama In A Public Park

Dave Askins — Fri, 11 Jul 2014 18:01:13 +0000

I was first introduced to Greek drama in my sophomore year of high school.

Here’s bit of friendly advice to high school teachers everywhere: If you take a group of kids in southern Indiana and assign them parts in Anouilh’s Antigone to read aloud sitting at their desks, at least one of those kids will contemplate stabbing out his own eyes as a way to avoid doing that.

This is Emily Caffery as Elektra, making her entrance onto the stage at West Park on opening night, July 10, 2014.

Because I am not a hero in a Greek play, I did not act on the inclination. But based on that first exposure to Greek drama, I did not develop an appreciation for it, or any other literary tradition. In literary terms, this failure to “develop an appreciation” for Greek drama is, I believe, accurately described as “understatement.”

So I must avail myself of another highfalutin literary device (irony) to urge you, Chronicle readers, to attend one of the upcoming performances of “Elektra,” this year’s Penny Seats Theatre Company West Park production.

Opening night was July 10. It will be performed over three weekends: July 10-12, July 17-19 and July 24-26. Buy a ticket.

To be clear, it’s not Greek drama I’m trying to sell you. I’d like to sell you on the idea of Greek drama performed in West Park, one of 157 parks here in Ann Arbor.

I want to sell you on that idea, because mostly when you read about Ann Arbor’s parks in The Chronicle, it’s in some super policy-wonky context. Sometimes that context is the city council, when it’s engaged in its own park-based drama. Or it’s our coverage of the park advisory commission.

So in the Penny Seats production of “Elektra,” I spotted an opening to pitch Ann Arbor’s parks to readers – in a different way than we typically cover them.

West Park is just west of downtown, between Chapin and Seventh streets. Motorists on Huron Street will be familiar with the park’s general location, even if they don’t know the park itself: It’s north of the HAWK crosswalk pedestrian signal as you pass the Y building.

Pedestrians who cross Huron at the HAWK crosswalk, and head a half block north along Chapin, will find the park entrance on the left. From that direction, the park offers a fairly conventional playground, a basketball court and a Project Grow gardening plot. A bit farther to the west, hugging the northern portion of the park, is a baseball field. And to be perfectly clear, that’s a baseball (not softball) field – which has been described by players as the best place to play baseball in all of lower Michigan. To the south, there’s a pond or wetland type area. A boardwalk leads across it, so you can stop along the way and make friends with a frog, some duck or a muskrat.

On up the hill to the west, past the ball field and the wetland, is the bandshell, with a series of seatwalls. The Penny Seats production of “Elektra” is being performed on the apron immediately in front of the seatwalls, not on the bandshell stage.

I attended opening night of “Elektra.”

I’ll grant you that the opening to this column might have convinced you that I am not to be trusted on theatrical matters. I do have one credential, however. The summer after that high school English class – the one that made me think about stabbing out my eyes – our teacher bused us up to the Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Ontario. We attended a half-dozen performances. So I think I have some frame of reference for what a professionally-produced stage performance is supposed to look and sound like.

And professional is what the Penny Seats production sounds like. Listen for yourself: [.mp3 Elektra Snippet 1] [.mp3 Elektra Snippet 2] [.mp3 Elektra Snippet 3]

And professional is also what the Penny Seats production looks like. See for yourself:

Elektra, July 10, 2014

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Sunday Funnies: Bezonki

Alvey Jones — Sun, 06 Jul 2014 04:19:55 +0000

Local artist Alvey Jones is a partner in the WSG Gallery, at 306 S. Main in downtown Ann Arbor. The Chronicle relies in part on regular voluntary subscriptions to support our occasional features like Bezonki, which in turn help support a local artist. Click this link for details: Subscribe to The Chronicle. And if you’re already supporting us, please encourage your friends, neighbors and colleagues to help support The Chronicle, too!

Column: The Jeopardy of Game Shows

John U. Bacon — Fri, 27 Jun 2014 13:54:23 +0000

John U. Bacon

Last night, I tried my luck on the NPR game show, “Ask Me Another,” which will air in a few weeks. But it brought back memories – traumatic ones – of my disastrous try-out for the Jeopardy game show 24 years ago.

“I’ll take ‘Humility’ for $100.”

“He was one of 48 people to fail the Jeopardy test on Thursday, June 21, 1990.”

“Ah, ‘Who was John Bacon?’”

“That’s correct – you control the board.”

“I’ll take ‘Lame Excuses’ for $100 please, Alex.”

It seemed like a good idea at the time. There I was, lying on the couch with a cold beer and a bag of chips, earning thousands of imaginary dollars for yelling things like “Millard Fillmore,” “The St. Louis Browns” and “Mesopotamia,” when they invited anyone who would be in Los Angeles to try out for the show. Sure enough, I was leaving for LA in 10 days, so I figured, Why not?

Why not, indeed.

“Under ‘Human Folly’ for $300, we have this answer: ‘Time better spent doing something productive, such as cleaning your toilet.’”

“What is ‘Preparing for the Jeopardy Test’?”

I heard a Michigan law school graduate won $172,000 on Jeopardy, which was a record for years. When I learned that, I began imagining how I’d spend such enormous winnings. (I decided on paying all my bills, then taking a friend out for ice cream with the surplus.) A friend of mine at the law school discovered the guy’s name was Chuck Forrest, and he worked at the State Department. Utilizing my skills as a crack investigative reporter, I tracked him down in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates. This trivia question of a place is not only nine hours ahead of us, but their office hours run from Wednesday to Saturday. I called him after a Friday night on the town.

He was willing to talk, if I was willing to pay for it. To save you the $10.75, I’ll pass on his advice: It’s an impossible test, and there’s no way to prepare for it. Not quite ten bucks worth of wisdom, but I can tell you he wasn’t lying on either count.

Indeed, only 3% of those who take the test make it on the show, and Forrest almost wasn’t one of them. “Alex [Trebek] has said publicly that my performance on the test was surprisingly unimpressive. I barely passed it. And some who do very well on the test don’t do so well on the show. The test is a poor indicator.”

Despite his forebodings, I spent the plane ride to LA perusing “The Dictionary of Cultural Literacy” in lieu of watching the in-flight movie. (This would prove a mistake.) I also developed the compulsive tendency of formulating everything I encountered in the form of a question, a habit that drove me and my hosts crazy. All told, I had my head in that book about eight hours or so.

I could have cleaned several toilets in that span.

Furthermore, whatever you might learn from studying is quickly eradicated by submersion into LA culture. Angelinos are incapable of considering any notion longer than a hip-hop song, and I’m convinced this rubs off.

“Answer: ’2 p.m. Thursday, June 21.’”

“What was ‘D-Day?’”

I drove to the KTLA studios on Sunset Boulevard for the big test, where I joined a line of 50-some people against a brick wall outside the entrance gate, just like in “Willy Wonka.” They were wearing everything from charcoal business suits to surfing attire – which, in LA, are appropriate outfits for investment bankers, housewives or priests.

Ten minutes after I arrived we followed an attractive blonde Jeopardy assistant past the pearly gates, snaking between lumberyard-sized warehouses. Through a huge garage door we finally entered a barren room with a bunch of folding chairs at the front. On our way in we picked up a pink application, a yellow sheet with 50 blanks, a piece of corrugated cardboard and a number two pencil. Rest assured, they don’t waste the prize money on such amenities as testing centers.

For friendly banter, the assistant, Kim, asked if anyone came from out of town. Quite a few people raised their hands, saying they were from Orange County, San Fernando or Pasadena. (I’m not making this up). Kim corrected herself: “I mean, from way out. Like Kansas or something.” I was one of only a handful who raised his hand, but I dared not speak. I could tell most present believed we Michiganders swim in our jeans and Xerox our faces for senior pictures. There was no point trying to explain.

The perfunctory chit-chat completed, Kim told us the test was extremely difficult, consisting of 50 straight $1,000 questions at 10-second intervals, and we would have to get “a lot of them right – but don’t ask us how many.” Thankfully, we didn’t have to phrase our answers in the form of questions.

She showed us a sample question on two TVs working simultaneously. “Place where you can rock, you can roll it, you can shake it, you can stroll it.” Almost everyone yelled out the correct answer “At the hop.” This was difficult? “Very good,” she said. “But the real ones won’t be that easy.” (“What is: ‘Kim ain’t no fool’?”)

Lo and behold, the first five questions were particularly difficult – so much so, I couldn’t remember most of them two minutes after the test. I do remember one on dance, though, which to me read like a Far Side cartoon: “Blah blah blah ballet blah blah blah 1900 blah blah blah.”

They might as well have asked me to read a bar code. I tried to think of something, anything, that might include both criteria, but I only managed to come up with: “Feet” and “President McKinley.” Perhaps, “What are President McKinley’s feet?”

I left it blank. Same way I answered “This monkey typically has a blue face and a red nose” (or was it, red nose and blue face?) and “He authored a childhood rhyme called ‘The Owl and the Pussycat’.” I grew up eating Captain Crunch and watching “Speed Racer.” If the author in question never had a cartoon, I didn’t stand a chance.

After those questions, I figured things could only get better – and they did. I knew that the Hagia Sophia was the Turkish mosque that was converted to a museum; that the Whig party immediately preceded the Republicans; that Van Gogh spent 1888 in Arles, France; and that Grand Marnier is flavored with orange. Thank God I scoured “The Dictionary of Cultural Literacy” for such scholarly fine points. I also knew the line “What fools these mortals be” is from A Midsummer’s Night Dream; that Kevin Kline won best supporting actor for “A Fish Called Wanda;” and that the capital of Chile is Santiago.

Even on a roll I botched a few, including this “answer”: “The part of the Human Body that features the islets of langerhans.” This was easily my most embarrassing wrong answer because my dad, a pediatric endocrinologist, has devoted his life to the study of that organ, the pancreas. I knew it too, and knew that I knew it, but that day all I could think of was “Torso,” “Below the neck” or “Bigger than a Breadbox.” A week in LA had taken its toll.

Speaking of which, I should have watched more TV, and fewer plays. You can forget studying “Cultural Literacy”– start reading People Magazine. I did just fine on almost all the “cultural”-type questions, but bombed the surprisingly numerous TV and movie questions. Some entertainment questions were so foreign to me, I could have just as easily written down “Ernest Borgnine” as “SPAM.” Entertainment is also my Achilles heel in Trivial Pursuit, where I generally answer every question “Rita Hayworth” or “Battleship Potemkin.” This strategy was just as effective on the Jeopardy test. (Hey sports fans, a warning: there wasn’t a single question for you on this test, and only a couple on U.S. and world history – my major.)

This is the essential difficulty of the test: It requires the intellect to enjoy Shakespeare, and the stupidity to watch “Three’s Company” re-runs. Therein lies the rub.

When they returned 10 minutes later with the results, I discovered that I wasn’t one of them.

“Answer: A freezer full of Eskimo Pies, a year’s supply of Turtle Wax, and the respect of your peers.”

“Ah, What is, ‘What you don’t get when you fail the Jeopardy test’?”

“That’s correct.”

“I’ll take ‘Sour Grapes’ for $1000 please, Alex.”

We, the rejected, had to make our own consolations. A 40-ish “actor and singer” (in LA, who isn’t?) reasoned that we were in very good company. “Just looking at the people who were there, it’s clear there weren’t any idiots.”

And if you’re going to get rejected, Jeopardy’s not such a bad place. We didn’t have to small-talk with Wink Martindale, nor jump up and down like drug-laden idiots looking for a bobby pin – and it wasn’t “Wheel of Fortune.” On my gravestone, the following would suffice: “He Never Bought a Vowel.”

Now, the bad news: we realized we shouldn’t have told so many people we were trying out for the show. When I returned, most of those I told were surprised to hear I hadn’t made it, but that could mean two things: they either thought I was smart, or that the test was for morons. This ambiguity was captured by a good friend who said, “I thought for sure you’d make it. I’ve always considered you a pretty trivial person.”

Several weeks later, I came to terms with all the ramifications of my failure, with one exception: I used to get undue pleasure from yelling at the contestants who can’t locate Montevideo, or don’t know that “Old Rough and Ready” was not Teddy Roosevelt.

Now I have to keep in mind that they might be idiots, but they’re smarter than I am.

About the writer: Ann Arbor resident John U. Bacon is the author of the national bestsellers “Fourth and Long: The Future of College Football,” “Bo’s Lasting Lessons” and “Three and Out: Rich Rodriguez and the Michigan Wolverines in the Crucible of College Football.” You can follow him on Twitter (@Johnubacon), and at johnubacon.com.

The Chronicle relies in part on regular voluntary subscriptions to support our publication of columnists like John U. Bacon. Click this link for details: Subscribe to The Chronicle. And if you’re already supporting us, please encourage your friends, neighbors and colleagues to help support The Chronicle, too!

Photos: Skatepark Grand Opening

Dave Askins — Sun, 22 Jun 2014 01:03:40 +0000

Ann Arbor celebrated the opening of its new skatepark on Saturday, June 21.

Trevor Staples addressed the gathering at the grand opening of Ann Arbor’s new skatepark.

The facility is located on the southeast corner of Maple and Ann Arbor-Dexter roads on Ann Arbor’s west side, in Veterans Memorial Park.

Festivities surrounding the late morning ceremonial ribbon cutting were started off by remarks from Trevor Staples, president of the Friends of the Ann Arbor Skatepark.

He reminded everyone that the park where the skating facility has been constructed is not just named Ann Arbor’s Veterans Memorial Park. The entire park, he noted, was a memorial to veterans who served our country, and he asked for a moment of silence to reflect on their sacrifice.

The ribbon cutting ceremony itself featured several speakers who recited the history of the more than seven-year effort that finally resulted in the skatepark’s construction.

The day’s events included skating competitions that culminated in some demonstration skates by pro skaters – including Tony Hawk and Andy MacDonald. Although the half pipe facility is no longer there, MacDonald learned to skate at Ann Arbor’s Veterans Memorial Park, at a facility that had been constructed on the opposite side of the park.

Below are some photos of MacDonald, Hawk and other skaters who celebrated the opening.

During the ribbon cutting ceremony, skating continued. This young skater demonstrated the basic principle: Fall Down Get Back Up.

Tony Hawk.

Andy MacDonald.

Tony Hawk and Andy MacDonald.

Tony Hawk.

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Sunday Funnies: Bezonki

Alvey Jones — Sun, 04 May 2014 04:00:32 +0000

Column: Hank Aaron’s Impressive Run

John U. Bacon — Fri, 11 Apr 2014 13:10:23 +0000

John U. Bacon

This week marks the 40th anniversary of one of baseball’s signature moments: Hank Aaron hitting his record 715th home run, to surpass Babe Ruth’s 39-year old record. But to appreciate how special that was, you have to understand who Hank Aaron is – and what he faced.

You’ve heard of Babe Ruth, who might be the best-known American athlete of the last century. Ruth loved the fans, and the fans loved him right back.

That’s why, when another New York Yankee, Roger Maris – a nice, humble guy – started closing in on Ruth’s record of 60 home runs in a single season in 1961, he became so stressed by Ruth’s fans rooting against him that his hair started falling out.

When Hank Aaron approached Ruth’s career home run record, he had it worse, for two very simple reasons: 714 home runs was the baseball record, a number even casual fans knew. And second, unlike Maris, Aaron is black. Of course, that shouldn’t matter in the least – but it mattered a lot in 1974.

Aaron grew up in Mobile, Alabama, one of eight children. They say his wrists grew strong from picking cotton, and his unorthodox practice of swinging “cross-handed” – that is, holding the bat with his left hand on top, instead of his right – was a habit he didn’t break until a minor league coach showed him the correct way to hold the bat.

Aaron made it to the Milwaukee Braves in 1954, one of the first African-Americans to play Major League baseball. According to Daniel Okrent, a best-selling author who also invented fantasy baseball, the ’50s was baseball’s most talented decade, because in that era every kid grew up playing baseball – not soccer – and, thanks to Jackie Robinson, everybody was finally allowed to play.

Surrounded by legends like Ted Williams, Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays, Aaron was often overlooked – and that was just fine with him.

He was a complete player, hitting for average and power, and winning three gold gloves for fielding. Yes, he hit his home runs, but not in eye-catching batches. When 50 homers a year was still the gold standard, the closest he came was 47. But he hit more than 30 home runs in a season 15 times – a record that still stands, even though nobody seems to know about it.

After the Braves moved to Atlanta, and Aaron finished the 1973 season just one home run away from tying Ruth’s all-time mark, there was no more hiding.

Aaron was no stranger to racism, of course, but what he faced during that long off-season was stunning – and downright scary. The death threats were so frequent, Aaron feared he might not make it to opening day in 1974. He wasn’t being paranoid: Lewis Grizzard, then the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s sports editor, quietly had an obituary written for Aaron just in case some lunatic followed through on his threat.

After enduring the off-season, Aaron was clearly ready for baseball to resume. The very first pitch Aaron received that season he sent over the fence, tying Ruth’s record. A few days later, on April 8, 1974, he smashed one over the wall in Atlanta to break Ruth’s record, once and for all. Aaron rounded the bases with his trademark poker-face, relieved it was finally over.

As a nine-year-old kid, I was blissfully unaware of everything Aaron had to overcome to achieve that mark. The next day in school, I jockeyed with my old friend Matt Colon for the right to announce the news at show-and-tell – and won, something I obviously remember to this day.

Aaron finished his career with the Milwaukee Brewers, the new American League team, toiling far from the spotlight, just the way he liked it.

When Barry Bonds approached Aaron’s all-time record of 755 home runs, many fans were again troubled, but this time for a different reason: just about everyone suspects Bonds of using steroids. That would help explain why Bonds’ home run production jumped from 16 a year to over 70; and why his hat size increased – in his thirties – from 7 1/4 to 7 3/8; and also why his personal trainer served time in prison instead of taking the stand to testify against his boss. Nonetheless, the toothless people who run baseball did nothing to stop Bonds, who broke Aaron’s record in 2007.

Aaron once again proved his class, congratulating Bonds on the Jumbotron. He also demonstrated his quiet dignity, doing so from afar rather than in person.

Despite setting one of the biggest records in sports, Aaron is not one of the biggest names in sports – probably not in the top ten.

He’s just one of the most impressive.

Sunday Funnies: Bezonki

Alvey Jones — Sun, 06 Apr 2014 12:39:43 +0000

Column: Michigan Stadium’s Big Open House

John U. Bacon — Fri, 28 Mar 2014 13:01:19 +0000

John U. Bacon

One debate I could do without is the question of who is a real Michigan fan, and who isn’t?

On the face of it, the question is pretty stupid. A Michigan fan is a fan of Michigan. And beyond the surface, it’s still pretty stupid. But let’s play it out.

The argument goes that only those who attended Michigan can call themselves Michigan fans. The rest? They’re mere “Walmart Wolverines” – fans who could have picked any school to cheer for, as well as any other, just like we pick the pro teams we want to follow, with no other connection than geography.

Why shouldn’t hard-cord alumni turn their backs on their non-degreed brethren?

There’s a history here, going back to James B. Angell, Michigan’s longest serving – and most important – president.

Angell took office in 1871 – eight years before Michigan’s first football game – and served until 1909, charting a course for Michigan that the university still follows, and other schools adopted. A Brown University alum and former faculty member, Angell’s vision for Michigan was to create a university that could provide “an uncommon education for the common man.”

He was thrilled to see the sons and daughters of farmers and factory workers becoming philosophers, but he couldn’t stand the game of football they – and everyone else – loved so much. Having seen first-hand the hysteria the sport created on campus, he wrote his fellow Big Ten presidents during that momentous 1905 season with great concern.

“The absorbing interest and excitement of the students – not to speak of the public – in the preparation for the intercollegiate games make a damaging invasion into the proper work of the university for the first ten or twelve weeks of the academic year. This is not true of the players alone, but of the main body of students, who think and talk of little else but the game.”

President Angell simply hoped to return college athletics to the English ideal, which allowed for more student participation and less notoriety for the victors. The idea of strangers with no connection to the university paying to watch them play struck him as odd and possibly dangerous.

But Angell failed to see football’s value in pitching his public school to the taxpayers, who picked up over 90% of the budget until the 1960s, missing the point that for many Michiganders, there were few other reasons to support the state school. If you were a farmer in Fennville or a factory worker in Flint, why would you vote for millage after millage to go to the state universities?

My answer is the Big House. As Notre Dame coach Frank Leahy once said, “A school without football is in danger of deteriorating into a medieval study hall.” To which Bear Bryant added, “It’s kind of hard to rally around a math class.”

Football, then and now, serves as the one place on campus where everyone feels welcome. On any given Saturday, fully a quarter of the 100,000 folks who pack the Big House did not attend the school. They include some of the university’s most loyal fans, and biggest donors.

According to Nate Silver – yes, that Nate Silver, who correctly predicted every state in the 2012 presidential election – the nation’s three biggest college football fan bases are Ohio State’s (3.2 million), Michigan’s (2.9 million), and Penn State’s (2.6 million), for a total of about 8.7 million fans, which is more than the entire Pac-12 combined. These three schools usually lead the nation in home attendance, too.

These stats teach a few less obvious but equally important lessons, too. If these teams depended solely on their students and alumni for support, they would have only about a fifth of their current following, since the “subway alums” constitute roughly 80% of their fan base.

Turning our attention back to the Big Ten’s “Big Three” programs, and the 8.7 millions fans who follow them: their gigantic stadiums hold more than three hundred thousand fans, but that still leaves 8.4 million of their followers on the outside looking in, which those fans eagerly do through TV and the Internet. If you want to know why the Big Ten Network was the first conference network, and is by far the most successful, that’s where you start: 17.5 million fans, dwarfing the next-biggest fan base, the SEC’s, at 13.6 million. And that’s why the Big Ten Network now reaches an estimated 53 million households: because it can.

The Big Ten’s 17.5 million fans undoubtedly include just about every demographic you can name in substantial numbers, but it’s what they have in common that’s most important here: a shared love of their favorite Big Ten schools and the conference itself, its history and traditions, right down to their memories of the same games.

Joining a hundred thousand like-minded strangers solves a modern problem, too. The Dalai Lama and Mother Teresa both noted that the great disease of Western civilization is loneliness. Yes, it’s possible to be lonely in a crowd – but not this one.

Studies show our endorphins spike when we march in formation, sing in unison, or cheer together in a stadium. Where else can you be certain a hundred thousand other people are feeling exactly what you’re feeling, exactly when you’re feeling it? This is why such places are more important now than ever.

Think about it. The Big Ten’s twelve teams do not play one game that’s not televised. You can sit back in your easy chair right at home and watch every game. Likewise, every song in the world can be purchased for a few bucks, and every movie is on DVD. Yet we still go to concerts, movies, and games, just as our ancestors did almost a century ago. If Beethoven, Humphrey Bogart, or Fielding H. Yost visited those places today, they would think almost nothing had changed.

Why do we pay money to go to these places? Because we need to be together.

Ken Fischer has run the internationally acclaimed University Musical Society for years with a simple philosophy: “Everybody in. Nobody out.” If the UMS, which has played host to everyone from Marian Anderson to Leonard Bernstein to Yo-Yo Ma, can open its arms to everyone, you’d think a football stadium could do the same.

We need to share something we care about with strangers. And to fill that need, you could do worse than Big Ten football.

“We have too much pluribus,” filmmaker Ken Burns said twenty years ago, “and not enough unum.” If that was true then – before the flourishing of private schools, charter schools and home schooling; before the creation of 500 TV stations that allow us to pick what kind of news we want to hear; before the Internet allowed us to see only the information and people we want, and ignore the rest – it is surely more true now.

Dr. Ed Zeiders, the pastor of St. Paul’s United Methodist Church right in downtown State College, has seen what the football team can do for the faithful in ways others might not.

“We are desperately needy,” he told me. “We need something to cheer about and rally around. Our culture is devoid of these things.

“We need a place to stand, and a people to stand with, and a cause to stand for. That is not original with me. That came out of World Methodism. And those three propositions hold the key to healthy and value-oriented living. I’ve taught and preached that for a lot of years.

“I have this belief that academics should be that unifying principle, but the evidence points to something else.”

While “Pastor Ed” has done a fine job creating that environment in his church, he joked with me that he couldn’t help but notice that the one down the street holds 108,000 true believers.

“Sports has the capacity to make that happen,” he said. “That can get skewed and twisted, especially in the marketing side of the equation, but my interest in sports is more in the community that forms around them. What my wife and I enjoy is the friendships we create in the stands. There is an ease with which sports fans connect with each other. And it has the potential to hold up something that is admirable and unifying.”

College football stadiums are now one of the few remaining places where we connect across race and religion, age and gender, economics and politics. And we do it with vigor.

When Fielding Yost opened Michigan Stadium in 1927, it seated 84,000 fans – three times the population of tiny Ann Arbor. It has played host to Heisman heroes, national champions, presidents, prime ministers, poet laureates, and over 40 million fans. It’s where Michigan fans showed the nation how to tailgate, and do the wave.

At one of the world’s great universities, this is the front porch. When you walk through the front gates, no one should care – and most don’t – about your age or income, or your race, religion or creed. Most don’t even care if you went to school there. They care about one thing: Can you sing “The Victors”? If you know when to throw your fist in the air, you’re in.

Welcome to the Big House. Hail.