Month: October 2018

He Wanted To Change The Rules

My father was not a sports fan, he was a sports critic with some rather radical rule change proposals.   He died 44 years ago but he thought some of his ideas were so good he wrote them down.

Here are two examples:

John F. Stith Sr.
John F. Stith Sr.

“Among the basketball games I have seen this has been true: If the winning side had made the free throws they did make, and the losing side had made ALL of their free throws, 90 percent of the games would have scored out differently.”
The team that made the most free throws almost always won, he said.

“So why have all the running up and down the court, calling fouls and delaying the game waiting for a free throw? It would be so much simpler to give each side a basketball and let them take turns throwing free throws and the side who made the most would win the game.”

About boxing, he wrote:

“I am not a sissy or a long-hair.”

“I have engaged in fights in the ring* and was fairly good –not excellent — only fairly good.”

“It seems to me to be a better idea to arm each contestant with a short piece of lead pipe so that the result could be achieved quickly and without argument. This would satisfy the blood-thirsty and let them go in time to get over to the dirt track. Otherwise, some poor boob competing for a couple of hundred dollar prize might run into the fence and they would be too late to see it.”

* Until I read my father’s idea notebook I didn’t know he had fought in the ring.  I thought he only fought in the street.  Dad had a black jack and brass knucks and liked to fight. Here is a story about one that didn’t last long.

Coming Friday: I Can’t Get Up

 

The Helper

Part One

Brother Dave, who is an Uber driver, stopped one evening at Quick Trip filling station in Charlotte to fill up.  While he was standing there, waiting for the gas pump to quit taking money out of his pocket, a young woman walked up and said, “Hi.”

He knew right then that she was either selling herself or begging for money.

“I hate to bother you like this,” the young woman said, “but I’m trying to get to Atlanta and I don’t have enough gas to make it. Could you help me out with some gas?”

Dave told the woman, “OK. Bring your car around and I’ll put some gas in it.”  He told me, “Don’t ask me why I did that because I’d had already been to that seminar a time or two.”

David H. Stith
David H. Stith

She left to get what he thought would be a clunker with the trunk wired shut. Or duck taped. He was wrong. She motioned to her boyfriend across the lot and he drove over to the pump in a late model, dual wheeled, black, crew cab pickup truck. A truck that, new, must have cost twice what my brother and his wife paid for their first house.

“I figured the best thing to do was go ahead and pump the $10 worth of gas I had already decided to give her and call it a lesson learned,” Dave told me.  “I started pumping. One and a half gallons later I heard the familiar ‘Thunk’ of the nozzle stopping at a full tank.”

“Lady, this tank didn’t hold but a couple of gallons of gas,” he told her.

“Oh!” she said. “I didn’t know it was that full. Well, thank you.”

She got in the truck and she and her boyfriend drove away, leaving Dave standing at the pump, regretting his decision.

“I was mad, frustrated too, when I got in my car and went back to work.”

Part Two

Later that evening, Dave said, he got a call to pick a rider at the Providence Road Sundries on Providence Road.

“My riders know my name by looking at their app after I accept the ride. My ‘rider’ was a man and a woman in their early 40’s. I assumed they were married. When they got in the car the man said, ‘Hello, Dave, how’s it going?'”

“I thought about that question for a second or two and replied, ‘Oh, everything is going just fine, but I do have a burr under my saddle.’”

“A burr? What do you mean by that?”

He told them what had happened at the gas station and when he finished the man asked, “Dave, can we pray for you?”

“It was simple Yes/No question. I said ‘Yes.'”

“Each of them put a hand on my shoulder and this was their prayer: ‘Lord, help David to feel good about what he did tonight. Help him to understand that it’s his job to be a helper and your job to judge their worthiness. Amen.’”

Coming Monday: He Wanted To Change The Rules