Karl Lindholm: Of jump shots and heroes

I’m so old, I predate the jump shot.

The storied Montreal Canadiens have hired a new general manager, Kent Hughes — a member of the Middlebury College Athletics Hall of Fame.

Over the last year or two, there have been a number of Cornwall Bear sightings reported on Front Porch Forum and elsewhere. I myself saw the Cornwall Bear.

Art Pepin had a big personality, was affable in the extreme: a raconteur; a crooner — he loved to sing and recite whole poems from memory (Frost’s “Birches,” for example). He said he was in the “business of making friends.”

We now have a Vermonter in the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown.

When the note came across my computer that the college was shutting down early for the holiday break, the Thursday before the last day of classes and the week prior to exams, I was dismayed.

There have been many great athletes from Middlebury Union High School over the decades, and Ken Burton has to be in the very top tier.

Heart. Determination. Relentlessness. Effort. Caroline Leary Dowd, class of 1992 at Middlebury College, had all these capabilities in abundance.

What is perhaps most striking about Dave Saward’s soccer career is his “coaching tree,” that is, the extraordinary number of his players who have decided to pursue a career in coaching and have succeeded at such a high level.

Nine years before his crowning achievement at Bates, Dave Morey’s Middlebury team “defeated” the other national powerhouse, Harvard, 6-6, before 25,000 fans in Harvard Stadium.

In its premiere showing at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival last April, “Alaskan Nets” won the Audience Choice Award, the festival’s top overall prize. Here in Middlebury, it won the Best Documentary Feature Award — the best among the 36 feat … (read more)

Last Saturday, I ventured to the Middlebury-Bates football game, the first athletic event at the college I have attended in more than year and a half.

I have wanted to go to a game in Holman Stadium in Nashua, N.H., for a long time because of the park’s historical significance.Finally, this summer I did, on Aug. 12, the very last day of the season for the Nashua Silver Knights of the Futures College Bas … (read more)

You want your kid to be a major leaguer, and make a ton of money, so you can retire and live on Easy Street?Well, turn him around!Make sure he bats left-handed, from day one, from the day he first picks up that fat red plastic kid bat, or some other kiddi … (read more)

As she was exploring the campus on her very first day at Middlebury College in August 1986, young professor Brett Millier encountered Frank Kelley, the director of residential life, who engaged her in lively conversation as was his wont.Frank learned that … (read more)