It's [Not Really] a Miracle!

Occasionally, I go to the AOL website to check on news. Today I found a link to a story on Huffpo, “Tim Tebow Officially Puts Evangelical Right on the Sideline.” 

Tebow apparently threw the yellow flag at a Baptist church where he had previously agreed to speak:

In an astonishing turn of events, Tim Tebow has now cancelled his appearance at First Baptist Dallas; and in doing so he has officially placed the political religious right to the far margins of society.Tebow's appearance was meant to be a pretty routine, if flashy event. First Baptist Church invited the football star, more famous for his prayerful pose than his forward passes,

Okay, now that’s just plain mean.

to be part of the reveal of their new church campus, which a press release calls "the largest church building project in modern history."

I’m not sure why a church would want to brag about that, seeing how badly that whole Tower of Babel thing turned out.

Just to be clear, First Baptist Dallas is not an outlier church. It is headed by Pastor Robert Jeffress, a very influential conservative Christian voice, who leads an 11,000 strong congregation connected to the Southern Baptist Convention. The theology and the constituency is squarely within the mainstream of contemporary right-wing Christian thought.But what has changed is that the views of the right-wing Christians are now officially out of step with the growing majority of Americans -- including, apparently, Tim Tebow.

Now out of step?

Dr. Jeffress has never been shy about his opinions

That's a kind way of putting it. Kinder than Jeffress puts his own opinions.

and he offered up some great soundbites in the last election. First he called Mormonism a cult, then changed his mind when Governor Romney (Mormon) was the Republican nominee, and topped it all off on the Sunday before the election by saying that President Obama's reelection would lead to the rise of the anti-Christ.

Exactly when was the last time the idea of a sitting president being the literal anti-Christ was mainstream?

Jeffress has also had a few choice words to say about the gays, namely that "homosexuality is perverse, it represents a degradation of a person's mind;" and Muslims who are following a religion that is a "heresy from the pit of hell."

That’s funny, too, because apparently at least some of those Muslims would agree with him about gays.

So, while it was not surprising that First Baptist Dallas would want one of America's most beloved and celebrated evangelicals to be part of their church opening, it was surprising that a petition began to circulate through Change.org urging Tebow to cancel -- and it is positively a miracle that Tebow decided to cancel.

Okay, so Tebow canceled his speaking engagement. I’m not sure it is worth all the hyperbole: “placed the political religious right to the far margins of society”, “positively a miracle that Tebow decided to cancel”, but I can understand that the people who hoped to hear him speak are disappointed. Still, the main focus of the event is surely on the wonderful things God is doing through First Baptist Dallas, what with blessing them with the largest church building project in modern history, so everyone accepted their disappointment with grace, right?

Oh, look, a few tweets:

Fast food Christian CEO bullied. Pastor bullied out of praying publicly. Today, athlete bullied out of speaking AT A CHURCH! - Rick Warren

I know it’s just me, but I think “Fast food Christian CEO” sounds hilarious.

It very very sad that Tim Tebow is bowing to the pressure of political correctness and cultural decay in canceling First Baptist Dallas. - Jack Graham

@TimTebow We are very disappointed in your decision to cave to liberal pressure and spurn Christians. - AFA (American Family Association - a lobbying group. Which means they are in the business of applying pressure.)

I think Tim Tebow just damaged his brand by appeasing those who oppose traditional values. - Rick Moore (His “brand”. Well, let’s not worry about anything silly, like his soul.)

I hope Tim Tebow hasn’t been bullied into changing his mind, as opposed to reasoned into changing his mind. I find it interesting that those who think poor Tim has been bullied out of taking the speaking engagement aren’t above trying to bully him back into it.

What do they really expect to happen now? Okay, I think it would be fun if Tebow said, “You know, you guys are right. I would like to speak after all if you still will let me,” and then went on to give a speech about how Jesus sided with the outcasts and not with the church establishment. 

I don’t think it really is going to happen that way. But I think it would serve them right.

Inspiration

Since John and I hold season tickets to the LSU women’s gymnastic team meets, we get invited every year to an event at which the team members are introduced. There’s an explanation of the scoring system used at meets and usually food.

This year the event was held in the fieldhouse where the team practices, and they held a mini-meet to demonstrate scoring and introduce their new routines.

The practice facility is decorated with inspirational slogans, such as “WIN: Whatever Is Necessary” and “Who out there FEARS us?” As I looked for a place to sit, I passed by a small bulletin board/white board combo with “Tigers to the TOP” written on it, a letter from Wheels to Succeed thanking the team for helping out at a fundraiser, and two newspaper clippings.

The sign above the clippings says, "Happy people don't have the best of everything, They just make the best of everything."

The clippings were not, as I first thought, about the team. They were stories about Malala Yousufzai, the young Pakastani activist who had been shot. 

Gymnastics is an odd team sport. Every member of the “team” is actually competing against each other as much as against the opposing team at the meet. Furthermore, each team is competing against every other team in the country at each meet. Teams are ranked according to their scores, so it is possible to lose a head to head competition against one team and still move up in the rankings over several other teams. The LSU Fighting Tigers compete at a high level in college gymnastics, having been to a Super Six in the last several years.

Yet you can’t see a better example of sports etiquette than at a meet. Team members cheer for each other, even though they are also competing against each other. They offer comfort for a team member who falls, praise for one who does well, and at the end of the meet, they congratulate (with a hug)the members of the opposing team who win events. I’ve seen gymnasts look disappointed, but I’ve never seen one sulk.

So it doesn’t surprise me that these hard working, competitive young women can stretch their idea of team to include one more young tiger, fighting for her life and for all women, halfway around the world.

Sinking In

The big news around here recently has been a 400 foot deep sinkhole in nearby Assumption Parish. Residents of the parish had been concerned about natural gas bubbling up from below the surface of Bayou Corne since June. Then, in July, a sinkhole opened up. An evacuation was ordered on August 3. For a while there were concerns about radioactivity, although word now is that the radiation is not above background levels. 

The sinkhole is near a salt cavern owned by the Texas Brine company, who are supposed to go in and investigate whether the cavern has been breached. A similar breach was caused by faulty drilling on Jefferson Island in the 1970’s. The breach wiped out the Diamond Crystal Salt Factory and changed the salinity and ecosystem of Lake Peigneur.

Texas Brine says their salt cavern was plugged and abandoned in 2011 but they will investigate and see if there is a problem. It is going to take around 40 days to drill to the cavern.

Yesterday, two cleanup workers went into the area by boat. They tied the boat to a cypress tree. Suddenly, the area around the tree dropped 40 feet, taking the boat with it. The workers were able to get the attention of others in the area and were rescued by airboat.

Salt caverns are often used for storage. 940,000 gallons of butane are being stored in a cavern only 2000 feet from the sinkhole. If the sinkhole expands far enough to breach the cavern, it could cause a massive explosion.

Did I mention all this is happening less than 50 miles from my house?

I say that’s the big news around here, but actually two other stories have captured even more interest. One is the murder of two sheriff’s deputies further downriver in LaPlace.

But this being Baton Rouge and this being August, the biggest news is that one of LSU’s best football players, a former Heisman Trophy finalist nicknamed the Honey Badger, has been thrown off the team. He had been suspended for a few games last year after testing positive for use of synthetic marijuana. It transpired he had not learned his lesson and had failed a few other drug tests.

Rumors flew. The young man was definitely going to transfer to McNeese University, a small college that plays in a lower division, meaning he wouldn’t have to sit out a year. How fair that was to the presumably behaving students already enrolled was a subject of hot debate. Then it was no, not McNeese, but Nichols State.

For the last two days, the news was that Honey Badger was prepared to stay at LSU as a student if he could be given a chance to try out for the team again next year. The coach was not in agreement. It may have been sinking in that time spent trying to keep one player out of trouble was time not available for other aspects of coaching.

I kind of feel for student athletes who get into trouble through stupid decision making. For most students, college is a time of experimentation. Some students can use drugs, flunk classes, get pregnant, drop out, drop in, and still have time to straighten up and make something of their lives and then pretend to their children that they were paragons of virtue. For students in competitive programs like pre-law and pre-med, this is less likely to be true. For student athletes, who have a set period of eligibility and who are competing for an even smaller number of professional jobs, it is even harder to overcome bad decisions. 

On the other hand, I understand why it is not advisable to cut these students even more slack. College athletics are big time business, and the temptation to cheat is overwhelming. Any kind of flexibility can be exploited and will be. I don’t blame the coach for taking a hard line. If anything, he maybe should have taken it sooner.

Last night, a new story made the rounds. Honey Badger is not going to Nichols or McNeese. He’s not even staying on at LSU in the fall. He is in a drug rehab program in Houston, hoping to return to LSU as a student in the spring. He has garnered a lot of respect for taking this step.

It’s hard to know which young persons can experiment with drugs and then move on and which ones will fall into the sinkhole of addiction. Like the news out of Assumption Parish, this is a developing situation.

I hope this young man tied his boat to the right tree. 

The Kittehlympics

Like most of the rest of the world, John and I have been watching a lot of the Olympic Games on television this past week. Spurred on by the noise and rapid movements coming from the TV, our cats decided to hold their own Kittehlympics one night.

Events consisted of full contact martial arts, the down-the-hall sprint, the around-the-kitchen-and-den race, the high dive (getting up on the back of the sofa and leaping upward before landing on the opponent cat), hurdles (jumping over every piece of furniture in the room), and cat toy soccer. I’m not sure who won, but it wasn’t the furniture.

During the 2010 Winter Olympics, Truffle was a mere spectator.

Watching the Olympics this year, I notice that the USA is not the only melting pot nation, if it ever was. There is a Dutch gymnast named Marcel Nguyen. Emili Sandé, the singer who sang Abide with Me during a choreographed memorial segment of the opening ceremonies, is Zambian-British. There are others, those are the two whose names I remember off-hand. 

This morning I read an article on Oscar Pistorius, the double amputee who is running for South Africa in the Olympics. There are still people arguing that his artificial legs give him an advantage in competition. I suspect if you could analyze the genetics and body mechanics of all the athletes participating in the games, you’d find they all had some kind of advantage over us mere mortals. (Michael Phelps, the swimmer, for example has long arms.) After all, isn’t that the reason you have a competition to begin with, to find out who can do the best with what they’ve got?  Whatever bio-mechanical advantage Pistorius might have over people who were merely born with naturally long legs and short torsos, he still needs to train and practice. He still needs to learn race strategy. He still needs to show up.  

Scoreless

It’s been a bad time for sports fans here in Baton Rouge. The BCS Championship Game has come and gone and LSU lost. Not only did they lose, they were held scoreless, the first shutout in BCSCG history. LSU fans are in a funk, to put it mildly.

Even worse, they aren’t able to vent about the big loss through their usual outlet, radio station WSKR the Score. As of New Year’s Day, the Score, a local sports talk radio station, is now Hallelujah 1210, a gospel station. Rumor has it that radio hosts got a call from management the day of the change; other staff found out by email. There was an article in the local paper last Saturday, but it was in the religion section and talked mostly about the new format, not what happened to the old crew.

There is another local station with a sports talk format, but it is an ESPN affiliate broadcasting mostly nationwide programming, with one local afternoon show on weekday afternoons and a few others scattered throughout the week. 

I never realized it until after the station changed formats, but the Score did not hire and pay most of their hosts. The hosts paid the station for their time slots and then sold their own advertising to make what money they did. Only one host was an employee of the station, and he was on hiatus. There are rumors about why that is, too.

So now there is a hot mess - hosts who sold advertising time they cannot deliver, advertisers whose products may or may not be suitable for a gospel format station. (Our barbecue platters are perfect for your next tailgate - uh, dinner on the grounds.) Nobody official seems to want to talk about why the change was made so abruptly with no warning to the people whose livelihoods were being affected.

Local sports fans, of course, are burning up the message boards talking. It takes their minds off the Big Loss.

I'm Not Tebowing; My Shoelace is Untied

I am worse than the average three year old when it comes to shoe laces. Due to my various foot issues, I have to wear lace-up shoes, at least most of the time. That would not be a problem, if it weren’t for the fact that my shoes keep coming untied. Sometimes it’s because I step on the ends of the laces, causing the bow to pull out, but most of the time they just work their way loose for reasons known only to themselves and God.

It’s almost always my right shoe, too. You would think if it were the way I tie my shoes, both bows would come undone roughly the same amount of the time, but no. And yes, I have tried double knotting the bows, and it gives me maybe an additional thirty minutes before the bow comes undone and I have to stop and tie it up again. So if you come upon me somewhere kneeling with my head bent, looking like this, I am not praying. I am tying my shoe. Again. I don’t even pray for my shoes to stay tied. I mean, the Lord helps those who help themselves, right?

It’s not that I have any objections to public prayer. If you want to kneel, or daven, or paint Matthew 6:5 under your eyes on game day, I won’t make a fuss. Public displays of piety , especially Christian ones, are common. When Juicy J and DJ Paul won the Oscar in 2006 for their song It’s Hard Out Here for A Pimp, Juicy J’s first words were, “Thank you, Jesus”. So if you want to establish your bona fides as your kind of Christian, not one of those people who write lyrics like, 

Its f***'d up where I live but this is how it is
It maybe new to you but it been like this for years
Its blood sweat tears when it comes down to this shit
I'm tryna get rich before I leave up out this b****
I'm tryna have thangs but its on aon [sic] a pimp but I'm praying and hoping to god I don't slip.”

I can see how your public displays of piety have to get more and more out there, given that all kinds of people, even rappers and hip-hop artists, feel entitled to say, “Thank you, Jesus”. That’s the nature of arms races. They push us to extremes. Jesus would understand.

It’s just that if I see you kneeling with your head bowed, I’m going to think you’re tying your shoes.

Destiny

On January 9, 2012, 7:30 PM local time (1:30 AM GMT), the Louisiana State University (LSU) football team will play the University of Alabama football team in the BCS Championship Game for the national collegiate football championship and a horrendously tacky looking but much prized Waterford crystal football.

For my readers from outside the US, that’s American style football, as played at the collegiate level, not what the rest of the world calls football and we call soccer. 

LSU has won every game so far this season, for a total of 13 wins and no losses, against a brutally tough schedule. Alabama has lost one game (to LSU) and played one game fewer, since they didn’t play for the Southeastern Conference Championship. (For those outside the US, the college and university football teams are divided among regional groups called conferences. If there are 12 or more teams in a conference, the conference subdivides into divisions and the two division leaders play each other in a championship game for a slightly less tacky trophy and a banner. And bragging rights.)

In the time between now and the game, fans of each team will be talking smack, making bets both monetary and not, and making fun of the other team and its fans, mostly its fans. The real purpose of the teams is to serve as tribal totems. The teams themselves are pretty much composed of decent young men who are hoping to hone their athletic skills and go on to play professionally. The tribes of fans are pretty much composed of idiots.

Last time LSU played in the championship game, I bought John and Neal tickets on StubHub. 

So I look forward to the morning of January 10, 2012, by which time all this will have been settled, for good or ill. (Hubby and son are alumni of LSU, so “good” is defined as an LSU win and “ill” as an Alabama win.) In the meantime, I speculate, as sports events cause me to do, whether the winner of this game is predetermined or not. For some reason, I don’t wonder that about other events in life. It’s not that I think that football games fall into some special category of events that are predetermined while everything else is in free fall. It’s just that I don’t usually worry about predetermination. I don’t see any way of deciding whether events are predetermined or not, and if there is no way to know something, I prefer to use the brain space on reflecting on those problems that do have solutions. 

A year or so ago I read a discussion on Talk Rational regarding whether the omniscience of God made free will impossible. I tried to follow the arguments, but they pretty much made my eyeballs itch. I don’t know enough philosophy to know when someone is making a reasonable but difficult to follow argument and when someone is just bullshitting. I read Daniel Dennett’s Freedom Evolves, a book that can best be described as “dense”, but can't remember most of it two years later. So don’t count on me for a nuanced discussion of the problem of free will.

I’ve had reason to think over the years that I’m glad I can’t read the future. Once while reading an account of a murder trial in our local paper and realizing that the victim was a woman whose son was one of my little clients fifteen years before; once when a childhood friend who had attended my mother’s funeral died six months later of a longstanding heart condition; once when watching the Southern Yacht Club burn down in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. My graduate school boyfriend had taken me to the Yacht Club with friends of his who were members and I felt grown up and sophisticated. It’s probably also just as well I couldn’t foresee that the young man, who was brilliant, was also going to develop a mental illness that cut short his promise and left him on disability.

But my not being able to predict these outcomes does not mean that they weren’t already set in motion years before I arrived on the scene. The domestic violence that led to the murder, one friend's heart disease and the other friend's mental illness, the corruption and mismanagement that led to the levees failing didn’t just happen one day. They all had deep roots. But were they unavoidable? That I don’t know.

Compared to these events, football games seem uncomplicated. There are only two possible outcomes: either Team A wins or Team B does. Of course, on the way to these outcomes, unpredictable things happen: a ball takes a funny bounce, a referee misses a call, a receiver drops a pass that hits him right in the hands. Later fans of the losing team might think “If only Eric Reid hadn’t made that interception on the goal line”, but what does that even mean? If that one event had changed, what else would have had to change? And would it have made a difference to the ultimate outcome, or would something else have gone wrong?

What I know is that on the morning of January 10, 2012, either Alabama or LSU will have the crystal ball - the crystal football. The other kind of crystal ball, no one has.

Baby Steps

Years ago, I met a group of online friends through a Get Organized interest group on AOL. As AOL went through changes and the message board disappeared, we became an email support group and then Facebook friends. As we supported each other through project after project - decorating, de-cluttering, dieting and/or exercising, finding new careers and getting our children through their teens, our unfailing mantra was “baby steps”. There was no project so big or daunting that it could not be broken down into small steps and achieved a bit at a time. For us, baby steps were a useful tool to achieve worthy goals.

In the last few days, it has occurred to me that baby steps can be just as useful in taking you to places you don’t want to go. Like most of the rest of the country, I have been riveted (horrified, but riveted) by the sex abuse scandal at Penn State. (Warning: that link contains disturbing references to child sex abuse.) I have been particularly interested in the disagreements over whether Coach Joe Paterno did enough in 2002 by reporting what he heard from Mike McQueary to Athletic Director Tim Curley and VP for Finance and Business Gary Schultz. Why didn’t he call the police? Why didn’t he insist McQueary call the police?

I can see how it happened, though. By the time McQueary told Paterno, the immediate emergency was over. So even if Paterno’s first thought was, “Mike, you’ve got to call the police right now”, I can understand a little voice saying, “Maybe I should give Curley a heads-up first. What if he gets calls from the police or the press and has no idea what’s going on?”

And once the decision was made to tell Curley and Curley set up the meeting with McQueary and Schultz, I can understand Coach Paterno thinking it was all being taken care of, and letting it go. One little baby step leading to the next.

I can understand the chain of events, but the problem is, nothing got done and Jerry Sandusky was able to spend nine more years victimizing boys. When a logical seeming chain of events leads to a horrific outcome, something is wrong with the logical seeming chain of events. There were a lot of people who knew about bits and pieces of what Jerry Sandusky was doing for years, and yet nobody stopped him.

I can think of times in my own life when baby step by baby step, I talked myself out of good deeds I meant to do or into bad decisions. I can empathize with Coach Paterno. Most of the time when I hear people say, “I can see myself doing that” the unspoken end of that sentence is, “so it was okay to do”. I see it differently. I can see myself doing that, but that doesn’t make it right. It just means that you don’t want to use me as a moral exemplar. I’m not going to hold up liquor stores or kick the cat, but if I wander into a moral gray area, I might wander back out on the wrong path.

So, yes, I can see how it happened, but that doesn’t make it right. Nine more years of victims makes it very far from right. Sometimes we do the very human, understandable, wrong thing, and need to live with the consequences. Sometimes we get there by baby steps.

A Pall Hangs Over the City

Two, in fact. Last week, a fire began burning in a marsh to the east of New Orleans. Usually such fires are allowed to burn themselves out, since they don't pose a threat of spreading to homes and businesses, and it's hard to get into the marsh to fight the fire. As days passed, the smoke became a serious hazard to those with allergies and asthma. Yesterday evening, the smoke began clouding the air over Baton Rouge, roughly 80 miles from the marsh as the crow flies. An acrid smell hung in the air as John and I left the house to go to dinner.


This morning, helicopters are battling the fire.


Another pall has been hanging over Baton Rouge for the past several weeks, this one due to a bar fight resulting in serious legal charges being filed. Two weeks ago several LSU football players, drinking in a local bar after curfew, became involved in a bar fight. Several people were injured, two of them with fractured bones. Two LSU players, one the starting quarterback, have been charged with second degree battery. That much everyone agrees on. What happened next is the subject of dispute and conjecture.


One of the victims insists that the team quarterback, JJ, is the person who kicked him in the face while he was down on the ground, causing a fractured maxilla and other injuries. His story is confirmed by the victim's girlfriend. There is a blurry video of the fight in the parking lot taken with a cell phone which shows a tall man in black kicking a figure on the ground. There is also recently released security video taken inside the bar before the fight started showing JJ wearing a light colored shirt. However, there is a "second kicker", in a light shirt, in the video but he seems to be wearing shorts and possibly is of a different race. With the poor lighting and poor video quality, it's hard to tell.


Another complication is that the victim's ex-girlfriend obtained a restraining order against him a few days after the fight, claiming that he is harassing her and her friends. The bar video does show the victim arguing and getting physical with a young woman in the bar. Two bar employees have told the press that the victim took a punch at someone in the bar before the fight started outside. The victim's account of himself has been that he intervened in a fight that was already occurring to help someone in trouble.


The two players who have been charged with battery are out on bond but have been suspended from the team. Sides are being taken, and on the local sports message board, Tiger Rant, have been labelled Team Sweep and Team BRPD Sweep. One side believes that by being out in a bar after curfew, the players were asking for trouble. One side believes the Baton Rouge Police Department are behaving incompetently. As often happens in such cases, the murky gray area between the two sides is rapidly being ignored.


Let me be clear: when I say, "gray area", I am not proposing that there is any moral gray area regarding kicking someone who is down on the ground. He may have been spoiling for a fight, he may have mistreated his ex-girlfriend, he may have bit off more than he could chew, but he did not deserve to be kicked in the face while he was helpless.


No, I am referring to the murky gray area that is human memory and eye witness testimony, and the murkier gray area of how do you treat people who have been accused but not yet tried for crimes. The rule "presumed innocent until proven guilty" is a rule of courtroom law that does not have to apply to the university and the football team. There isn't any good answer that I can see to the question of whether the two players should have been suspended. People of good sense and good faith can be found on either side of the issue. If nothing else, they can be suspended for breaking curfew, but if that were all that had happened, it is likely they wouldn't have been.


Then there is that notoriously tricky form of evidence, eye witness testimony. The victim is sure that JJ is the one who kicked him, but was he really in a position to tell? He was down on the ground with someone kicking at him, it may have been hard to tell just who. He may be convinced that the most identifiable person in the group was the one that kicked him, even though he couldn't really know. His girlfriend's memory of events may be completely independent of his, or it may not. It may have been shaped by hearing him say, "Remember how JJ kicked me next?" or some such.


The memory of the accused may be equally fuzzy. JJ insists that he didn't kick anybody. That may be true. That may be a conscious lie. That may also be his memory of the truth. It's not impossible that alcohol and adrenalin interfered with his memory of events, and that what he remembers is what he presumed he would or would not have done in such circumstances or what he wanted to think he did in such circumstances.


It is sad to think that a guilty person may go free because reasonable doubt of his guilt can be raised or that an innocent person may go free but with an acrid cloud over his head because he can never be completely exonerated. That's the reality of our justice system. We more often than not have to deal with cases that are not open and shut. Often we deal with them by pretending that in fact they are open and shut, and that the people who can't see it just have smoke in their eyes.


Update, September 2: A tropical storm-in-the-making is now headed toward us. It could put the fire out, along with our power.

The Legend

I woke up this morning to the news that Tennessee women's basketball coach Pat Summitt has been diagnosed with early onset dementia. The news actually broke yesterday, but I was too busy trying to track down relatives on the East Coast to make sure they were okay after the earthquake (they were) to have noticed. Of all the things I was expecting to happen this week, those two were not on the list.  Of all the things I was expecting to happen in the next decade, those two were not on the list.


For the last dozen years or so, Tennessee and LSU have been competing for dominance in SEC women's basketball, with Tennessee having the edge. After Pokey Chatman left as LSU's coach and Van Chancellor took over, LSU's teams struggled to compete. Now LSU has a new coach, Nikki Caldwell, who played and coached as one of Summitt's assistants at Tennessee. I don't think I'm the only LSU Lady Tiger fan hoping that Tennessee doesn't come looking for Nikki Caldwell as Pat Summit's replacement. Summitt has announced her intention to keep coaching, although she acknowledged that she will have to lean heavily on her assistants, but who's to say what the course of her illness will be. I wish her well.  


Pat Summitt has the most wins in the NCAA of any basketball coach. Not just any women's basketball coach, any NCAA basketball coach. Now, due to a cruel accident of neurology, she is likely to end her life not even remembering her achievements. It is up to her fans and players and those of us who, while not exactly fans, were certainly aware of her gifts to remember for her.