Monday, May 24, 2010

Two more great obits...

...in the Times today are major league pitcher Jose Lima, who owned more than 2,000 suits:

“I’ve never worn the same one twice,” he said. “I give the old ones to my brothers. They wear the same size that I do.”

And Stan Jones, who played on the 1963 Chicago Bears championship team.

Jones recalled negotiating with Bears' owner and head coach George Halas:

“When we talked contract, he always started with the same question,” Jones told Jeff Davis in the biography “Papa Bear: The Life and Legacy of George Halas” (2005). “ ‘Stan, what can you ask for that I won’t have to say no to?’ I’d say whatever it was, and he’d say, ‘I can’t justify that to the board of directors.’ There was no board of directors. Halas was the board of directors. I could never get any more money out of him.”

Before he played in the NFL, Jones was an All-American tackle at Maryland, where he played both offense and defense.

That reminded me of a time when my father struck up a conversation with someone about his grandson and his high school football season."He goes both ways," my dad bragged to the stranger.

My father never did understand why this elicited such an odd look.

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