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As a sophomore in high school, when Zigman was the basketball coach, he asked my why I didn’t go out for the team. I told him I was cut from the freshman team, by coach Anderson, because I couldn’t make a left handed layup. I didn’t think I had the skills. Ziggy told me, you acquire the skills after someone teaches them to you. He taught me how and I made the bb team in my junior year. He was a hero to me in high school and became a good friend after graduation. There are those who can coach with yelling and discipline and those who can coach with empathy, encouragement and a good heart. He taught me the game but, even more, he taught me lessons for life. “Cheese and crackers!”

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Hey Dom, Thanks for this, a good reminder that my experience of someone is almost certainly unlike another's. Also goes to show you that a coach can have have very different effects on their charges. You and I do agree on Anderson, a real prig who turned me off basketball with his totally arbitrary application of "standards," as your experience with him verifies. Hope all is well where you are. Where are you, anyway?

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I’m alive and well, with the exception of my legs (as you know only too well) and living in Aurora, IL with my wonderful wife Pam. I call her Mary Poppins because she is practically perfect in every way 😘. Hope you are well and feeling better these days. Take care buddy.

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Best sentence I've read this year: "Consciousness had nothing to do with it, except that, having scouted the opposing team, our coaches could diagram formations, draw up plays, and, most important, explain the “reads”—in other words, the tells, the clues, the signs, the symptoms—that would disclose what to expect from the first few flickers of movement on the line of scrimmage."

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Hey Tim, ha! It was hard to herd them words into the right order. Glad to hear they made some sense. How you doing down there? Hope all is well.

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All good down here, considering, thanks. Very pleased to see your body politic seems to be getting its act together. It helps us--the rest of the world--too.

I'm sure it took some doing, but well herded.

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