Send up a prayer or 2

By Jim Metcalfe, The Delphos Herald
Published:  Thursday, October 29, 2009 (4 months, 3 weeks ago)
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This is a bit of departure from my normal musings — at least at the beginning.
My colleague and friend, Dave Boninsegna, lost his mother Monday morning.
She had more or less been on a death watch for almost a month and kept hanging in but lost the battle.
His daughter, Victoria, is having gall bladder surgery Nov. 10 and Carmela — the one that has had multiple bouts of cancer, is likely to have another surgery on this (around her spine) the next day.
Keep this family in your prayers the next couple of weeks. As Dave would tell me, they need it!
As well, my mother is having abdominal surgery (aneurysms) today. Say a prayer for her as well.
Sometimes, companies and professional sports do a lot of good things; we just never seem to hear about it.
That is the wonderful thing about the Internet; you can search for things yourself.
Stories that were once unknown can now be known widely.
It also helps to be a big, bad member of the media, like me!!! OK, quit snickering!
Here is one of those stories.
It seems that the Cincinnati Redlegs and their Community Fund, along with a generous donation from the newest Wal-Mart in the Queen City, a newly-renovated baseball field will be dedicated in Madisonville, about a mile away.
In fact, it will be done this morning.
This is a field — at Anderson Place — for use by Cincinnati youngsters (the Madinsonville Braves youth baseball program and students from John P. Parker Elementary School) playing the National Pastime.
We all know the local support this city gives to its youth baseball programs: Little League fields that are the envy of any around courtesy of contributors and the Little League Association; the number of coaches that are involved in a given year; coaches that seem to be there forever, like Ed Holdgreve, John Burnett, the recently-retired Roger Wilhelm and some of the old-old timers that were there long ago that built the program.
I know I will forget some but if memory serves me, my dad, Carroll — Archie to almost everyone else — was coaching in the early years.
I don’t personally remember Bert Bell, one of the major figures behind the mergence of the National Football League.
This is being written as the book, “On Any Given Sunday” — on the life of Mr. Bell — is soon to be released.
He died in 1959.
What does that have to do with the present-day NFL?
From advance reports about this book, we find out that this man who was once tabbed “the most powerful executives in the history of professional football” was credited with saving the then-budding league from bankruptcy by coming up with the annual National Holiday (aka the player draft), as well as the sudden-death (perhaps should be changed to sudden-win) overtime.
He was a football man through-and-through, as apparently he claimed many times.
He died “with his boots on” — suffering a fatal heart attack watching a Steelers/Eagles game (two teams he once owned at some point) at legendary Franklin Field in Philly, where he once quarterbacked for Pennsylvania in the Ivy League in the pre-World War I era.
Apparently, the SEC football coach aren’t very enamored of the officials these days.
Another pair of coaches were reprimanded by the league for their criticism of the officiating in their respective games last weekend.
This is becoming an ongoing trend.
These men make too much money and there is a lot on the line every game in college football — they should be able to take some criticism.