We got out of school early and when I got home, I found out we were going to Grandma’s house in Skiatook, Oklahoma. Those were the kinds of things that mattered to a third-grader when President Kennedy was assassinated on the streets of Dallas.
So 53 years later — including 31 at the News — I was less curious about my place in this city but equally useless, not that I could have done much beyond type had I been here. On Thursday morning, lying by the pool at the Beau Rivage in Biloxi, I read the first 40 pages of Theodore White’s The Making of the President 1964, which details the Kennedy assassination and how the mechanics of government managed to lurch forward, awkwardly but steadily, at Parkland Hospital and Love Field.
A few hours later, there was nothing more on my mind than what kind of ice cream to buy in the lobby to take to my room to watch an episode of The Americans on my iPad. Then I returned to my hotel room, only to see our world focused on an assassin in downtown Dallas one more time.
Suddenly, getting up early to watch Roger Federer at Wimbledon seemed a lot less meaningful.
This wasn’t the first time I felt that my world of writing and talking about sports was not particularly important in the grand scheme of things. Not by a long shot. But I also recognize what sports can do for people in times of crises. It’s no exaggeration at all to suggest that the rise of the Cowboys in the ’60s helped erase much of the stigma that was unfairly attached to Dallas following the actions of one sick, lone gunman.
