Proudly presentsDiamonds 💎 are a Girls Best Friend : 50 years of stories from ball Diamonds.
The dedication page : While many of the main characters in this book have since passed away, we would like to pay tribute to John Culp, Roy Cardin, Jeff Tobler, and anyone else who was a part of the journey who is no longer with us.
Roy Cardin of Shenandoah, Jeff Tobler of Carroll County, and John Culp of West Virginia were three terrific examples of people who lived larger than life while on earth and will be remembered well into the future.
I hope that we did their memories proud through the words in the pages that follow!
Introduction :
Chapter 1 – In the Beginning
Chapter 2 – The Long and Winding Road
Chapter 3 – Life in the 1980s
Chapter 4 – The 1990s
Chapter 5 – Turning the Page while out West
Chapter 6 – Who’s the Boss and the Four Corners of Carolina.
Chapter 7 – WVU-T, VBL, and The Valley
Chapter 8 – Shenandoah, Virginia, provides the beginning to the end.
Afterword – Wrapping Up
Notes to John & Nancy – Chapters 7 and 8 will have the bulk of the load, but the effort was never about balance.
A total of 50 links have been pushed forward in two posts, and please include ALL stories that lead with Diamonds 💎 in the past 30 days.
What is left – writing for chapter 7 and the inclusion of offers to a handful of people who I have offered what I call companion pieces to.
Chris Graham
Allen Worrell
Chuck McGill
Greg Talley
Mr Thompson
Chris Dodson
Thank you to Brad Nester, Wayne Carter, Craig Worrell, Ryan McCafferty, Amy Gaskins, and Cheyenne Strickland for their efforts up to this point. It meant a great deal !
The flight ✈️ out to British Columbia is booked for November 5th, and the cutoff for this part is October 25th.
The process being used here is a new one as it allows the reader to see the story get told. Minus the editing, the entire book will have been made available on our site, free for the taking!
The term ” Four Corners ” is used to describe the genius of Dean Smith and his slowdown offense at the University of North Carolina. For the purpose of this book, we will use it to describe our decades long connection with the state of South Carolina.
As you can see in the photo above, the 🌴 Palmetto State is not to scale, but its place in our history is.
Charleston, Aiken, Greeneville, Hickory Knob, Ridgeland, and North Augusta are some of the places that pop out, and there are some sports stories that deserve to make the cut.
Newspapers who ran some of my stories included the Jasper Sun, Beaufort Gazette, and the Island Packet. We also produced the very first of our seven books during our time ” off, off, Broadway.”
When we returned from our first stint out in the Pacific Northwest, the goal was to relocate to Hilton Head Island, but it just wasn’t in the cards back in 2000. The next best thing to living on HHI would have been to call Bluffton home, but affordability pushed out even further to a town 31 miles and light years away. Ridgeland would become our home for the next 18-24 months.
Ridgeland has grown over the years and now hosts a PGA tour stop. It was home to me and eventually our children once I had settled in to my new job with The Island Packet newspaper. David Eggers had offered me a unique opportunity with the newspaper owned by McClatchy Media. The Gazette was a sister publication in the next county over and would become a big part of our story.
Ridgeland, instead of HHI, explains the comment, Off, Off Broadway, so now let’s see about Who’s the Boss…
Judith Light and Tony Danza teamed up for a fun sitcom back in the day, and the young lady who played the daughter ended up with a nice career as well. The fact that I ended up working for a handful of celebrities along the way led me to draw the comparison to Who’s the Boss ?
Kevin McClatchy was the principal owner of both the Pittsburgh Pirates of the MLB and a chain of newspapers across the country. The team was owned from 1996 – 2007 and covered the time when I worked for the company.
Mr Batten had been my boss earlier in my career, and the number of places where you will see his name on things is impressive
Getting back to the McClatchy family and my time in the Low Country, while I happily wore a Pirates ball cap during that time, I never interacted with the powers to be. But I did manage to make a little circulation history when I teamed up with our marketing team to sell the banner of our newspaper for eight days!
Just like Aaron Sorkin scribbled out, ” A few Good Men ” while tending bar at Syracuse, I took a napkin and created an idea that made a lasting impression on the newspaper industry, I believe that the impressive lady who ran our marketing department was Beth Patton, and creating the opportunity to showcase my thought process was eight miles beyond stimulating !!!
Her folks took the responsibility of finding a local company that could write a big enough check to cover the cost of an additional 10,000 copies per day that would be distributed for free, with their logo on it. It went from Sunday prior to the Heritage golf tournament until the following Sunday. It was my job to then find a home for said 10,000 copies each day until the end.
The exciting part is that it created an unprecedented bump in our circulation numbers at a time when our industry was a wounded duck. The bad news is that the bump is great year one, but the second time around, it only keeps the same spot in year two.
Nationwide articles were written about the magnificent execution of a brilliant plan, and it was a proud, proud moment in my career. I am not sure if the original napkin still exists, but it does in my mind!
Thomas Heyward Academy became the only time that our younger children attended a private school. This was for two reasons : private school is a rich person’s choice, and we should never give up on public education.
I’m not sure how many different cities you could choose to create a greater distance and lifestyle change than this one. The fact that Sabrena Carter Deal handled this move prior to her Senior year of High School with the amount of class that she did gave me comfort in knowing that she was capable of anything you would set her mind to !
We did our best to make the transition more comfortable, especially for Sabrena, as we let her finish up her junior year out in Washington. We added to our family with a pup that fit in the palm of your hand at the time, and Diamond 💎 would be with us for 15 years.
In our spare time, we created our very first book, one that we did together as a family. It covered the basketball program at Thomas Heyward Academy and everyone involved. When I look back at the effort now I see two things – first, I look at the career path that Sabrena went down and second, ith was the beginning of my partnership with a young lady dubed, Shorty McShorteson or Squirrel for short.
The most recent tie to South Carolina comes from picking up a few ownership shares in the Professional soccer clubs in the Upstate area of the state. I needed to scratch the itch about soccer that came from working with Adrienne Harris McGuire and Forrest Johnson.
Dennis Cerrie and I came very close to having a pizza parlor there. The Walker Course at Clemson University is a Top 10 favorite. Alyssa Ervin calls Travelers Rest home nine months out of the year.
North Augusta, South Carolina, is the most unique mailing address that I have ever used and who could forget the Bomb plant on the Savannah River ?
The biannual time share on the beach at Hilton Head Island also keeps us connected, as does Dawn Staley being in Columbia. Hickory Knob State Park has memories galore as does Pedro at South of the Border.
The Florence Morning News with a coverage area that brushed up against Myrtle Beach and the house in Charleston with Tenia Cattles is etched in stone. My first hole in one ever at Fripp Island, the first trip to Dafuskie (sp) Island and getting the meaning of Jimmy Buffett’s The Prince of Tides.
While the various video clips won’t show up in the book, here’s one more.
Both Sabrena and Chris would end up graduating from high school here, we met Fab from Brazil, and we sailed with Captain Megan and cried when we found out the Lighthouse at Harbor Town was cosmetic. Chris attended his only year of college down at the College of Charleston, walking the Battery.
Watching Tim Tebow play baseball for the Columbia Fire Flies, coaching at Silver Bluff High School for a season all led to what would take place in the Shenandoah Valley later. But for the seventh time, we moved to Roanoke, this time for a day. Then it was on to Massanutten Mountain and then Luray.
The picture above shows South Carolina as an afterthought, but that’s only that way on that wall. A great deal of life happened and continues to happen down in the Low Country !
There are few people who understand how they are wired or driven and grow into being comfortable with the results of who they are. Some folks will perceive that point in life as arrogance while others have a different take on the subject.
Alyssa Ervin, Kris Richardson, and Tiffanie Moore are three people who stick out in Carroll County when I’m looking for cover. Yes, I also do not hide from my DNA and mental wiring but will happily acknowledge that the physical ship sailed many a moon ago.
The topic of role models is an important one, now more than ever. While plenty of people have a particular skill set that warrants appreciation, being comfortable in that role is a whole different world.
During the year plus that Kris and I were working on our basketball book, you could see early signs of Alyssa Ervin becoming at peace with being different than most. The years since have proven that to be the case, and I’m not sure that it would be a stretch for a second book on the journey.
Even during the lone season at Elon University, where the basketball side of life didn’t work out the way anyone hoped, Ervin adjusted by owning the classroom side of college while searching for a more comfortable fit on the court.
Now, we are looking forward to seeing the Furman University Paladins try to live up to the label of the team to beat in the Southern Conference. It’s always a fun write to cover her down there because she’s at ease with other’s expectations, in part because she has her own set of them.
Richardson, Marc Motley, Ed Robtison, and now Pierre Curtis at FU are four of the coaches who have guided Ervin since the day that Marion Harris discovered her and pointed her in the direction of Basketball. Yes, that part of the story will never get old – Marion Harris, Talent Scout.
Greg Bolen is another great example of someone who has grown into being a larger than life character, and I recently asked him the question, do you remember when it was that you first became comfortable with being Greg Bolen ?
Over the six years here, there have only been nine times that my path has crossed with the young lady that I like to call Christy’s Little Girl. Yes, I am aware that she now hovers over Mom in regards to her height, but that relationship is a HUGE part of their story.
I am aware that when I am writing about the exploits of our basketball phenomenon, I am competing with the likes of people who have ESPN by their name. I laugh at that in the same manner that Ervin herself would say, saying I ain’t afraid of nobody. How many people can say that they wrote a book about the journey of a group of local kiddos who captured not one but two state titles ?
The subject of Ervin comes up when I talk about just how right I can be when looking forward. After her junior year on The Hill, when everyone else was discussing the severe drop-off that was about to take place, I boldly predicted that Ervin would be able to take us back to the States. She did just that alongside Madison Lyons, Sarah Alderman, Katie Lam, and Half-Pint Harris.
Now, if you are going to point out your clarity, you must also show the other end of the spectrum. A few years ago, when the JMU football coach packed up and headed out to Indiana University, I called it the very definition of a money grab because nobody was going to win the Big Ten from Bloomington……
Now, back to the Fab Four and why it’s important to say THANK YOU to Alyssa.
Emma Leath is the first person that I met through The Hill, in which I had to remind myself that she wasn’t actually my daughter. Part of that came from getting to know her family as well as I did, and another part was the comparison to the pitching style of Greg Maddux. When you are smaller than most and want to be next level successful, you have to work harder with your brain.
The day that I realized that Emma would not be given the opportunity to pitch at the D1 level because of her size, it truly saddened me. To the point where I started to kick around ways for her to receive recognition her Senior year at Cavalier Park.
Ashlyn Newman broke the scoring record of Adrienne Harris McGuire ( the other one that I have to remind myself that she is the daughter of Shelia and Marion, not me). Miss Newman happened to scoop up the title of valedictorian on her way out of town.
Jabin Talley managed to rack up more victories on the Tennis court than any previous player, and Leath secured mote pitching victories, passing the record of Sydney Nester along the way.
Creating the campaign, one centered around four classmates, each reaching the pinnacle in their sport in the same year. It would boost the visibility of Leath, Newman, and Talley, but what could it possibly do for the All-Time scoring leader in the history of CCHS ?
The answer was zero or
When you are already on the center stage, why would you be willing to lend your spotlight to others? It takes being comfortable with who you are and where you are, and Kiddo has that covered. Tip of the cap to Jon and Christy on raising her and then sharing her in the manner that they have !
Who knows, maybe we will have a tenth exchange, and it will allow a Top Ten list. Until then, I will just continue telling the story from afar.
Travis Osborne is one of a kind, and it’s for all of the right reasons ! The day that it became apparent was when we were hosting our third banquet of five, and he couldn’t attend because his Kiddo had a travel volleyball tournament that same day. Yet, Travis took the time to both create and frame the certificate above and then deliver it on his way out of town.
There is a bond between us that can best be explained by irrelevance in the grand scheme of things. It dates back to a lengthy phone call that took place one day as I just started my two hour drive down to Appalachian State University to announce a field hockey game.
Every morning, Travis takes the time to select and send me a scripture from the Bible for our Morning 🌄 Brew. Without fail and it’s not because of a bank roll of cash that finds its way to his mailbox.
Mailbox 📬 Money by Jimmy Buffett is not playing on our Alexa…
Fun little song 🎵 and please know that Travis checks in, even when there is zero to minimal benefit to it ! The very definition of being a friend, that’s what that is. Dawn, or Mrs Osborne, welcomes the time we get to spend together because it gives her a break from being responsible for him.
Whether he is painting the middle school Dugouts or fixing my goofs around our house, he does it with both knowledge and grace, a rare combination to possess. Here is six days we will head over to Durham for the Duke – North Carolina football game ( I hear that those two schools play basketball too ) and I won’t care if he wears the opposite color of blue..
