女性および紳士...Hillary Brooks

So this is...it's...um...okay, I am speechless. I am without speech. (Again, it would seem.)

My previous post, to do with the intangible benefits of having a professional football team in your hometown, generated a few comments. One of them was from Hillary, who not only broke the subject wide open - she atom bombed it. At least for me. Probably no one else will care, but it turns out that her neighbor's dad once knew my dad, at least a little bit.

Sweet action!

She wanted to know if there was not also a Japanese league that played American-style football. (Yes, there are in fact three, according to Wikipedia.) Seems she has a neighbor who has a father who used to be the head football coach at Indiana University, and who now coaches for a team in Japan in his retirement. Her comment ends with, "A guy by the name of Pont?" I will admit that my knowledge of IU football coaches goes back only as far as Bill Mallory; and yet even having said that, I feel a slight tug of shame in my heart that I did not know at least this little bit about IU football history.

John Pont was the head football coach at Indiana University between 1965 and 1972, and he led the team to the Rose Bowl in 1968. Back before the BCS, the Rose Bowl used to mean something. It was the Holy Grail for football players in the Pac-10 and Big Ten conferences - the champions of each conference would play in the nation's greatest bowl game, known as "The Granddaddy of Them All." It was a New Year's Day tradition. Actually, it's still a New Year's Day tradition, but it doesn't mean what it used to, now that it has been sullied by its association with the BCS.

Indiana University, a Big Ten school, has played in exactly one Rose Bowl in its history. Head coach John Pont took them there. And...had he not quit the team (or perhaps been asked to leave, I don't quite recall) because he did not much care to go to practice quite as often as the coaches would have liked, a young third-string quarterback named Bill Peddie would have been on that Rose Bowl championship team. Seven years later he and his wife - whom he met at Indiana University and married later in 1968, after that Rose Bowl game he did not play in - would give birth to a healthy baby boy, who would eventually be known as, well...me. (Actually, I just presume I was a healthy baby boy, but who knows? Look how I turned out!)

Anyway...I could have just put all of that back into a comment, but look at how wordy it got. Even my brief comments are absurdly verbose. Plus, I had to give Hillary props and much Blog-O-Rama love. What a nugget of information to turn up! It's one of those small world moments. Another good one was back in college - when I was going to Indiana University - and I met a chap called Mike Austin, of the hamlet of Rochester, New York. He was among a circle of friends to whom I was introduced by a guy called Greg Cochran, with whom I had gone to high school but never really gotten to know all that well. As I got to know these people, I discovered that Mike had a cousin, called Scott. Turns out that Scott was the very same one I had become friends with in high school - and am best friends with to this day.

There is a song by - surprise! - Rush that fits here, I think, and I shall close with a couple of lines of it:

"More things than are dreamed about
Unseen and unexplained
We suspend our disbelief
And we are entertained...mystic rhythms"