Freddogg Off The Chain

I am a human mockingbird but no Ike Turner speaking of slapping. I listen to accents and language patterns then imitate them and it’s good for a writer for enrichment purposes or else you risk sounding too educated and start doing Will Short word puzzles while listening to NPR.

Rap radio on Satellite has been my latest orbit and maybe the last resting place of free speech. In the morning a girl without much of a clue reads from morning news headlines and then people call in. She read about the professor from a small school in New England who was shooting students with his thumb and forefinger making some bogus if not extremely insensitive commentaries about the Virginia Tech tragedy. The adjunct Professor should not have been talking junk and as a result his non tenured ass was summarily fired as they say on mainstream cable.

The rap host kicked open the phone lines by saying,”I’m all for freedom of speech and academic freedom and all that and I don’t think the man should have been fired but I just have one question,”What the fuck?” And with that the phone lines were open.

“Yo man I’m just sayin like you ain’t goin to see no Chinese dude walk into a classroom at a black school and waste 30 people cause that shit just ain’t happenin, know what I’m sayin? I mean he maybe get two or three but somebody gonna shoot his ass straight up. Thirty people, no dog, fuck that!”

The Host responded “Are you saying all students at black colleges pack heat when they attend classes?” “Nah man, probably not all of them, but enough, you know, it’s like having sky marshals in your class, just in case some shit do be breakin out.”

“The Host got sarcastic: “And if that didn’t work maybe they could throw their weed at him.”

“Whatever yo?”

“Next caller.”

The themes of uncensored rap are pretty consistency the same as to border on non creative like if the music genre were a car it would be a Geo Tracker. It’s kind of cool but has a contaminating effect in the way you speak cutting off words at the beginning and end and the messages are mostly nasty and disrespectful of authority and women but Ice T is still my boy check out his lastest CD where he makes fun of it all and still gets paid with his Yellow Masarati driving self.

I’m out. Next stop is the all white Christian gospel channel and that is going to be tough!

Freddoggy G Unit

Photo is 1978 left to right Tracy Felton,Warren Perry,Glenn Smith and Lance White.That is Penn relays plaque for winning a 16 team mile relay section race in 3:26

Glenn Smith was a sophomore on the end of the junior varsity basketball bench in 1977 with his team up by 30 and five seconds remaining on the clock. Coach Don Lockwood looked down and uttered a single word,”Glenn.”
Glenn responded with a single two word sentence and his basketball career was abruptly ended.
The next day on a December afternoon he arrived at winter track practice wearing long black pants, a plain white tee shirt, and Chuck Taylor dirty white sneakers.
“You Coach Fredman,”he asked?
“Yes I am and who are you?”
“I’m Smith,”he said. “And I’m here to run anchor on your mile relay team.”
“Really, we’re pretty good and what do you know about mile relays,”I asked Smith?
“Man what are you talking about,”he said. “I am a runner and I can just run.”
I told Smith to toe the line and when ready to take a lap and in the 95 seconds it took him to get around I would let him know what kind of adaptive phys ed class would be best for him to join.
Smith took off and ran into my life with a 53 flat 400 meters with no training and no warm up, long pants and clopping shoes. Smith and I would share many moments of triumph and tragedy over the next two years including two state championships and I always think of him when the old crossroads of life lectures are brought up because Smith was dropped on his head in the middle of a busy intersection at age 15. He was facing life choices that come to other young men at 25. I told Glenn that over and over during long conversations and Glenn vacillated between respecting me as a man who cared what happened to him and “chumping me out” like the time he took all turns wide running the 600m at William and Mary and when I told him about it he just looked back and asked,”How many six hundreds did you ever run” and I didn’t take it personally even though I was the only other person there.
The 1977 Salesianum Invitational at Brandywine Creek State Park and we were entered in the Division Two race. I went to check our entry and when I returned to the Van I discovered Glenn and David eating cream doughnuts I had stashed in boxes under the last bench seat for after the race. I was amazed and dumbfounded that runners would actually warm up on cream doughnuts. There was white powder all over their brown faces and my world was way out of balance.
I am cool but I hit sarcastic overdrive and just kept asking what in the world are you doing? Find me other athletes standing behind vans eating doughnuts. Just find me one so I can know this is not isolated to my team.
“Ain’t nobody need or care about your stupid Fredman doughnuts,”Smith said. “Why did you buy them if we weren’t supposed to find them?”
The doughnut repartee continued as Smith arrogantly bit into a Boston Cream. “Eat the rest of them Glenn because you are out of this race today.”
That’s o.k because I quit. Don’t nobody want to run for no Doughnut Coach anyway?”
We raced to a medium finish then got in the van for the long ride downstate. There was tension and everyone was quiet.
Two hours later we were at the beginning of Glenn’s three mile country loop around the King Cole fed lot for large hybrid live stock.
Nick Miller started the chant, an instantaneous rap in the rhythm and blues period. The van rocked from side to side as my black athletes weren’t about to let Smith escape without having their fun. “Whatta ya know Mr Dough? Where you gonna go Mr. Dough? Smith ate all the bread. None was left for our Coach Fred. Coach Fred he pitched a fit but Smith don’t care because he quit. We were family, we were cousins till Smith showed up and ate two dozen.”
I was laughing because funny is what it is and as I watched Smith glide in front of the van across the road I could not detect even a hint of a smile.
Smith came into my classroom on Monday to hand in his stuff. I told him as soon as I took possession that he would never run another step at Cape, not indoor or outdoor because I was in control and to quit on me was to quit all seasons forever. I called his bluff and he backed down.
That November we returned to Brandywine State Park and won a State Championship after winning the Henlopen Conference Meet where Lance White took first and Smith third.
We celebrated behind the van I awarded Smith an orange Mr. Doughnut shirt and he was moderately amused. Smith our second runner of seven had dropped out of the championship race because he said the hills were hurting his heart.
Later in early spring we went to Dover with a plan to snap their 33 meet string of dual meet victories. That was in the days of three event limitations.
Dwayne Henry beat Smith straight up in the 100 and 400 and Coach Neylan has him set up to capture the 200 so I pulled Smith and took second and third but Henry was gone and Dover didn’t have their stud to deal with my emotional madman on the anchor leg of the mile relay and the meet came down to just that.
Three of my guys had shaved heads. I told them to run a clean race and to not even look sideways because I didn’t want to lose the meet on a sportsmanship infraction.
Dover versus Cape in the mile relay was always the showdown of showdowns. My 3rd man Duke Perry ran a personal best 51 to open a seven meter lead. Smith took the stick and walked through and out of the zone giving the lead right back to Dover. I was so mad that all that work was just given back.
Smith jumped on the shoulder of the Dover runner as I looked on with a sense of detachment. Coming off the turn with both teams about to break 3:30 in a dual meet Smith raised the baton in the air and shook his head no from side to side. The team on the infield was screaming,”Mr. Dough! Mr. Dough!’
We won the race but I expected a call for poor sportsmanship but it didn’t come. Everyone snapped. I got my team on the bus and just got out of there.
Later at the Dover Relays Smith was running leadoff for a loaded 4 by 800 team that had Cross Country All American Lance White on the anchor. Smith came through the quarter in 54 then bought it of the third 200. By the time he reached the exchange zone in 2:27 everyone was gone including his own relay team. I had instructed them to grab their sweats and hop back over the fence.
Coach Neylan was amazed. “That counts as an event,”he said.
“I know, we’re not supporting a 2:27 here tonight,”I said. “He who goes crazy must go it alone.”
That spring Glenn Smith would lead our team on a two by two formation lap around the track prior to the State Meet at our own school. Glenn would place second in the 100 meters and anchor a couple wining relay teams as we won the meet going away.
And then Glenn Smith went away as I simply could not keep him rooted into the school scene for another year.
Ten years later Glenn would die in an employee van accident on his way to work at the Chicken plant. His cross country teammates and relay teammates and coach were all there for his send off. A Charismatic heartbreaker and leader with immense natural talents had died without a mark on his body. He looked like he could get up and anchor another relay team. In the end that is what Glenn was born to do.

There may have never been a better week in Indoor Delaware Track and Field than the one “picked up and lay down” by fulltime basketball player and part time winter runner Lance White in January of 1978.
I had borrowed defensive specialist White off the basketball team and trained him for two weeks to compete in the basement on the wooden track inside the Philadelphia Civic Center. Lance was entered in the two mile and was the reigning Division Two Delaware State Cross Country Champion.
I also brought a mile relay team as the fastest five Delaware times would run at the Philadelphia Track Classic at the Spectrum that Friday night.
We arrived way early on Tuesday so I took the athletes for a subway ride to center city. They walked around awe struck and I asked veteran Curtis Johnson if he knew how to get back, showed him the entrance to the subway, gave him 20 dollars and just disappeared like I had gotten lost.
Ten minutes after I had returned to the basement of the Civic Center my team walked in telling me "I was wrong” to leave them out there like that and “who ever told me I was funny other than my wife?”
Robert then went over to a pay phone and no joke called information trying to get the phone number of Seventy-Sixer Darrell Dawkins. “He’s up here somewhere,” Robert said, thinking proximity by phone increased the likelihood that Chocolate Thunder would hook up with a fan from Slaughter Neck.
There were three heats of the two mile and Lance was in the medium one. I quickly went to work to move him up to the seeded heat and with the help of Chris Dwyer whose brother Fred was a former Villanova star Lance was placed in the seeded heat as the Meet Director told me ‘My kid” may be the best distance runner in Delaware but was sure to “Get smoked” in this star studded field.
“That ain’t ever happening in a high school meet on this planet, ”I told him. “Tell your hot coppers they can run but they can’t hide.”
I happily informed Lance he had been moved to the fast heat and he happily informed me that I was out of my mind and why should he trust a coach who earlier left him stranded in the middle of the city.
We walked over to the banked wooden “old school before old school was cool” track.”I have a couple coaching points for you. The number is 22 as in times around.”
Lance said something like boring and he couldn’t last 22 times around anything. I then asked him if he wanted his quarter splits or perhaps a banana split then told him the quarter mark would keep changing and I was too dumb to figure it out.
The real strategy was to hang back but maintain contact and to avoid the silly surges like 65 second quarters thrown in by the front runners to break down the pretending contenders.
“Move up with two to go and take it over on the final lap,”I told Lance. "The only “high schooler” who can break your heart is that girl who said ‘No’ to your prom date request.
Coach Chris Dwyer went to the quarter marks to give me Lance’s splits. At the mile Lance was 4:48 and just cruising in a daze. Villanova assistant Jack Pyrah came over to me and asked if Lance was an African?
“He is so smooth and consistent, ”Pyrah said. “Don’t call Lance an African or a dark horse,”I said. ‘He’s still coming to terms with me naming my bobbed tailed white cat Lance.
Mark Beam from Springfield Montco or Delco with long blond hair was controlling the race. With two laps left Lance moved to the front. I was hyperventilating because I knew it was “Showtime before cable”
Gun lap and Slaughter Neck was “in the house!” Lance blistered the last lap “slapping the boards” crossing the finish line in an incredible 9:29.
I returned to Lewes and discovered on Wednesday that there was an Invitational Mile at the Track Classic Friday night. The Mile run in the basement was the qualifier.
I called the Philadelphia Department of Recreation and Meet Director Jim Williams to lobby for Lance’s admission into that race. Williams had just publicly refused to pay Filbert Bayi’s, a 3:50 miler, plane fare to Philly from California but had no problem allowing Lance into the meet.
The strategy was the same as the two mile run on a new blue track 11 times around. Lance popped onto the track at the last minutes the only runner of color ironically named White.
Out went the pace and Lance was almost broken and looked like he was losing interest but on lap 10 he made up the gap and with the gun he was gone. The race was won in 4:27 a decent indoor time for a kid that never ran an indoor mile in his life.
Three years later when Lance was an All American Runner at Edinboro University three girls from Slaughter Neck walked by my classroom just before the first bell. They were crying as they looked in the door when upon seeing me they screamed then ran in a hugged me.
“Fredman, we thought you were dead. That’s what everyone on the Slaughter Neck bus was saying this morning?”
“What exactly were they saying?”
‘They said Fredman got run over by a car last night and he was still lying out there in the road because nobody wanted to pick him up.”
Fredman was Lance White’s black cat and the circle was completed as the final lap always belonged to Lance White.

I am a Catholic boy and have the startle reflex to prove it. I took my hits and listened to the dogma and like most of my contemporaries I absorbed it all with a grain of salt realizing that god could turn me into iodized salt like the Lot’s wife who turned around to catch a little live action sodomy. Care for a little Pillar talk?
Tomorrow is Good Friday which if you are a Baby Boomer Catholic boy was always used as an excuse for your parents to lock you down for three hours and I an only guess what they were doing but I’m sure it involved bunny costumes.
I remember a kid in Grammar School getting a nun beat down on Holy Thursday for telling the Raleigh Coupon joke. Raleigh Coupons were on the back of Raleigh Cigarettes and could be saved and redeemed for toasters, vacuum cleaners and small dogs.
The “Jesus Joke” was on the march to Mount Calvary when the woman comes out of the crowd to wipe the face of Jesus and his face is imprinted in twilight zone permanence on her skirt then a guy appears and asked,”Jesus do you collect Raleigh Coupons “and Jesus responds,”Certainly where do you think I got this nifty cross?”
Catholic boys made jokes about everything because to believe in sacred cows could bring down the high heat of heaven and in an unintended way many of us believed that Jesus understood humor but it is never mentioned in the bible because zealots are too busy bashing and crucifying non believers to get any joke.
The Crucifixion of Jesus is a scary story and I feel deep sorrow for the man and if the man were god how different would things have been if he ascended at that point and just hovered and watched them cower and say how sorry they were but fear is not the answer, love is the answer and has nothing to do with being afraid which is why Catholic boys make jokes because we know that god will love us in spite of ourselves


Father Freddogg

Rodney Smith jumped so high he jumped right out of his shorts. The spring of 1984 I am at the Delaware State Championships as the Head Track Coach at Cape Henlopen in Lewes Delaware with a personal record 5’2” in the high jump set 10 years earlier during a decathlon for over the hill athletes with disposable time to spend on themselves.
But now I am the coach of a squirrelly athlete who is a threat to break the magical seven foot mark. I am excited and nervous and as I look down from outside the fence beyond the opposite end zone I see Rodney clear 6’6” without his shorts. Rodney was one of the first to compete in tights but the rule says track issued uniform which included pants at least it did the last time I checked with my other guys.
It was time for me to go to work. I had to talk an athlete out of his pants and if you think that’s easy in a crowded stadium it is not. Luckily a 45 foot skinny shot putter who I had coached down to 37 feet by the end of the season was done for his career and so in exchange for all the hotdogs he could eat he came out of his shorts.
I then got Rodney over to the fence explained to him the precarious position in which he had placed himself and had to practically choke him before it sunk in that if he jumped 9 feet without his shorts the rules committee would ecstatically and joyfully toss him from the record books because many appointed judges get off on that type of stuff.
Rodney cleared 6’8” in his gold shorts when I detected the Meet Director standing next to me. “No thanks I just ate, ”I joked.
“I’ve been told your guy was jumping without his pants on?”
“People be telling you some dumb stuff, ”I said. “Did you ever notice that Porky Pig never wears pants?”
The Director was not swayed. “I am asking you point blank did he compete without pants earlier in the competition?”
“Here’s what I’m telling you about my college bound state champion high jumper. If you look down there he is wearing pants. That’s what I see and that’s all I know. I am his coach. Do you think I’m going to spend a chummy moment with you divulging a perception that may be an illusion or a hallucination? Just let it go!”
Rodney asked is his typical arrogant way to have the bar raised to 7 feet because he had already won at 6’8” and who cared about that? The judge and crew looked at him like,”Yea right, whatever?”
And so an actual step ladder came out and a tape with metric on one side and whatever it is that we Americans use on the other. Seven feet first attempt.
Rodney nailed seven feet with enough room underneath his butt for a sofa cushion. It was Bemonesque as Smith annoyingly circled the pit over and over and over again. But if you know Track and Field you know that sometimes in an athlete’s greatest moment of triumph a tragic twist that only those on the Hindenburg could explain comes down to smother your world.
By rule a record setting jump must be measured before and after the clearance, Clarence. The bar was re-measured over and over and kept coming up 6’10.5”. Smith who could have been tossed for no pants snapped at judges who just kept scratching this heads like “How we do that?”
Jerry McGuire of the Delaware State News interviewed Smith and asked him what it felt like to clear seven feet only to be told later it was 6’10.5”?
“It was like being told your parents had been killed in an airplane crash,” Smith said.
McGuire honored Smith with Quote of the Year in the following News Year Day edition. Rodney went on to a four year career of sprinting and jumping and hurdling at Saint Joseph’s College but never again cleared or thought he cleared 7 feet.
Smith was once overheard responding to the question: ”What about your high school coach?”
“He was a nice guy,”Smith said, but didn’t know all that much about track.”
But I do now a thing or two about pants and mathematical conversions from metric to English and official tape measures that lie in the wet grass until needed. It’s all so imperfect and yet there is a certain symmetry to this story.