I'll Call It Like I See It

by sheila morris

Category: sports

  • nobody says it better than Serena


    This past Tuesday night I spoke at Chris Maw’s monthly social Words and Wine which brings authors and readers together in an informal setting for food, wine, and friendly interaction. My thanks to a friend of many moons, Fred Quattlebaum of Modern Family Asset Management, for sponsoring the event and to musicians Marty Lopez and Julien Kaprino for providing great entertainment. I was invited to talk about my newest book, Four Ticket Ride, but whenever I speak about my writing, my thoughts turn to truth and equality.

    I read while…

     

    …Pretty’s smile sells books!

    At her press conference this past Saturday following her loss in the finals at Wimbledon, Serena Williams was questioned about why she lost. Although she tried to say her opponent played a brilliant match, the members of the press wouldn’t let it go. They asked her if she thought her lack of match play in 2019 had hurt her, whether her role as a mother took too much time away from her tennis, and finally someone said they heard Billie Jean King wondered if she spent too much time supporting equal rights or other political issues.

    Serena’s quick response to that question was “The day I stop supporting equality is the day I die.” I can identify with her answer because I’d like to believe my actions to support equality and social justice are two of the dominant forces of my life.

    My first understanding of how it teels to be treated as a second class person came at an early age and became the impetus for my lifetime support of equality, too. My dad gave me the vision of looking at the whole world as my territory. Nothing should be impossible if I set goals and then worked hard to achieve them.  There were no limits, according to him. When I entered the work force at the age of 21 in 1967, I learned very quickly that there were, indeed, limits.

    Limits were imposed by powerful men in positions of leadership in the places I worked from Houston, Texas to Seattle, Washington to Columbia, South Carolina – men with tanned skins and silver hair who sat behind large impressive oak desks, men who saw me despite my impeccable credentials as lesser than my co-workers whose singular good fortune was that their gender and the color of their skin made them superior to me in the eyes of my bosses.

    It was a rude awakening for me to find out that my dad had been wrong. But that rude awakening changed my life as I took part in the battleground for ratification of the equal rights amendment here in South Carolina in the 1970s, my involvement in the civil rights movement in Columbia in the 1980s and eventually coming to the most passionate cause of my life: the LGBTQ movement for equality in the 1990s. I want to be able to say with Serena that the day I stop supporting equality is the day I die.

    For me, writing has been my platform for supporting equal rights during the past 13 years. For ten of those years, I have had the most fun as a blogger on my wordpress blog I’ll Call It Like I See It. When I finish a blog, usually after many re-writes, all I have to do is click on the word publish and my words fly through cyberspace to readers who either choose to follow me or randomly read my posts whenever a topic interests them. One observation I’ve made about my readers is that you all are far more interested in Pretty than you are in my political commentaries.

    I saw a segment about the author, vlogger and you tube super star John Green on Sixty Minutes this past Sunday night. John Green, the author of the Fault in our Stars and a ton of other titles has a Twitter following of more than 5 million. My blog, I’ll Call it Like I see It, on the other hand, has 1,700 followers. Thank goodness my daddy also offered me the good advice of never comparing myself to others. Some people will be better off and some people will not, but that’s not how we are measured.  In spite of that advice, I will do a small comparison.

    I am thrilled that in the first 6 months of 2019, I’ve reached people in more than 60 countries from Argentina to Vietnam through 36 posts with nearly 5,000 hits. My top five countries for followers are the US, the UK, India, Canada and France. Small potatoes to John Green, but quite an amazing audience for a little girl from deep in the piney woods of Grimes County, Texas who grew up in a time where her family’s only communication device was a two party telephone line that her grandmother on her daddy’s side used for spying on her neighbors.

    Truth telling is a lost art.  Honesty is no longer a virtue nor is it admired by everyone we come in contact with.  Nonfiction writing lacks the pop and sizzle of fiction, although I like to think sometimes it’s a close second.

    One of my favorite scenes in the movie Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is the scene where the tortured son Brick played by Paul Newman discussed his problems with his father Big Daddy played by Burl Ives. Brick blamed his alcoholism on mendacity which he claimed affected everything in the universe but especially the family he came from.  Big Daddy wasn’t so sure about that claim, but I have to say Brick just might have been on to something powerful. I was so impressed with this idea that I devoted a chapter I call Human Frailty and Mendacity in my latest book Four Ticket Ride to the concept.

    Ideas for writing come to me in random places, but what I can promise you is that I try to bring truth telling to every piece I write.

    Stay tuned.

    P.S. Thanks so much to everyone who bought my books from Pretty Tuesday night – we almost sold out! I loved meeting you all and look forward to seeing you again in November.

    P.S.P.S. Thanks to our friend Saskia for taking pictures.

     

     

     

  • one woman’s bucket list is another woman’s good life


    me and my best friend Charly enjoy Pretty’s bucket list

    Pretty’ s bucket list got one wish lighter this summer with the nearly completed screened in porch in our backyard. We had a screened porch with a wonderful squeaky wooden swing in the first house we bought and lived in together. During the first nine years of our marriage we were way too busy for swinging though.

    Fast forward ten years, another four houses, and now too tired for swinging we are one door short of another screened in porch. Pretty is ecstatic to have her pool and porch waiting for her whenever she takes tiny amounts of time away from managing her antique empire to enjoy them.

    I, on the other hand, have only the Evil PT sessions to interrupt my porch sitting and playing in the cool pool this summer. Poor me.

    I thought about making a bucket list of my own but then decided why bother when Pretty’s list is working fine for me.

    Charly advises when the heat gets to be too much,  head for the porch

    Stay tuned and stay cool.

     

  • Daddy and his dogs


    Lordy, Lordy – my daddy loved his dogs.

    Daddy with his bird dog in his lap, his open Bible on the table, 

    and his hunting gun leaning in the background

    The first and last memories of my daddy always include his love for his dogs, his family, his church and public education; and I’m pretty sure I have those in the right order. He was an outdoorsman, a quail hunter during season so the dogs we had were supposedly purebred pointers, but they never succeeded in the field because they couldn’t get used to the sound of guns since they spent their lives indoors sitting in his lap.

    Daddy and his dog Dab watching a Longhorn football game on TV 

    Daddy holding Seth while Dab relaxes in his own chair

    This is how I remember my daddy – impeccably dressed in coordinated shirt, tie, jacket and slacks on his way to work or to church, but never too busy to say goodbye to one of his dogs.

    My daddy, Dr. Glenn L. Morris, died way too young at the age of 51 on June 30, 1976. I remember him on every Father’s Day and all the days in between – still.

    Cancer was the culprit for the loss of my father, and yesterday cancer claimed a friend of ours, Consuelo Heath, who also waged a long brave battle against this disease. Pretty and I send our sympathy and love to her wife Lynda Parker. Rest in peace, Consuelo.

    Stay tuned.

  • Vive la France! D-Day, the donald, and the drop shot


    The French have it all this week: 75th. Anniversary of the Allied invasion in WWII that began on the beaches in Normandy on June 06, 1944 (commonly referred to as D-Day); an American president on the continent who truly can’t stop himself from revealing his ignorance of, oh well, just about every nasty thing he finds to tweet about on an hourly basis; and the final week of the 2019 Roland-Garros tennis tournament, the second Grand Slam event of the year which finds familiar names in the men’s semi-finals and fresh faces in the women’s semis.

    I am swept along by the stirring images of the American cemetery in Normandy, the stories of the amazing four women ages 92 – 99 known as the Rosies who were not only the Riveters but also the draftswomen and/or anything else needed, these four women representing all the women who worked building the planes, ships and bombs necessary for our soldiers waging a war in Europe, Africa and the Pacific. These women are in France for the D-Day Anniversary remembrance and will bring their memorie as well as their flowers for one of the crosses in the cemetery which belongs to a brother by his sister who has never had the opportunity to visit his grave. Tom Brokaw will also be on this site as he pays tribute one more time to the fallen soldiers of WWII who inspired his book in which he named them our Greatest Generation.

    One of the women who wins the French Open this year will be a first time winner of a Grand Slam. The names of the four remaining women in the draw will be familiar only to those who follow women’s tennis regularly: Ash Barty of Australia, Johanna Konta of Great Britain, Marketa Vondrousova of the Czech Republic and seventen-year-old Amanda Anisimova of the USA. These remarkable women managed to eliminate more familiar  tennis names like the Williams Sisters, defending champion Simona Halep, #1 player in the world Naomi Osaka, Madison Keys, Sloane Stevens, and 108 additional competitors who fought their hardest on the clay courts but lost to better players on a given day.

    The men at Roland-Garros are also down to the final four, but their names are not only familiar but famous. Roger Federer of Switzerland meets his long-time rival Spanish clay court warrior Rafael Nadal in a much anticipated semi-final match. Federer has won 20 Grand Slam tournaments to Nadal’s 17. The Serbian Novak Djokovic has 15 Grand Slam titles but came into the French as the winner of the previous three major tournaments so a win for him would put him in a category all his own. Austrian Dominic Thiem will play Djokovic in the other semi-final on the men’s side. The French got the final four men in the correct order, but who could have predicted the women’s semi-finalists? I can’t wait.

    Last  and definitely least, an American president trolls the international twitter space with irrelevant nonsense and makes his trip for D-Day a public relations nightmare for his staff and everyone he encounters on the other side of the Pond. I felt sorry for the Queen during his toast at the state banquet. She looked like she was wondering if her dogs would be more entertaining than this presidential impersonator from the Colonies. Poor Queen Elizabeth. And can anyone really believe the British royalty told the president to bring his whole commoner family for dinner?

    Stay tuned.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • Nick Kyrios is to Tennis as Donald Trump is to the American people — bad to the bone


    Nick Kyrios is  an Australian professional tennis player ranked #25 in the world in men’s singles. Daniil Medvedev is a Russian tennis player currently ranked #14 by the ATP in men’s singles. Today they met in the first round of the Italian Open being played in Rome this week. I have had lots of time to watch the entire clay season unfolding this spring on the road to Roland Garros at the French Open which begins on the morning of the 26th.

    Monaco, Barcelona, Madrid and now Rome this final week before the next major at the French Open. Today I watched Nick Kyrios “play” against Daniil Medvedev and perform the same outrageous antics I’ve watched him do for years against opponents. Trick shots, serving underhanded, bullying  referees and opponents in general, using whatever disrespectful tactic he can generate to fluster his opponents and entertain his fans who, I admit, are many.

    I have never been a Kyrios fan, and today I made a personal promise to refuse to watch any of his matches being shown at any event. It’s just me and my little protest, but maybe I could hashtag my protest into a movement if I knew how to hashtag anything.

    Meanwhile across the Pond from Rome as we refer to the Colonies who have become our own states due to little wars and things like that in the 18th. century we have another Bad Boy who refuses to respect our constitution which contains the map of how each branch of the government is to perform.

    For those of you who have forgotten the one civics class taught to you by a coach in junior high school I’m choosing to refresh you with the big Three lynchpins of government: the judicial system with its highest authority in interpreting the constitution, the executive branch which has it function to implement the laws of the land, and the congressional branch which is supposed to make the laws and supervise the executive branch through its oversight of the executive.

    Ok. Right now, this very minute…we have a president who has gone off the reservation by refusing to comply with the subpoena process issued by the Congressional committees for oversight.Think evil. Think wicked. Think Machiavellian. If he were a tennis player, he would throw his racket on the ground, stomp it, and then yell that the other guy was a loser anyway. The referee would issue him a racket violation which he would scoff at.

    The president is being as disrespectful to the law as Nick Kyrios is to the game of tennis for which he equally shows no respect.

    I am consciously choosing to never watch Nick Kyrios play tennis again. Small protest, but it makes me feel better. I always mute the president when he speaks.

    I of course will never vote for Donald Trump for president for reasons too numerous to list here, but let’s just say I can’t stand a bully who thinks he is above the law. Think Bill Clinton. Think Richard Nixon. Add to that knowledge in the basic history lessons.

    I pledge to stop laughing at things which I know aren’t funny. I plan to follow the debates to see where my future belongs.

    Bad Boys, take your brand of disrespect and shove it…anywhere…I don’t have to see.

    Stay tuned.