I was working in my classroom late Sunday afternoon, spending the day earlier entertaining a grandson, the son of my son, Wes McGee.
I did not take my cell phone with me, and when I got home, I found an urgent message from my wife telling me to call her immediately. I did and discovered that she had left our house just before I got there after my son called and told her his house was on fire and asked if we could come.
That kind of news got me out of the house and headed towards their home in Decatur. Running the back roads, I was pushing the speed limit until I got to the Hiwassee bridge and could see a large column of smoke 10 miles distant. I pushed the speed limit clear out of the way as I sped towards an uncertain scene.
Knowing only that the house was on fire, and seeing the mighty conflagration it likely was, my head was filled with all kinds of dread and fear. Were any of the eight kids trapped? Was my son OK? My nurse daughter-in-law was at work at Mercy Hospital and I knew (?) she was safe but how will she accept what was happening? What did such an event mean for all their futures?
I got to my son's place in record time, but after I learned that all my loved ones were safe, I relaxed a bit, regretting I drove so fast when doing so really didn't make an iota of difference. That is what often drives poor decisions -- fear.
I was going to lead my column off with a story about Coach Bradley Keyes, who was fired recently from his post as head track coach at Pembroke Academy in New Hampshire.
It seems the powers that be were requiring his track athletes wear face masks when they competed in races, no matter the distance. Coach Keyes even tried running 200- and 400-meter sprints with a mask on to gain first hand knowledge of what that is like.
Running events require a large infusion of oxygen when competing. Masks not only greatly restrict the flow of air into the lungs, they also serve to reintroduce carbon dioxide back into the lungs that was just exhaled. Not only serving to depress the immune system, such a policy would cause some athletes to just pass out on the field.
Coach Keyes refused to abide by these rules and for that he was fired.
In Arkansas, while there were plenty of protocols and procedures mandated by the state, athletes in play never wore masks with football players and basketball players spending a great deal of time breathing on each other in the course of a competition. Fans were restricted to masks, coaches, sideline personnel, but not the players. To have required the players to wear masks would have been bad for the players, and so at least there were some individuals in authority who were not driven solely by fear.
The years 2020 and 2021 have seen some of the strangest goings on in my life. Watching people driving down the highway by themselves wearing masks, watching people on a Florida beach wearing masks in what is likely the safest place on earth to be in what has been termed a pandemic, it is obvious some people are scared out of their minds. Pandemics meant, in the past anyway, a spike in the number of deaths occurring an area or country. The total number of deaths in the U.S. actually dropped in 2020 from 2019.
However fear comes, it usually clouds judgment, and takes a person away from the part of the brain that makes rational decisions.
Speaking of fear, or a lack of it...
The Razorback baseball team had a big game Sunday. They are the No. 1 team in the nation in the polls, and they were playing No. 3 Mississippi. They split a double header Saturday, with the winner of Sunday's game likely to be ranked No. 1 in the next poll, with the winner also grabbing the top spot in the SEC West standings.
Prior to Sunday, the Rebels and Razorbacks have split the 104 times they have played each with both teams owning 52 wins over the other.
Arkansas jumped out to an 11-0 lead in the first three innings, and it looked like another easy Hog victory. However, Mississippi isn't ranked third in the U.S. without having a ton of talent on their roster.
Ole Miss started chipping away at the lead and by the end of the seventh inning, they had tied the game 14-14. The game was in Oxford, with the home town crowd bananas with their team's comeback and it looked certain that the Razorbacks would be knocked off their perch as No. 1 in the West and the nation.
It would have been easy to have folded, as things just went to pieces from the third to seventh innings. But they didn't. Arkansas came back to score 3 in the eighth and 1 in the ninth with Kade Cops coming on to shut out Ole Miss the rest of the way, and victory was secured. This has happened more than once this year.
Being able to control your fear gives a better edge in sports, and well, life in general.
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Editor's note: John McGee, an award-winning columnist, sports writer and art teacher at Pea Ridge elementary schools, writes a regular sports column for The Times. The opinions expressed are those of the writer. He can be contacted through The Times at [email protected].