Sports: December 2008 Archives

While many of us get ready to gorge on the college football bowl season that started today, I would be remiss if I didn’t give a shout out to my hometown Richmond Spiders football team. They won the Division 1-AA football championship last night, the first team sport championship in the history of the university.

(I do refuse to call 1-AA the FCS, as they are now officially designated. Just an awful attempt to justify the BCS mess.)

If you didn’t watch the game last night, you probably don’t know background on the coach, which is straight out of central casting. The former team MVP returns to coach his alma mater and wins championship in his first year there. But prior to all that, he started out as an undercover cop before becoming a coach. And he’s also given a bone marrow transplant to one of his own daughters.

Game summary clip is below. Congrats again to the Richmond football team on a well-earned championship.

Well, almost in my backyard. There is a 5k cross-country running course less than 2 miles from my house, in Pole Green Park, and tomorrow it is going to be hosting the 2008 USA Track & Field National Junior Olympics Cross Country Championships. Runners from ages 9 to 18 will be competing to be Cross Country All Americans. Almost 2500 runners are expected to participate in 10 different classifications.

I think it’s pretty cool that we’ve got a national-class cross-country course close by. I won’t be heading over there, but it looks like it will be a pretty big deal. It’s sponsored by USA Track and Field and an official national championship.

A video was put together of the actual course, if you’re actually interested. Kind of jarring, as it was taken from a four-wheel vehicle over the course, then sped up.

I don’t remember saying that before the basketball game, but that’s exactly what happened. (If you don’t know, I play on a church league team and coach the team.) In the first couple of minutes of the game, I wound up jamming the pinkie on my right hand while tying up an opponent on a rebound. It hurt, but felt like a jammed finger that you might get playing basketball. So, I played on. I continued to grab rebounds (sometimes gingerly) and block shots, and we won comfortably. There was swelling, but not too bad.

I was a bit concerned before I went to bed, but decided to sleep on it and see how it looked in the morning. There was still swelling, but the soreness was manageable. Still, I went in for an x-ray, and the picture to the right shows what the x-ray tech (and I saw) — a couple of clear breaks. (Click on the picture to view a larger version. If you didn’t know it, most pictures on this site work that way.)

So, it was on to a hand surgeon this afternoon, and his diagnosis was more significant — multiple fractures (more than the two obvious ones), with some really small pieces in some areas. Until he can do the surgery and figure out how to get things back in place (whether by pins, screws, or plates), he won’t even know if the finger will be immobilized or not. But it will almost definitely never work quite the same. He said he hadn’t seen this type of break be this bad in over a year.

Monday is surgery day, and then I’ll find out what comes next. In the meantime, my pinkie is splinted and taped to the ring finger, making typing this (as a touch typist) a bit challenging and taking longer than normal to type. And I guess basketball is out for a while. Just another of life’s little wrinkles, I guess.