If you get sufficiently old, you wind up outliving some folks that you’ve gotten to know. Two such folks handed away this previous week.
Ted Ramoundos, in his grownup life, was an artist and singer of some native reknown in southern New Jersey the place he grew up. We went to highschool collectively, and he graduated just a few years after I did within the midst of some turbulent adjustments after the dying of our headmaster in April of my graduating yr.
However the place Teddy and I had an unshakable bond was by our time on our college’s basketball staff. And, let’s face it, we weren’t all that good. We had one win my junior yr — and given the truth that your Founder was the staff’s middle throughout these years in an period the place you had been seeing 6-foot-9 level guards coming by the system, I wasn’t enjoying to grow to be a school or professional athlete.
The worth, for me, was with the ability to be a part of a staff and dealing collectively in direction of a standard aim — a aim which we didn’t attain on a regular basis, so it was particularly candy once we did handle to outscore a staff over the course of 32 minutes. If you take lengthy rides on a bus in the course of the late fall and winter months, you create bonds with the opposite guys on the bus. They’re unshakable, a part of the reminiscences you always remember.
I’m satisfied that he won’t have been capable of finding his artistic and musical self with out classes realized on the basketball courtroom. For those who look him on on YouTube movies, he’s truly fairly the frontman.
Teddy wasn’t the one acquaintance I misplaced this previous week. And, because it seems, it was a member of a sports activities staff.
Again in my formative days of overlaying discipline hockey for our day by day native newspaper, the very best staff within the capital area was The Lawrenceville (N.J.) College. One of many gamers was a defensive midfielder named Karen Weber. She was a superb athlete with a fantastic stick, and somebody who labored very well with a bunch of wonderful gamers.
Contemplate the time after I obtained to know Weber and numerous members of the Massive Crimson staff. It was, in fact, the times when there was an precise newspaper conflict in central New Jersey. It was years earlier than the varsity joined the Mid-Atlantic Prep League, It was additionally years earlier than synthetic turf.
The turf — pure turf — was a subject of dialog the day I did a Lawrenceville sport. It simply occurred to be the New Jersey Prep “A” championship sport, which was all the time held at a impartial web site. However that web site, for this yr, was at a neighborhood public faculty, Pennington Hopewell Valley Central (N.J.), which had top-of-the-line grass pitches in the complete county, if not the state.
Nonetheless, the folks in cost determined that the sport wouldn’t be performed on the varsity discipline, which was situated on a terraced again lot behind the highschool. As an alternative, it might be performed on the outfield of the softball diamond, just a few years downhill from the varsity pitch. It was the primary time that the outfield could be used the complete season for a discipline hockey sport, which meant that the grass was full and a bit springy.
On the day, Smith performed nice hockey, and he or she needed to. That’s as a result of a first-half collision with an opponent meant that her teammate, Megan Smith, needed to go away the pitch with concussion-like signs.
Weber could be a particularly profitable athlete in discipline hockey, ice hockey, and lacrosse at Lawrenceville, and matriculated to Hamilton School. She grew to become a profitable advertising and marketing govt, and certainly one of her most distinguished shoppers was the world-famous Grand Central Terminal in New York Metropolis.
For those who noticed information of a public occasion there, she most likely had a hand in attracting it to the area, whether or not it was a jazz band or the Story Corps recording cubicles that gather private life accounts in 40-minute intervals for the Library of Congress and Nationwide Public Radio.
I reconnected with Karen Weber just a few years in the past by social media. She was nonetheless working even whereas going through some well being challenges. She posted footage of her canines in addition to posting considerate sayings of girls’s empowerment.
I’m satisfied she would by no means have been such an outspoken, artistic, and caring individual with out her life on the athletic fields of the Northeast.
Sports activities does change folks and makes nice lives. Ted and Karen had lives that had been well-lived. Relaxation in peace.
