Writing from the porch: Kevin Sherrington’s tranquil perch to capture a bizarre year in sports – The Dallas Morning News

Gary Cartwright, the runt of Blackie Sherrods literary progeny at the old Fort Worth Press, left the toy department at an early age but never outgrew it. Everything important he learned, he learned at the Press. Which is probably why a few of his most notable magazine pieces, from the legacies of Jack Ruby and a Dallas stripper to the death of a Texas Ranger, were collected under the title, Confessions of a Washed-Up Sportswriter.

With apologies to the late press boxer, who took a pretty dim view of the yahoos who came after him, consider the confessions of a shut-in sportswriter:

A fountain gurgles in a nearby bed of ferns under the canopy of a Japanese maple. A cocky blue jay primps in the basin. Across the alley, the breeze rippling the leaves in a three-story cottonwood sighs like a wave dying on a beach.

And then theres the sound a screen door makes after you let it go: one bark, then two...

I wrote that in late May well into a pandemic that shut down sports for months and let them up grudgingly to provide a glimpse of my world view from the screen porch in the age of the coronavirus.

From my North Dallas home, its a little more than a half-hour to JerryWorld and Globe Life Field, and American Airlines Center is just 15 minutes down the tollway. But for the better part of my six-month exile from press boxes, all three might as well have been around the world.

On the screen porch, I wrote in March that responding to this global crisis would be more difficult than what we were asked to do after 9/11, when we were told that wed be fighting terrorism simply by going about our normal routines. I called Planos Natalie Chou, the UCLA basketball star, to discuss her concerns about the targeting of Asian Americans during the pandemic.

I wrote about the prospects of little ol Colonial breaking the sports drought, the effects of the 1918 flu at Texas A&M, and the impact of protests popping up everywhere. In one column, I speculated what might be the point of no return for some sports this year; in another, I worried we might be rushing back too soon.

In August, I wrote about the Mavs in the playoff bubble from my wicker seat out back. This was new. Part of the job requirement has been to provide a sense of place. Unless readers wanted to know how my new sunshine ligustrums were coming along as Luka Doncic lifted the Mavs on his shoulders, they were out of luck.

Communicating with athletes and coaches has been futile. Zoom calls are a poor substitute for real eye contact.

Worse yet, in the wake of Mike McCarthys wacky first year: Jerry Jones doesnt Zoom.

Even when I occasionally got out of the house, nothing was the same. The Argyle PA announcer tried diligently to keep fans six feet apart. But, as I wrote, playing a high school football game in a pandemic was like putting on a rock concert in a hospital ward.

The perspective from high atop Globe Life Field was different, and not because of the roof or air conditioning. What unnerved me even more than the creepy DoppelRangers lined up like sentries was the fake crowd noise. Go figure. It seemed symbolic of our predicament. I felt like a pawn in a ruse.

For the first time in my life, the games Ive loved felt like they were forced, like we were trying a little too hard to distract everyone from a bigger truth. Reminded me of a 12-year-old boy and the Sunday afternoon after his fathers first heart attack. Neighbors took the kid and his younger brother to a park for a game of baseball as a diversion. Its what good neighbors do, and they had the best of intentions. But nothing, not even baseball, would blot out the image of the ambulance taking my father away from me.

Even now, with vaccines on the way, its difficult to reconcile the conceit of games against a backdrop of more than 300,000 U.S. deaths and cases rising by the hour. But on we forge, nonetheless. Players and coaches test positive. Games are postponed or canceled. But the business of sports cannot, must not, will not stop.

Because of conflicting emotions bubbling up as we tried to act like all is normal, it was probably inevitable that it would make some of us more reflective. Maybe as a result, causes and protests that once might have received cursory attention took center stage. Especially with athletes. This wasnt exactly different, but it was certainly more pronounced. Athletes changed lanes; the media veered, too.

We didnt just write about the protests by pro athletes, either. In July, I streamed a Tyler school board meeting where board members voted unanimously to change the names of the high schools in an effort to right an old wrong.

Giving voice to these protests made a lot of you uncomfortable. Even angry. Some readers thought I occasionally took it too far. One old civil rights warrior said I didnt go far enough.

Finding a way to bridge what divides us was impossible. These are unprecedented times, and in meeting these challenges, weve often failed to heed the better angels of our nature. As I wrote in the wake of athlete boycotts in August, the pandemic wrung out most of our patience and social upheaval squeezed out what was left.

Fortunately, the screen porch proved to be a zen kind of place this year. I could sit out back and let my thoughts drift. I miss it. Too cold now. Probably just as well. Let me tell you something, I risked my sportswriter card writing about blue jays and birdbaths. Gary Cartwright would have hated it. Then again, he never had a season like this one.

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Writing from the porch: Kevin Sherrington's tranquil perch to capture a bizarre year in sports - The Dallas Morning News