FB: Minnesota Intercollegiate Athletic Conference

[Kilted Rat]

Update on how KR spent the majority of the day so far to learn that the 140,000 mile dented dream needs a $900 deposit if I want to see air conditioning again.

KR- You making it up to C'ville this weekend? Just roll down the windows and drive. Save your $900 for beer, you won't need AC for another 8 months.

I'd put the odds of me making it to C'ville at 60/40 good guys

Definitely gonna save the $900 and roll the windows down and pop the sun-roof. Besides, I get a stuffed up nose when I'm in the AC too much. Also, most of my rotations next summer will start early in the morning before it gets too hot and by the time the following summer comes around I'll have money to maybe afford a newer car with AC that actually works!

KR-
You sure that your AC unit just simply needs to be recharged, or do you trust your mechanic?  If it just needs to be recharged, it takes $30 and 15 min. of your time.  If you trust your mechanic, nevermind what I just said, but if he is a stooge, maybe it just needs to be recharged with refrigerant!

Mighty Royal

Already had it recharged 2 months ago. It worked fine for 1 month and 2 weeks. I trust the mechanics, I've been going there for everything the past 2 years and they've treated me well.


So.... here's today's time-line in the life of KR.


8AM roll out of bed and eat a bowl of generic Malt-o-meal cheerios.

9AM start calling places to see how much a new set of tires for the 140k dented dream would be.

9:30 AM Realize that I'm not gonna be able to get a set of 4 tires for less than $240 and start contemplating putting 2 new tires on the front and moving the best of the old tires to the rear (any thoughts? Is this a reasonable idea for a small front wheel drive car?)

11AM Call the place where I took my car in July to get the AC checked and where I paid $90 to get it charged.

11:15AM Left to drive down and drop off my car to get it checked out with my bike minus the front tire across the back seat and put the front tire in the front seat so that I had a way to get home

11:30AM Started biking the 4.5 miles home from the car place

11:50AM Arrived at school to workout, ran 3 miles, did sit-ups, push-ups and some other lifts.

1PM got home from the gym.

1:15PM phone call from the place, the clutch in the compressor for my AC is out and it's a $900 fix.

1:20PM get on my bike to ride the 4.5 miles back to the car place.

1:40PM get there and load my bike back into my car to drive home.


Now I'm tired and watching the 2003 Stagg Bowl.




It must be getting close to Johnnie Football time, the MIAC board has 7 of the last 10 posts on post patterns!

[sumander]

Perhaps some brats from the Award winning Lakes Processing would be appropriate?

That sounds tasty. But skip the "Laker brat", that just has a bad sound, especially for the more recent grads.
See you around 8 then?

8:00 would require a 6:00 AM shove off. I was thinking more in terms of 9:00 - 10:00.

If the Godfather will grill them I will bring a sampler of the award winning brats from Lakes Processing!

[sumander]

Plus I'm kinda excited to see what the Stift... virgins bring for their offerings.

Suggestions would be helpful!

You're going to lose your Stiftungsvirginity   It'll be enjoyable

Looking forward to it!

[DuffMan]

60/40 KR?  I thought the Mrs. and you were going to spend the holiday weekend in Central MN???  I'll expect you at the Pace Arrow, and I'll have Hamm's to reward you.

[Touchdown Tommy]

Well if you bring food it gets eaten or cooked.  The Godfather or Veek or ROR (with his handy dandy fold up PROPANE grill) will be more than happy to cook them up.  Speaking of Veek, bout time for him to come out of his offseason hiding.  Load up the Titan with those wild rice brats and plenty of cold bevies.

[finsleft]

60/40 KR?  I thought the Mrs. and you were going to spend the holiday weekend in Central MN???  I'll expect you at the Pace Arrow, and I'll have Hamm's to reward you.

If that isn't incentive enough for a short road trip with the windows down, I don't know what is.

BlueDevil Bob, will we be seeing you on Saturday?

Buckman, you in?

[Johnnie Red]

sumander, bring the award winning brats! I'm trying to get some pork patties from Ruck's in Belle Plaine to also bring along. They are excellent.

[Buckman]

The following is the feature article in this month's issue of Minnesota Moments Magazine  (www.MinnesotaMoments.com).  Since the article cannot be viewed online and is only available in the magazine, I requested and was granted permission to reproduce the article from Mike Nistler of Minnesota Moments.  Bill Kraft is a 1962 graduate of SJU.  Enjoy!

A Fever in the Blood


By Bill Kraft


I know when it began. I know when the fever in the blood set in like an accelerated osmosis that seeped into my consciousness to take up permanent residence. It began in 1956. That is the year my father subscribed to the Minneapolis Tribune on the plains of North Dakota. That is the year Johnny Football fever, that benevolent affliction, visited me in Strasburg, N.D. I did not suspect at the time that the two of us would become such fast friends that I would never want it to leave.

St. John's University in Collegeville had already become something of a family tradition. An older brother and two first cousins had already matriculated to St. John's ahead of my arrival in 1959. Stories about exploits on the football field began to trickle down from my cousins and the Minneapolis Tribune. The era of St. John's Hall-of-Famer Johnny "Blood" McNally had already passed, but the roots of a great tradition had already burrowed deep into the soil in the "natural bowl."

By the time I arrived, John Gagliardi had begun to assemble a gridiron juggernaut that would dominate the MIAC for decades to come and propel him and his program to national acclaim. Three-time All-American Chuck Froehle, whose prowess on the field took on legendary proportions, reputedly threw body blocks into on-coming traffic just for practice. Such tales, of course, were told with the kind of mythological hyperbole that soon becomes legend. It is a legend that has survived and thrived throughout the decades.


The first time I entered the natural bowl I knew that I had encountered something unlike anything I had seen before. Before me lay a meticulously groomed field of grass so verdantly lush, so pristine that any human imprint on its surface seemed almost a desecration of its natural beauty. From that field of Eden brilliant green blazed with a piercing intensity that almost brought tears to my eyes. The field itself lay in an oval surrounded by towering trees that became murals of flaming reds, oranges, yellows and gold on bright October afternoons.

It is a pristine refuge for Division III competition, a sanctuary far removed from the world of major college athletics and professional sports soiled by academic fraud, drug abuse, prima donna narcissism, recruiting violations and an "ethic" that sacrifices the integrity of the game for a win-at-all-costs imperative. If St. John's boasts a near 100 percent graduation rate among its athletes, it is because learning precedes winning. At St. John's the designation student/athlete is not an oxymoron. Chances are that the Johnny quarterback will not tell you that the Thomas Wolfe Society is an animal rights advocacy group. When Blake Elliott departed in 2003, he took with him a fistful of school records. And a degree in biochemistry. Too often in the National Football League, "degree" has come to define the severity of the latest charges leveled against one of its players.

If academic standards are not compromised at St. John's, neither is the joy of the game. From the seats in Clemens Stadium, Johnny practice looks more like children frolicking on the green than the rigors of young men engaged in the discipline of athletic competition. In the exuberance of the moment, an offensive lineman rolls his 260 pounds into a ball and rumbles down the field, or a wide receiver snatches the ball from the clutches of the kicker and puts a foot to it sending it into the stands. It is the kind of spontaneity born of a love for the game, a spontaneity too often stilled by the extravagant contracts and mercenary motivation of professional sports. The only agenda at St. John's is to nurture a love of the game and to get ready for St. Thomas or Bethel. Not the National Football League or Ohio State.

More of that joy, too, is rooted in the ritual that precedes and concludes each practice. That is when Gagliardi gathers his team on the field. I have never been privy to those proceedings, but the genuine affection they seem to elicit makes for the kind of bonding that athletes take with them long after graduation. Maybe that is what accounts for the kind of loyalty that sends the sons of athlete-alumni to St. John's to play for the grand old patriarch. It is a solicitous paternalism that has endeared him to generations of alumni on and off the field. That intergenerational bond has become the rock of a tradition steeped in excellence and achievement.  

That same paternalism may well account, too, for Gagliardi's ban against full contact scrimmages. The prevailing wisdom in the game of football would likely regard such an unconventional approach as near sacrilege, the strategy of a maverick coach. My initial disappointment at such a precaution soon gave way to the wisdom behind it. Gagliardi recoils from the prospect of serious injury to a player, not because it will jeopardize his prospects on the field, but because it will jeopardize a young man's future.

My personal contact with Gagliardi has been limited to coincidental encounters in the halls. On one such occasion a bemused Gagliardi, observing that the high school letter jacket I wore bore colors identical to those of Minneapolis De La Salle, inquired as to why I was not on the team's roster. Such an inquiry was flattering, but the chasm between Strasburg High School and St. John's and the MIAC was too far to bridge. The prospect of my landing a spot on the roster would have demanded a magnanimous leap of faith by Gagliardi and an even greater one from me. Such a fantasy would have been tantamount to Mr. Average making it at Notre Dame. It was a presumptuous notion I immediately dismissed. The ensuing years confirmed what I had always known. My participation in the great tradition would remain strictly vicarious.

If the ensuing years far removed me from Clemens Stadium, they did nothing to separate me from my grand passion. The fever lay in abeyance until St. John's reached the national finals in 1965.  Circumstances kept me from the game. I had obligations to the U.S. Army and was on board a ship crossing the Pacific Ocean for a tour of duty on Okinawa. The technological age of the Internet had not yet arrived leaving me isolated half a world away from St. John's and the media. And the Johnnies were up against Linfield, Oregon for the NAIA crown. Two weeks across the Pacific Ocean on an army tub test even the sturdiest of physical constitutions, but the tsunami of sea sickness roiling in my stomach seemed less an ordeal than the suspense of waiting for the final score. That suspense ended the moment I set foot on Okinawa. There in a refuse disposal lay the military's overseas newspaper; The Stars and Stripes. I rifled through its pages with a frantic hope that I might find the score. And there it was. St. John's 33, Linfield 0. A non-believer would have ascribed the finding of that score to coincidence. I ascribed it to providence.

Practicality and providence brought me back to Central Minnesota in 1993. Employment opportunities and my network of friends were still intact. So was an intuitive conviction that Johnny football and I were meant to rendezvous. We met again often on game day. Over the years upgrades at Clemens Stadium had replaced the natural grass with artificial turf and a new scoreboard. What remained constant, however, was the quickening in my blood when the team took the field. A scarlet wave of 170 Johnnies rippled down the field from north to south in an intimidating show of numbers. A surging exhilaration scrolled up the long years as if I had never left. Maybe the freshman in me will never die.

That exhilaration was but a foreshadowing of what lay ahead in the 2003 season. In a fairy tale scenario that any Hollywood agent would have dismissed as too contrived, too improbable and too incredible, St. John's reached two milestones. The first, a win over Bethel on Nov. 8, 2003, made Gagliardi the winningest coach in college football history. The second took them to the summit and the Holy Grail of Division III football in the national title game against a Mount Union behemoth boasting a mystique of impregnable invincibility and riding a 55-game winning streak behind an offensive line almost big enough to rival the mastodons in the National Football League.

In the St. John's locker room another kind of drama was taking shape. All-American Blake Elliot was dedicating the biggest game of his career to his brother Adam in recuperation from severe injuries suffered in an auto accident.  What might have been maudlin excess in a hackneyed Hollywood script turned into the poignancy of real human drama down on the field.

Near hysteria set in as I watched the miracle unfold on the field. Pacing frenetically like an expectant father, I watched St. John's dismantle Mount Union. David's rock had found its mark. Goliath was beginning to fall with a crash that would send tremors across the playing fields of Division III football.

Sports, like life, has its epiphanies, a sudden flash of truth or the realization that an
elusive dream is about to come true. One came when Mike Zauhar stepped in front of a Mount Union receiver, plucked the ball from the air and bolted 100 yards down the sidelines for a St. John's touchdown. On the sidelines Blake Elliott leaped skyward in a dance of celebration while pandemonium exploded on the St. John's bench. Then Elliott, whose All-American credentials read like a resume of legendary feats, provided another one. Like an artist in a farewell appearance, Elliott closed his career with the kind of virtuoso performance that becomes myth among the alumni faithful. Near midfield early in the fourth quarter, Elliott took a hand-off, shook off a defender and sprinted 51 yards up the middle for a touchdown. It was a fitting homage to his brother Adam. And a measure of poetic justice. An official's error in the third quarter had nullified the game's most spectacular play. St. John's was inside the Mount Union 10 yard line when Elliott turned to his repertoire of magic one more time. Loping into the end zone, Elliott extended his body, planted both feet inside the endline and cradled a pass to his chest with two defenders clinging to him in a futile attempt to knock the ball loose. The official ruling declared that Elliott 's feet had crossed the endline. Instant replay confirmed what I knew to be true. Elliott had made the catch inbounds with a panache that was the summation of his spectacular career. It is how I will always remember him. My only regret is that Norman Rockwell was not there to put it on canvas for posterity.          

[Buckman]

Buckman, you in?

Abso-fricking-lutely!  Just not sure on time yet, guessing 10-ish.  What is most needed as far as food goes? 

[sumander]

sumander, bring the award winning brats! I'm trying to get some pork patties from Ruck's in Belle Plaine to also bring along. They are excellent.

How many 4-5 doz?

[BDB]

BlueDevil Bob, will we be seeing you on Saturday?

It'll be a last minute decision if I make it this Saturday fins. Still keeping the option.

The River Falls game is a definate.  8)

[finsleft]

Great article, Buckman!

BDB, want me to give you a wake up call? Say around 5:30 a.m.?

[57Johnnie]

bennie,

The Bobblehead and the SJU Baby Legend Bear are always next to the computer and the 03 cap is always worn on game day and most other momentous occasions (like every day at my age). During the 03 season I wore the RAT sweatshirt and not the red alumni one at for every game. Outside of the much needed AO RALLY for the Cobber game it seemed to work so I have continued the practice.  

[BDB]

Great article, Buckman!

BDB, want me to give you a wake up call? Say around 5:30 a.m.?

That wouldn't be needed.  

If I come up it would be Friday night to Little Falls. The damn traffic would sure be bad then.  

I've got some personnel issues that are my main headache right now.

[Johnnie Red]

sumander, four dozen should be plenty. Thanks for doing this. If you could bring along four dozen buns, that would be great.