Those basketball fans will be the death of me yet

Times are hard and I’m beginning to think SweetAnnie has taken out a large life insurance policy on me in the hope of making them less hard (at least for herself). I can’t absolutely prove this is the case, but the anecdotal evidence that she’s trying to get me bumped off is overwhelming.

I’m writing this not so much as an attempt to cheat her out of the insurance money should her plan work, but rather as a possible last chapter to my posthumous biography, “I Was Robbed!”

Now Sweet Annie is—while not particularly devious—very intelligent. She’s too smart to simply push me into the Grand Canyon or tie antlers to my head and drop me off in the woods during deer hunting season. She has to make my untimely demise seem like an accident, or if not an accident, then at least a murder she had no part of.

To do this she has been taking advantage of my naiveté with regard to sports. With the exception of boxing, I don’t know diddley when it comes to sports. I can differentiate a baseball from a football (the football’s the one that bounces funny, right?) but that’s about it. As to professional sports teams—who’s playing whom—fuggidaboudit. I know nothing.

How is Sweet Annie using sports to kill me? Well, for the past year or so, she’s been loaning me a sweatshirt. It’s a nice hoodie that on more than one occasion has kept me warm when temperatures dropped suddenly and I had no jacket handy. It’s blue with white lettering, reading in large print: DUKE.

Some of you may already know that Duke is a university somewhere; North Carolina, I believe. Or Saskatchewan. Anyway, it’s a school and Annie’s brother is head of the English department there, which is how she scored the sweatshirt.

Some of you also may know that Duke fields a basketball team, supposedly a good one. And the Duke basketball team has a bitter rival; the University of North Carolina. I don’t know if these guys are with the NBA, NCAA or the NAACP, but the fans there take their basketball very seriously.

So seriously, in fact, that the mere sight of Annie’s Duke sweatshirt gives UNC fans an unquenchable desire to engage in the one sport I understand and enjoy (see boxing, above). On at least three occasions, young guys have sent disparaging comments in my direction while I was wearing the Duke shirt. When I try to explain to them that I don’t give a rat’s hindquarters about Duke, UNC or any other basketball team, Sweet Annie chastises me for being “disloyal” to the Duke spirit.

See? She trying to get me to, um, duke it out over Duke. Though I like boxing, even Muhammad Ali was retired by the time he was my age, and for good reason. He wanted to live. So do I.

So, no more Duke shirt for me. If Annie wants that insurance money, she’s going to have to do better than that.

Make your Kindle happy! But it a copy of Mike Taylor’s book, Looking at the Pint Half Full, available from Amazon and other online booksellers. Email Mike at mtaylor325@gmail.com.