For those of you that visit here solely because you relish Dave's awkwardness, failures, pedantry, and bombast, you might want to stop reading today's post right now . . . because today's post is a tale of success, timing, and perfection; last Thursday, I was running my son's travel team practice at the high school turf field, and there was a lot going on: my other son had practice on the far side of the field, and some high school kids were playing a game of touch football in the middle of the field -- which would have been fine, except that every time they punted the ball it came flying end-over-end into our scrimmage by the goal, and after the third time this happened, I had one of my players bring me the ball -- and then --in the typically grouchy and hyperbolic fashion that I adopt after several hours of coaching-- I yelled to them: "You need to stop punting, because you're not good at it, and you're going to kill one of my players!" and then I held the ball out with both hands, tilted slightly downward and to the left, and launched a picturesque high-arcing fifty yard punt, on a perfect spiral, into the arms of the farthest kid (and I know it was a fifty yard, punt because I was at the goal line and he was at the fifty) and though I was probably a bit over-the-top and obnoxious in my tone with them, because of the beauty of my punt, they apologized profusely (and later on, I gave them a quick lesson on how to punt a spiral).
