Tag Archives: Portland State University

Sports news

Portland State vs. Oregon: Oh, the quandary

You might be aware from this blog that occasionally I have written about University of Oregon football. The Ducks ascended to NCAA gridiron elite status, only to fall dramatically two seasons ago.

They went from heroes to zeroes virtually overnight.

I didn’t attend Oregon. I attended Portland State University, in the downtown district of my hometown of Portland, Ore. However, since the Ducks were winning a lot of football games and twice played for the national collegiate championship — losing to Auburn in 2011 and Ohio State in 2015 — I have become a Ducks fan. Hey, I’ll cop to being somewhat of a fair-weather fan.

Now, though, comes the quandary. Portland State’s Vikings — who compete on the Division I-AA level — are traveling 100 miles down Interstate 5 to Eugene next Saturday to play the Ducks.

What do I do? I know. I’ll root for the Vikings, understanding that they likely are going to get clobbered by the Ducks, who are showing some signs of life after a miserable season and then a rebuilding year in 2017. The Ducks have a new coach, Mario Cristobal, who went to Eugene as an assistant to one-and-done head coach Willie Taggart, who left Oregon after a single season to return to his home state of Florida to coach Florida State University.

But dang! I would love to see Portland State score an upset. Is it impossible? I direct you to what Appalachian State did to the University of Michigan, in the Big House in Ann Arbor, just a few years back. ASU on Sept. 1, 2007 handed the Wolverines the upset of the ages before a crowd of 109,000 stunned and shocked Michigan fans.

As the saying goes: That’s why they play the game.

education news

University pulls plug on Greek life … you go, FSU!

I have to acknowledge at the top of this brief blog post that I didn’t belong to a fraternity in college.

I was a young married father by the time I enrolled at Portland (Ore.) State University. I commuted to class from my small rented house and went home at the end of the day.

But when I read about Florida State University suspending fraternity activities, I couldn’t help but cheer the news. FSU President John Thrasher suspended Greek life after the death of an FSU student who died as the result of a fraternity prank gone horribly bad.

This is the kind of tragedy we hear about from time to time. Students join these frats and sororities and subject themselves to all kinds of misbehavior from their “brothers” and “sisters.”

I know that deaths from these kinds of pranks aren’t all that common. I also accept that there’s a lot about Greek life I never have experienced and arguably don’t quite “understand.”

What I’ll never get is why students attending institutions of higher learning have to behave as though they’re still in junior high school. Yes, I’m an old man now. I do remember a time when I was much younger and I can recall some of the foolish things I did when I considered myself virtually bullet-proof.

Still, I want to applaud FSU President Thrasher for banning all Greek life and prohibiting alcohol consumption by students on the Tallahassee campus.

Perhaps this terrible story could send shockwaves across the nation’s vast networks of higher ed institutions.

Sadly, I doubt it will.

entertainment news, national news, political news

Sen. Thompson made his mark early

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There will be tributes a-plenty in the next few days and weeks as politicians — and actors — remember one of their own: former U.S. senator and former TV and film actor Fred Dalton Thompson.

The Tennessee Republican was a larger-than-life guy who died today at his home after battling a recurrence of lymphoma.

He ran for president once. Served in the Senate. Acted in some pretty good films and had a good run as the district attorney in the hit TV show “Law and Order.”

I want to remember this man in another fashion.

R.I.P., Sen. Thompson

The first time I saw him was in 1973. It was on TV. I was a college student majoring in political science at Portland State University in Oregon and Thompson was serving as chief counsel for the Republican senators serving on the Select Senate Committee on Watergate.

Its chairman was the late Democrat Sam Ervin, the self-described “country lawyer” from North Carolina.

Thompson’s role in that committee was to provide legal advice for the Republicans on the committee. The panel was investigating the Watergate scandal that was beginning to metastasize and eventually would result in the resignation of President Nixon.

Fred Thompson had really bad hair, as I recall. But appearances aside, he was a tough interrogator, as was the Democrats’ chief counsel, Sam Dash.

My memory of Thompson was jogged a bit the other day by MSNBC commentator Lawrence O’Donnell who opined — after the daylong hearing of Hillary Clinton before the Select House Benghazi Committee — that senators and House members shouldn’t be allowed to question witnesses. O’Donnell cited the work that Thompson and Dash did in pursuing the truth behind the Watergate scandal.

Leave the questioning of these witnesses to the pros, O’Donnell said. The Benghazi committee congressmen and women, he said, made spectacles of themselves.

Thompson, indeed, was a tough lawyer. My memory of him at the time was that he questioned anti-Nixon witnesses quite hard and didn’t let up very much on those who supported the embattled president.

He did his job well.

That is what I remember today as the nation marks Sen. Thompson’s passing.

May he rest in peace.