Night Owl Cards

(I've begun packaging some of the prizes for the giveaway. I believe I now have everyone's address except for Jeff S. Just send me an email!) For the first 35-40 years of my life, the word "goat" as it applied to baseball either meant the Billy Goat curse that followed the Cubs around for 100 years or a player who screwed up in a significant game. "Baseball's Greatest Goats," that was the kind of title used for books or articles and everyone knew that when they opened the pages, they'd read about the biggest gaffes, goofs and blunders in baseball history. Try searching that phrase now. "Goat" no longer means the opposite of "hero" in sports lingo. It actually means hero. G-O-A-T. Greatest Of All Time. Just about every internet sports reference to "goat" involves Michael Jordan or Muhammad Ali or some other athletic great. Somehow "goat" has come to mean completely the opposite of what it used to ...

I am not a military veteran. I've always been more of a thinker than a doer, and I knew that at an early age. The U.S. suspended the military draft in 1973, when I was 7 years old, so there was never a chance I might enter the military. But growing up in the '70s and early '80s, we were still so close to the Vietnam War, and I was nervous about a lot of things. President Carter reinstated mandatory registration with Selective Service for 18-year-olds when I was a teenager after the Russian invasion of Afghanistan. I felt a sense of foreboding as I approached my 18th birthday. The military wasn't for me. But still, this was nothing compared with when the draft was in effect. You all know the stories of baseball players who left behind their sport to serve in the military for multiple years. That seems like a foreign time to me and difficult to grasp. The time period that has always fascinated me is what happened during the late '60s and early '70s, durin...