NFL draft, Saturday

With the Carolina Panthers set to make the 98th overall selection and first pick of the fourth round of this year's draft, NFL.com says the best available prospect is Christian Ballard, a 6-foot-4, 284-pound defensive lineman from neither the University of Kentucky nor a Kentucky high school.

With the Philadelphia Eagles set to make the eighth overall pick in the first round of the 1983 draft, Sports Illustrated's Paul "Dr. Z" Zimmerman was probably saying that the best available prospect was Notre Dame tight end Tony Hunter, Illinois quarterback Tony Eason or Florida fullback James Jones. (None of those guys was a Kentuckian either.)

Not that I would've known. By April 1983, we didn't yet have cable TV, where I could've watched Dr. Z on ESPN's pick-by-pick coverage, and I no longer subscribed to SI, where I could've read Dr. Z's mock draft. It had been only two months earlier that SI's Valentine's Day 1983 issue had set off something of a management-labor dispute in my house.

In February 1983, I was 14 and a very meaningful half years old. I know now that I didn't know, hadn't seen or hadn't done much of anything. In fact, I know now I still don't know, haven't seen or haven't done much of most things. But I did know, had seen and had done a few things when I was 14 and a half, and so I was pretty much convinced I knew and had seen all things--and even had done most.

My mom knew otherwise. In my house, Dad was the bombastic disciplinarian--the implorer and the pleader, the yeller and the cryer. The frothing position coach. Mom typically took a gentler tack.

When I got off the bus from Heath one February afternoon to find that week's issue of SI waiting for me, for example, "sizzling Cheryl Tiegs" had been additionally attired in a smart and modest, paper-doll dress that my mother had fashioned from a scrap envelope and affixed to the cover. This was classic Mom--not shutting out influences but shaping them.

But there was also in Mom the (thankfully) more rarely seen, no-quarter meter outer of condemnation and sanction. And it was this Mom, who later that evening, having flipped through the issue to look for college-basketball coverage, violently ripped page after page from the magazine as the swimsuits gradually shrank and the looks on the faces grew increasingly seductive.

I was incensed and insulted. Mom cared only that I was 14 and a half and hers.

The memory gets a little shaky here. I'm pretty sure that I actually was the one who pulled the plug on the SI subscription in a strange, made-sense-at-the-time act of defiance. Whether it was a strike or lockout didn't really matter; all that did was that there would be no more Dr. Z for me.

This post is dedicated to Number1Son, who absolutely won't read it.