Posted: 28 Dec 2020 07:07 AM PST

DECEMBER 28, 2020

COMMEMORATING THE CENTENNIAL of the great Ray Bradbury, biographer Sam Weller sat down with former California poet laureate and former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts Dana Gioia for a wide-ranging conversation on Bradbury's imprint on arts and culture.

SAM WELLER: The first time I met you was at the White House ceremony for Ray Bradbury in November 2004. You were such a champion for Ray's legacy — his advocate for both the National Medal of Arts and Pulitzer Prize. As we look at his 100th birthday, I want to ask: Why is Bradbury important in literary terms?

DANA GIOIA: Ray Bradbury is one of the most important American writers of the mid-20th century. He transformed science fiction's position in American literature during the 1950s. There were other fine sci-fi writers, but Ray was the one who first engaged the mainstream audience. He had a huge impact on both American literature and popular culture. He was also one of the most significant California writers of the last century. When one talks about Bradbury, one needs to choose a perspective. His career looks different from each angle.

It's interesting. You see him as a California writer. He moved to California from Illinois in April 1934. He was 13 years old and he's often associated with the Midwest, the prairie, and its ideals. How do you separate those two things? Is he a Californian or Midwestern writer? Is he both? Or does the question ultimately not matter?

Regional identity matters more in American literature than many critics assume. We have a very mobile society, so today many writers are almost placeless. But Bradbury is a perfect example of a writer for whom regional identity was very important.

How do you decide where a writer comes from? There are two possible theories — both valid. The first theory looks at where a writer was born and spent his or her childhood. But I favor a different view. I believe a writer belongs to the place where he or she hits puberty. That's the point where the child goes from a received family identity to an independent adult existence.

Once Bradbury came to Southern California, he never left. He lived in Los Angeles for 77 years. All of his books, all of his stories, novels, and screenplays were written here. The great imaginative enterprise of his life — bringing science fiction into the American mainstream — happened in California.

Is there any way to measure Ray's impact on popular culture?

Let me offer one perspective. If you compiled a list in 1950 of the biggest grossing movies ever made, it would have contained no science fiction films and only one fantasy film, The Wizard of Oz. In Hollywood, science fiction films were low-budget stuff for kids. The mainstream market was, broadly speaking, "realistic" — romances, comedies, historical epics, dramas, war films, and adventure stories.

If you look at a similar list today, all but three of the top films — Titanic and two Fast and Furious sequels — are science fiction or fantasy. That is 94 percent of the hits. That means in a 70-year period, American popular culture (and to a great degree world popular culture) went from "realism" to fantasy and science fiction. The kids' stuff became everybody's stuff. How did that happen? There were many significant factors, but there is no doubt that Ray Bradbury was the most influential writer involved.

It's interesting you say this because you don't seem to be afraid — some critics don't want to connect popular culture or mass culture with literature or with high intellectual arts. You seem to say that Bradbury is one of those people who brought these two things to the crossroads.

In my academic training, I was inculcated in the tradition of the psychological and social realist novel, the so-called "Great Tradition." This was an extraordinary literary lineage — Austen, Eliot, Dickens, Conrad, James, Cather, Hemingway, not to mention Balzac, Stendhal, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Dostoyevsky. The realist novel was one of the great achievements of Western literature. It provided a powerful means to articulate and understand personal and social relations of enormous complexity. Three cheers for realism! Maybe even four.

But there are different modes of storytelling. The most primitive is myth, where natural forces become personified in narratives. The next historical development was romance. In romantic narratives, we have the world not as it is but as we wish or fear it to be. This was the mode of medieval and Renaissance narratives. (Centuries later it also became the mode of science fiction, fantasy, horror, Gothic romance, and old-school mysteries.)

Realism is the mode that emerged last. Although the realist novel quickly became the dominant narrative form, its popularity only dates back about 400 years. The realist novel had a particular power that made it very attractive. The realist mode allowed one to see the world simultaneously from the inside and the outside. It compared — usually with a great deal of irony — the subjective experience of characters and the exterior world that surrounds them. Great novels mediate these two realities with tremendous finesse.

But realism is not the only way to tell a story, and the romantic mode never vanished. Even some of the realist masters, such as Dostoyevsky, Dickens, and Balzac, found themselves exploring the mode of romance to represent certain human possibilities. Romance remained very strong in American literature with some of our most original writers — Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne. But it never became academically respectable. It smacked of popular or children's literature. As a senior at Stanford, I had to ask permission to add Mary Shelley to my reading list! (Another student asked to read H. P. Lovecraft and got a stern lecture.)

How do you place Bradbury in this opposition of the realist and romantic traditions of storytelling?

Bradbury never went to college — that's one reason why he was so original. He was not indoctrinated in the mainstream assumption of the superiority of the realist mode. He educated himself. He read the books that he wanted to — from masterpieces to junk. Then he began to write children's literature, which is to say, pulp science fiction and fantasy. But he mixed in elements from the realist tradition.

Then something amazing happened. In a 10-year period, Bradbury wrote seven books that changed both American literature and popular culture. They were mostly collections of short stories. Only two were true novels. In these books, for the first time in American literature, an author brought the subtlety and psychological insight of literary fiction into science fiction without losing the genre's imaginative zest. Bradbury also crafted a particular tone, a mix of bitterness and sweetness that the genre had never seen before. (There had been earlier novels, mostly British and Russian, in which serious writers employed the science fiction mode, but those works showed the difficulty of combining the different traditions of narration. The books always resolved in dystopian prophecy.) Bradbury, for whatever reasons, was able to manage this difficult balancing act — not once but repeatedly.

What books are you thinking about here? What do you consider Bradbury's best period?

Sam, you'll probably disagree with me — but I think Bradbury's best work was mostly done in a 10-year period in the early part of his career. In one remarkable decade he wrote: The Martian Chronicles (1950), The Illustrated Man (1951), The Golden Apples of the Sun (1953), Fahrenheit 451 (1953), The October Country (1955), Dandelion Wine (1957), and A Medicine for the Melancholy (1959). The books came one right after the other, and he created a new mode of speculative fiction.

The culture immediately recognized his achievement. Suddenly, major mainstream journals published his fiction, and producers adapted his work for movies, radio, and TV. Millions of readers, who would not have read pulp fiction, came to his work. He also became the first science fiction author to attract a large female readership.

I don't disagree with you in terms of that period of productivity. I might expand it by a couple of years because in '47 he published Dark Carnival, his first collection of short stories, which is somewhat primitive, but Stephen King called it "Dubliners of American Gothic." Of course, Ray revised it in 1955 into The October Country, so it's a little murky there. But it's interesting that you don't put 1962's Something Wicked This Way Comes into that pantheon of classic Bradbury. Why is that?

You may be right about Something Wicked This Way Comes. It is the transitional book. I chose the books with the best combination of invention and finesse. The books from the early 1960s are good, but one starts to see his imaginative powers gradually weaken. Sentimentality creeps in. You could extend his golden period a few more years to include Something Wicked This Way Comes, along with his collections R Is for Rocket (1962) and The Machineries of Joy (1964). But we can't disguise the fact that his later works taper off.

I agree.

Sam, you and I knew Ray very well. He was one of the most generous, cordial, gracious artists I ever met. I wonder if Bradbury's very goodness didn't eventually temper the paranoia, ferocity, anger, and anxiety that animated his early fiction.

I agree that his character, avuncular kindness, generosity of spirit, and overall positive nature differed greatly from the snarl of early stories or the meanness, inherent in a take such as "All Summer in a Day." So, I actually agree with you that his kindness might have started to take him away from the dark human commentary of his early work.

You wrote a great essay, "Literary L.A., with No Apology," in which you talk about your origin story with Fritz Lang and encountering him at Royce Hall. What is your Bradbury origin story? You said you picked up The Machineries of Joy.

Yes, that was the first hardbound book I ever bought. But I'd already been reading Bradbury for years. I was probably about 10 when I first read his work. I encountered a Bradbury story in some anthology. I searched the wire paperback racks at the local drugstore until I found The Golden Apples of the Sun. I loved it, so I began reading all of his books, mostly borrowed from the Hawthorne library.

My friends read him, too. Little boys read novels back then. Bradbury became one of our foundational writers. Even at 11 or 12, we could sense he was different. He wasn't like Isaac Asimov or A. E. van Vogt — the simple, plot-driven sci-fi we were used to. Bradbury had refined it into something subtler and more humane. We didn't know it yet, but we were reading literature.

How would you describe the nature of Bradbury's literary achievement?

Let me explain my claims for Bradbury. When I talk about his literary quality, I do not mean that The Illustrated Man is equal to Anna Karenina. What I'm saying is that Bradbury created a new kind of fiction, which required enormous mastery and originality. His novels and short stories opened up huge possibilities for later authors and narrative artists in all genres. This is no small thing. And his books are still widely read. Any author who writes one great novel has beaten overwhelming odds. Most writers never write anything that is read 50 years later, even the winners of literary prizes. Look at a list of Pulitzer Prize winners from 50 years ago. How many of those books have survived?

That is why Bradbury's later decline doesn't matter. For 10 years, he was Joe DiMaggio. Every time he went to bat, there was a good chance he would hit the ball, sometimes out of the park. It's significant that Ray's great hitting streak came in the 1950s, a period of national optimism. Despite the anxiety, darkness, and anger in his work, Bradbury always wrote in a spirit of hope and reconciliation. He never believed humanity was beyond redemption. Perhaps as America shifted into the late 1960s and beyond, he lost touch with the culture.

That's all very true. Do you have a favorite book yourself? Ray bristled at that question. He said you can't pick a favorite child, and that all of his books were his "children." For his readers, we all have books we attach to, either sentimentally or nostalgically, creatively, or intellectually. Do you have a favorite work by Bradbury?

Not a single work but a favorite form — the short story. That is where his talents burned most brightly.

Agreed.

It's impossible to pick a single collection. I would select two or three stories from each of the early books. The best stories stick in your imagination. They also ripple through the culture like "A Sound of Thunder," which popularized the notion of the Butterfly Effect. Other favorites are "The Pedestrian," "The Veldt," and "There Will Come Soft Rains."

These stories express human desires and anxieties in ways that expose our naked psyches. I wonder if anyone has noticed that Bradbury was part of a midcentury American version of magical realism that paralleled the Latin American movement. His stories share a visionary style in which fantasy and realism intermingle similar to works such as John Cheever's "The Swimmer," Bernard Malamud's "Angel Levine," or Truman Capote's "Miriam." Bradbury created a cluster of myths and images for the late 20th century — situations, characters, and images that moved beyond the written word to become films, TV, comic books, theater, operas, and visual art.

Can you elaborate on Bradbury's role as a modern mythmaker?

Look at The Martian Chronicles. At the height of American optimism, Bradbury wrote a bittersweet novel about the failures of science, technology, and progress. Humanity makes it to Mars, but the triumph is illusory. Mars becomes a landscape of ghost towns. The novel was an extraordinarily fertile moment in American imagination. He suggested the notion of unlimited positive progress was an illusion. His wasn't the dystopian vision of Orwell or Zamyatin but something gentler and more elegiac. H. G. Wells could write about the end of civilization from a global perspective. Bradbury made the vision personal and lyric.

That's fascinating. You cite The Martian Chronicles. If I were to pick a work that exemplifies him at his best, it might well be that book because, of course, it's a story cycle focusing on different point of view characters in each story. I think it shows Bradbury's incredible range. It's also possibly his finest prose. It's elegant, but not purple. Something Wicked This Way Comes, even Dandelion Wine, can venture into a little bit of flowery language, but he hit his stride with The Martian Chronicles, as well as with his social commentary and his humanist commentary.

Yes, Bradbury began to shift into a more minor mode in Dandelion Wine.

I agree.

Martian Chronicles was his most ambitious work. As you know, Ray patterned it on The Grapes of Wrath. Steinbeck's tragic vision of Depression-era America became Ray's Martian tragedy of human defeat. Mars became a cosmic Dust Bowl. The dispossessed farmers became doomed astronauts and interplanetary immigrants.

You know this history. He bought his copy of The Grapes of Wrath coming back by Greyhound bus from the 1939 World's Fair in New York. The World's First Science Fiction Convention transpired at the same time, and so he was returning to Los Angeles, stopped off, briefly, at his boyhood hometown of Waukegan, which he rechristened "Greentown" in many of his works, most notably Dandelion Wine, and he bought his first copy of The Grapes of Wrath after seeing it in a cigar store window, of all things. Back on the Greyhound, he traveled through America reading it in 1939. It's incredible.

You can't make stuff up like that.

When was the first time you met Ray Bradbury in person?

I never met him until he came to Washington to receive the National Medal of Arts. No science fiction writer had ever won the National Medal. I felt it was important to honor areas of American creativity previously ignored. (We eventually awarded medals to an animator, literary translator, set designer, comic book artist, graphic designer, electrical guitar pioneer, and cartoonist — while never neglecting the traditional fine arts.) Ray was the first of these new honorees. The first time I spoke to him was the phone call informing him about the medal. He was effusively delighted. His doctors told him not to come. Ray came anyway, in his wheelchair, with three of his daughters and yourself. He loved every moment. He was like a kid at Disneyland.

This began a friendship that lasted until the end of his life. I continued to visit Ray when he was on his deathbed. He couldn't read any longer, so I would read to him. We had a long and affectionate relationship.

Do you have a favorite moment or favorite memory of Ray?

My favorite memory of Ray came from a science fiction convention at the University of California at Riverside. Not the convention itself but trying to get to it. Ray was the keynote speaker. He asked if I would introduce him. The speech was scheduled in a huge building at the center of campus. But there was no direct way to get Ray's wheelchair into the building. Every entrance had high steps designed for 18-year-old college students. Our faculty hosts eventually took us around back to the service entrance by the garbage dumpsters. I pushed Ray through a series of underground corridors until we got to a huge elevator, which had been designed to bring trolleys up from the food service kitchen.

We went up a floor or two, and a group of guys from the food service came in with their packed trolleys. They were all young Mexicans speaking Spanish. They noticed this old man in a wheelchair. The professors all froze up. They felt uncomfortable. But these were the sort of guys I grew up with. I turned to them and asked in my lousy Spanish if they knew who this man was. They shook their heads. Then I told them he was "el escritor famoso, Ray Bradbury." My hosts looked at me as if I were crazy. But then the guys shouted, "Ray Bradbury!" Every one of them knew who he was. Then they crowded around to get his autograph.

Wow. Great story.

The moment strikes me as the best measure of Bradbury's fame. Can you imagine the same reaction, indeed any reaction, to Saul Bellow or John Updike? These immigrant workers, whom American intellectuals consider beyond the compass of literature — you know all the social, cultural, and racial barriers that exist — were part of Ray's audience.

And Ray was delighted to meet them. He chuckled and signed napkins and order slips. He had a global audience. He spoke to people novelists don't usually reach. That is something that we should honor. Bradbury had an imagination that invited people in. I'm one of them. I know I'm not the only writer of my generation who feels Bradbury made a fundamental contribution to my intellectual and literary formation.

This topic has been very important in your work for decades. At the NEA you focused on expanding reading and organized The Big Read. Bradbury participated by video in Big Read programs all over the country. I was fortunate to deliver keynote presentations at many of these events. Ray was one of these rare gateway authors for young, reluctant readers, ushering them over to more challenging works of literature. In your estimation, now that Ray is no longer with us, you've written about the impoverishment of American intellectual culture, how are we going to engage reluctant readers as we move forward, and avoid a post-literate society? Or are we already there?

Our academic culture has lost its ability to inspire new readers. The decline in reading has been enormous, even among college students. At its height the Big Read was almost everywhere in the United States — every state, almost every major city plus hundreds of small towns. There were 25,000 organizations working in partnership with us. For the first time in over two decades American literary reading started growing. We made nearly 30 books available in the program, but the most popular novel was Fahrenheit 451. It was the title teachers and librarians most often selected. To Kill a Mockingbird was a close second. They were the gateway books, and they appealed to every age group.

You can't force young people into literature. They need to be led by pleasure and wonder. Creating a new generation of readers is important. When a society loses the capacity to read fiction, it loses one of the most powerful ways by which we grow and refine our inner lives, our understanding of ourselves, and our understanding of other people.

That is a powerful statement, and it echoes the themes addressed in Fahrenheit 451.

One final question for you. When you look over your own vast body of work, essays and poetry, and the incredible anthologies you've edited with these remarkable introductions that I use all the time as a creative writing professor in my classes at Columbia College Chicago, which one did Ray influence the most? Or if there is not one piece he inspired, how did Ray influence your own writing?

My experience with Ray — and other science fiction writers — changed the way I looked at literature, not only as a writer but also as a critic and editor. He helped me understand intuitively (before I could explain it intellectually) that there was no set hierarchy of literary modes. The novel was not superior to the romance as a mode of storytelling. They were just different. What mattered was excellence. One of the main changes in literary taste during my lifetime has been the erasure of the line between realism and fantasy. Likewise there is no longer a hard line between "serious" and "popular" culture.

As an editor of anthologies, I understood that the best way to get 18-year-olds to read was by offering them a variety of good work in different styles. Let them discover and explore their own taste. If you don't have a science fiction story, horror story, or adventure story in that mix, you might as well forget about engaging young readers, especially the boys. This diversity does not represent an abandonment of standards. There are masterpieces in all those genres.

The way we teach literature has failed to engage the imagination of the new generation of readers. Unless we acknowledge and build on their experience in popular culture, nothing will improve.

This blurring of boundaries between popular culture and high culture is exactly what Bradbury did with The Martian Chronicles, and that's why Christopher Isherwood, who was the first critic to review it as a work of literature, pointed that out exactly — this convergence of popular storytelling with high intellectual literary technique at play. You've been really gracious with your time.

Let me ask you a question. What was it like to write the first real biography of Ray while he was still alive?

It was quite the complex situation. I had him gently mentoring me on how to write a life story. Of course, he had never written a biography himself, but this was one of the most important writers of the 20th century. And I don't think that's hyperbole. He instructed me throughout the process to have fun and to not overthink the process but to, through osmosis, study his life and his philosophies and his accomplishments, and let them seep into my thinking and let that come out creatively, not necessarily intellectually. He always thought early drafts should be subconscious, so I really had this great writing mentor — who was also my subject — instructing me how to write a biography of him! To his immense credit, he never wanted to see a draft of the book. Not until I was done. He said, "I've given you this opportunity. I've knighted you with this and I don't want you to feel like you're writing it for me, so I don't want to look at the manuscript. I don't want to peer over your shoulder." I gave it to him when I was finished, and it had already been turned in to the publisher. He read it on his 84th birthday and said, "You have written a beautiful book!"

The kindness and creative wisdom of this man was towering and, as you said, he never went to college and had very little formal writing training. The only training he had was at Los Angeles High School in the late '30s. I don't think I'll ever meet another artist with this level of philosophical and creative insight. I went on to do four books and a graphic novel surrounding Ray and his life. Two of those books won the Bram Stoker Award. My new book, Dark Black, a collection of 20 Gothic short stories, was partially inspired by Bradbury's The October Country, even though it is very much a book that reflects my voice, my ideas, and my ethos. But Bradbury's influence on me is immeasurable.

It is impressive that Ray kept his goodness and generosity, that innocence, while working in and around Hollywood most of his adult life. The cynicism and bitterness of Hollywood never infected him, though he was often treated badly. That's a testament to the quality of his character.

Let me add one more thing. When we ponder Bradbury's particular innovations as a writer, it is important to recognize that he lived and wrote in Los Angeles, which had emerged as the global center of popular culture. That culture shaped him, and he reshaped it. The movies and television also helped disseminate his work to a degree that few writers ever enjoyed in their own lifetime. If Ray had stayed in Waukegan, he still would have been a writer, but neither his books nor their reception would have been the same. Part of Bradbury's importance was how much he changed storytelling on a global scale. Later, when Philip Roth, Margaret Atwood, and Don DeLillo wrote science fiction, we weren't surprised. Bradbury had paved the way. That probably could only have happened in postwar Los Angeles.

Sam Weller (@Sam__Weller) is the two-time Bram Stoker Award-winning biographer of Ray Bradbury. He worked with Bradbury for 12 years. Weller's latest, Dark Black , is a collection of 20 Gothic short stories. He teaches in the English Department at Columbia College Chicago.

Dana Gioia is an award-winning poet. Former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, Gioia is a native Californian of Italian and Mexican descent. In 2015 Gioia was appointed the State Poet Laureate of California by Governor Jerry Brown.

It wasn’t all bad: Top local sports stories of 2020 that aren’t COVID-19 - The Fayetteville Observer

Posted: 30 Dec 2020 03:18 AM PST

Monica Holland | The Fayetteville Observer

As is often the case in society, politics and life in general, sports served as a bellwether for the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Many of us didn't understand the gravity of the situation until March 11, when the NBA suspended its season.

When the multi-billion dollar association took a self-imposed sideline, we realized that it was a very real possibility that restaurants, gyms, businesses and even schools might follow suit.

The potential gave way to a hard truth as social distancing, masks, stay-at-home orders and Zoom meetings became part of our daily conversations.

The games we loved were suddenly gone; the ACC Tournament called off during a shootaround, high school basketball state finalists left in limbo, the Fayetteville Woodpeckers' season opener on hold.

Some very large dominos began to fall — Kentucky Derby, Masters, Little League World Series, Tokyo Olympics — all canceled or postponed as the entire sports world was benched.

It's senseless to deny that the biggest story in sports for 2020 was the global shutdown. But let's pretend it's not.

Let's look past the state championship appearances for E.E. Smith girls' basketball, Westover and Lumberton boys' basketball that were put off two days before tipoff and never played. Let's save talk of Fayetteville State's snatched opportunity to defend league titles in men's and women's basketball when their seasons were pushed back.

Let's set aside the shock of seniors who had no closure to spring sports seasons left dangling in the pandemic.

Let's celebrate the other stories.

Here's what we'll remember most about local sports in 2020 that's not COVID-19.

1. Social justice

We saw sports lead the way in COVID-19 response, and we saw that same leadership in the wake of several deaths of Black men and women at the hands of law officers.

Locally, E.E. Smith coach Dontrell Snow was compelled to release a statement on racial injustices that included the line: "Police brutality is inhumane. This is not a black/white issue, this is a human issue."

Clinton High alum, state record-holding scorer and Duke guard Mikayla Boykin expressed her emotions with a rap that's gotten more than 50,000 views on Twitter.

UNC Pembroke basketball coaches Drew Richards and Tony Jones joined a march for change in Fayetteville.

Even NBA stars Chris Paul, from Winston-Salem, and Dennis Smith Jr., from Fayetteville, led a march from Fayetteville State University to an early voting site to help students make their voices heard.

More: NBA stars Dennis Smith Jr., Chris Paul lead Fayetteville State University students to early voting

2. Local signees

Westover's D'Marco Dunn became a Fayetteville high school's first UNC basketball signee since Rusty Clark in the 1960s, picking the Tar Heels over more than 20 other offers.

"He thinks I can fit really well in his system," Dunn said of coach Roy Williams. "They obviously needed some help shooting from the perimeter after last year. That's why he recruited me. We both think it's a great fit."

Gray's Creek running back Jerry Garcia Jr. signed with Richmond and Pine Forest defensive lineman Isaiah Potts signed with Charlotte.

In girls' sports, Jack Britt guard Nyla Cooper added her name to the long list of Howard students that includes Vice President-Elect Kamala Harris. Gray's Creek two-sport star Kylie Aldridge made enough of an impression on live streams of summer games to land a softball scholarship to Virginia Tech.

And "Triple-Double" Daija Turner from Village Christian, who led the country in blocked shots as a junior and was named the Best of 910Preps Female Athlete of the Year, flipped her commitment from Virginia Tech to TCU.

In Robeson County, a place known more for its poverty, crime and what-ifs than high-level football, four student-athletes fulfilled their dreams of signing with Division I programs.

More: 'This is crazy': How 4 high school football players in Robeson County overcame multiple obstacles to earn Division I scholarships

3. Saying goodbye

One of the greatest athletes to come from Fayetteville, Massey Hill High alum Junior Edge was among those who died this past year.

Edge once outscored an opposing basketball team all by himself, produced a 21-0 record as a pitcher in two seasons and led the North Carolina football team to a share of its first ACC championship.

More: Cumberland County loses local athletic legend in Junior Edge

Pine Forest athletic director Jason Norton left descriptions like "legend" and "bigger-than-life character" behind after his death of cancer at age 47.

East Bladen's Eagle family was heartbroken to lose longtime coach Russell Priest at age 73 in July.

Bruce Stephens was honored by pallbearers in officiating stripes at his funeral earlier this month. He called local high school games for 36 years.

And two members of Methodist's sports family died this year in All-American baseball player David Roller and 12-year men's basketball coach Joe Miller.

4. Champions

Robbed of their chance to claim a title on the court, the Westover boys' and E.E. Smith girls' basketball teams were named co-champions after their postseason was cut short two days prior to the NCHSAA 3-A finals.

More: 'Still a champion': E.E. Smith, Westover get closure as co-state champions

"In a sense, it's a good thing because you're still a champion. We worked for it and then we didn't get to finish it off by playing that last game. It was sort of disappointing but we were still excited. &mldr; We accomplished something. We'll go down in the history books," Smith senior Kendall Macauley said.

The titles give Cumberland County 10 state basketball championships.

Westover finished the season 30-0, just the fourth team since 2002 to finish a season undefeated.

Smith went 31-1 to reach its first-ever state championship.

Cape Fear wrestler Dallas Wilson earned his third straight individual state championship and his Colts teammate Nick Minacapelli claimed a state title in 2020.

"The legacy I hope to leave behind is: when people hear my name 20 years from now they'll say, 'That kid didn't know what giving up meant,' " Wilson said after being named the Best of 910Preps Male Athlete of the Year.

Northwood Temple also got in on the championships, winning its first boys' basketball state title in program history.

More: Cape Fear's Wilson, Minacapelli win wrestling titles

5. Broncos, Monarchs, Flyers win titles

Fayetteville State shined at the CIAA tournament's last dance in Charlotte before moving to Baltimore.

The Bronco women claimed their first league tournament title in a decade and the men finished as the runner-up after a gut-punch one-point loss.

The Broncos also claimed CIAA titles in volleyball and cross country, and a third straight appearance in the CIAA football championship.

Methodist's men's basketball squad got over the hump after finishing in second place in the USA South tournament twice in the previous three seasons, winning a league title behind Dante Burden's 26 points in the title game.

One local team managed to bag a national championship. The Sandhills Community College men's basketball team squeaked out a National Junior College Athletic Association Division III title on March 13, just hours before practically all of college sports shut down.

The Pinehurst-based Flyers were led by sophomore Sayaun Dent's 27 points.

More: Meet the Sandhills Community College Flyers, a college basketball team that won a national title in 2020

6. USGA makes home in Pinehurst

The United States Golf Association, which conducts the U.S. Open, U.S. Women's Open and 12 other championships, found a second home in Pinehurst.

In September, the USGA revealed plans to move significant parts of its organization to Pinehurst from their current location in Liberty Corner, New Jersey. The sport's governing body will build an equipment-testing facility, innovation hub, museum/visitor center and offices in the town by 2023, thanks to an incentive package approved by local and state officials.

As a result, the famed No. 2 Course at Pinehurst Resort will become an anchor host to the U.S. Open, adding to its already scheduled 2024 Open additional dates of 2029, 2035, 2041 and 2047.

More: USGA bringing offices, museum to Pinehurst; additional US Open dates announced

7. Cumberland County high schools get new tracks

Photos of students running on a messy, muddy track at Westover High ultimately led to a huge win for all 10 Cumberland County Schools.

After fundraising and public support for a new track at Westover, principal Vernon Lowery took her concerns to the Cumberland County Board of education and got results that included new, rubberized tracks at every public high school in the county.

Tracks at all of the schools are expected to be completed within three years.

"I applaud the administration for finding the money and making these upgrades," board vice chairman Greg West, who ran track at Terry Sanford, said. "Now, we can host events at schools, which is better for parents, and practice will be on a familiar surface. All the P.E. classes can use it, too, and cheerleaders won't be in the mud on a rainy Friday."

More: All Cumberland County high schools are getting new rubberized tracks

8. Fayetteville native becomes UCLA's first Black AD

Groundbreaking is not new to Fayetteville native Martin Jarmond.

At 37, he became the youngest athletic director at a Power Five school and the first African-American to hold the position at Boston College.

In May, at 39, he was named the ninth athletic director at UCLA, where he'll also be the first African-American to serve in that capacity in the 101-year history of the school.

"Fayetteville is my foundation,'' Jarmond said in a Fayetteville Observer interview. "It taught me perseverance, hard work and to see things through. I have so many fond memories of Murchison Road, being a ball boy at Fayetteville State, going to the mall, Seabrook &mldr; everything about Fayetteville is gritty and tough, and that's what I took from it and learned from it.''

More: Fayetteville was new UCLA AD Martin Jarmond's foundation for success

9. Woodpeckers in the bigs

Seven players who donned the red, white and black at Segra Stadium in its inaugural summer of 2019 made Major League Baseball appearances in the first month of play in 2020.

Right-handed pitcher Cristian Javier earned his first MLB victory in a faceoff with North Carolina native and former All-Star Madison Bumgarner.

Bryan Abreu, another Pecks alum, relieved Javier and retired two batters before giving way to former Fayetteville ace Enoli Paredes, who blanked the Diamondbacks for 1.1 innings. Humberto Castellanos, another ex-Woodpecker, made his major league debut with a perfect ninth inning in the 8-2 win.

Pitchers Nivaldo Rodriguez and Carlos Sanabria along with shortstop Janothan Arauz also made the jump from Fayetteville to the majors.

More: Ex-Woodpeckers make jump to major leagues in one year

10. Sammy Batten retires

After 31 years, 40 bowl games, three U.S. Opens and hundreds of high school football games, Sammy Batten has signed off as The Fayetteville Observer's senior sports reporter.

Many of the stories on this list, and every year-end list during his tenure, Sammy reported.

During a standing ovation in the Kenan Memorial Stadium press box during UNC's game against Notre Dame in November, Heels senior director of athletic communications Steve Kirschner told other reporters in the room they owed Sammy a debt of gratitude for practically inventing recruiting coverage.

A three-time National Sports Media Association North Carolina sports writer of the year and Fayetteville-Cumberland Parks and Recreation Co-Ed Softball champion coach/pitcher, Sammy is looking forward to spending some time in Europe when travel is safe.

We at The Observer are happy for him and sad for ourselves. We'll miss Sammy's good nature and skillfully crafted script. And we know you will, too.

More: A phone call that created a career for 31 years and 9 months

Sports editor Monica Holland can be reached at mholland@fayobserver.com.

Support local journalism with a subscription to The Fayetteville Observer for local sports coverage and all-access ACC sports reports from across the state.

Ronald Murl Snyder, 1944-2020 Obituary - Columbia Daily Tribune

Posted: 30 Dec 2020 08:00 AM PST

Ronald Murl Snyder was called to heaven on December 26, 2020 at Boone Hospital in Columbia, after a valiantly fought battle with COVID-19 related pneumonia. He resided in Macon and was a member of the 1st Christian Church there.

Ron was born in Unionville on January 13, 1944. He spent his childhood on the family farm in Lucerne with his beloved parents Murl and Jessie Snyder, and his older siblings Duane and Wanda (Whitney). The farm is still in the family to this day and is a registered Century Farm.

Ron and Donna (Cooper) were married December 27, 1963, while on semester break. The wedding was at the Methodist Church in Unionville where Donna's father, Joseph Cooper, served as pastor. They were high school sweethearts and voted Most Popular Couple. They would have been married 57 years on December 27, 2020.

Ron graduated from Unionville High School in 1961 and received a football scholarship to the University of Missouri in Columbia. His last game was the 1966 Sugar Bowl in New Orleans. The Tigers won (due in no small part to Ron sacking the ever-loving crud out of Steve Spurrier multiple times) and Ron received the game ball. The Tigers 1965 team was inducted into the Missouri Sports Hall of Fame. After a short period of time in professional football with the St. Louis Cardinals he decided to return to the classroom.

After receiving his master's degree in Education at UMC, Ron taught and coached at the Fort Osage High School in Buckner, and Normandy High School in St. Louis. The next year he moved into coaching at the college level and was at Duke University for one year then back at Mizzou for four years. Ron had the wonderful opportunity to go to four bowls. Two as a player, the Blue Bonnet Bowl and Sugar Bowl, then two as a coach at the Sun Bowl and the Fiesta Bowl. His "Grid Iron Warrior" approach to football would translate to and inform his entire working life. The friends and memories made during his playing and coaching years would last a lifetime and be deeply treasured.

As a lifelong entrepreneur Ron had the uncanny ability to see creative solutions that were hidden to most. He was a tremendously, unreasonably hard worker who enjoyed his employees and the camaraderie and pride of a job well done. He was the guy that knew the janitor's name and he showed up, in all the ways that matter, for anyone willing to work. Ron was intimately involved in the renovation to Faurot Field as well as the construction of the basketball arena. As he left the house each morning, if anyone was up to see him off, he would say "I'm off to conquer the world." His commitment to caring for and providing for his family were his last thoughts. His last words were to yell "I love you." How fitting.

Ron and Donna shared a lifelong passion for MU football and basketball. He truly enjoyed watching his son, Cooper, play through high school and college and his grandson Josey, play his first year of flag football just this past summer. When presented with his first grandchild, Jaylon, he took to being Poppy like a duck to water. Being a grandfather was an incredible joy to him. His granddaughter Grace was the apple of Ron's eye. Ron was competitive, adventurous, and loyal to a fault. He had a quick and intelligent wit and was fearless in telling it like it is. Float trips on the Current River, with one of his best friends and brother-in-law Bob Herrick, were an annual event from 1962 until 2019. These float trips evolved from rowdy college students to family trips to father son float trips. He loved spending time at the family farm named for him, "The Legend's Lodge" reconnecting with North Missouri friends and the beloved Wainscott family. Pheasant hunts were prime territory for good and mostly appropriate stories. "Near Death Experiences" (as Donna referred to them) with his daughter, Elizabeth, were not nearly as dangerous as Donna made them out to be and became the stuff of family legend. He was defined by sweat equity. If you broke a sweat with him, just know he loved you.

He is survived by his high school sweetheart and wife Donna; daughter, Elizabeth, and son Cooper; grandchildren: Jaylon, Joseph and Grace Snyder; his brother and best friend Duane and his wife Janice; nieces and nephews: Darin, Eric, Jenae (Young), David Whitney, Debbie Whitney, Jason and Joe Herrick, Jenny Irwin and Jamie Quick.

He was preceded in death by his parents, Murl and Jessie Snyder; sister, Wanda (Whitney) and her husband Duane Whitney; their grandson Kendall Whitney, Bob and Darlene Herrick.

Services were held Tuesday, December 29 by Playle & Collins Funeral Home, 709 27th Street, Unionville, MO, 63565, and conducted by Dr. Dave Leslie pastor at the 1st Christian Church in Macon. Music was provided by Toni Rieckeberg and John Wiggins. Ron's favorite music, Willie Nelson's Stardust, was played during visitation.

Published on December 30, 2020

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