 The Syracuse Orange basketball team has a long and storied history that I've been a part of (as a fan) since the late '80s, from the championship-caliber teams of Derrick Coleman and Sherman Douglas through the lean years of an NCAA suspension and Lawrence Moten's greatness to the shocking Final Four run by the John Wallace-led team of scrappy underdogs (1996) to the disappointing Jason Hart / Etan Thomas / Ryan Blackwell class of the late '90s/early 2000s until the capstone championship (at long last) with the Carmelo Anthony-led run to the title in 2003. Since then, we had half a decade of solid and disappointing seasons (the 2006 magical Big East tournament run led by Gerry McNamara the highlight, missing the tourney in 2007 and 2008 the lowlights) and then we peaked as a team with a group of stellar recruiting classes that led to #1 rankings and #1 seeds in the NCAA tournament through the great Kris Joseph - Wes Johnson - CJ Fair - Dion Waiters - Fab Melo - Michael-Carter Williams teams that culminated in another Final Four in 2013. Then through the first 25 games in a new league (the ACC), Syracuse went 25-0 and spent 3 weeks as #1 in the country, only to collapse down the stretch despite Tyler Ennis and CJ Fair and lose to 11 seed Dayton in the 2nd round of the tournament. A year later, they were handed crippling recruiting limits after a seeming decade of NCAA investigations that resulted from Fab Melo cheating on a single exam and a few kids smoking pot and the result has been a turbulent five years of fandom - from the 18-14 team of 2014-15 to a shocking 5th Final Four run in 2016 under Jim Boeheim behind miraculous back-to-back defeats of Gonzaga and #1 Virginia featuring seniors Michael Gbinije and Trevor Cooney alongside freshman legends Malachi Richardson and Tyler Lydon which stamped their place as bracket-wreckers in the modern era (2 final fours in 4 years despite all the turbulence of NCAA investigations).
Then they missed the tournament in 2017 (after losing Richardson, Gbinije, and Cooney to early entry and graduation) and then spent last year struggling the whole season after losing 5 of their top 6 players (Lydon to the NBA, Tyler Roberson & DaJuan Coleman to graduation along with grad transfers Andrew White and John Gillon). Then they were down to 6 scholarship players by January after injuries and transfers took away Taureen Thompson, Howard Washington, Matthew Moyer, and grad transfer Geno Thorpe). But that team - potential NBA players sophomore Tyus Battle, freshman Oshae Brissett, and a group of scrappers - PG Frank Howard, skinny freshman Slovakian Marik Dolezaj, and hands-of-brick junior transfer Pascal Chukwe along with the only scholarship reserve, injured freshman Bourame Sidibe, somehow squeaked into the tournament as the very last team in, then won 3 games in the NCAAs as an 11 seed before running into the buzzsaw that was Duke after a shocking Sweet 16 run.
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10. Black Panther / Avengers: Infinity War I'm doing a bit of a cheat to squeeze in extra movies on my list and I don't have enough to separate the two Marvel entries in my reckoning. I think after seeing pretty much all of the Marvel movies in the past several years - despite never being a comic book movie fan before them - I was pleased / surprised / overwhelmed by the "Snap" and all that came before it in the near finale of the multi-year, multi-film experiment that has broken box office records and turned me into a massive fan of comic book movies. On the other hand, Black Panther was refreshing, exciting, awe-inspiring and simply inspiring to see POC centered in a movie this big and this awesome (and with the box office to prove it). Whether it's a "better" film than Infinity War - probably, I mean it will be up for Best Picture (and might even win) but I probably enjoyed Infinity War more coming out of the theatre. Both great movies and everyone has seen them. The rest of this list is way, way, way more obscure :)  
I recently watched two documentaries that are on the Academy Awards Best Documentary shortlist for 2018, and they are at the moment two of my three favorite movies of the year (alongside Alfonso Cuaron's stunning Roma). Free Solo I saw on the big screen - which I would highly recommend for its breathtaking visages, while Minding the Gap is on Hulu (who picked up distribution). Both movies did well at the box office, in a year of documentary surprise hits that reached the $10M+ mark (led by Won't You Be My Neighbor, RBG, and Three Identical Strangers). And both were amazing.  Stick. Not because he’s good with a bat and not for the size of the stick in his pants, not that I had any clue about that, in any case. I'm curious, sure, but I'm curious about most of the boys my age, or some of them, most of the time. But Stick is Stick because he’s tall and thin, or tall for his age a few years ago, must have been before I met him. Stick isn’t much taller than me I know. But he doesn’t use his real name. I wrote that paragraph back in August of 2009, almost 10 years ago, the start of a short story titled "Stick" that became my first submission for a fiction class I was taking at Rowan University, my final year of study for my MA in Writing. I needed both a short story idea and a novel idea for my final-year thesis, given that I had exhausted my time and energy on the previous novel I'd been workshopping for three years at Rowan, the long forgotten (and likely really terrible) Five Day Morning. I was reading a novel at the time called What We Do is Secret, about teen punks in LA in 1980 dealing with the death of The Germs lead singer by suicide, and what was fascinating about the novel was the way in which the narrator spoke - a sort of ultramodern stream of consciousness, like Holden Caulfield on speed, one of the many drugs the narrator of the novel was actually on. I loved it - I still love it - and I wanted to try that style of writing so I took a stab using an abbreviated version of one of the many bizarre character nicknames in the novel ("Stickboy") and turned it into the free writing paragraph above. And lo and behold, just those lines gave me two characters (Stick and the narrator) and a story of sorts -- the narrator's attraction to Stick, his best friend. I loved the short story and I loved writing it and many many many versions later I was able to publish the short story "Fireworks" based on the same characters, in a flashback sequence in the novel I ended up writing for my thesis, which began with the same exact paragraph as "Stick." And now, 9 years later, in a completely rewritten story, plot, timeframe, and with almost all new characters, that novel is getting published. The Young Adult novel "I Will Be OK. Everything" will be released in January 2020 by Amphorae Publishing. So yes, I buried the lede pretty far down in this post but I'm getting published! And the character of "Stick" remains.  |