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At some point in your young life, you were rewarded for being something — and the pleasure of that reward led you to end up believing that was who you really were.

But who were you before that? Who were you before parents and teachers and culture taught you to conform to what they wanted? Do you remember?

Those people rarely say, “This is what I want you to be.” They don’t even necessarily have bad intentions. But the people around you start shaping you into what they believe you ought to be. Sometimes they try to make you into little versions of themselves. Sometimes they’re acting out of fears from their own lives — trying to save you from something which damaged them.

But you were born knowing who you are. Do you remember who that is?

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ESPN is both the best thing and the worst thing to ever happen to college sports.

The network showed a lot of absolute junk in its early days, but it also made people become accustomed to being able to see their college football and basketball teams more often. Although ABC and CBS had been the early leaders in college sports, ESPN pushed the boundaries and opened the floodgates. The rights money flowed freely to colleges and conferences.

Fans were happy. Wealthy major conferences and colleges were happy. Athletes were happy with the exposure. Coaches got paid more.

But ESPN was a relentless hype machine. In promoting its games, the push is all about the individual — the single achiever, the big star. And that has taken a lot of the enjoyment out of team sports for me.

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I was apparently a lot sicker than I realized.

After discovering 12 days ago that I had gallstones, I spent a lot of time reading about possible treatments, but I slowly became convinced the emergency room doctor had been right. I needed surgery to remove my sickened gallbladder.

I was in enough discomfort — and eventually full-scale pain — that I didn’t work much last week. By Saturday morning, the worst pain of my life was back — and it was even worse this time.

I returned to the emergency room at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Birmingham Saturday morning. By that evening, I was admitted to the hospital with plans to get me go home late Sunday if surgery went well that morning. The official diagnosis was acute cholecystitis.

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