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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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Toxic people rarely have any idea how toxic they are. In fact, they mostly wonder — with feelings of hurt and outrage — why so many people they’ve loved have been so “unfair” to them.

These people don’t necessarily appear to be monsters. You might like many of them when you first meet them. But if you allow them to stay in your life, they’re going to drag you down — and the start of a new year is a great time to resolve to cut their poisonous influence completely.

As with other toxins, some toxic people are more deadly and dangerous than others. Some are obviously toxic from the beginning. Others present themselves as self-sacrificing saints, so they appear to be good people. Yet others will make you so dependent on them that you dare not upset them.

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