String Music
One of the things that makes life worth living is if something really means enough to you then you always find people to help you enjoy it. They just show up, knowing you for who you are and who you’re supposed to be.
Readers of this blog know my thing is music. At 11, about the time the Beatles hit our shores, I realized that writing songs was the absolute most extraordinarily awesome thing a person on this planet could do. By 15 or 16 I was making attempts to do just that. Forty-plus years later I’m still making those attempts, which have piled up in the dozens. I really like writing about Wake Forest for the Journal and this blog, but I have to tell you that as soon as Willie Nelson covers one of my songs and it goes platinum, I’m on to that other gig.
But along the way all these wonderful people have materialized to help me along. Bruce Winkworth, the baseball media relations director extraordinaire at N.C. State has showered me with tapes and CDs over the years, turning me on to many of the artists who I consider among my very favorite. Bruce really steeped me in that Texas Singer Songwriter crowd, the Steve Earles and Guy Clarks and Townes Van Zandts and James McMurtrys (I’m really, really big on James McMurtry), Billy Joe Shavers and Joe Elys and Jimmy Dale Gilmores and even the late great Blaze Foley.
And then there’s Bill Armour, one of the first real Wake Forest people I got to know well when I landed in Winston in 1978. Billy A is a recovering sportswriter who worked for the Winston-Salem Sentinel back when there was a Winston-Salem Sentinel, but who was smart enough to go out and get a real job. Billy A, who like me was lucky enough to see the Dead back when Pigpen was still on harmonica and singing Turn On Your Lovelight and Jerry was actually skinny, has also been a big-time musical benefactor over the year, always seeming to know just who I needed to hear next to get where I needed to go. Billy A outdid himself a couple of months ago, presenting to me an external hard drive with a terabyte of capacity absolutely filled with recordings, mostly audio but a fair share of video of pretty much anyone and everyone you would ever want to hear. He said if I did nothing else but listen to music 24 hours a day—and I’m tempted to take him up on it—I’d need six years to hear everything in the library. My Christmas present from Nate, my son/technical adviser, was a plug attachment that allowed me to hook up my computer to my stereo and thus get the sound out of my much, much better speakers.
And that’s how I’m able to listen to a Clash concert from the London Lyceum on Jan. 3, 1979 London’s Calling while I write this post about Gary Clark’s 3-point percentage.
Clark, Wake’s only senior, is burning it up from outside this season, as you’ve probably heard. After shooting 32.4 percent from beyond the arc his first three seasons, Clark has made 41 of 65 this season for a whopping 63.1 percent. There’s red hot, there’s white hot and then there’s whatever Clark is doing this season. But the reason he doesn’t show up in the NCAA or ACC statistics is he hasn’t made enough 3-pointers to qualify for the rankings.
The NCAA requires 2.5 made 3-pointers a game, the ACC two. The only two times Clark popped up in the ACC stats was after he made five against Winthrop to give him 11 (out of 14 for 71.4 percent) in five games and after he made four against UNC Wilmington to give him 19 (out of 27 for 66.7 percent) in nine games. Then he made one against UNC Greensboro, one against Xavier and none against Presbyterian to fall off the pace. He really fell behind when he hit a stretch of only one over the three games against High Point, N.C. State and Maryland to find himself with only 28 over 17 games. Clark has picked it up since, drilling 13 over the past five games but still goes into tomorrow’s game at Maryland with 41 in 22 games. So if he makes five against Maryland like he did against Winthrop, then he’s back in the ACC rankings so far ahead that he can’t even been seen by the pack.
Malcolm Grant of Miami currently leads with 44.4 percent.
Enough of this work. It’s Friday night, my bride and I ordering popcorn shrimp takeout and watching Nowhere Boy, the biopic of a young English spud named Lennon. I’ll let you know if it’s worth your time.