ITEM ONE:

TAFT PLAYS A HOME GAME, THANKS TO BUD ADAMS

BUD ADAMS’ gift will “bring it all home” – literally -- for the Taft football team next Friday (11/1).  The Tennessee Titans’ owner donated $10,000 last summer to the Taft Youth Development Center in Pikeville, Tennessee to improve its football field.  The team, because of the poor condition of its facilities, had not played a home game in years.  Taft serves 156 male juvenile offenders, ages 15-19, from throughout Tennessee.  To play on the Taft team, players must give up all gang colors and signs and agree to work together as a team.  The school plays nine games a season against both public and private schools.  Next week, thanks to Adams, it will finally host a game -- against St. Andrews, an elite private school -- on its new field with a scoreboard and new bleachers.  “It’s the highlight of my four years of volunteering at Taft because it means so much to the players,” says LINDA GILBERT, organizer of the football program.  “It will benefit the entire student body and help boys who are sent to Taft in the future.”        

ITEM TWO:

SHELL APPOINTED PLAYER DISCIPLINE APPEALS OFFICER

Pro Football Hall of Famer ART SHELL has been appointed by NFL Commissioner PAUL TAGLIABUE to serve as the appeals officer for on-field player discipline.  Shell will hear and decide upon all appeals by players of disciplinary action issued by NFL Director of Football Operations GENE WASHINGTON.  Under the NFL Collective Bargaining Agreement, the appeals of players who have been fined or suspended for on-field rules violations are decided by the Commissioner or his designee.  The choice of a designated appeals officer is based upon an evaluation of candidates by Commissioner Tagliabue and GENE UPSHAW as executive director of the NFL Players Association.  Shell’s NFL coaching experience made him especially well-qualified to serve in this role in the view of both men.  After a Hall of Fame playing career, Shell became the Los Angeles Raiders’ offensive line coach from 1983-89, and was named the team’s head coach during the 1989 season.  He compiled a 56-41 won-lost record as head coach through the 1994 season.  Shell was the offensive line coach of the Kansas City Chiefs from 1995-96, and Atlanta Falcons from 1997-2000.

ITEM THREE:

MERTON WAS AN NFL FAN

He was a world-renowned philosopher and author who spent the majority of his life in a monastery.  Yet, it turns out, the late THOMAS MERTON was an NFL fan.  In researching a book on the man who was born in France, taught English at Columbia University, authored such classics as the Seven Storey Mountain, and became a Trappist monk, biographer JAMES HARFORD has discovered a revealing Merton diary entry.  It is from August 26, 1968 and details Merton and friends watching a Dallas-Green Bay preseason game on TV at a Franciscan friary in Kentucky.  Turns out Merton was a big fan, liked replay and would love the unpredictable NFL of today.  “Football is one of the really valid and deep American rituals,” wrote Merton.  “It has a religious seriousness, a comic, contemplative dynamism, a gratuity, a movement from play to play, a definitiveness that responds to some deep need.  It happens.  It is done.  It is possible again.  It happens.  Another play is decided, played out, done (with replay for the good ones so you can really see how it happened).  Football presents an ever-renewed variety, openness to new possibilities, new chances.”  Merton would have loved that 25 of the 30 division champions of the past five years have been new.