My son-in-law calls me “Ball Man” because I’m always bouncing a ball, catching a ball or watching somebody else bounce or catch a ball. It wasn’t until the other day when I watched a school district-wide elementary track meet that I realized to what extent I’m really “Ball Man.”

I was raised a sports guy and over the many ensuing years I just assumed everybody else was more or less the same. Not so. But that didn’t occur to me until I started watching grade-school kids run the 100, 200, 400 and 100 hurdles. I quickly found myself engrossed in their races, and just as quickly began analyzing who were the best runners among the large group of kids. My competitiveness was seeping out and with the knowledge I have compiled over 50 years of sports experience I was soon drawing rapid conclusions, even if they were as mundane as rating 8-year-olds running on a track.

That likely makes me as much weird as unique.

Or as my son-in-law says, a Ball Man.

My schedule runs on sports time. If it’s 6 o’clock, it must be the NBA playoffs. If it’s 7:05 p.m., it’s time for the Mariners’ home game. If it is winter and it’s around 7 p.m. on a Tuesday, Wednesday or Friday, its high school basketball time. If it’s the fall and a Friday, its high school football, and if it’s spring its track and field or baseball or fastpitch softball.

That’s just the way it is for me.

I find myself walking into a gym somewhere, or stopping to watch a slowpitch game, just to evaluate the talent. My daughter knows this and occasionally, as she did the other night, asks me to go to her son’s basketball practice to check it out. I quickly figured out who were the four returning starters from the Evergreen High School basketball team and saw my eighth-grade grandson hold his own against older players on the junior varsity end of the court. I called and reassured her that her son will be OK, that he will be part of the team come fall and winter.

One time many years ago I offered my services in the Seattle Mariners minor-league department. They laughed me off. But the reality is I could have helped them, and I believe some of them in the minor-league department at the time knew it.

For several years, I wrote a weekly update on the Mariners’ minor leagues for an online firm doing business out of San Francisco, and I also wrote about them for a preseason baseball book that comes out each February on a magazine rack near you.

One time not too long ago while I was having dinner in the Mariners’ media room, five scouts from various organizations set down at my table. They started discussing minor league players and eventually turned to me and started asking questions about several of them. I was taken back by their requests, because I never dreamed they knew that I knew.

I’ve done some youth coaching and several years ago got into high school coaching at Bremerton. That lasted one year and since then I’ve tried to interview my way into several other coaching jobs there to no avail. Despite having a lot of knowledge that I think would translate to being a good coach, I never get past the interview stage. I’m either a terrible interviewer – which is what I would like to believe – or some of the folks doing the interview don’t much like me.

That’s too bad, too, because I have a lot to give.

Besides, I’m the Ball Man.

Being a ball man deals with the physical side of me. Or as the Bible says, the Body. In the larger picture, it is not very important.

The flip side of the Body is the soul or spirit. That side of me doesn’t care if I could possibly hit a 90-mph fastball, knock down consistent threes, accurately throw a football 75 yards or dissect a minor-league system for scouts. What is really important is what is in my heart, my soul, my spirit.

It’s so simple, this life, yet at the same time so hard. I think we instinctively know what is right. That’s the simple part. But when it comes to daily living, that instinct gets bumped around, knocked down, and sometimes lost, and then we often do something we later come to regret.

Love, a basic four-letter word, is the basis for everything we do. It’s our foundation. Without it, we have wars and rumors of war, and not just on the global stage, but on our own little personal stage.

Like anything else, love comes in varying degrees. You can go from Charles Manson to Mother Teresa with it, with many of us stuck somewhere in the middle, depending on whether we had a good day or bad day at the office.

I had a co-worker in Oklahoma back in the 1960s that smoked, drank a few bourbons once in a while, uttered cuss words when he got disgusted with something or somebody, but of all the people I have met over the years he comes closer to Mother Teresa than anybody else I have known.

Old Ernie could be crusty. But wherever there was a need, whenever somebody was in trouble, Ernie was there way before anybody else to help out. The rest of us would finally figure it out and go to help and Ernie had already been there and gone.

Ernie never asked for anything. Never admitted to doing anything, he just did. And he did it with love. An unspoken love. But a love that was about as true as I have ever seen.

After I left Oklahoma, I often called Ernie or wrote him letters. I usually did so when I was down about something. Ernie never failed to lift me back up, to inspire me to carry on, hopefully to new heights.

That’s what love is about.

There’s not enough of it in our current world. The Cowboy in the White House has squandered all the love the world gave us after 9/11. He says he’s a Christian and because he says that, my daughter, for one, thinks he can do no wrong.

I don’t argue with her. But the view that Christians are inherently good just because they are Christians just isn’t so. Saying I am a Christian does not grant me a free pass on anything. It is what is in my heart, my soul and my spirit that determines me, and determines my future when I finally pass over and go back home to the other side.

Life here on this Earth, for me, is just a temporary layover, like what happens to me just about every time I take a flight out of Seattle and find myself delayed in Chicago or Houston or Atlanta or some other city I had not planned on visiting for any length of time.

I’m just a tiny speckle of sand on a life beach that is 10,000 miles long and 10,000 miles wide. What I physically do here has little relevance to how I will be treated once I get back home. I could give away billions of dollars to worthy causes, work hard to eradicate the AIDS virus, land all sorts of peace prizes, and if in my heart, my soul and spirit I’m not right with the ultimate power, it doesn’t matter.

Unfortunately I don’t have those billions of dollars to test my belief.

I’m just Ball Man.

Have a great month.

You are loved.