When I was a little kid, my parents use to have me read the newspaper at home. They weren’t trying to keep me updated on world news or anything. It was just a way to help me practice reading, to learn new words and to get a better understanding of sentence structure beyond “See Spot jump.” I didn’t typically comprehend what I was reading, but that wasn’t really the point of the exercise.
It was through these regular perusals of the newspaper that I first read Rick Cleveland. I couldn’t begin to remember what some of those columns were about early on, but I know that it was through reading them that I first started learning about college sports in the state of Mississippi.