Smokers' Lungs

A non-smoker's and a smoker's lungs

To deter smoking, the Food and Drug Administration has proposed putting five gruesome graphics on cigarette packages. Some experts believe this will not be an effective deterrent. When asked his opinion on the FDA proposal by Terry Gross on NPR’s Fresh Air, Johns Hopkins neuroscientist David J. Linden, author of Compass of Pleasure, said studies have shown the effectiveness of anti-smoking warnings wear off fairly rapidly. This is at least partly because the circuitry  of the brain of an addicted person is permanently rewired. There is no such thing as ex-alcoholics, for example; rather, there are alcoholics who no longer drink, just as there are nicotine addicts who no longer smoke. Perhaps addicts need to understand that they are always going to be addicts; the goal is not to be somebody you are not. It is hard enough to be an addict who successfully successively says no; to be an addict who is not an addict is impossible because your brain knows better. You and your brain have to be on the same page or the book is not going to make sense.

Doug McKenzie-Mohr, a Canadian environmental psychologist works with communities to instill lasting behavioral change. The Boston Globe reported McKenzie-Mohr believes such information campaigns, like the FDA's,  “have virtually no likelihood of changing behavior.” He apparently knows other ways to help the addicted.

All in the Family

I am the ninth child in a family of sixteen (counting my Irish- and Norwegian-American parents), all of whom survived into adulthood except the second child who died in the diphtheria epidemic following the First World War. Everyone in the family, except me, became smokers. How I escaped has always puzzled me. One possible explanation is that in grade school our class visited the Boston Museum of Science, where I saw a smoker’s and a non-smoker's lungs suspended in formaldehyde in a glass display case. I think the display was not far from the museum entrance, so it was hard to miss. Children are very impressionable and highly educable. I’m not certain I learned my lesson about the evils of smoking from that ghastly smoker’s lung I saw as a child, but I think having a smoker’s lung at the entrance of every grade school in America might  be a far more effective way of deterring smoking than putting gruesome graphics on cigarette packages. By the time a kid  takes a cigarette out of a package, somewhere between the ages of eleven and say fifteen, it is already too late. Peer pressure and the billions of dollars the cigarette industry have spent, directly or indirectly, to addict kids, will have their effect, and as for adults who have been smoking for years, forget it, because that's what most of them will do, forget it, as studies of anti-smoking warnings have shown. The chances are a smoker’s palpable lung near the entrance of grade schools will do more to deter kids from smoking than a hundred gruesome graphics on cigarette packages. If the lung I witnessed once when I was about nine or ten made such a difference, what would it do witnessed over and over again, K through 12?

In addition to being heavy smokers, my family were also heavy drinkers of both alcohol and coffee—strong black espresso-like coffee the morning after. Following my father’s and older brothers’ examples, I began drinking coffee in the morning at about the age of eight and was so strung out on caffeine  by the time I was fifteen that I knew I had to break the habit and I did, but I continued getting an occasional fix on coffee ice cream, which habit I did not break until I was in my early twenties. I might not have been able to break the caffeine addiction if I had been addicted to nicotine. Since addiction to caffeine lays the groundwork for all the other addictions, reducing its occurrence could have far reaching benefits. As the twig is bent, so shall the tree grow. In Portsmouth, Ohio, now notorious as the Oxycontin capital of America, how many have graduated from caffeine to nicotine to oxycodone? Instead of using the purloined Indian Head rock to teach kids in south-central Ohio about their cultural heritage, as state representative Todd Book preposterously proposed, how about having a smoker’s lung at the entrance not just of each grade school, but of the middle school and high school too? Maybe if some of our addicted politicians—addicted to dishonesty as  well as to drugs—and their puppet masters would will their lungs to the public schools, they would be doing more in death for future generations than they ever did in life. 

5: Oxy & Contin: From Zanesville to Zanzibar

“ 'You’ll  probably find it hard to believe and you might even think I’m crazy,’ the doctor said, spreading his arms wide apart to indicate how wide of the truth what he was about to say might seem.”

Chapter 5

“It’s only Heck,” the embarrassed doctor said when the rat hopped out of the drawer up on to the  desk.

“Who?” the man with the shaved head said.

Now that she was over the shock of seeing the rat in the drawer,  Barbie felt sorry for the confined creature. “The poor thing,” she said.

“What do you mean?” the man with the shaved head said to Barbie, seeing an opportunity  to display his wit. “He’s top drawer, ain’t he?”

“I wish I hadn’t screamed,” Barbie said. “I mean rats have feelings too, don’t they?”

 “It probably couldn’t breathe in there,” the hollow-eyed woman sympathized.

“I know rats aren’t as clean as  cats, and baby rats aren’t as  cuddly as kittens,” Barbie said,  “but that’s no reason for people to treat rats like, well, like . . .”

“Like rats,” the man with the shaved head quipped.

“Exactly,” Barbie said.

“But why was the rat in the desk in the first place?” Madelyn asked. 

“Because he’s  my pet,” the doctor said.

 “Pet rat?” Barbie said, looking at her mother. “And I can’t have a pet kitten?”

“You can’t have a pet kitten, and you can’t stay here another minute. Please go home now, Barbie,” her mother insisted.

“But why was the rat in the desk?” Barbie asked, repeating her mother’s question.

 “I’m done answering questions,” the doctor said.  “I would like  everybody out of my office.” When no  one appeared willing to be the first to exit, as is sometimes the case with guests at a party, he said, firmly, “Now!”

Clutching her prescription as if it was a winning lottery ticket, the  hollow-eyed woman left. The  doctor scribbled an Oxycontin prescription for the man with the shaved head.

“Here's yours, Theodore,” the doctor said. 

 “Call me, Ted, doc,”  the man said  as he put his copy of The Road to Serfdom under his arm. He stopped in the doorway, and said, the tattooed inscription on his brow looking like an epitaph on tombstone, “Oh, by the way. In case anyone's interested, I'm a lay preacher.”  Before she left,  Barbie wanted to give Oxy and Contin a hug, but they were still in her mother’s  arms, so she didn’t dare. Not that they noticed. They were still staring bug-eyed  at the rat on the desk.

 “What’s going to happen to the kittens?” Barbie asked.

 “Never mind what’s going to happen to the  kittens,” her mother said. “It’s what’s going to happen to you if you don’t  get your little behind  home as fast as you can.”  

 Barbie replied petulantly, “Oh, why did we ever leave Zanesville!” Sulking,  she turned on the heels of her Keds and left.

Except for the rat and the kittens, Madelyn and the doctor were alone in the office. The doctor looked at Madelyn, waiting for her to leave. Instead,  she  deposited  the kittens on top of the tall, three-drawer  metal file cabinet. Being higher than they had ever been before, at least physically, the  kittens crouched together anxiously.  

“Why are you putting them up there?” the doctor asked.

“Because I’d like to I have a word with you, doctor,” she said. “I think you owe me an explanation.”  

 “Isn’t it you who owe me an explanation?” the doctor replied, walking over and closing the door, causing  Oxy and Contin to look  at each other in alarm, because they understood in the way cats have of understanding things, that even if they could get down from the file cabinet, there was no escape from the office.

 “I owe you an explanation? For what?” she asked.

“For them,” the doctor said, nodding  toward  the kittens.  He moved closer to them. Because he was only five foot four,  he stood about eye to eye with the elevated kittens.  Intimidated by his piercing eyes, which were enlarged by his thick glasses, they edged as far back on top of the cabinet as they dared.

“I’ll apologize for Barbie,” Madelyn said, “but those are not my kittens.” 

“Then whose are they?”

“I don’t know that they’re anybody’s,” she said. “But I know whose rat that is. What I  don’t know is why it was in your desk.”

“Why was Heck  in my desk? That’s what you want to know?” He stopped staring at the kittens and stared at her.

“Yes,” she said, wilting a bit under his gaze.

As he stared at her, she wished, instead of confronting him,  that she had left his  office when he asked her to. Realizing there was nothing to stop him from firing her, she  was suddenly very anxious. She recalled what Barbie had said about wishing they had never left  Zanesville. She craved an Oxycontin,  but they were in her pocketbook, which was locked in her desk in the outer office. “It’s probably none of my business,” she muttered, taking a step back, giving ground, both literally and figuratively.

 “You’ll  probably find it hard to believe and you might even think I’m crazy,” the doctor said, spreading his arms wide apart to indicate how wide of the truth what he had to say might seem. But I’ll tell you anyway,”  he continued, as  he began kneading  the  back of the rat’s neck with the knuckle of the middle  finger of his right hand. 

“What’s wrong?” he asked, noticing her startled look.

“Wrong?”

“You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“It’s just that I’ve never seen anybody pet a rat.”

“Oh,” he said shrugging, “it’s just a habit.  I wasn’t even conscious I  was doing it. But petting a rat is really no different from  petting a kitten, is it?” To prove his point, the  doctor stopped kneading Heck’s neck and reached up and took Contin in his arms. “See,” he said as he began rubbing the back of Contin’s neck. Taking advantage of being in the doctor’s arms, Contin  licked his fingers eagerly, finding traces of Oxycontin on them.  

“But why was the rat—”

“Call him Heck, please,” the doctor interrupted her.

“Why was it—why was Heck—in the drawer?” she asked.

As he considered whether to answer her question, the doctor  put Contin back on top of the file cabinet. Relieved to have his sister back, Oxy welcomed her by wagging his little tail, but when he nuzzled with her he picked up the scent of fresh Oxycontin and began licking her mouth ravenously.

 “Some people might  say instead of bats in the belfry,  I’ve got rats in the drawer,” the doctor told Madelyn, with a humorless grin, as he resumed Heck’s backrub.

The phrase Madelyn was thinking of, as the doctor resumed his massage of the rat, was not that he had bats in the belfry but that he didn’t have all his marbles. But all she said was,  “I wouldn’t say that. I’m just a hick  from Ohio. What do I know? If people at Harvard keep rats in drawers, they must have a reason.”

 With a condescending smile, the doctor said, “You think people keep rats in drawers at Harvard?”  Picking up the rat up by his hind quarters and looking  him straight in the eye, the doctor said, “Well, I suppose we should explain,  shouldn’t  we, Heck? There’s no point in keeping her in the dark, is there?”

Heck made vigorous motions with his paws, as if he were a mute  lifeguard giving swimming instructions to a passenger on the deck of the Titanic.  Like children watching from the balcony of the theater of the absurd,  Oxy and Contin looked down on the scene in complete perplexity.

  Looking at his wrist watch, the doctor told her, “We’re wasting time. Why don’t you go out and tell our impatient patients there'll be a  delay.”  

When Madelyn stepped outside, she saw the line had thinned out. Because of the cold and delay, some of the less desperate—deserters from the army of addicts— had drifted away.  Without saying what it was, Madelyn announced that the doctor had to deal with an emergency inside. 

“It don’t have somethin’ to do with those kittens, does it?” asked a wiry fellow in a Caterpillar Tractor cap. “I think they got the rabies myself,” he said, only he pronounced it “rabbis,” and he  spat a mouthful of chaw as an exclamation point. When she went back inside, Madelyn  was shaking with tremors, craving an Oxycontin, but when she discovered that her drawer was unlocked  and her pocketbook not in it, she hurried to the bathroom to see if she had left it there, which she sometimes did, but it wasn’t there either. If only she could remember what she had done with her pocketbook. Had she even taken it out of her car that morning? She took a moment to brace herself before going back in the doctor’s office, but she stopped before reentering when she heard his voice. Assuming he  was on his cell phone, she decided to wait before entering.

“I know, I know,” she heard the doctor say. “She probably isn’t  going to believe me, but I’ve got to tell her something.  What?” There was a pause. Madelyn assumed the person at the other end of the call was telling the doctor something. “Oh, it’s reassuring that you think so,” he said with a tinge of sarcasm,  “but what you and I think is one thing, but what  she thinks is another. What was that?” Another pause. “Yes, yes, I agree. I should have kept my mouth shut at Harvard.  But we’re not at Harvard anymore, are we?” Pause. “All right! All right! Let’s not get into that again. Yes, yes, I know. I couldn't have trusted Summers. I know, I know. He’s a snake. I should have listened to you.” There was another pause after which the doctor said in a lowered voice. “What? She’s standing outside my door?” There was a pause. “Madelyn,” the doctor called. “Are you out there?”

“Yes, doctor,” she said entering guiltily, embarrassed to have been caught eavesdropping. The doctor, was  seated behind the desk facing the rat. But how could whoever the doctor had been talking to know she was outside the door?

“How long were you out there?” he asked.

“Just a few seconds” she fibbed. “I thought you were on your cell phone.”

“No, I wasn’t,” he said.

“You weren’t?” She looked around the office. Except for the kittens  on the file cabinet  and the rat on the desk, there was no one else in the office.  “Who were you talking to?”

“I was talking to Heck,” he said.

 “What?” she asked incredulously.

“Well, not exactly talking,” he said.

“But how . . . ?”

“I’ll try to explain,” he said.

“Yes, doctor, why don’t you explain what this is all about,” Madelyn  said finally, sinking emotionally drained into the chair that had been previously occupied by the hollow-eyed woman. 

What Madelyn had on her mind at that moment, however, was not the hollow-eyed woman or the man with the tattooed inscription on his shaved head, or Barbie, or the kittens on the file cabinet, or the rat on the desk, but her missing pocketbook with the Oxycontin. 

“Oh, by the way. In case anyone's interested, I'm a lay preacher.”

Sarah Palin's Midnight Message

“Palin Says She Didn’t Err on Paul Revere”

                     Headline in the New York Times

Sarah Palin’s Midnight Message

Listen to Fox News, children, and you shall hear,

Of a midnight ride that’s very queer,

But not in April of Seventy-five

When none of you were yet alive, 

But, now, when Palin says, “If the Yankees march

                          By land or sea from the town to-night,                     

Hang a dollar sign above the arch 
Of the Old North Church as a signal light—
One if by Todd, and two if by me;
And I waiting on the opposite shore will be,
Ready to ride and spread the alarm
Through every Republican village and farm,
For Tea Partiers to be up and to arm.”

Then she slips away and with muffled oar
Silently rows to the opposite shore,
Just as the moon rises over the bay,
Where thousands of redacted emails lay 
Stating ungrammatically she’s declared war 
On every S.O.B., near and far, 
Who doesn’t know their ass from NASCAR,    

And on every traitor who’s never tried 
To stop the creeping socialist tide.

Meanwhile, Todd through alley and street
Wanders and watches, with pricked up ears,
Checking out massage parlors as he sneers 
At all who can’t see Russia from their door. 
He says, “My growling mama grizzly will eat

Up all the cowards whose fears

Of Global Warming are so G(al)ore.”

Next he climbs the Old North Church tower, 
Crowing to the bats in the belfry overhead

And with his Alaskan derring-do tread

Scatters the pigeons who cower

In the rafters that round him made
A hiding place for all those candidates afraid

To stick their necks out, except the Mormon, so tall,
The biggest RINO of all.
Then Todd pauses to listen and look down
A moment on the roofs of Beantown
Where RomneyCare has cast such a pall.

Beneath, in the churchyard, lay the dead
Kennedys, their graves on the hill,
Wrapped in a silence so deep and so still
That Todd could hear the departed Ted 
And other liberal ghosts who’d spent
Taxpayers’ hard earned money and lent

Even more to General Motors—the road to hell

Is paved by Goldbrickers under the spell

Of the New Deal’s disciples at the Fed. 
A moment only Todd curses the aforesaid,
And suddenly all his thoughts are bent
On his moose hunting mama grizzly far away,
Where the river widens to meet the bay—
Where each redacted email floats 
Like an armada of paper boats. 

Meanwhile, impatient to misspeak and deride, 

Booted and furred like a clothes horse in stride,
On the opposite shore prances Wasilla’s Pride. 
Now she pats her horse’s hide,
Now she gazes at Russia, so far but so near;
Then, impetuous, she stomps the earth,
And resolves to reduce her ample girth;
But mostly she watches with a squinting glower
The belfry of the North Church tower
As it rises above the graves on the hill,
Where the Kennedys lay somber and still.
And lo! as she looks, on the tower’s height
A glimmer, and then a dollar’s light!

She springs to the saddle, the bridle she turns,
But lingers and gazes, till full on her sight
A second dollar sign in the belfry burns.

A stream of unconsciousness, her smile so sweet,

Each wink of the beauty queen in the dark
Spirals virally on the internet—a Palin remark
Speeds electronically with each tweet,

Faster than a speeding bullet, faster than light,
For the fate of Palination is riding this night;
And the spark struck out by that tongue in its spite 
Kindled the dame into fame on Grub Tweet.
She  has left Wasilla and mounted the steep,
High above candidates with promises to keep.
Over their  sheer stalking heads she glides
As she crosses the knees of her plump carcass

Under the expensive skirt from Nieman Marcus

And the cesarean scar it allegedly hides.

It’s twelve by the village clock

And she still hasn’t announced
Whether she’d put her head on the block
And risk derailing the gravy train if she got trounced

In the 2012 presidential slog,

After which there’d always be some wag to ask her,

“Are you the same Miss Sled Dog

Who eats, shoots, and leaves Alaska?”

It’s one by the old village clock

When Wasilla’s Pride enters Lexington

And sees the liberal media gathered to mock

Her arrogant ignorance of the past.

Gazing at her with a hungry glare,

They  assemble there for a repast,

To feed electronically on a telegenic moron.

It’s two by the village clock

When her entourage pulls into Concord town

Where she knows Thoreau drowned

In the pond after hitting his head on Plymouth Rock,

And Charlton Heston, wearing only a jock,

Fired the shot heard round the world.

She looks ahead to the Fox Evening News,

The one network not controlled by Jews,

For her glorification of guns to be unfurled.

You know, from her bestsellers, which nobody’s read,

Of how she would rather be dead than red;

Of how she left Alaska, with its long winter’s sleep,
Because she had lucrative engagements to keep;

Of how she had flown after losing her water,

And how Levi had impregnated her daughter;

And then how that daughter had gone on the stump

And made a nice bundle getting over the hump;

Of how this family of Alaskan chillbillies

Keeps getting richer than Beverly Hillbillies;

And of how Katie Couric tried to mess up her head

By asking her what, if anything, she’d read.

Twitterin’, Facin’, and sometimes emailin’—

Through the night rides Sarah Palin;

With only the maverick McCain to thank,

She counts her money all the way to the bank;

The pink rogue elephant in a canter,

With every Givenchy eager to pant her;

Without a misgiving, doubt, or care,

She’s made herself a millionaire.

Distorting history and mauling each fact,

She’s like some P.T. Barnum act.

What’s the midnight message of Sarah Palin?

In America, any ignoramus can make a fortune failin’!

Or if you prefer to Rin-Tin-Tin it,

There’s a sucker born every minute.

                  

                                                    Robert Forrey

                                         

Alaskan Chillbillies

Jim Tressel: Nearer My God to the Shoe

“Alright, have it your way—you heard Brutus Buckeye yelling ‘Go Bucks!’”

On the occasion of the fall of Jim Tressel, I have taken the liberty (above) of photoshopping a famous James Thurber cartoon (shown below). But Thurber and his fellow Buckeye classmate Elliot Nugent provided a fuller treatment of the conflict between the body and the mind, or the flesh and the spirit, or between football and academic freedom at the Ohio State University in the play they co-authored, The Male Animal. Only in the play, it's not called The Ohio State University, it's called Midwestern University. A movie of The Male Animal was made in 1942, with Henry Fonda playing a prof who is suspected being a communist and, even worse, not a fan of the university football team. Jack Carson plays the lunkhead ex-football star who returns on Homecoming Weekend and tries to hook up with the prof's wife, whom he had dated when they were undergraduates. 

     If a play is ever written or a movie made about the Jim Tressel era at OSU, I think it will be called Nearer My God to The Shoe  ("The Shoe" is the nickname for the Buckeye's stadium) and the heavy will not be the lunkhead football player but the geeky president of the university who sells out the Coach as Judas did Jesus.

"Alright, have it your way—you heard a seal barking." 

The Buckeyes: Ohio's State Religion

                                                                          * * *                                                                        

“For those that don’t have religion, there is football.” A  line from the 1975 movie Night Moves, in which Gene Hackman plays a former professional football player turned floundering private detective who is going around helplessly in circles in a world devoid of meaning and values.

* * *

“Trust ye not in lying words . . .” Jeremiah 7:4

State Religion

The word fan is short for fanatic, which is a person who idolizes and  blindly worships someone or some thing.  The sports fanatic is second  cousin to the religious fanatic. The religious fanatic worships a god, the sports fanatic worships a star player or  a favorite team. Religious fanatics have holy places and so do sports fanatics. Catholics have the Vatican, Muslims have Mecca, and Buckeye fans have Ohio Stadium, on Woody Hayes Drive. 
     The Buckeye religion depends upon young men, many of them African-Americans, to perform the violent rituals that the fanatically faithful live to watch. A central myth of the Buckeye religion is that these young men are clean living and stalwart amateurs who without remuneration, other than board, room, and tuition,  perform the violent football ritual for the faithful. While OSU makes millions, the players get trophies and medals they trade for tattoos. One player who traded some memorabilia said he and his mother were struggling financially while others were making lots of money from the program. He mentioned no names, but in 2010 the annual revenue from the program was $68 million and Tressel's salary package was $4.1 million. Some players are from single parent families and from impoverished backgrounds where drugs and crime are rife. The single parent is often a poor mother. That is the player’s excuse, but what is Coach Tressel’s?

If Tressel is the minister of the Buckeye  religion, OSU president Gordon Gee is the bishop, but in the Buckeye  religion the minister is much more powerful than the bishop as Gee revealed when he quipped to reporters, “I’m just hoping he,” meaning Tressle, “doesn’t dismiss me.”  Because they are incriminating, if not devastating, important truths can sometimes be revealed only in jest.  In the Buckeye religion, the geek is the lowliest, most pathetic creature in creation, not worthy of washing the feet of a coach who has not only won a national title but beaten Michigan nine  out of the last ten meetings. Not since Wally Cox, TV's Mr. Peepers, roomed with Marlon Brando have we had such an odd couple as Gee and Tressel. For the trustees to have hired the bow-tied Gee for a second go-round was a good way of emphasizing who is really the boss  at OSU—the coach of the football team. But by revealing an inconvenient truth, Gee may have brought  his own retirement that much closer. If the coach has got to go, can the geek be far behind?

If the eighth circle of hell is reserved for those football players who get caught, the ninth circle is reserved for those who get caught and reveal inconvenient truths about “the program,” as the Ohio State system is sometimes called. Running back Maurice Clarett has been consigned to the ninth circle because not only was he caught red-handed but he then blew the whistle on the whole program.

Maurice Clarett consigned to the Ninth Circle of Hell

In our intensely competitive society, being Number One is tantamount to salvation. “Winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing,” Vince Lombardi liked to say. That's the first and only commandment of big time college football. Jim Tressel has put a pious spin on “winning is the only thing,”  by saying, in effect,“Winning is the godly thing.” Winning is  a goal so worthy of reaching that  cheating to reach it is acceptable provided you don’t get caught. This is as true in football as it is on Wall Street. The hypocritical Tressel got  caught and now the nation is shocked, shocked to learn that he  was forced to resign because he and his recruits have not always played fair and square. It’s a very big  news story not only in Ohio but throughout the country and will be for at least forty-eight hours. This is not just an athletic crisis. This is a spiritual  crisis because OSU football  is the state religion of  Ohio. The state motto, which Tressel highlighted in The Winners Manual,  is “With God all things are possible.” The unwritten corollary is, “Without the Buckeyes, nothing is possible.” There is no other category that Ohio has ranked first in, and thereby been redeemed by, except OSU football. Five times Woody Hayes (blessed be his name!) took the Buckeyes to the Promised Land.  A national title is the state’s salvation. Jim Tressel did it once, but he got caught and now he will be consigned to the Eighth Circle of Hell. Hayes is a saint for having five times filled  up the spiritual emptiness at the heart of it all. Jim Tressel did it only once and now he’s been caught. The fans will turn on him the way they turned on the forty or so players who were caught in his ten years as coach. Along with everyone else, even Brutus Buckeye might turn on him. I can imagine the disgraced coach saying to the Buckeye mascot, “Et tu, Brutus?”          
     “Lasting goals are also from God, and they affect the people around us for good,” it says in The Winners Manual. Well, maybe around Him but not exactly around Tressel. There is Robert Reynolds, to take just one example, who early in Tressel's  tenure  infamously choked the Wisconsin quarterback well after the whistle had blown, knocking him, or choking him, out of the game. Whatever possessed Reynolds to do that? When he was later suspended by the Tennessee Titans for failing a drug test, we have a possible explanation, though the win-at-any-cost-because-God-is-on-our-side spirit of OSU football may have been the only inspiration he needed, though it should be pointed out that the Buckeyes choked and the Badgers came from behind to win the game. For anyone with eyes to see, it was clear whose side God was on that day. 

OSU linebacker Robert Reynolds who gave a whole new meaning to the phrase “an athlete who chokes.”