Back in the 1990s, I played on an older-than-30 baseball league in Charlottesville. I’d played in high school and for a brief time in college, and I was amazed by how much I still loved the game and wanted to compete.

I was a pitcher — a hard-throwing right-hander with a decent curve — but I had always struggled with control. When I was on, usually in the warmer months, I could get into a groove and pitch well. But when it was cold, or when my frustration would get the better of me, I tended to lose focus. But I tried to overcome that when I played for the Tigers — trying to prove something to myself, I guess — and I worked hard at it. So hard, in fact, that I broke my arm in half.

Everyone gets older. But not everyone gets old. That was the take-away last week when I spent some time with the Charlottesville Retreads, a senior softball team that has been practicing and playing at Darden Towe Park since 2003.

At 9:30 a.m. on Tuesdays and Thursdays from March until mid-October, when they practice and scrimmage, you’ll find ministers, doctors, professors, tradespersons, educators, businesspeople and ex-athletes, both male and female, who have said goodbye to the players they might have been in their youth, but not to a game they love.

“I’ve played all my life,” said Larry Stremikis, 74, one of the original founders and current manager of the Retreads. “Even though you are getting up in years, you have to stay active, and you want to have fun, too. And I love the camaraderie it enhances.” Read More…

As a young reporter for the Chicago Tribune in the months following 9/11, Will Potter was already growing weary of reporting on cops, crime, and shootings in the city. On a whim during some time off, he decided to help a group of activists hand out leaflets opposing animal testing.

“It wasn’t what journalists usually do,” says Potter, now 37. “But I was feeling like I wasn’t making a difference in the world as a reporter.”

Shortly after that, two FBI agents showed up at his door and told him he could be put on a terrorism watch list if he didn’t help them gather information about the animal activists he had helped. The agents knew that both he and his then girlfriend had applied to graduate school and warned them that the student aid they had applied for could be pulled if they didn’t cooperate. “ ‘Everything changed after 9/11,’ ” he recalls them saying.

“I couldn’t believe they were using that rhetoric of terrorism against someone handing out leaflets,” says Potter. “That was really shocking to me.” READ MORE…

Nearly three months after Virginia Quarterly Review managing editor Kevin Morrissey took his own life, stories are still being penned about what the tragedy revealed about the troubled inner workings of the award-winning magazine: charges of favoritism, spiraling spending, poisonous tensions between staff members, and the hot-button suggestion that the magazine’s editor, Ted Genoways, bullied the 52-year-old Morrissey in the last few weeks of his life.

Documents recently made available to the Hook show that Genoways was burning through VQR’s endowment, hiring an intern for a key office role without going through the usual state procedures, and— perhaps most surprisingly— planning to take advantage of the intern-turned-employee’s million-dollar-plus donation to another program to save his own struggling enterprise.

Meanwhile, as the official UVA investigation into the management of the magazine continues (web update: the report was issued shortly after this story was posted), two recent stories have taken a different tack: casting Genoways, not Morrissey, as the hapless victim of a reckless rush to judgment. READ MORE

On John Casteen’s last official day in office as the president of the University of Virginia, a tragic story, one fit for the pages of the award-winning literary journal that he nurtured, began to unfold.

That Friday, July 30, the managing editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review, 52-year-old Kevin Morrissey, took his own life. Since then, UVA has shrouded VQR behind a wall of silence, changing the office locks, launching an audit, and even routing all incoming telephone calls to the University’s public relations office.

A Hook investigation reveals that behind the staid, Thomas Jefferson-designed exterior of VQR’s headquarters swirl allegations of financial recklessness, conflicts of interest, and a bizarre pattern of management-by-email that drove a staffer to quit. Some say there was also a pattern of bullying that may have pushed a fragile man into tragic oblivion. READ MORE