Word: comptons
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...challenges one faces in teaching the game of cricket to the lads in Compton, Calif., world capital of gangsta rap, one difficulty looms above all others. It's not the rules or the etiquette or the language of bowlers and wickets. Katy Haber, 50, a British expatriate and team manager, sums up the matter thus: "It's all we can do to keep them from sagging their pants...
...style issue, in fact, has reared its head at a midweek practice on a raggedy field in the heart of Compton, a mostly black and Hispanic town south of Los Angeles. Two members of the Homies & Popz team--which includes a few ex-gangsters and a couple of homeless guys--have shown up in baggy jeans hung low around the hips. "Gentlemen, we practice in whites!" player-coach Ted Hayes laments. "We practice in whites...
There is cricket in Compton because in 1995 a Beverly Hills chap rang Haber in need of one more body for a Sunday match in the Los Angeles Social Cricket Alliance. Haber, who had ditched a movie-producing career to run a homeless village in downtown Los Angeles with Hayes, offered Ted. Hayes, now 48, had never played but practically had a British accent by day's end. "The etiquette, the civility, the fact that no one is bigger than the game--I thought it was the perfect sport to teach homeless guys to be gentlemen," Hayes says. A year...
Hayes runs the Homies & Popz through a tight workout spiked with lectures on focus, attitude and respect. He leads a boot-camp jog, yelling out "Compton Cricket!" as they answer "U.S.A.!" For Hayes, the highlight of the trip to Britain was having young men "who grew up in all this violence" preach the gospel of peace to Adams and the wannabe gangsters of Belfast, who were planning a tribute to the violent rapper Tupac Shakur (gunned down in Las Vegas in 1996) until the homies told them that ain't cool. One of their ex-teammates is doing hard time...
Thirty years ago, military satellites first noticed flashbulb-like gamma bursts going off throughout the cosmos. The Compton Gamma Ray Observatory, opened in 1991, discovered that the bursts were surprisingly common--300 or so occur each year--and remarkably distant. "They are more than halfway to the edge of the visible universe," says NASA astrophysicist Neil Gehrels...