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TACH
Retired Number
Joined: 03 Nov 2005
Posts: 28461
Location: Chillin on the Delaware.. from the Jersey Side
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 Posted: Tue Feb 13, 2007 7:36 am Post subject: Here's a Duke lacrosse player you need to know |
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| Quote: | For a year now, since the rape charges first hit, we've heard the uproar about Duke's lacrosse players. Their faces looked at us from magazine covers and talk shows, the battle lines of their guilt or innocence set by race, gender, class. Ugly business, and not over yet.
But here's another Duke lacrosse player you ought to meet. At the end of the day, there should be no disagreement about him. ...
Jimmy went from his Long Island roots to Duke as a determined athlete and student.
"Just a terrific personality. Always a smile on his face. His teammates just loved to be around him," his coach, Mike Pressler, said over the phone Monday. "He was the kind of kid that every coach in America would be proud to call his own. I can't imagine a better teammate or a better friend."
By the spring of 2002, Jimmy was a senior and close to graduating with a degree in economics. He was on the all-ACC Academic team as a midfielder. In the conference championship game, against No. 1 Virginia, he scored four goals and the Blue Devils won 14-13. Pressler still remembers how the press flocked around him afterward. How happy Jimmy was. The star of the game. The hero.
"It was just his day in the sun," Pressler said. "I'm sure it was something he never forgot."
Jimmy had a scholarship to go to law school after Duke. Also an offer to work at a financial company. "But he felt like he had a higher calling," Pressler said.
Jimmy joined the Army Rangers. Later, he figured, he'd come back to his life. One day, he would coach a lacrosse team, and help kids find the happiness he had that spring day against Virginia. So he left Duke behind, just as the class of 2006 — when the world caved in the Blue Devil lacrosse team — was entering.
Somewhere in Iraq last week, Sgt. James John Regan was killed in action. No other details.
He had served double tours in both Iraq and Afghanistan, returning to harm's way again and again and again. He had been awarded a Bronze Star, a Purple Heart, other medals. He was 26 years old.
Back in New York, according to Newsday, the family held a remembrance for him Sunday at their home. That included Mary McHugh, a medical student and his fiancée. They were to be married a year from now, when Jimmy's last tour ended.
The Newsday account mentions that many of the mourners wore Jimmy's high school graduation picture. He was so young, with Duke and the future ahead of him.
Pressler got the news on Friday. He is now coach at Bryant University, a division II school in Rhode Island, having been one of the casualties of the tumult at Duke.
"My first thought was of the Regan family. I can only imagine what they're going through," he said. "After that, I just had a question. Why? Why does that program have to suffer even more?"
The Blue Devils will soon open a new season with a new coach, trying to put 2006 behind them, hoping the cloud goes away. The rape charges against three players have been dropped, but sexual assault charges still stand. They are no longer on the team. The district attorney's actions have come into question and he is no longer involved in the case. The community still seems split about the matter, along the same eternal lines.
No one is sure when or how it will finally end. But we know, at least, where it will end for Jimmy Regan.
He's to be buried in Arlington Cemetery. |
RIP Regan... |
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Tony Montana
Star Player
Joined: 18 Apr 2005
Posts: 2962
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| Posted: Tue Feb 13, 2007 9:28 am Post subject: |
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| Let's see if the slimy Gang of 88 (the self-serving group of Duke professors that signed a letter slamming the team and the players in the face of the initial, now proven fraudulent rape accussation) come together to honor this tragic death of such a brave and honorable member of the team :roll: |
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Kobe>Lebron
Star Player
Joined: 20 Aug 2002
Posts: 3571
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| Posted: Thu Feb 15, 2007 7:00 am Post subject: |
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| Tony Montana wrote: | | Let's see if the slimy Gang of 88 (the self-serving group of Duke professors that signed a letter slamming the team and the players in the face of the initial, now proven fraudulent rape accussation) come together to honor this tragic death of such a brave and honorable member of the team :roll: |
I have learned that as knowledgable as most professors are they aren't good people to get non academic advice from.
Most of them have screwed up personal lives. There is a difference between knowledge and wisdom.
_________________
"I was laying myself on the line by saying, if this doesn't work in three to four years, if we're not back on the top then I will step down because that means I have failed,"
Jim Buss (2013) |
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