I'm pretty sure that none of you read the TMQ column on ESPN.com. If you do, you must have missed the December 11th column. I know this because the only person who has asked me about this was my brother Ben, after a young man he works with in scouts asked him if he had a brother in Norman, Oklahoma. Otherwise, he wouldn't have known about it either.
I'm sure that I've lost most of you by now, but if I haven't, allow me to explain. TMQ is short for Tuesday Morning Quarterback and is a weekly column written by Gregg Easterbrook. (If you'd like to know more, you can check out it's Wikipedia page, or previous columns on ESPN.com.) I started reading his column a while ago and they are typically quite lengthy and cover mostly football and politics, but sometimes other topics as well. He likes different statistics, such as writing about teams that gain more than 600 yards in a game yet lose or encourages teams to always go for it on fourth down because the odds are in their favor.
He also invites readers to email him when they see things, such as football games with a combined score over 100 points, teams getting artificial turf fields that are a color different than green, etc. One of these things that he asked readers to email him about is called the Christmas creep. The Christmas creep is basically when retailers move forward the Christmas shopping season. In his December 4th column, he mentioned that a reader had pointed out to him that the Christmas creep originated when the angel Gabriel appeared to Mary to announce Christ's birth nearly a year before it happened.
Since he invites readers to email him, I thought I'd give it a try. I told him about Samuel the Lamanite's prophecy of Christ's birth five years before it occurred, which would have been a specific announcement of the day four years prior to Gabriel's announcement to Mary. I didn't think much of it, but the next morning I got a short reply: "thanks will mention and thanks for the kind words -- best Gregg"
So, I can't say I was completely surprised when I saw this in the following week's column:
Although it was not the first time the Book of Mormon has been mentioned on ESPN.com (a search for "Book of Mormon" yielded one result - this column from 2003), to the best of my knowledge it is the first time the Book of Mormon has been quoted on ESPN.com. I was a little surprised that he followed the quotation with a jab at the Book of Mormon, even though Sarah told me I should have seen it coming. On the bright side, he did include a link to the online version. Missionary work can occur in mysterious ways. I've always been a fan of the more creative approaches.
For those of you who are interested in reading the whole column (which I'm sure is none of you) here is the link. (It's about two-thirds the way down, but it's easiest to find by looking for the picture.)
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