Next Wednesday, the 13th of December, the Lakota Nation Invitational basketball tournament kicks off for the 19th time. I was an assistant basketball coach for Little Wound High School during the 2000-2001 season and experienced the LNI from courtside. It's one of the great sporting events that exists, a single elimination basketball tournament during the Christmas season that gathers all of the Lakota high schools in the state of South Dakota to the Rapid City Civic Center to do battle for the honor and pride of their home communities. It's something between the NCAA tournament and an old tribal summer gathering, when the kids used to compete at riding, shooting, getting girls...

Yesterday Barcelona, defending champions of the Champions League, needed a win over tough Bundesliga competition Werder Bremen to escape the group stages of the tournament and earn a spot in the knock-out round. There has been a lot of talk this year that Ronaldinho is taking a break, that he isn't sharp, or as my friend John Maris said, that "he's fallen off a cliff." The world's chief practitioner of the jogo bonito, the beautiful game, put doubts to rest yesterday at Camp Nou about the future of happy football with two touches...

Lekshi John Around Him died two months ago. He was an Oglala Lakota elder and spiritual leader who taught Lakota language and culture for many years at Little Wound High School and Oglala Lakota College in Kyle, South Dakota on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. Uncle John, as he was known to many people on and off the Rez, died of cancer in his home near Last Horse Creek surrounded by his children and grandchildren. During his lifetime he taught me, and many other people, the Lakota sweat lodge songs, and his 1982 recordings of the songs are still the best comprehensive record of the traditional form of the Lakota inipi songs. I wanted to write an informal eulogy for Lekshi John to try to get at the significance of both his life and his death.

I took a class in college called The Autobiography taught by an English professor named Michael Wood . Professor Wood is an academic author who has written on Proust and Nabokov among other very tough literary nuts and he is also a critic who writes about movies and books . He ended up being my thesis advisor in college and helped me to start my first novel, Selector. The class was called simply The Autobiography. In that class I remember reading Ted Hughes' (read Hawk Roosting ) comments on his wife's (Sylvia Plath's) biographers in which he calls them "Biografiends" as if they were metaphysical bodysnatchers, graverobbing ghouls. I remember thinking, "Why does he even let them get to him?"