SPECIAL PRESIDENTIAL GUEST COMMENTATOR: LINCOLN MEMORIAL UNIVERSITY LADY RAILSPLITTERS START THEIR PLAYOFF RUN

Recently I contacted the 16th President of the United States, Abraham Lincoln, Official Balladeer’s Blog Nickname: The Beardmeister General,   to ask him to add parenthetical commentary to this release from Lincoln Memorial University about the Lady Railsplitters soccer team starting their playoff season. Abe graciously agreed (“Anything to get away from Mary’s demented babbling for a few minutes” he said under his breath.)  

 HARROGATE, TN – The no. 8 seed Lady Railsplitter soccer team (10-6, 3-6) will travel to Hickory, North Carolina on Tuesday to take on no. 1 seed Lenoir-Rhyne University (13-2-1, 8-1) in the quarterfinal round of the 2010 Food Lion South Atlantic Conference Women’s Soccer Tournament. (Abe: How did a university named after me and located in Tennessee wind up in a conference called the South Atlantic Conference? It’s not like Tennessee has sandy beaches overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. Did my drunk Vice President have anything to do with this? The Tennessee connection makes me smell “Andy the sot” behind this.)

The Lady Railsplitters completed the regular season by qualifying for the tournament as the league’s no. 8 seed (Abe: There are 8 teams in this tournament? That’s about the number of people I beat in the Presidential election my first time out…But I kid) following Saturday’s 1-0 loss to Wingate University at home on the LMU soccer field. Lenoir-Rhyne tied with Carson-Newman College as regular season champions but took the top seed in the tournament by virtue of their regular season 2-1 win over the Lady Eagles in Hickory, North Carolina. (Abe: Seeds? Fields? Lady Eagles? I don’t understand what the (expletive deleted) any of this (expletive deleted) has to do with sports!)

Tuesday’s match between LMU and LRU will get underway at 7:00 p.m. in Hickory (Abe: Is that hickory like the tree or hickory as in “Old Hickory”? Jackson is always razzing Rutherford B Hayes and me about how cool his nickname is. Plus he gets on Franklin Pierce about running over that old lady with his carriage. I wish he’d lay off Franklin. He and I get together and swap ‘crazy wife’ stories on Tuesday nights) and will be played under the lights with the winner advancing to Friday’s semifinal round that will be played in Rock Hill, South Carolina against the winner of the no. 4 seed Newberry College vs. no. 5 seed Mars Hill College (Abe: MARS Hill? Have you crazy young people gone and put institutions of higher learning on other planets? Oh, Christ! I just know Kennedy’s gonna try to take credit for paving the way for that!)  match at 3:00 p.m. 

Well, that wraps it up! Good luck to the Lady Railsplitters and thank you for your time, Mr Lincoln. I hope Andrew Jackson’s razzing doesn’t get on your nerves too badly!

Abe: Oh, don’t worry about it, Mr Wozniak. When Jackson gets too out of line with it I remind him of how I’ve got it all over him in a way that really peels the bark off “Old Hickory”.

What do you mean?

Abe: Well, let’s just say I put the “man” in Great Emancipa –

Thank you, Mr President! That will be all!