165: Life and Death and Basketball

D Magazine's EarBurner

Michael Sorrell is the president of Paul Quinn, the oldest historically Black college west of the Mississippi. He died in 2008. True story. The man's heart stopped, and his girlfriend Natalie (now wife) performed CPR until medics could arrive and shock him back to life. So we talked about the fact that he's our first undead guest on EarBurner. And we talked about how the pandemic changed people and why those changes have made it harder to run an instution of higher learning. But the main reason we invited Michael onto the podcast was to talk about basketball. He played in college. And after law school at Duke, he played on the courts at the downtown Dallas T. Boone Pickens YMCA—which is about to be sold and torn down. If it weren't for those pickup games, Michael says, he wouldn't today be the president of Paul Quinn. How can Dallas be a great city without a downtown Y?

Some links for you:

The Morning News reports that the Y, after being downtown since 1885, plans to abandon the city's core.

Zac profiled Michael in 2021 for our sister publication D CEO.

In 2017, Tim ran Kelly Oubre Jr. off the Y's courts when he interfered with the lunchtime pickup game. The Washington Post covered it.

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