In the course of the past school year, Vin Ascolese lived through a dream -- helping his grandfather, a legendary coach at North Bergen (N.J.) High, win his first New Jersey state title -- and a nightmare, after that state title was revoked by the New Jersey Interscholastic Athletics Association because of illegal recruiting tactics used by the elder Ascolese during his final year at the helm.
By the time it was all over, one could understand why Vin Ascolese wanted nothing more than to sign his letter of intent to play linebacker at Arkansas and head down to Fayetteville.
Thanks to Ascolese's own Twitter account, we now know that he's whiling away the hours before he can officially become a Razorback by waxing lyrical about what it's like to be a Razorback, even though he's never actually been one.
Here is Ascolese's self-appointed sonnet -- which Deadspin's Barry Petchesky astutely pointed out is not, in fact, a sonnet at all -- as posted directly on Twitter and later picked up by onfinite.com and the SB Nation blog Arkansas Expats:
While it's inspiring that a burgeoning football talent would care enough about both his new school and poetry to try and combine the two, there are a handful of worrying notes in that particular effort. To wit, Ascolese's poem is missing three apostrophes, jumps between different tenses, uses the wrong form of one word ("to" instead of "too"), toggles between capitalizing and not capitalizing "Razorback", and mistakes "gentleman" for "gentlemen", among other typographical errors.
That's the bad news. The good news is that Ascolese's poem includes the phrase "balls of steel" and directly alludes to literally killing foes. That certainly has to show that Ascolese is committed to the cause.
Whether Ascolese's play on the field has as big an impact as his literary forays remains to be seen, but he has certainly forged a bright start toward etching himself in Arkansas folklore with the use of a word processor before he even sets foot in a Fayetteville classroom.
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