There were two or three of us. Actually there were about four or five of us. White guys, that is. We were among the 30 or so guys that regularly played noon pick-up basketball at Alameda (CA) Community College back in the late 1970s. Just about everybody else was African Americans with a few Hispanic and Asian guys as well.

“White guys can’t jump,” was the commonplace, and relatively speaking, that was me. But, I had a good set of hands, and I could also really really shoot from long distance. Following the fledgling American Basketball Association, we had just put in a three-point line in our pick-up games. After I made four or five three-pointers in one game, one of my black friends shouted out, “you can’t jump but you sure got radar.”

From that day on “Radar” was my nickname, my “sobriquet,” to use the old fancy French-derived word.

Martin Luther once gushed wildly about Jesus’ “sweet lips,” leading to my blog’s sobriquet. Next time I’ll say more about why Luther nicknamed Jesus “SweetLips.”