Congratulations to Chase Brown on his selection for the top scholarship award from the Miss-Lou chapter of the National Football Foundation and Hall of Fame Thursday.

A multi-sport star and gifted student at Trinity, Chase may be heard from down the road. His dad, Barr Brown, was a star at Cathedral who played in the Mississippi High School All-Star game and went on to LSU.

The only thing which kept Barr from becoming a star at LSU was a guy named Hokie Gajan, who starred for LSU and the Saints.

Congratulations are also due to other winners, both high school and junior high. These kids have their focus in the right direction, and it is very likely more than one of these junior high honorees will be back in a few years as a scholarship winner.

The past couple of columns have been devoted to football and basketball rules evolution. There will always be a debate over the origin of baseball, with Abner Doubleday is generally credited for inventing the game.

There is another camp which holds that Alexander Cartwright actually invented the baseball field in 1845 and with fellow members of the New York Knickerbockers Club making up the original rules of the game.

I don’t know enough to become involved in that debate.

Natchez’s Jimmy Allgood annually produces an old-timers baseball game out at Jefferson College, and I’ll simply wait until I can have a chat with Jimmy before I attempt to talk about old baseball rules.

Most people realize softball evolved from baseball, but few know the first game of softball was played using a boxing glove wrapped in its own laces as a ball.

The year was 1887 during a cold winter in Chicago (are there any other kind?).

George Hancock, who happened to be a reporter for the Chicago Board of Trade, got together a bunch of his fellow members at the Farragut Boat Club, used chalk to mark bases on the floor and played baseball indoors. The final score was said to have been 41-40.

The game proved to be fun and quickly became popular, leading to the formation of the Mid-Winter Indoor Baseball League of Chicago in 1889.

The league adopted 19 special adjustments to the rules of baseball. A fire captain took the game home to Milwaukee and used it to keep his firemen busy during idle times. Other fire companies took up the game, using a small medicine ball instead of a boxing glove as a ball.

One of the Milwaukee teams was known as the Kittens, and kitten ball became one of the early names of the game of softball. It was also called mush ball, indoor-outdoor, diamond ball and playground ball.

The game wasn’t universally known as softball until 1926, when the name was adapted by the International Rules Committee. The game of softball was national in 1933 under the American Softball Association (ASA).

It became a sport in the Pan-American Games in 1978 and an official Olympic sport at the Atlanta Games of 1996.

And that’s official.

Al Graning is a former SEC official and former Natchez resident. He can be reached at AlanWard

39157@aol.com.