A live-and-learn life lesson from the guy who’d go on to pitch for the White Sox for six of his 10 major-league seasons: “Don’t try to make a study date before finals with a girl you really like.”
Former All-Big Ten ace Donn Pall (BS ’85) learned this the hard way, when he asked future wife Katie if she’d study with him in an empty classroom in Lincoln Hall. “I wanted to ask her out on a date but she wasn’t ready for all that with me yet. So I talked her into studying with me.
“The thing is, all I could think of was her so I got absolutely no studying done. I would talk to her, try to think of clever things to make her like me more and imagine going out with her. The bad news was I did very poorly on the final exam that I was supposed to be studying for. I almost failed the class.
“The good news is we eventually started dating a number of years later and I somehow convinced her to marry me."
