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Obit watch: April 10, 2023.

Monday, April 10th, 2023

NYT obit for Craig Breedlove.

Michael Lerner, actor. 186 credits in IMDB (counting the three upcoming), including “Mayor Ebert” in “Godzilla”, “Today’s F.B.I.”, four “Rockford Files”, “The Bold Ones: The New Doctors”, and “Banacek”.

Francesca Cappucci. She worked for KABC-TV in LA.

Out of the blue, Quentin Tarantino named the glamorous Italian movie star wife of Leonardo DiCaprio’s Rick Dalton after her in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019).

Jacques Haitkin, cinematographer. Other credits include “Fist of the North Star”, “Team Knight Rider”, and “The Girl, The Gold Watch, and Everything”.

Hobie Landrith.

The Mets and the Houston Colt .45s (now the Astros), founded as 1962 National League expansion teams, began stocking their rosters in an October 1961 draft. They alternated in selecting players whom the eight N.L. teams viewed as too young, too old or too ordinary to keep.
Houston chose Eddie Bressoud, a shortstop with the San Francisco Giants, as the first pick of the draft. The Mets chose Landrith, also a Giant, as their first selection.
When reporters asked Mets Manager Casey Stengel why Landrith, 31 years old, was anointed as the first Met, he replied: “You gotta have a catcher or you’d have a lot of passed balls.”

(Side note: as best as I can tell, Eddie Bressoud is still alive at 90. He was traded to the Red Sox before he played a game with Houston, and then went from the Red Sox to the Mets.)

Landrith had a career batting average of .233 with 34 home runs and 203 runs driven in.
“I was in the major leagues more because I was a good defensive catcher, and the fact that I was good at handling pitchers,” he once told the baseball history website This Great Game. “I always thought I was a fairly decent hitter, but I realized that I wasn’t in the big leagues for my bat.”

Posted in Cars, History, Movies, Obits, Sports, TV | Comments Closed

Your loser update: April 5, 2023.

Wednesday, April 5th, 2023

MLB teams that still have a chance to go 0-162:

None.

Kansas City, Philadelphia, and Washington are all 1-4 right now.

Posted in Loser, Sports | Comments Closed

Your loser update: April 4, 2023.

Tuesday, April 4th, 2023

It has been a few days. Where are we in the season?

MLB teams that still have a chance to go 0-162:

Philadelphia

Posted in Loser, Sports | Comments Closed

Your loser update: March 31, 2023.

Friday, March 31st, 2023

MLB teams that still have a chance to go 0-162:

Boston
Cleveland
Detroit
Kansas City
Houston
LA Angels
Miami
Philadelphia
Washington
Cincinnati
Milwaukee
St. Louis
Arizona
San Diego
San Francisco

In other news, the Astros lost to the White Sox yesterday. As we all know, this means they won’t be able to sell beer at Minute Maid Park this year…

…because they lost the opener.

Posted in Loser, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: March 22, 2023.

Wednesday, March 22nd, 2023

John Jenrette Jr., former Democratic congressman from South Carolina.

Mr. Jenrette was, famously, caught up in the ABSCAM scandal.

A former social acquaintance, John Stowe, got in contact with Mr. Jenrette in 1979, saying that he had found a wealthy investor, sometimes referred to as a sheikh — an invention of the F.B.I. — who was willing to finance the revival of an empty munitions factory, bringing 400 jobs to Mr. Jenrette’s district. To sweeten the deal, Mr. Stowe said, he needed legislation that would let the sheikh emigrate to the United States.
Mr. Jenrette was captured on videotape, during one of his visits to a townhouse in the Georgetown section of Washington in December 1979, discussing a payment he would accept with people said to be lieutenants of the phony sheikh.
To an offer of $100,000, with $50,000 up front, Mr. Jenrette said, ”I have larceny in my blood — I’d take it in a goddamn minute.”
Five envelopes, each containing $10,000, were laid out on a desk.
Despite the urgings of Anthony Amoroso, an F.B.I. agent posing as one of the sheikh’s executives, Mr. Jenrette didn’t take the money. Instead, two days later, Mr. Stowe picked it up. Mr. Jenrette, fearful of appearing to have accepted a direct payoff to help the sheikh, agreed to receive $10,000 from Mr. Stowe as a loan, and received a promissory note for it.
The jury delivered a quick verdict, convicting Mr. Jenrette and Mr. Stowe of one count of conspiracy and two counts of violating the federal anti-bribery statute by promising to introduce legislation to let a fictitious Arab businessman into the United States.

…

The case put a great strain on his marriage, which had already been roiled by his womanizing. His wife, Rita (Carpenter) Jenrette soon wrote, with a co-author, an article for The Washington Post with the headline “Diary of a Mad Congresswife,” in which she declared, “I hate my life as a congressional wife” and described Mr. Jenrette’s struggles with alcohol.
A few months later, she posed for Playboy and, in an accompanying article, said that she and her husband had once made love on the steps of the United States Capitol. When she was profiled in 2017 on “CBS Sunday Morning,” she amended that to say that they had simply shared a passionate kiss behind a Capitol column.
The Jenrettes divorced in 1981 after five years of marriage.

…

“Between our two salaries we were OK but not flush with money,” Ms. Jenrette, now known as Princess Rita Boncompagni Ludovisi, wrote from Italy. “This evoked his childhood to him, the poverty, the lack, the uncertainty brought to a child with elderly parents. He drank more, and the rest is history.”

Willis Reed, noted player for the New York Knickerbockers.

Reed won the N.B.A.’s Most Valuable Player Award for the 1969-70 season and was named the M.V.P. of the championship series. He won the Rookie of the Year Award in 1965, was voted an All-Star seven times and won another N.B.A. title and finals M.V.P. with the Knicks in 1973. For his career, he averaged 18.7 points and 12.9 rebounds per game.
He was chosen by the N.B.A. for its 50th and 75th anniversary teams. In 1996, he was chosen by the N.B.A. as one of its 50 greatest players. His No. 19 uniform jersey — white with blue and orange trim — was the first to be retired by the Knicks, on Oct. 21, 1976. He was enshrined in the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 1982.

Bobbi Kelly. This is probably going to be a “Who?” moment for most of you.

She was the woman on the cover of “Woodstock: Music from the Original Soundtrack and More”.

The man, Nick Ercoline, was her boyfriend at the time. They married in 1971 and stayed married until her death.

It wasn’t until the 20th anniversary of Woodstock, in 1989, that Nick and Bobbi were publicly identified as the couple in the iconic photo that they now proudly display in their kitchen.

Posted in Law, Music, Obits, Politics, Sports | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: March 21, 2023.

Tuesday, March 21st, 2023

The athletic program at St. Francis College in Brooklyn.

All of it. All 19 sports will be abolished after the spring semester.

Obscure school, who cares, right? They were actually a Division 1 school, which kind of surprised me: the basketball team was 14-16 this season, and 7-9 in the Northeast Conference.

In its statement the school cited “increased operating expenses, flattening revenue streams, and plateauing enrollment in part due to a shrinking pool of high school graduates in the aftermath of the pandemic” as reasons for the need to restructure. Former chief operating officer Tim Cecere has also been appointed acting school president with the board granting Dr. Miguel Martinez-Saenz his request for a personal leave.

…

The men’s basketball program, which dates back to 1896, was the oldest college program in New York City and a charter member of the NCAA.

The school states they intend to honor all current athletic scholarships, but the athletic staff will be let go at the end of the semester.

More from ESPN, which claims 21 teams instead of 19:

The move comes as part of larger restructuring of the private Catholic school located in Brooklyn. Enrollment at the school is about 2,300 undergraduate students.

Just for the sake of comparison, my old school has an undergraduate enrollment of 2,800 to 3,500 (US News gives two different figures)…and the basketball programs are DII. As far as I know, St. Ed’s has never tried to compete in D1.

It seems to me that it might have made more sense to drop down to D2, rather than eliminating athletics totally. But St. Francis just moved to a new facility…that doesn’t have a gym or pool. The original plan was apparently that they were going to share those things with some other school. Perhaps that turned out to be impractical?

Posted in Firings, Obits, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: March 14, 2023.

Tuesday, March 14th, 2023

Dick Fosbury, Olympic high-jumper and inventor of the “Fosbury Flop”.

With a running start at a raised bar, he launched himself back first, seemed to hover for a moment parallel with the ground, and landed approximately on the back of his neck.
The technique has been compared to a corpse being pushed out of a window. Like Fred Astaire dancing on the ceiling, Fosbury’s flopping struck many onlookers as residing somewhere between a physical feat and a joke. At the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City, the crowd oohed, aahed and laughed watching Fosbury compete.
But the last laugh was his:
The high-jump bar kept being raised, and Fosbury kept clearing it. He finally executed a Fosbury Flop at 7 feet 4¼ inches — earning him not just the gold medal, but an Olympic record at the time.

…

Within a few years, the Fosbury Flop was the standard method of elite high jumping. (The current Olympic record is held by Charles Austin, who Fosbury Flopped 7 feet 10 inches at the 1996 games in Atlanta.)
More broadly, the Flop set a standard for the kind of innovation that can transform a human endeavor. The Times has written about “the Dick Fosbury of ski jumping,” of racewalking, of golf, of angler fishing and of the game show “Jeopardy!” When Piaget introduced a line of watches advertised as a “daring departure,” the company made Fosbury its spokesman.

…

In later years he often said that at the start of his high-jump career, in high school, he was the worst jumper in his school, in the school’s conference and in all of Oregon. He was seemingly not even a gifted athlete, having failed to make his school’s football and basketball teams.

…

It was not just Fosbury’s form that made him an unconventional athlete. He wore mismatched running shoes. He had the arm muscles of a chess player. Before making an approach run, he rocked back and forth, clenching and unclenching his fists.

Joe Pepitone, noted Yankee.

In his second season, he displaced the Yankees’ longtime first baseman Bill Skowron, and with Mickey Mantle and Yogi Berra aging and Roger Maris’s best years behind him, Pepitone seemed poised to become the focus of the next-generation lineup. From 1963 to 1965, he made three consecutive All-Star teams, belting 27 home runs in 1963, 28 in 1964, 18 in 1965 and a career-high 31 in 1966.

…

His Yankee teams finished no higher than fifth through 1969, after which he completed his big-league career in the National League, playing for the Houston Astros, the Chicago Cubs and briefly in 1973 for the Atlanta Braves.
He socked 27 homers again for the Yankees in 1969 and hit .307 in more than 40 at-bats for the Cubs in 1971, but after 1966 he never drove in more than 70 runs in a season. Overall, he hit 219 home runs, with a career average of .258.
For most of his career, Pepitone undermined his own gifts with his rambunctious and self-destructive behavior. He had money problems and marital problems. His night life began after night games; he drank with and without his teammates and was no stranger to drugs. He claimed at one point to have turned Mantle and Whitey Ford on to marijuana, and in an interview in Rolling Stone magazine in 2015, he recalled that when he was with the Cubs, fans in the bleachers would throw packets of joints and cocaine at him in the outfield, and he would hide them in the ivy that covered the stadium wall.

…

Pepitone played briefly in Japan in 1973 and wrote a whiny article for The New York Times about his treatment there; hardly anyone spoke English, he complained, “and at my apartment, I swear the door was 4 feet 5 inches high.”
He played some professional softball, was in the bar business for a time and in the early 1980s worked briefly for the Yankees as a hitting coach. In 1985, he was riding in a car with two other people when the police stopped them for running a red light and found drugs — cocaine, heroin and quaaludes — and a loaded handgun in the car.
Pepitone was convicted on misdemeanor counts of possession of drugs and drug paraphernalia and served about half of a six-month sentence.

And speaking of Japan, this one goes out to FotB RoadRich: Masatoshi Ito is dead at 98.

“Who?”

He brought 7-11 to Japan.

Perhaps his greatest contribution to modern Japan began in 1973, when a young executive persuaded him to bring 7-Eleven to the country. Starting with a single store in Tokyo, the deal he struck with the chain’s owners, the Dallas-based Southland company, launched a revolution in Japanese retailing that would transform everything from the way companies moved their products to the way people eat.
The company’s introduction of the ready-to-eat rice ball to store shelves in 1978 made that humble snack into a central part of the country’s fast food culture.
In the decades that followed, 7-Eleven and its imitators would open tens of thousands of convenience stores across Japan, providing a wide range of goods and services. The shops — open 24 hours a day, every day of the year — became so integral to daily life that the government declared them part of the national infrastructure.

7-11 in Japan was so successful, the parent company ended up buying out Southland, who had run 7-11 in the US into the ground.

The victory, however, was short-lived. In 1992, Mr. Ito announced he was stepping down as Ito-Yokado’s president after three executives at the company were accused of providing payoffs to corporate shakedown artists who had threatened to disrupt the company’s annual meeting, a common racket at the time.
Replaced by his protégé, Mr. Suzuki, Mr. Ito stayed out of the public view for several years before re-emerging in the late 1990s, when he was appointed Ito-Yokado’s honorary chairman. In 2005, the company became Seven & I, combining the convenience store’s name with the first initial of its predecessor. Mr. Ito remained honorary chairman until his death.

Jesus Alou, baseball player and one of the three Alou brothers (Felipe and Matty were the other two).

Jesus Alou played in the major leagues for 15 seasons and was a member of the Oakland A’s teams that won World Series championships in 1973 and 1974. He had limited power, hitting only 32 home runs in his career, but he was a solid batter with a career average of .280.

He was also famous for another reason:

When Jesus Alou was a rookie, he and his brothers were all in the Giants’ outfield on Sept. 15, 1963. They were the only three brothers in major league history to play together in a single game.

Patricia Schroeder, former Congress woman (D-Colorado).

Posted in Obits, Politics, Sports | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: March 13, 2023.

Monday, March 13th, 2023

Kenzaburo Oe, noted Japanese writer and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Though he often said he wrote with only a Japanese audience in mind, Mr. Oe attracted an international readership in the 1960s with three works in particular: “Hiroshima Notes,” a collection of essays on the long-term consequences of the atomic bomb attacks; and the novels “A Personal Matter” and “The Silent Cry,” which had their genesis in a crisis for him and his wife, the birth of a son with a deformed cranium.

Pat McCormick, Olympic diver.

At the 1952 Olympics in Helsinki, Finland, McCormick won the women’s 3-meter springboard and 10-meter platform competitions, the only ones being held for women at the time. In 1956 in Melbourne, Australia, eight months after the birth of her first child — and with her husband, Glenn McCormick, as the team’s coach — she won them both again.
Her feat was unequaled until another American, Greg Louganis, captured the 3-meter and 10-meter titles at the 1988 Seoul Olympics four years after doing it in Los Angeles.

Bud Grant, former coach of the Minnesota Vikings. He was 95.

He had a regular-season record of 158-96-5, for a .621 winning percentage, the second-most victories for a Vikings coach. His Vikings won 11 division titles and made it to four Super Bowls, but they never won; they lost to the Kansas City Chiefs in 1970, the Miami Dolphins in 1974, the Pittsburgh Steelers in 1975 and the Oakland Raiders in 1977.
His teams were led by the celebrated defensive line known as the Purple People Eaters, headed by Alan Page and Carl Eller, and by an offense that included quarterback Fran Tarkenton and running back Chuck Foreman. He was named N.F.L. coach of the year in 1969 and was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1994. He won 10 or more games seven times between the 1969 and 1976 seasons.

Posted in Books, NFL, Obits, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: March 11, 2023.

Saturday, March 11th, 2023

Traute Lafrenz (who also went by Traute Lafrenz Page) has passed away at 103.

She was the last surviving member of the White Rose.

The White Rose was short-lived and never counted more than a few dozen members, most of whom were young and idealistic. Ms. Lafrenz (who later in life went by the name Traute Lafrenz Page) carried political leaflets and helped the group gain access to ink, paper and envelopes to produce and disseminate its anti-Hitler tracts, and to urge Germans to turn against the Nazis.
But the response to its activities, peaceful as they were, seemed to betoken the profound intolerance displayed by the Third Reich to any hint of opposition among Germans, even as it pursued the extermination of European Jewry and what it called “total war” against its adversaries.

…

While Ms. Lafrenz was a medical student in Hamburg, she met Alexander Schmorell, a central player in the White Rose, who introduced her to the leaders of the group, the siblings Hans and Sophie Scholl, when she moved to Munich to continue her medical studies in the early 1940s.
Other leading players included Christoph Probst, Willi Graf and the group’s older mentor, Kurt Huber, a professor of philosophy who was committed to liberal democracy.

…

The White Rose’s leaflets began appearing in the summer of 1942, but the project faltered in February 1943 with the arrest of Sophie and Hans Scholl, who were distributing fliers in a university building in Munich when Jakob Schmid, a janitor, spotted them and tipped off the Gestapo. Four days after their arrest, on Feb. 18, 1943, they were executed. Ms. Lafrenz attended her friends’ funeral, even though it was conducted under Gestapo surveillance.
Other members of the White Rose followed the grisly trail to execution; they were among an estimated 5,000 people beheaded under a revival of the use of the guillotine ordered by Hitler. The beheadings continued until January 1945.

Ms. Lafrenz was arrested in March of 1943. She was set to be tried at Bayreuth in April of 1945, but the US Army liberated the prison (and the prisoners) before the trial started.

“Traute Lafrenz was not at the center of the White Rose,” Mr. Waage wrote. “She did not physically write any of the leaflets — but she did just about everything else. She helped lay the foundation for the revitalization of cultural heritage as a weapon against brutality; she helped make the distribution of the leaflets as practical as possible and helped to spread them.”
In the postwar era, Ms. Lafrenz remained stubbornly reticent about her activities. “I was a contemporary witness,” she told Bild Zeitung in 2018. “Given the fates of the others, I am not allowed to complain.” Her daughter Renee told the newspaper that she had not learned of her mother’s wartime struggle until 1970.
Indeed, it was only on Ms. Lafrenz’s 100th birthday, on May 3, 2019, that she was awarded Germany’s Order of Merit, a high civilian honor. The citation said she “belonged to the few who, in the face of the crimes of national socialism, had the courage to listen to the voice of her conscience and rebel against the dictatorship and the genocide of the Jews. She is a heroine of freedom and humanity.”

Suzy McKee Charnas, noted SF writer. I believe Lawrence mentioned this to me a while back, but I could not find a link I was willing to use. The NYT obit says she passed away January 2nd, but “her death was not widely reported at the time”.

Ms. Charnas, whose books were well regarded but who, by her account, did not make a living from her writing, was best known for her science fiction. But she also wrote vampire fiction, young adult fantasy novels with women as central characters, and a memoir about taking care of her father in his later years after a long period of estrangement.

The obit gives a lot of space to her “The Holdfast Chronicles” series.

In an epic that began with “Walk to the End of the World” (1974) and concluded 25 years later with “The Conqueror’s Child,” Ms. Charnas conceived a dystopic world in which an escaped female slave, Alldera, leads the rebellious Free Fems to brutally conquer and enslave their former male masters. The men had faulted women for the near-destruction of humanity, called the Wasting.

…

The other books in the Holdfast series are “Motherlines” (1978) and “The Furies” (1994). “The Conqueror’s Child” won the 1999 James Tiptree Jr. Award (now called the Otherwise), a literary prize for works of science fiction or fantasy that explore gender.
She also won two other science fiction and fantasy awards: a Nebula for a novella, “Unicorn Tapestry,” which is a chapter in her 1980 novel, “The Vampire Tapestry,” and the basis for her play, “Vampire Dreams”; and a Hugo, for “Boobs,” a short story.
“Suzy, to me, was a lot like David Bowie,” said Jane Lindskold, a science fiction and fantasy writer who knew Ms. Charnas from a writers’ group in Albuquerque. “She followed her own muse. She could have just written only vampire books, but she did what she wanted to do.”

…

Science fiction was not the only genre she explored. In “The Vampire Tapestry,” she created Dr. Edward Weyland, a vampire posing as an anthropology professor.Writing in The Washington Post, the fantasy writer Elizabeth A. Lynn praised the novel, saying it “works on many levels — as pure adventure, as social description, as psychological drama and as a passionate exploration of the web that links instinct, morality and culture. It is a serious, startling and revolutionary work.”
The director Guillermo del Toro, who is known for his science fiction and horror films, was an admirer of “The Vampire Tapestry.” He called it “flawless” on Twitter in 2015 and, after Ms. Charnas’s death, said, “It may be her masterpiece.”

The paper of record has a habit of running retrospective obits under the heading “Overlooked No More” for people who didn’t get an obit at the time. To the best of my knowledge, they still have not published an obit for Gardner Dozois.

However, this one struck home for me: Dilys Winn, mystery bookstore founder and writer.

When she opened Murder Ink — believed to be the nation’s first bookstore devoted entirely to the genre — she didn’t even have a window sign. But inside the store, compact though it was, one could find every type of mystery: British cozies, unsettling gothics, suspense thrillers, novels about hard-boiled detectives, police procedurals and even unpublished manuscripts — 1,500 titles in all.

…

Winn enjoyed hosting events so much that she sold the bookstore in 1975 and began holding Sunday afternoon mystery talks (admission $5) at the Steinway Concert Hall on the Upper West Side featuring mystery writers, editors and other guest speakers. She organized a 16-day mystery reader’s tour of the United Kingdom, with sites of interest that included the Tower of London, Jack the Ripper’s London neighborhood and the London docks. Excursions to Scotland and Wales provided more opportunities to commune with mystery writers, crime reporters and, supposedly, ghosts.
All the while, Winn was feverishly working on her opus: “Murder Ink.” Published by Workman Press in 1977, it included offbeat essays by established figures and Winn herself (under various nom de plumes), along with character studies, photographs, quizzes and even a guide to “terrible edibles” one might avoid — or seek, depending on the motive. In 1978, the Mystery Writers of America conferred an Edgar Allan Poe award on Winn, and the next year she published a sequel, “Murderess Ink: The Better Half of Mystery.”

I bought my mother a copy of Murder Ink as a present one year, so of course I read it. I loved it. I still think that’s a pretty swell book, and I want to say that’s one of the key books in influencing my lifelong love of mysteries.

“Spot”, or Glen Lockett, noted record producer for SST Records.

As the in-house producer for SST from 1979 to 1985, Mr. Lockett controlled the mixing board on landmark recordings that helped bring American punk from deafening gigs in garages and basements to the mainstream — the college-radio mainstream, at least.
He produced or engineered more than 100 albums for SST, including classics like Black Flag’s “Damaged” (1981), Descendents’ “Milo Goes to College” (1982), Meat Puppets’ first album (1982), Minutemen’s “What Makes a Man Start Fires?” (1982) and Hüsker Dü’s “Zen Arcade” (1984).

I never got into any of SST’s stuff (I tried listening to Hüsker Dü) but I’ve always liked the SST poster I saw once at a record store in Houston. “Home taping is killing the music industry. Keep up the good work.”

Rick Scheckman. He was David Letterman’s film coordinator.

Scheckman joined Late Night With David Letterman in March 1982, a month after the show debuted on NBC. The writers called on Scheckman so often, he was given a full-time job as film coordinator.
“If 20 minutes before tape time, the writers suddenly came up with a bit that required film of a monkey washing a cat, Shecky knew where to find it,” writer Mark Evanier wrote on his blog.
When Letterman moved to CBS in 1993, Scheckman came along and remained with the Late Show through its 2015 conclusion. For those 33-plus years, his stuff was referred to as “Shecky Footage,” Letterman archivist Don Giller pointed out in a tribute post on YouTube.
As did many Letterman behind-the-scenes staffers, Scheckman often wound up in front of the camera, playing, for example, Elvis Presley; a naked man in the shower with a copy machine; a fan of Star Wars and Pokémon; and himself, getting shot by Bruce Willis (“Yippee ki yay, Shecky!!”), as seen in another tribute video.

Tributes from Mark Evanier and Leonard Maltin.

Otis Taylor, of the Kansas City Chiefs.

Over an 11-year career that began in 1965, when Kansas City was one of the top teams in the American Football League, Taylor was one of quarterback Len Dawson’s key offensive targets. (Dawson died last year at 87.) Tall and acrobatic with soft hands, he was the prototype for the big receivers who would come to dominate the position.
In 1966, his breakout season, Taylor caught 58 passes for 1,297 yards, an average of 22.4 yards a catch. Five years later, after the A.F.L.’s merger with the N.F.L was finalized, Taylor led the league with 1,110 receiving yards, and United Press International named him the N.F.L.’s player of the year.

…

When the Chiefs faced the Vikings in Super Bowl IV on Jan. 11, 1970, it was their second appearance in the championship game. They had lost to the Green Bay Packers, 35-10, in the first Super Bowl.
The Vikings were 13 ½-point favorites, but the Chiefs handled them easily. Kansas City was leading, 16-7, late in the third quarter when Dawson tossed a short pass to Taylor. He shook off a tackle from Earsell Mackbee, a cornerback; faked Karl Kassulke, a safety; and ran in for a 46-yard touchdown. Their 23-7 victory would be the Chiefs’ only Super Bowl win until 2020; they won the championship again last month.
“That’s it, boys!” Chiefs coach Hank Stram said gleefully from the sideline. “Otis!”

…

In his rookie season, when he started four of Kansas City’s 14 games, he caught 26 passes for 446 yards. He emerged as a star the next season, and over his career he was chosen for the Pro Bowl three times and was a first-team All-Pro twice.
He caught a total of 410 passes in his career for 7,306 yards, with 57 touchdowns. He ranks third in Chiefs history in receiving yards, after Tony Gonzalez and Travis Kelce.

Posted in Books, Heroism, History, Music, Nazis, NFL, Obits, Sports, TV | 1 Comment »

More firings!

Friday, March 10th, 2023

Well, really, only one, and oddly not men’s (or women’s) college basketball.

Chuck Fletcher out as GM of the Philadephia Flyers.

The Flyers, currently 24-30-11, went 141-144-43 (.495 points percentage) overall under Fletcher. They only reached the playoffs once, in the 2020 season. Three of those seasons were impacted by COVID-19, including that playoff season when the Flyers racked up a 41-21-7 record and came up one game short of reaching the conference finals.
Things quickly started to go downhill during the 2020-21 season, though, as the Flyers, who entered that season with lofty expectations, finished sixth of eight teams in their division and missed the playoffs. Last season was even worse, as the Flyers’ .372 points percentage was the second-worst in franchise season. The team also suffered through two 10-plus game losing streaks, including a franchise-record 13-game skid, while suffering a slew of injuries that resulted in over 500 man-games lost.

I have no joke here, I just like saying “man-games”.

Edited to add: Well, spoke too soon.

Mike Anderson out as men’s basketball coach of St. John’s.

St. John’s finished eighth in the Big East with its worst NET ranking (98) under his watch and a 2-14 record in Quad 1 and 2 games.
Over Anderson’s final two seasons, St. John’s went 3-22 in Quad 1 games and 2-14 against ranked opponents.

Side note: St. John’s is rumored to be looking at Rick Pitino as a new coach.

Which leads me to side note #2: “How an FBI agent’s wild Vegas weekend stained an investigation into NCAA basketball corruption”.

Also: Josh Pastner out as men’s basketball coach at Georgia Tech. Seven seasons, 109-114 overall and 51-78 in conference.

Pastner’s tenure will be remembered for the 2021 ACC championship – Tech’s first since 1993 – and his seemingly endless enthusiasm and positive energy. He spoke of how he didn’t see the glass as half full, but instead overflowing.
He was generous with his time and happily served as an ambassador for the institute. On behalf of the ticket office, he called fans to help sell season tickets and even personally answered emails from fans telling him that he should resign.

Posted in Firings, Sports | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: March 10, 2023.

Friday, March 10th, 2023

Robert Blake. LAT. THR.

Yes, yes, “Baretta” and Bonny Lee Bakley. Also: “The Court of Last Resort”, “The F.B.I.”, “Electra Glide in Blue”, and “12 O’Clock High” among other credits. I’ve seen “In Cold Blood” but it was a long time ago. (I think I actually rented it on VHS.) I’d like to see it again: my recollection is that it was an excellent adaptation of what I consider to be a very good book, with some astonishing cinematography.

I can’t tell if Blake was the last surviving “Our Gang” member or not. If he wasn’t, he was certainly pretty darn near being the last one.

(And on a side note: “Fred” was actually played by two different Triton cockatoos: “Lala” and “Weird Harold”. “Weird Harold” was a “stunt double” that they only used when “Fred” was flying. I don’t know if either one is still alive, but the San Diego Zoo website claims that, with proper care, cockatoos can live anywhere from 60 years to a full century.)

The Reno Air Races. At least, in their present form. (Hattip to FotB RoadRich.)

The first major step in its demise happened Thursday when the Reno-Tahoe Airport Authority’s board of trustees voted unanimously to authorize its president and CEO, Daren Griffin, to negotiate final terms for the event.
It calls for the event this year from Sept. 13 to 17 to be the final air race at Reno-Stead Airport, with an air show in 2024 to celebrate its 60th anniversary.

But:

Although the Stead location is off the table, the Reno Air Racing Association – which organizes the event – sent out an email Thursday afternoon saying, “We are committed to finding a new location so that the event can continue. In fact, we are currently exploring several other possible locations to host the event in the future but it starts with making this year’s event the biggest and most successful it can be.”
Among the challenges cited in this decision was an increase in insurance costs for the event from $780,000 to $1.3 million and regional growth that makes hosting it at Reno-Stead Airport more challenging.

I’ve been to Reno fairly recently, but have never been to the air races. (Always wanted to go, though.) I hope they find a new location. But I’m having a lot of trouble, just based on what I saw when I was in the area, visualizing a location that has the required infrastructure and space to support all those planes, as well as having enough hotels/motels/campgrounds to house the crowd coming in for the races. Perhaps the plan is to move to another location in Nevada? Or out of Nevada? I have a vague memory that there was talk about doing air races in South Texas some time ago…

Posted in 1970s, Birds, Law, Movies, Obits, Planes, Sports, TV | 1 Comment »

Firings watch.

Thursday, March 9th, 2023

Playing catch-up here. Sorry for drawing heavily on the Entertainment and Sports Programming Network, but I’m having trouble finding better links.

Patrick Ewing out as head basketball coach of Georgetown. Six years, 75-109.

Mark Fox out as head coach of the California Golden Bears. Four seasons:

The Golden Bears finished their season Wednesday with a first-round Pac-12 tournament loss to Washington State that dropped them to 3-29 on the season. They went 2-18 in Pac-12 play.

Mark Adams resigned as head coach of the Texas Tech men’s basketball team. I’m calling this a “firing” because he was suspended eight days ago for making an “inappropriate, unacceptable, and racially insensitive comment.”

According to the school, Adams was encouraging a player to be more receptive to coaching and “referenced Bible verses about workers, teachers, parents, and slaves serving their masters.” Adams apologized to the team immediately after the comment, the school said.

Jim Boeheim out as men’s basketball coach of Syracuse. This one is weird: I can’t tell if it is a firing or a retirement. It feels like a “mutually agreed” retirement.

47 seasons, 1,015-441 overall in his career, and the second best record as a Division I coach. (Mike Krzyzewski is the record holder.)

Posted in Firings, Sports | Comments Closed

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