Gersson Rosas out as “President of Basketball Operations” for the Minnesota Timberwolves.
(Hattip: Lawrence.)
Archive for the ‘Sports’ Category
I’m cold, and there are wolves after me.
Thursday, September 23rd, 2021Obit watch: September 21, 2021.
Tuesday, September 21st, 2021Lawrence sent over an obit from – I kid you not – the “Journal of Emergency Medical Services” for actor Tim Donnelly.
He only has 19 credits in IMDB. No “Mannix” but he did appear on the 1960s “Dragnet” multiple times, and also did a guest shot on the good “Hawaii 5-0”. Other credits include “Adam-12”, “Parts: The Clonus Horror”, and “Project U.F.O.”
Why the “Journal of Emergency Medical Services”, though? Mr. Donnelly’s most famous role was “Chet Kelly” in “Emergency”.
That was one of the great ‘staches in 1970s TV.
More seriously, I loved “Emergency” as a child, and I’m sad to see him go. (Kevin Tighe and Randolph Mantooth are both still alive, though.)
FotB RoadRich sent over the obit for George Holliday. Mr. Holliday was the man who filmed the Rodney King beating.
Reuben Klamer. Mr. Klamer was an inventor and toy creator: among other things, he invented “The Game of Life”.
His creations included his own version of the hula hoop and a variation on the Erector Set. He came up with a Pink Panther show car built on an Oldsmobile chassis and rode around in it to promote the “Pink Panther” cartoon series.
He also worked closely with television producers and built props for popular shows, including the Starfleet phaser rifle, which could stun or disintegrate living creatures, for the original “Star Trek” series. (He said he had an agreement for the toy rights to the rifle, but it fell apart and his toy phaser was never produced.) He made a special Napoleon Solo gun for “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.” that was so popular, the gun itself received fan mail. (He successfully created a toy version of that one.)
Anthony Johnson, “Ezal” in “Friday”.
This isn’t exactly an obit, but I think it’s worth noting.
Your loser update: week 2, 2021.
Tuesday, September 21st, 2021NFL teams that still have a chance to go 0-16:
Atlanta
Minnesota
Detroit
New York Football Giants
New York Jets
Indianapolis
Jacksonville
Still early enough in the season that I don’t have much to say yet. Perhaps by next week the picture will come into greater focus.
Your loser update: week 1, 2021.
Tuesday, September 14th, 2021We’re back, baby!
NFL teams that still have a chance to go 0-16:
Atlanta
Minnesota
Detroit
Chicago
Green Bay
Dallas
Washington
New York Football Giants
Baltimore
Cleveland
New England
Buffalo
New York Jets
Indianapolis
Jacksonville
Tennessee
Firings watch.
Monday, September 13th, 2021Well, how about that?
We have our first college football firing, two games into the season.
Clay Helton out at the University of Southern California.
The precipitating incident seems to have been losing to Stanford on Saturday. Helton was 46-24 overall. But his record since 2018 was 19-15, and apparently the usual suspects (boosters) felt like they were consistently underperforming.
Interesting note: Ivan Jasper is going to coach quarterbacks for Navy. Why is this interesting? Jasper was fired as offensive coordinator on Saturday, but Navy’s head coach (Ken Niumatalolo) persuaded the athletic director (Chet Gladchuk) to re-instate him.
Also fired: assistant Billy Ray Stutzmann, who is being let go after his request for a religious exemption to getting the COVID vaccine was rejected.
TMQ Watch watch.
Thursday, September 9th, 2021Since many asking: no Tuesday Morning Quarterback this season either. But I haven’t forgotten how to do it! Am keeping notes (“saving string,” to writers). If my new book out in a week https://t.co/uABXN0D3L7 is a hit that will put me in a TMQ mood for ’22. pic.twitter.com/rgBwow56yP
— Gregg Easterbrook (@EasterbrookG) September 4, 2021
But that’s not going to stop TMQ:
Hell’s Sports Bar about to reopen! No curbside service, you enter all Hell’s-branded properties.
Sunday in Hell’s Sports Bar, Texas and Florida see Houston v. Jax (2020 combined record 5-27) not Steelers v. Bills (2020 combined 27-9). https://t.co/1ffz3pVh6l
— Gregg Easterbrook (@EasterbrookG) September 8, 2021
Yes. Because two teams that had bad records last year, and turnover in the off season, will automatically be playing a bad game to start off the new season.
In other news, the loser update returns Tuesday.
Obit watch: September 7, 2021.
Tuesday, September 7th, 2021Damn.
— David Simon (@AoDespair) September 6, 2021
Michael K. Williams, “Omar” on “The Wire”, “Leonard” in “Hap and Leonard”, “Chalky White” on “Boardwalk Empire”, and lots of other stuff. THR.
Keith McCants. He was picked fourth overall by Tampa Bay in the 1990 draft, but turned into a bust. Tampa Bay let him go after three years, he bounced around a bit (playing with Houston and Arizona) before leaving football, and fell into addiction. He was 53, and apparently died of an overdose.
Jean-Paul Belmondo, legendary French New Wave star. (“Breathless”, among other credits.)
Tony Selby, British actor. (“Doctor Who”, “Eastenders”).
Obit watch: August 25, 2021.
Wednesday, August 25th, 2021Charlie Watts. THR. THR 2. BBC.
I am slightly tempted to make “never call me your drummer again” a “leadership secret of a non-fictional character” – indeed, someone on Hacker News cited this as an example of managing a high-performing team – but I can’t condone punching a cow-orker. Even if they do suffer from “lead singer’s disease”.
Buckie Leach, coach of the US women’s foil team. Lee Kiefer, one of his team members, became the first US woman to win an individual gold at the most recent games.
Mr. Leach was killed in a motorcycle accident.
Lloyd Dobyns Jr., noted NBC news correspondent. He’s another one of those NBC news guys I remember from when I was young.
I intended to note this a few days ago, but it got past me: Igor Oleksandrovych Vovkovinskiy passed away at 38. Mr. Vovkovinskiy was the tallest man in the United States: 7 feet, 8 inches.
Obit watch: August 11, 2021.
Wednesday, August 11th, 2021Alex Cord. He may have been best known as “Archangel” in “Airwolf”, but he had a significant body of work going back to the 1960s. No “Mannix”, but a lot of other cop shows, and multiple appearances on “Fantasy Island”, among other credits.
Patricia Hitchcock. Yes, Alfred’s daughter.
She had a few other credits, but retired in the 1970s.
Tony Esposito, Hall of Fame goalie for the Chicago Blackhawks.
Walter Yetnikoff, legendary head of CBS Records.
In one of his first acts as president, Mr. Yetnikoff somewhat reluctantly let Ron Alexenburg, the head of CBS’s Epic label, sign the Jacksons. Epic had wrested the group from Motown Records (which retained the rights to the group’s original name, the Jackson 5), and though Mr. Yetnikoff wasn’t overly impressed with the Jacksons’ initial albums for Epic, he cultivated a relationship with the group’s key member, Michael, supporting the young singer’s interest in expanding into solo work.
In 1982, that encouragement resulted in “Thriller,” still one of the top-selling albums in history.
…
Unfortunately, he was one of those people who didn’t just have issues: he had a lifetime subscription and a complete run of bound volumes.
…
…
Brian Mulheren. He was the man in the NYPD in the 1970s and 1980s. Specifically, and to quote the NYT, he was a “veteran detective who as an audacious, deft and indefatigable one-man emergency management liaison between City Hall and the New York Police and Fire Departments became known as ‘Mr. Disaster’ and the ‘Night Mayor’…”
Mr. Mulheren played an outsize role for a first-grade detective. He was armed with a gold shield, but his uniform, such as it was — it typically consisted of a rumpled beige trench coat and a crumpled Irish tweed hat — was devoid of the stars and bars that define status on the police force.
Yet by sheer force of personality and the connections he had cultivated, he was deferred to by city commissioners and by police supervisors who outranked him when he arrived, often first, at the scene of a crisis in his black Lincoln Town Car, which was crowned with a forest of antennas that linked him to every emergency radio frequency in the city.
In the 1970s and ’80s, he served as City Hall’s wake-up call when an officer was shot or a firefighter was felled. Before the city established a full-fledged emergency management department, he seamlessly and almost single-handedly coordinated interagency strategies.
“He was one of those rare people who kept the N.Y.P.D. and the Fire Department together,” John Miller, the Police Department’s deputy commissioner for intelligence and counterterrorism, said in an interview. “He basically created the organized response to chaos that we replicated and have used ever since.”
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Mr. Mulheren was credited by Officer Steven McDonald’s family with saving his life when he was shot in Central Park by a teenage bicycle thief in 1986 and rushed in a patrol car to Metropolitan Hospital, where doctors said he was unlikely to survive.
In 2016, Mr. McDonald told Columbia, the Knights of Columbus magazine, that he vividly remembered Mr. Mulheren’s dauntless intervention.
“You might think he’s not going to make it, but we’re going to Bellevue,” Mr. Mulheren announced on his own initiative, according to “New York’s Finest,” a forthcoming book by Michael Daly.
“He had no rank or high station but stepped forward and said, ‘No, he’s not going to die; he just needs a second chance,’” Mr. McDonald recalled. “I believe that was the Holy Spirit speaking through Brian to everyone there. Just like that like they loaded me up on a special ambulance and flew down to Bellevue Hospital, where they saved my life by the grace of God.”
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In another emergency, when a firefighter was overcome and no ambulance was immediately available, Mr. Mulheren was said to have commandeered a city bus, told the passengers to debark and ordered the driver to take the injured man to the hospital.
Serving mostly under Mayors John V. Lindsay, Edward I. Koch and David N. Dinkins, Mr. Mulheren, a police buff since childhood, insinuated himself into the department’s decisions to buy smaller patrol cars to economize on gas; change their color from green, black and white in the early 1970s to “grabber blue” with white accents to make them more visible and less intimidating; modernize lights and sirens; air-condition the cars; and improve radio communications. He also encouraged the Fire Department to requisition a hyperbaric oxygen therapy chamber to treat burn victims.
He was 73 years old, and passed away due to COPD. His family attributes his condition to inhalation of debris at the WTC site after the 2001 attacks.
Bagatelle (#44)
Wednesday, August 11th, 2021I did not give a flying flip at a rolling doughnut about the Olympics. As a matter of fact, I believe they should have been cancelled this year, they should remain cancelled for all time, and cities should use the money to provide free guitar picks for the poor.
So I missed this story last week, but you know it is the kind of thing I can’t pass up, and I don’t think it got a lot of attention.
The coach of the German modern pentathlon team was disqualified on Saturday.
As it happens, “modern pentathlon” is one of the few Olympic sports I care much about: how can you not like a combination of swimming, fencing, running, horses, and shooting? (Plus: Patton. Minus: they are apparently using laser guns these days, instead of real pistols.)
But that’s not why the story is interesting. She was disqualified because…
I believe we have video of the event.
Okay, I’m sorry, that was a cheap joke, but it never gets old. Here is the actual footage:
Bundestrainerin Kim Raisner: "Hau mal richtig drauf. Hau richtig drauf!" Dann schlägt sie selber noch mit der Faust zu (Sekunde 23).@DOSB Das muss Konsequenzen haben.#ARD #Fünfkampf pic.twitter.com/JIBpqEGR6M
— Max Möhrike Ⓥ (@der_veganer) August 6, 2021
Obit watch: August 9, 2021.
Monday, August 9th, 2021It was a busy weekend, and I’ve got a backlog. I hope I don’t miss anybody.
Damn. Said it before, I’ll say it again: “Night Court” was a swell show, and she was part of what made it swell.
Trevor Moore, comedian (“The Whitest Kids U Know”).
Jane Withers, actress.
She did other movie and TV work, including “Giant”, and played “Josephine the Plumber” in the Comet commercials.
Bobby Bowden, football coach.
“When I was at Alabama the bumper stickers read ‘Beat Auburn,’ he recalled in “The Bowden Way” (2001), his book on leadership written with his son Steve. “When I was at West Virginia they read ‘Beat Pitt.’ When I came to F.S.U., the bumper stickers read ‘Beat Anybody.’”
Bowden’s Seminoles beat most everybody. He coached Florida State to national championships in 1993 and 1999 and his teams finished in the top five of the Associated Press rankings every season from 1987 to 2000. The Seminoles were unbeaten in bowl games from 1982 to 1995.
He was, for a period of time, the coach with the most wins in college football. I phrase it that way, though, because this was after the NCAA vacated 111 of Joe Paterno’s victories over the Penn State scandal:
Coach Bowden now ranks second, with 377 career wins.
Paul Cotton, of Poco.
Mr. Cotton joined Poco, replacing the founding member Jim Messina in 1970, just in time to appear on the group’s third studio album, “From the Inside” (1971). Produced by Steve Cropper, the guitarist with the Memphis R&B combo Booker T. & the MGs, the project signaled a new artistic direction for the band, maybe nowhere so much as on the three songs written by Mr. Cotton.
Rooted more in rock and soul than in the country and bluegrass that had hitherto been the group’s primary influences, Mr. Cotton’s sinewy, blues-inflected guitar work and brooding baritone vocals on songs like the ballad “Bad Weather” greatly expanded Poco’s emotional and stylistic palette.
Herbert Schlosser, TV executive. Among other accomplishments: “Saturday Night Live” and “Laugh-In”.
Jon Lindbergh. Yes, he was Charles Lindbergh’s son, but he led an interesting life of his own.
He didn’t go into aviation like his father: instead, he became a pioneer of undersea research.
After college, he did postgraduate work at the University of California San Diego and spent three years as a Navy frogman, working with the Underwater Demolition Team. He appeared as an extra in the television series “Sea Hunt” and had bit parts in a few movies, including “Underwater Warrior” (1958).
He also worked as a commercial deep-sea diver and participated in several diving experiments. They included a 1964 project in the Bahamas called “Man-in-Sea” in which a submersible decompression chamber devised by Edwin Link allowed divers to stay deeper under water for longer periods.
As part of that project, Mr. Lindbergh and Robert Sténuit, a Belgian engineer, set a record by staying in a submersible dwelling for 49 hours at a depth of 432 feet, breathing a mixture of helium and oxygen that allowed them to swim outside the dwelling without harm despite the enormous pressure of the water above. Mr. Sténuit wrote an account of the experiment in the April 1965 issue of National Geographic.
Mr. Lindbergh was also involved in the development and testing of the Navy’s Alvin deep-ocean submersible, which he used during the recovery of the hydrogen bomb in the Mediterranean. An American bomber had hit a refueling tanker in midair and dropped four hydrogen bombs, two of which released plutonium into the atmosphere, though no warheads detonated.
He later helped install Seattle’s water treatment system in icy waters as deep as 600 feet. Finding that he liked the area, he bought a secluded Georgian-style home on Bainbridge Island in the mid-1960s and raised his family there. He later farmed salmon in Puget Sound and in Chile as part of an emerging aquaculture industry and sold the fish to airlines and restaurants.
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Charles Lindbergh lived long enough to see Jon flourish in his career and was relieved that his son had not followed him into aviation. “He removed any burden of his own career from his son’s shoulders,” Mr. Berg wrote in his biography, by telling Jon that much of what had first attracted him to aviation in the 1920s no longer existed.
“Thirty years ago, piloting an airplane was an art,” Charles Lindbergh told his son, but it no longer seemed like an adventure.
Rather than become a flyer, Charles Lindbergh added, “I think I would follow your footprints to the oceans, with confidence that chance and imagination would combine to justify the course I set.”
Nach Waxman. He founded Kitchen Arts and Letters, a Manhattan bookstore specializing in food related books.
In one instance, Mr. Waxman counseled Citibank on its banquet menu for the Venezuelan finance minister; in another, he found Indigenous recipes from New Guinea for the American Museum of Natural History’s dining room during an exhibition on rain forests.
“He could make helpful recommendations, obtain the very cookbook you needed, search for out-of-print editions and discuss the authors,” said Florence Fabricant, a food and wine writer for The New York Times.
Mr. Waxman once said that about two-thirds of his customers were culinary careerists purchasing professional tools. “Knives are one tool,” he told The Times in 1998. “Books are another.”
…
“It’s really the professional business that’s the gratifying business,” Mr. Waxman told The Times in 1995. “People who are expanding their skills and the scope of their work. I will tell you, when the lease was up a few years ago, I gave serious thought to moving the store to a second floor somewhere just to make it a place for motivated people, not casual drop-ins. The people who come here have a language in common.
“Just sitting and selling books is boring,” he said. “It’s making change and putting books in bags. What’s fun is helping people solve their problems.”
Obit watch: August 6, 2021.
Friday, August 6th, 2021Richard Trumka, AFL-CIO president.
J.R. Richard, former pitcher for the Houston Astros. NYT. Entertainment and Sports Programming Network.
Richard, who was part of the Astros’ inaugural Hall of Fame class in 2020, pitched all 10 of his big league seasons with the Astros before his career was cut short when he suffered a stroke while playing catch inside the Astrodome on July 30, 1980.
“He was one of the greatest pitchers we ever had and probably would have been in the Hall of Fame if his career was not cut short,” Richard’s former Astros teammate Enos Cabell said in a statement released by the team. “On the mound, he was devastating and intimidating. Nobody wanted to face him. Guys on the other team would say that they were sick to avoid facing him. This is very sad news. He will be missed.”
Before the stroke, Richard was one of the most dominant pitchers in baseball, leading the league in strikeouts in back-to-back seasons in 1978 and 1979. In that 1979 season – when he set a franchise record with 313 strikeouts, which was broken by Gerrit Cole in 2019 – he also led the National League in ERA at 2.71.