Archive for the ‘Sports’ Category
Firings watch.
Friday, February 2nd, 2024Well. Well well well. Well.
Thursday, February 1st, 2024I’ve said before that I have a high bar for linking to ESPN. This clears that bar, especially since I think the story is kind of buried.
“How fears over CTE and football outpaced what researchers know”.
Nut graph:
Beginning of a CTE backlash? Or ESPN positioning themselves for a possible partial buyout from the NFL?
TMQ Watch: January 30, 2024.
Tuesday, January 30th, 2024So, it has come to this. Kansas City and San Francisco. Again.
We’re a little bit disappointed, but honestly, Detroit has nothing to be ashamed of this season. They played well, and we hope this continues next year.
In other news, it’s Baltimore, gentlemen. The football gods will not save you.
After the jump, this week’s Tuesday Morning Quarterback (which you won’t be able to read in its entirety unless you subscribe to “All Predictions Wrong”, which is the actual title of Gregg Easterbrook’s Substack)…
Firings watch.
Wednesday, January 24th, 2024No big firings still, but a few coordinators lost their jobs. I’m playing catch-up here, so please forgive the ESPN links.
Vic Fangio has been let go as defensive coordinator of the Miami Dolphins, supposedly by “mutual decision”.
Joe Barry fired as defensive coordinator of the Green Bay Packers. That’s the Green Bay Packers who made it as far as the divisional round of the playoffs.
TMQ Watch: January 23, 2024.
Tuesday, January 23rd, 2024Last week, we quoted TMQ:
Final score: Detroit 31, Tampa Bay 23. What’s the pace now, Gregg?
(To be honest, we don’t have a lot of faith in Detroit beating San Francisco. But, as FotB pigpen51 notes, “On any given Sunday…“. Stranger things have happened. And we’d love to see Detroit in the Superb Owl.)
After the jump, this week’s Tuesday Morning Quarterback (which you won’t be able to read in its entirety unless you subscribe to “All Predictions Wrong”, which is the actual title of Gregg Easterbrook’s Substack)…
Firings watch.
Tuesday, January 23rd, 2024Adrian Griffin out as head coach of the Milwaukee Bucks. I’ve been having intermittent problems with archive.is again, so here’s the ESPN link as well.
This was his first year coaching (he was hired over the summer) and the team is currently 30-13.
Dave Heeke out as athletic director of the Arizona Wildcats.
(TMQ Watch is about 90% done, and will be going up later. It would be going up now, but I have two breaking news stories to do.)
Quick firings watch.
Wednesday, January 17th, 2024The NFL firings will continue until morale improves. But none of the rumored really big firings have happened yet.
Alex Van Pelt out as offensive coordinator of the Cleveland Browns. Also out: running backs coach Stump Mitchell and tight ends coach T.C. McCartney.
Yeah, I’m not sure Van Pelt was the issue here…
Pete Carmichael Jr. out as offensive coordinator in New Orleans. Also out: “Senior offensive assistant” Bob Bicknell and wide receivers coach Kodi Burns.
Obit watch: January 17, 2024.
Wednesday, January 17th, 2024Professor Peter Schickele, of the University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople.
Damn it.
I was a big fan of Prof. Schickele and his interpretations of P.D.Q. Bach when I was younger. I still am, but I was when I was younger too. (If it’s been a while since I bought a PDQ Bach album, well, it’s been a minute since I bought any albums.)
Fun fact: he stole Philip Glass’s woman. (Well, okay, only sort of. You’ll have to read the obit for the full story. And that is supposedly a NYT “gift” link: please let me know if you have a problem.)
Worth noting: he wrote the score for “Silent Running”.
Crucially, there was the music, which betrayed a deeply cerebral silliness that was no less silly for being cerebral. Mr. Schickele was such a keen compositional impersonator that the mock-Mozartean music he wrote in P.D.Q.’s name sounded exactly like Mozart — or like what Mozart would have sounded like if Salieri had slipped him a tab or two of LSD.
Designed to be appreciated by novices and cognoscenti alike, P.D.Q.’s music is rife with inside jokes and broken taboos: unmoored melodies that range painfully through a panoply of keys; unstable harmonies begging for resolutions that never come; variations that have nothing whatever to do with their themes. It is the aural equivalent of the elaborate staircases in M.C. Escher engravings that don’t actually lead anywhere.
True story: once upon a time, I had just bought the new Schickele recording of a recently discovered P.D.Q. Bach work. Lawrence and I were sitting around our apartment listening to it when a friend came over for a visit. Said friend was (like us) a big fan of Glass and other minimalist composers. So we told our friend we had a new Philip Glass recording, and we wanted to play the first track for him.
He was fooled. Right up to the point where the slide whistle came in.
I was lucky enough to see him in performance…
…when he could still climb down a rope.
“They were playing a record in the store,” Mr. Schickele recalled in a 1997 interview for the NPR program “All Things Considered.” “It was a sappy love song. And being a 9-year-old, there’s nothing worse, of course. But all of a sudden, after the last note of the song, there were these two pistol shots.”
That song, he learned, was Mr. Jones’s “A Serenade to a Jerk.”
“I’ve always felt that those pistol shots changed my life,” Mr. Schickele continued. “That was the beginning of it all for me.”
Prof. Schickele also gave me a quote I have been known to use from time to time:
“Truth is just truth – you can’t have opinions about truth.”
John Brotherton, owner and pitmaster at Brotherton’s Black Iron Barbecue. The Saturday Dining Conspiracy has been there twice, and eaten there once. That’s not a shot at Mr. Brotherton, just a statement of reality. When you run a really good barbecue restaurant (which Brotherton’s is), your customers run the risk of the barbecue selling out before they get there.
Dejan Milojević, assistant coach for the Golden State Warriors. He was 46.
Lynne Marta, actress. Other credits include “The Misadventures of Sheriff Lobo”, “The F.B.I.”, and “Then Came Bronson”.
Some followups: Tom Shales in the NYT. And an appreciation of him by one of the NYT writers.
Nice obit for Terry Bisson by Michael Swanwick.
Michael Swanwick also has a touching piece up about his friend of 50 years, Tom Purdom, which I encourage you to go read.
TMQ Watch: January 16, 2024.
Tuesday, January 16th, 2024Last week, we observed that we hadn’t noticed a lot of “cold coach = victory!” this season.
What’s this week’s TMQ headline?
TMQ: Cold Coach = Victory!
Sigh.
After the jump, this week’s Tuesday Morning Quarterback (which you won’t be able to read in its entirety unless you subscribe to “All Predictions Wrong”, which is the actual title of Gregg Easterbrook’s Substack)…
Obit watch: January 12, 2024.
Friday, January 12th, 2024Russell Hamler, the last surviving member of Merrill’s Marauders.
…
The dense bamboo, tangled vines and banyan trees of the jungle, where men marched single-file in stifling tropical heat and humidity, was as much an enemy as the Japanese. Dysentery and malaria were endemic and rendered many men unfit for combat.
Mr. Hamler trekked until he wore holes in his boots, then walked on bare feet before receiving new footwear in one of the parachute drops, he recalled in an interview published in 2022 with Carole Ortenzo, a retired Army colonel and a member of Mr. Hamler’s extended family. Leeches sucked blood from his limbs and bugs “bored into your arms,” he recalled.
The Army supplied mostly K-rations, providing just 2,830 calories a day to men who were burning far more energy. Famished soldiers, Mr. Hamler recounted, dropped grenades into rivers, skimmed the dead fish and cooked them in their helmets.
“There had to be absolute silence at night in the jungle because any noise invited shelling from the Japanese,” Mr. Hamler said. Pairs of men dug foxholes nearby so one could sleep while his buddy stood sentry. When it was time to switch roles, the sentry tugged a rope attached to the sleeping man to wake him without uttering a sound.
…
…
In May 1944, three months after the Marauders entered Burma, the airstrip in the town of Myitkyina, the mission’s key objective, fell to the Americans and Chinese troops who had reinforced them. In August, the heavily fortified town itself was captured. The Marauders were disbanded one week later. All told, the unit suffered 93 combat fatalities in Burma and 30 deaths from disease. Another 293 men were wounded and eight were missing. Most startling, an additional 1,970 men at one point were hospitalized with sicknesses, including 72 with what was described as “psychoneurosis.”
Mr. Hamler had been evacuated after the battle of Nhpum Ga in April to northern India, where he spent five weeks recuperating in a hospital. He was transferred back home to Pennsylvania and served as a military policeman until he was discharged in December 1945. He was awarded a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star.
He was 99.
It has been a bad few days for writers.
Lawrence sent over a report that David J. Skal died after a car accident on January 1st. I can’t find a trustworthy link for this, though it is confirmed by Wikipedia and the SF Encyclopedia.
Skal was a prominent cultural critic, who specialized in the horror genre. I was a pretty big fan of what I’ve read of his work: I particularly liked Hollywood Gothic: The Tangled Web of Dracula from Novel to Stage to Screen and Dark Carnival: The Secret World of Tod Browning, but I feel like just about anything he wrote is worth picking up. (I haven’t read his Claude Rains book yet. I actually didn’t know he’d written one.)
He also appears in a lot of DVD commentary tracks. His Wikipedia entry has a good list. And he was from Garfield Heights, so he counts as another good Cleveland boy.
Terry Bisson, prominent SF and fantasy writer, although that may be minimizing his work somewhat.
Three things I want to link to:
- “They’re Made Out Of Meat”, a Bisson story that I find absolutely hilarious.
- Michael Swanwick’s profile of Terry Bisson.
- I didn’t know that the New Yorker had profiled him, but they did back in October.
(This is another obit where reliable links have been hard to find, and a second one Lawrence tipped me off to.)
Edward Jay Epstein, writer who the NYT describes as a “professional skeptic”. His first book was Inquest: The Warren Commission and the Establishment of Truth which started out as his master’s thesis:
His book raised doubts about the commission’s finding that Kennedy was killed by a lone assassin, basing them largely on what Mr. Epstein considered serious deficiencies in the panel’s investigation. “Inquest” was published a few months before “Rush to Judgment” by Mark Lane, another in a tsunami of books that suggested that the commission had been hampered by time constraints, by limited resources and access, and by Justice Warren’s demand for unanimity to make its conclusions more credible.
“It was the only master’s thesis I know of that sold 600,000 copies,” Professor Hacker, who now teaches at Queens College, said in a phone interview.
…
Bud Harrelson, shortstop for the Mets. (Hattip to pigpen51 on this.)
Harrelson played in the major leagues for 16 seasons, 13 with the Mets; he appeared in 1,322 games with the team, the fourth most in franchise history. (Ed Kranepool tops the list with 1,853 games played, followed by David Wright and Jose Reyes.)
Standing 5 feet 10 inches and weighing between 145 and 155 pounds at varying times, he wasn’t much of a threat at the plate. He had a .236 career batting average and hit only seven home runs. But he possessed outstanding range in the field and a strong arm. He won a National League Gold Glove Award in 1971 for his fielding, appeared in two All-Star Games and was inducted into the Mets’ Hall of Fame in 1986.
He played on the 1969 “Miracle Mets” team, and famously got into a brawl with Pete Rose in 1973.
Adan Canto. THR. IMDB.
Georgina Hale, British actress. Other credits include “The Bill”, “Doctor Who”, several “T.Bag” TV movies, and “Voyage of the Damned”.
Brian McConnachie, comedy writer and occasional actor.
Tracy Tormé. I usually don’t do obits for celebrity children just because they are celebrity children, but Mr. Tormé seems to have carved out a niche for himself as a TV and film writer.
Firings watch.
Thursday, January 11th, 2024One sort-of firing, one not a firing but noteworthy.
Bill Belichick out as head coach in New England. Everyone was expecting this, but it seems more like a firingnation:
…
As I’ve said before, the man has nothing left to prove. Does he try to go someplace else and pick up the 15 wins he needs to pass Shula? That’s the speculation, but I figure it will take two to three years at least to get 15 wins. It isn’t like he’s going to another team that’s as good as the Patriots were: I’d expect five win seasons at best to start with.
And Nick Saban out in Alabama in what seems like a genuine retirement.
Milk for the Khorne flakes!
Wednesday, January 10th, 2024More from the NFL firings front:
Contrary to reports the other day, “Wink” Martindale is officially not out as defensive coordinator for the New York Football Giants.
Yet.
Current reports are saying he’s furious with the organization, and (as noted above) “cursed out” head coach Brian Daboll after his people were fired. But he hasn’t officially resigned or been fired at this point.
He’s got one year left on his contract. If he’s fired, the Football Giants would owe him $3 million. If he resigns (and there’s apparently interest in his services from the Rams and Eagles) they don’t owe him anything. So I’m not sure why they would block him from joining another team, unless it is just pure spite.
Edited to add: “sources” are reporting that da Bears are firing offensive coordinator Luke Getsy, but keeping Matt Eberflus. Given the situation with the Winkster, I’m looking at “sources say” with a bit of skepticism.
Also “out” according to “sources”: quarterbacks coach Andrew Janocko, wide receivers coach Tyke Tolbert, running backs coach Omar Young and assistant tight ends coach Tim Zetts.
Edited to add 2: both the NYPost and ESPN are reporting that the Winkster is officially out, by “mutual decision”. Which apparently translates to: they don’t have to pay him, and he’s free to sign with some other team.
Meanwhile, Pete Carroll is out as coach of the Teattle Teahawks…I mean, Seattle Seahawks. This sounds like one of those firingnations:
He had been saying that he planned to coach in 2024 as late as Monday. ESPN. 137-89-1 overall, 10 playoff wins. But they were 9-8 and missed the playoffs this year.