Stolen by me from my beloved and indulgent aunt:
Edited to add: I went through this list of Cleveland Browns starting quarterbacks and tried to come up with a count. I may be off, but I didn’t come up with 59.
I came up with 64.
Archive for the ‘NFL’ Category
Norts spews.
Friday, September 9th, 2022CleCon!
Tuesday, September 6th, 2022That’s Cleveland content, for my peeps in Ohio.
Daniel Stashower (The Beautiful Cigar Girl) has a new book out: American Demon: Eliot Ness and the Hunt for America’s Jack the Ripper, about the Cleveland Torso Murders.
He also has a good piece up at CrimeReads tied to the book and his family history in Cleveland. I had no idea he was a good Cleveland boy.
I’m probably going to wait to buy this one, but that has nothing to do with Mr. Stashower, and more to do with the fact that I’ve read a fair amount about Eliot Ness and the hunt for the torso murderer. That includes a good write-up in Bill James’s Popular Crime and (I think) the original version of In the Wake of the Butcher: Cleveland’s Torso Murders.
On the lighter side, Field of Schemes has a good piece up on the quest for a new Browns stadium:
As I’ve said before, FoS runs a little left for my taste, but the one thing we agree on is opposition to giving money to sports teams.
(For the record, my Cleveland relatives who are sports fans informed me that they have given up on the Browns this year, as they are completely disgusted with their handling of the Watson debacle. I think this also means I can make jokes about the Browns without feeling guilty.)
This is stretching the definition of “Cleveland content” a little bit: Cedar Point is about an hour from Cleveland, but that’s close enough that a good number of Clevelanders go there. Anyway, Cedar Point is shutting down the Top Thrill Dragster coaster.
The Top Thrill Dragster gained fame for reaching speeds of 120 mph in just 3.8 seconds…
At the time it opened in 2003, it was the tallest and fastest roller coaster in the world. But it was later eclipsed by the Kingda Ka ride at Six Flags Great Adventure in New Jersey.
The coaster had been closed since last August, after a woman was badly injured. Top Thrill Dragster entry on Wikipedia.
Loser update update.
Friday, September 2nd, 2022The NFL regular season begins Thursday, September 8th.
The loser update will return on Tuesday, September 13th (since we have to wait for the results of the Monday night game).
In honor of great and good friend of the blog, pigpen51, we promise that we will try to avoid Detroit Lions jokes as much as possible this year.
In honor of great and good friend of the blog, Manhattan Infidel (who recently returned to blogging), we promise that we will try to avoid New York Football Giants jokes as much as possible this year.
Obit watch: August 24, 2022.
Wednesday, August 24th, 2022Len Dawson, one of the greats. NYT.
…
…
In 1987, Dawson was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio, just 20 miles from his childhood home of Alliance, Ohio. Dawson, inducted into the Chiefs Hall of Fame in 1979, also was selected 1972 NFL Man of the Year, an award that honors a player’s contributions both on the field and in the community.
Dawson’s work as a broadcaster was recognized in 2012, when he received the Pete Rozelle Radio-Television Award from the Pro Football Hall of Fame, 25 years after he was enshrined as a player. Dawson, Frank Gifford, Dan Dierdorf and John Madden are the only members of the Pro Football Hall of Fame who also received the Rozelle Award, which recognizes “longtime exceptional contributions to radio and television in professional football.”
…
…
More important to Dawson was the contribution he and the Chiefs played in Kansas City, a town searching for its major-league identity.
“The games themselves don’t mean that much,” he said. “You tend to forget the details. But our success was important to Kansas City. I like to think our football team played a part in changing the minds of people about Kansas City. That is the most significant thing to me.”
Tim Page, Vietnam war photographer. (Alt link.)
A freelancer and a free spirit whose Vietnam pictures appeared in publications around the world during the 1960s, he was seriously wounded four times, most severely when a piece of shrapnel took a chunk out of his brain and sent him into months of recovery and rehabilitation.
Mr. Page was one of the most vivid personalities among a corps of Vietnam photographers whose images helped shape the course of the war — and was a model for the crazed, stoned photographer played by Dennis Hopper in “Apocalypse Now.”
Michael Herr, in his 1977 book “Dispatches,” called him the most extravagant of the “wigged-out crazies” in Vietnam, who “liked to augment his field gear with freak paraphernalia, scarves and beads.”
…
He published a dozen books, including two memoirs, and most notably “Requiem” a collection of pictures by photographers on all sides who had been killed in the various Indochina wars.
Issued in 1997 and co-authored by his fellow photographer Horst Faas, it was a memorial that he considered one of his most important contributions. The collection was put on permanent display in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.
Requiem: By the Photographers Who Died in Vietnam and Indochina (affiliate link to used copies on Amazon). I’ve mentioned it before, but I think this is a great book.
His closest encounter with death came in April 1969 when he stepped out of a helicopter to help offload wounded soldiers and was hit with shrapnel when a soldier near him stepped on a mine.
He was pronounced dead at a military hospital, then was revived, then died and was revived again, finally recovering enough to be transferred to the United States, where he endured months of rehabilitation and therapy before picking up his cameras and heading back to work.
During this time, in an event that consumed much of his later life, two fellow photographers headed on motorcycles down an empty road in Cambodia in search of Khmer Rouge guerrillas and never returned.
Over the following decades, Mr. Page made repeated forays into the Cambodian countryside in a futile search for the remains of the two men, Sean Flynn and Dana Stone.
This goes unmentioned in the obit, and isn’t strictly relevant, but I find it an interesting historical footnote: Sean Flynn was Errol Flynn’s son (by his first wife, Lili Damita). To the best of my knowledge, Mr. Flynn and Mr. Stone have never been found: “In 1984, Flynn’s mother had him declared dead in absentia.”
Personal indulgence: Doris Emily Bedford Gerlat. She was the mother of my beloved and indulgent Uncle Allan (who is married to my beloved and indulgent Aunt Cheryl: the two of them are responsible for the Major Award among other things).
Obit watch: June 23, 2022.
Thursday, June 23rd, 2022Obit watch: June 22, 2022.
Wednesday, June 22nd, 2022Jaylon Ferguson, linebacker for the Baltimore Ravens. He was 26.
Maureen Arthur. Beyond “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying”, she was also in “The Love God?” as “Evelyn Tremaine” (the wife/cover girl of pornographer “Osborn Tremaine”). Other credits include “Kolchak: The Night Stalker”, “Night Gallery”, “Mork & Mindy”, “CPO Sharkey”, and “Get Smart”.
Obit watch: June 2, 2022.
Thursday, June 2nd, 2022Marion Barber III, of the Dallas Cowboys. (He also spent one season with Chicago.) He was 38.
Barber led the Cowboys in rushing for three consecutive seasons. The highlight of his time with the club came in 2007, when he rushed for 975 yards with 10 touchdowns and was named to the Pro Bowl for a Dallas team that compiled a 13-3 record.
Barber finished his career with 4,780 rushing yards and 53 touchdowns. He caught 179 passes for another 1,330 yards and six touchdowns.
Krishna Kumar Kunnath, aka “KK”, Bollywood singer. He was 53.
KK had been performing in an auditorium packed with college students when, after singing his last song of the evening, cameras caught him wiping his brow as he was led offstage in a hurry.
He was declared dead at a hospital soon after. The cause was not yet known, his publicist said.
Obit watch: May 20, 2022.
Friday, May 20th, 2022Elspeth Barker, novelist.
She wrote one book: “O Caledonia”.
The book recounts the short, unhappy life of a girl named Janet, who, like Ms. Barker, grew up half-feral in a neo-Gothic castle in rural Scotland, avoiding people and befriending jackdaws. Both faced constant harassment from local boys, and both sought refuge in foreign languages and books.
Though the novel opens with Janet newly dead, murdered on a staircase, it is full of life, energized by Ms. Barker’s thistle-sharp eye for natural detail: She writes of mist that “floats in steaming filaments off the glens” and of Janet shaking “wet honeysuckle over her face.”
“O Caledonia,” her only novel, was a hit among readers and critics. It sold widely in Europe and won a number of minor British literary awards, including the Scottish Book Prize, and was shortlisted for a major one, the Whitbread Book Award (now the Costa Book Award).
To be honest, I probably would have let this get past me, if it wasn’t for this line from the obit:
On a totally unrelated note, I don’t have a good place to put this, so I’m sticking it here.
Horridge, who spent 25 years as the Houston Oilers’ mascot they called Roughneck, died at the age of 86, according to KPRC2’s Randy McIlvoy.
Horridge always wore a Columbia blue shirt over his shoulder pads with a shiny chrome hardhat emblazoned with the Oilers’ oil derrick logo and he carried a 48-inch rig wrench, which he used to implore the Astrodome crowd to make some noise.
Before the Oilers’ 1979 AFC Championship Game in Pittsburgh, Horridge told The Washington Post that he used to carry a plastic wrench with him at games, but he switched to a real one that weighed 44 pounds after some Steelers fans tried to rough him up in Pittsburgh after the AFC title game the previous season.
Longtime Houston Oilers mascot Art Horridge has passed away at the age of 86. I think all of us who went to games and covered the Oilers remember Art and his passion for the #Oilers @BudsOilers . Thanks to his family for sending these pics to us @KPRC2 pic.twitter.com/78bgxcNZxm
— Randy McIlvoy (@KPRC2RandyMc) May 19, 2022
(Hattip: Lawrence.)
Firings watch.
Friday, May 6th, 2022Las Vegas Raiders interim president Dan Ventrelle is out.
This is kind of interesting because of the circumstances. The Raiders put out a tweet:
— Las Vegas Raiders (@Raiders) May 6, 2022
And that’s all. No press conference, nothing else. Kinda makes you wonder…
Edited to add 5/7: Former interim president Ventrelle is saying that his firing was retaliatory.
…alleging he was fired in retaliation for bringing concerns by multiple employees about hostile workplace conditions within the organization to the NFL.
“I take that responsibility very seriously, which is why multiple written complaints from employees that Mark [Davis] created a hostile work environment and engaged in other potential misconduct caused me grave concern,” Ventrelle said in a statement to the Las Vegas Review-Journal. “When Mark was confronted about these issues he was dismissive and did not demonstrate the warranted level of concern.
“Soon thereafter, I was fired in retaliation for raising these concerns. I firmly stand by my decision to elevate these issues to protect the organization and its female employees.”
He also said he’s hired lawyers and “would not provide further comment at this time”.
Obit watch: April 22, 2022.
Friday, April 22nd, 2022Daryle Lamonica, quarterback for the Oakland Raiders.
He started out playing for the Buffalo Bills in the AFL, behind Jack Kemp. But he couldn’t replace Kemp as the starter, and the Bills traded him to Oakland, where he was pretty successful.
He led the 1967 Raiders to a 13-1 regular-season record and the A.F.L. championship, throwing for 30 touchdowns and 3,228 yards. He passed for two touchdowns in the Super Bowl, which the Raiders lost to the Packers, 33-14.
Lamonica was part of an offense that emphasized precise timing between the quarterback and a receiver running his route. It was designed to create open space in the defense’s secondary, making it especially vulnerable to deep passing plays.
…
Lamonica was selected for the Pro Bowl once with the Bills and four times with the Raiders.
…
Worth noting, because that’s just the kind of hairball I am:
(Previously.)
Guy Lafleur, of the Montreal Canadiens. I’m not a huge hockey fan, but even I’ve heard of Guy Lafleur.
The winger affectionately known as “The Flower” and “The Blonde Demon” played 14 seasons with Montreal (1971-85) and was a cornerstone of five Stanley Cup-winning teams, including in 1977, when he was awarded the Conn Smythe Trophy as playoff MVP. Lafleur was electric on the ice, becoming the first player in league history to produce six consecutive seasons with 50-plus goals and 100-plus points (1974-80).
During the height of his career in the 1970s, Lafleur was a three-time Art Ross Trophy winner as the NHL’s points leader, a two-time Hart Trophy winner as league MVP and a three-time winner of the Lester B. Pearson Award (now known as the Ted Lindsay) as most outstanding player according to the NHL Players’ Association.
Sports obit watch.
Saturday, April 9th, 2022I was going to wait until tomorrow to blog this, but since several people have sent it to me today and it is losing timeliness: Dwayne Haskins, quarterback for the Pittsburgh Steelers. ESPN.
The reports I am currently seeing say he tried to cross an Interstate highway on foot, and was hit by a dump truck. He was 24.
Tomorrow is not promised to anyone…
Also: Rayfield Wright, former offensive lineman for the Dallas Cowboys. He was 76 and had been suffering from dementia since at least 2012.
Referred to as “Big Cat” by teammates, Wright made five Super Bowl appearances in his 13 seasons with the club. He was selected first- or second-team All-Pro in six consecutive seasons and earned a spot on the NFL’s All-Decade team for the 1970s.
Wright was the first offensive lineman in franchise history to earn a spot in the team’s Ring of Honor and the Hall of Fame. He was followed by Larry Allen.
They remain the only two.
Obit watch: February 25, 2022.
Friday, February 25th, 2022Joe Wanenmacher, founder and owner of the Tulsa Arms Show, one of (if not the) largest gun shows in the world.
Mike the Musicologist and I have been lucky enough to attend a few of the Tulsa shows. The obit says that Mr. Wanenmacher had mostly handed off operational responsibilities to his other family members, but he still built the show into what it is today. Our hat is off to him.
(Hattip on this to our great and good friend David Carroll.)
Sandy Nelson, drummer and subject of one of the most interesting obits I’ve read in the NYT recently.
He had a big hit in 1959 with “Teen Beat”, which was based on a drum riff he heard in a strip club:
“While they were looking at these pretty girls in G-strings, guess what I was doing?” he told The Las Vegas Weekly in 2015. “I was looking at the drummer in the orchestra pit.”
“He was doing kind of a ‘Caravan’ beat,” he added, referring to a jazz standard. “‘Bum ta da da dum’ — small toms, big toms. That’s what gave me the idea for ‘Teen Beat.’”
He had a second big hit with “Let There Be Drums” in 1961. In 1963, he had a motorcycle accident and lost part of his right leg: he retrained himself to play the bass with his left leg.
He did a bunch of instrumental albums in the 1960s and 1970s, many of which featured covers:
But he also continued to do experimental work:
His friend and fellow musician Jack Evan Johnson said that Mr. Nelson was especially proud of “The Veebles,” a whimsical five-track concept album released on cassette in 2016 that had an extraterrestrial sound and theme.
“It’s about a race of people from another planet,” he told The Las Vegas Sun in 1996, when the long-gestating project was just beginning to take shape. “They’re gonna take over the Earth and make us do nothing but dance, sing and tell dumb jokes.”
(I checked: there was a CD version of this, but it is out of print. Amazon and Apple Music do not show a digital version, though some of Mr. Nelson’s other work is available from both.)
Mr. Nelson acknowledged that he had not handled his early success well.
“I spent most of the money on women and whiskey, and the rest I just wasted,” he told The Review-Journal.
…
Yes. He dug a cave in his backyard.
The project took him 12 years.
“I got a ‘cave tour’ once,” Mr. Johnson said by email, “and it was quite something, precarious even — dug down at a very steep angle into the hard desert soil, with no kind of support structure whatsoever and just enough room to scoot down into it for a ways until the room opened up at the bottom.”
“He had an electric keyboard down there,” he added.
Kenny Burrough, wide receiver for the Houston Oilers during the 1970s.
Other than the original “Hot Lips”, credits include a guest spot on an early episode of a minor 1960s SF TV series, “Back to School”, “T.H.E. Cat”, “Coronet Blue”, the legendary “Delgo“, and a whole bunch of other stuff…
…including “Mannix”. (“The Solid Gold Web“, season 2, episode 23. She plays a former love interest of Mannix.)
Norts spews.
Wednesday, February 2nd, 2022The Brian Flores lawsuit against the NFL is mildly interesting, but it is also being well covered in other places, and I don’t know what I can say about the suit itself.
However, there is one aspect of it that I think isn’t getting as much coverage as I’d like:
…
I have to wonder: if paying coaches to lose is a common practice, why haven’t we seen more 0-16 (or 0-17) teams? Is there so much “respect for the game” out there that nobody’s willing to take the offer? Even if you’re going to end up with a #1 draft choice?
Edited to add: Well, this is interesting:
More firings.
Wednesday, January 19th, 2022Ken Norton Jr. out as defensive coordinator for the Teattle Teahawks…I mean, Seattle Seahawks.
Also out: Andre Curtis, “defensive passing game coordinator”.
Firings watch.
Tuesday, January 18th, 2022Mike Mayock out as general manager of the Las Vegas Raiders.
The biggest issue seems to be that Mayock was closely tied with Jon Gruden (I’ve seen him described as “Gruden’s hand-picked choice for GM”) who, as you may recall, got fired in October.