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Obit watch: June 1, 2022.

Wednesday, June 1st, 2022

Lester Piggott, one of the great British jockeys. I don’t know a lot about British horse racing (or Irish horse racing, for that matter, though I can tell you who Shergar was) but even I’d heard of him.

With 30 victories, Piggott holds the record for the most wins by a jockey in the five British Classics races — the Epsom Derby, the 2,000 Guineas Stakes, the 1,000 Guineas, the Oaks Stakes and the St. Leger Stakes — and he is the last British jockey to win his country’s Triple Crown, aboard Nijinsky in 1970.

…

“The way he rode, with an unusually short length of stirrup for a relatively tall man and his bottom high in the air, must have made the horses feel there was no weight on them,” Luck said in a phone interview. “People said to him, ‘Why do you ride with your butt in the air?’ And he said, ‘Well I have to put it somewhere.’”
Luck added, “Piggott ushered in a golden generation of riders in Europe; he was the one they all aspired to.”

Kenny Moore. He sounds like an interesting guy: he was an Olympic marathon runner, an early tester of Bill Bowerman’s shoes (which went on to become Nike), an All-American in cross-country…

…and a long-time Sports Illustrated writer, specializing in track coverage.

“He wasn’t a writer of devices,” Peter Carry, a former executive editor of Sports Illustrated, said in a phone interview. “He was a guy with a real literary bent and a real sense of language. He was quite economical and eloquent at the same time.”

…

George Hirsch, a former publisher of Runner’s World magazine, which Mr. Moore wrote for after he left Sports Illustrated, said that Mr. Moore’s athletic past had enhanced his access to his subjects.
“I can remember when he interviewed someone like Bill Rodgers or Joan Benoit,” Mr. Hirsch said in a phone interview, referring to two elite marathoners, “and he would run with them and see who they were in ways that he couldn’t have done if he had not been an elite runner.”

Charles Siebert, actor. Other credits include “Xena: Warrior Princess”, “Mancuso, FBI”, “And Justice for All”, “Richie Brockelman, Private Eye” (and of course “The Rockford Files”), and “Tarantulas: The Deadly Cargo”.

Posted in Horses, Movies, Obits, Spiders, Sports, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: May 21, 2022.

Saturday, May 21st, 2022

Roger Angell, baseball writer.

Mr. Angell was sometimes referred to as baseball’s poet laureate, a title he rejected. He called himself a reporter. “The only thing different in my writing,” he said, “is that, almost from the beginning, I’ve been able to write about myself as well.”
He disliked sentimentality about sports. “The stuff about the connection between baseball and American life, the ‘Field of Dreams’ thing, gives me a pain,” he once said. “I hated that movie.”
He was alert, however, to what he called the “substrata of nuance and lesson and accumulated experience” beneath baseball’s surface. And his humor flashed above all this.

This is odd, because I always associated him with that “Field of Dreams” school of baseball thought. (I have another name for it, but in deference to the dead and to the sensibilities of my readers, I won’t put that here.) I would occasionally run across a piece by Mr. Angell about baseball in the New Yorker, and…I don’t think I ever finished one.

“It is foolish and childish, on the face of it, to affiliate ourselves with anything so insignificant and patently contrived and commercially exploitative as a professional sports team,” he wrote in his book “Five Seasons” (1977). “What is left out of this calculation, it seems to me, is the business of caring — caring deeply and passionately, really caring — which is a capacity or an emotion that has almost gone out of our lives.”

This is a mildly amusing piece by Bill James that involves the late Mr. Angell slightly.

Like his stepfather, E.B. White, Mr. Angell spent a good deal of time in coastal Maine, where he owned a home on Eggemoggin Reach in Brooklin. Also like his stepfather, Mr. Angell was an enthusiastic consumer of martinis. He composed an essay, “Dry Martini,” that some consider the best on the subject. In it, he admitted that he ultimately moved to vodka from gin because vodka was “less argumentative.”

The “Dry Martini” essay. For some reason, archive.is won’t let me archive it.

This seems a little harsher than my usual obit, and I’m sorry for that. Props to Mr. Angell for living to 101. At the same time, his style of writing was not one I have a lot of sympathy for, and I wonder how far he would have gone if it wasn’t for his family connections.

Posted in Books, Obits, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: May 20, 2022.

Friday, May 20th, 2022

Elspeth 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:

In a 2017 interview with The New York Times, the British novelist Ali Smith called it “one of the best least-known novels of the 20th century.”

On a totally unrelated note, I don’t have a good place to put this, so I’m sticking it here.

Art Horridge.

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.

(Hattip: Lawrence.)

Posted in Books, NFL, Obits, Sports | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: May 19, 2022.

Thursday, May 19th, 2022

Vangelis (Evángelos Odysséas Papathanassíou).

Yeah, yeah, yeah, “Chariots of Fire”, “Blade Runner”…

…in the late ’60s, he found success as a member of the Greek rock band Forminx and then with the progressive group Aphrodite’s Child, which had hits with the single “Rain and Tears” in 1968 and the influential album 666 in 1972.
He enjoyed a partnership with Yes lead singer Jon Anderson, and they released four albums as Jon & Vangelis from 1980 through 1991. (He had been asked to join Anderson’s prog rock band in the wake of keyboardist Rick Wakeman’s departure but declined.)

…

His other big-screen work included Costa-Gavras’ Missing (1982), the Japanese film Antarctica (1983), Roger Donaldson’s The Bounty (1984), Roman Polanski’s Bitter Moon (1992) and Oliver Stone’s Alexander (2004).

How about a musical interlude?

Ray Scott, pioneer of bass fishing as sport.

The idea for a bass fishing tour came to Mr. Scott, then an insurance salesman, when rain cut short a fishing outing with a friend in Jackson, Miss., in 1967. Stuck in his hotel room watching sports on television, he had an epiphany: Why not start the equivalent of the PGA Tour for bass fishing?
He held his first tournament at Beaver Lake, in Arkansas, where 106 anglers paid $100 each to compete over three days for $5,000 in prizes. A second tournament followed that year; in 1968 he formed a membership organization, the Bass Anglers Sportsman Society, or BASS.
In 1971, Mr. Scott started what has become known as the Super Bowl of bass fishing: the Bassmaster Classic, his organization’s annual championship tournament, which he paired with a merchandising expo for manufacturers of bass fishing boats and gear.

…

Mr. Scott was the showman of BASS, the umbrella company for tournaments, magazines and television shows. Easily recognized in his cowboy hat and fringed jackets, Mr. Scott memorably served as the M.C. for tournament weigh-ins, entertaining thousands of fans with his exuberant patter as anglers pulled flopping fish out of holding tanks.
“Now, ain’t that a truly wonderful fish?” he asked one tournament crowd. “How many of you want to see more fish like that? C’mon, let’s hear it for that fish!”

NYT obits for Rosmarie Trapp and Sgt. Maj. John L. Canley.

John Aylward, actor. Other credits include “Stargate SG-1”, “The X-Files”, and “3rd Rock from the Sun”. He also did some theater:

He appeared in stage roles at the Kennedy Center with Kentucky Cycle, and at Lincoln Center with the play City of Conversation. A classically trained actor, Aylward performed everything from Shakespearean roles to farce with plays by Alan Ayckborne, and dramas by David Mamet, Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams.
His standout roles included playing Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman, Richard III, Scrooge in Inspecting Carol and Shelley Levine in Glengarry Glen Ross, a role he played twice.

Marnie Schulenburg, actress. (“One Life to Live”, “As the World Turns”) She was only 37, and died from cancer.

Posted in Fish, Music, Obits, Sports, Theatre, TV | 1 Comment »

You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#89 in a series)

Tuesday, May 17th, 2022

This is one of the oddest hyena watches I’ve ever done. One reason is that I’ve never seen someone accused of “illegal registration of a helicopter”. (As we will see, there’s slightly more to the story than that.)

The city of Anaheim sold land to the Los Angeles Angels for a new stadium. There’s already been one issue with the land sale violating California affordable housing law.

Now, the state attorney general has asked a court to put the deal on hold. Why?

…a detailed FBI affidavit showed {Mayor Harry] Sidhu is under investigation for public corruption, and the attorney general said he does not yet know whether the facts uncovered in the investigation could make the sale illegal.

…

However, FBI special agent Brian Adkins wrote: “I believe Sidhu illustrated his intent to solicit campaign contributions, in the amount of $1,000,000 … in exchange for performing official acts intended to finalize the stadium sale for the Angels.”

…

Adkins also said Sidhu “has attempted to obstruct an Orange County grand jury inquiry into the Angel Stadium deal.” The agent also said he believed there was probable cause that Sidhu “may have engaged in criminal offenses,” including fraud, theft or bribery, making false statements, obstruction of justice and witness tampering.

…

Sidhu, according to the affidavit, met with a witness who was cooperating with the FBI investigation, although the mayor was unaware the person was an FBI source, and coached the witness to lie to the county grand jury about what the two had discussed and when they had discussed it.

Okay, so we’ve got obstruction of justice and witness tampering, as well as bribery. I’m guessing the false statements probably involve lying to the Feds. As for the fraud:

…SIDHU is engaged in an ongoing scheme to commit honest services fraud by sharing confidential information with representatives from the Los Angeles Angels Major League Baseball team (“the Angels”) regarding negotiations related to the City’s sale of Angel Stadium with the expectation of receiving a sizeable contribution to his reelection campaign from a prominent Angels representative.

Where does the helicopter come in?

The evidence, according to the affidavit, also showed Sidhu pursued an Arizona address to register his helicopter, despite the fact that he lived in Anaheim and based the helicopter out of Chino.
Had he registered the helicopter in California, he would have owed $15,888 in sales tax. Had he registered the helicopter in Arizona, he would have owed a $1,025 vehicle tax.

I’d tend to call that “tax fraud” myself, though I also have trouble throwing stones at someone who tries to lower their tax bill (especially in California).

It should be noted that:

  • Mayor Sidhu has not actually been charged with any crimes yet, though the release of the FBI affidavit makes me think this is coming soon.
  • Nobody from the Angels has actually been accused of a crime yet.

The other odd aspect of this story is that I got tipped off to it by Field of Schemes. Neil deMause is a little more to the left than I’d like, but we find common ground in being opposed to giving tax dollars to sports franchises. This is the first actual political corruption story I’ve ever picked up from him, so take a bow, Mr. deMause.

Edited to add 5/18: Well, we have an actual indictment. But not against Mayor Sidhu: against Todd Ament, the former head of the Anaheim Chamber of Commerce.

According to federal officials, Ament – with the assistance of an unnamed political consultant who federal officials describe as a partner at a national public relations firm – devised a scheme to launder proceeds intended for the Chamber through the PR firm into Ament’s bank account, authorities say.
Federal officials say Ament and the PR consultant defrauded a cannabis company that believed it was paying $225,000 for a task force that would craft favorable legislation regarding cannabis.

The way I’m reading this, the charges against Mr. Ament aren’t directly related to Mayor Sidhu or the land deal: but the Feds had Mr. Ament nailed on those charges, and used them as leverage to flip Mr. Ament, who is strongly believed (based on poor document redaction) to be “Cooperating Witness #2” in the Sidhu affidavit.

More from Field of Schemes.

Posted in California Über Alles, Helicopters, Law, Planes, Politics, Sports | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: May 17, 2022.

Tuesday, May 17th, 2022

Maggie Peterson, also known as Maggie Mancuso.

She doesn’t have that many credits in IMDB, but they are interesting. She appeared several times on “The Andy Griffith Show” (and in “Mayberry R.F.D.” as well as “Return to Mayberry”) and did guest shots on “Green Acres”, “The Odd Couple”, and several appearances on “The Bill Dana Show”.

And she was “Rose Ellen Wilkerson”, the long-suffering and slightly dim girlfriend of Don Knotts’s character in “The Love God?”, which both Lawrence and I have written about.

The print edition of “People”, though this does not seem to be official yet. Noted:

Sources told The Post that under Wakeford, People had been selling more than 200,000 copies at the newsstand a week. Since then, newsstand sales have been uneven, with a May 2 Prince Harry cover dipping to about 160,000 copies sold, and a March 14 Lizzo cover cratering to between 125,000- 150,000 copies sold, which is said to be one of the worst selling issues in People’s half-century history.

Katsumoto Saotome, Japanese writer. His major project was six volumes of stories from survivors of the Tokyo firebombing.

Mr. Saotome traced his efforts to document the Tokyo firebombing to his attendance at a lecture given by a well-known history professor in 1970. He recalled asking the professor why the attack air was never mentioned in the same textbooks that described the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. The professor told him that there was little documented evidence about the experiences of those who had lived through the firebombing.
Mr. Saotome decided he would seek out fellow survivors and ask them to share their stories of that terrible night. “I was not a popular writer,” he recalled, “so I had a lot of spare time.”

He also established, using private funds, a memorial museum.

He reserved some of his most potent anger for the Japanese government, which he said should have taken more responsibility for starting the war and compensated survivors of the firebombing. A group of them sued the government in 2007, but Japan’s Supreme Court rejected their claim.
Mr. Saotome said he never forgave his government for awarding Curtis LeMay, the United States Air Force general who had been the architect of the Tokyo air raid, its highest decoration for a foreigner, for helping to establish Japan’s modern air force after the war.

Jürgen Blin, boxer. He was best known for fighting Ali in 1971 (after Ali’s loss to Joe Frazier). Mr. Blin was knocked out in the seventh round.

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

Looks like I picked the wrong week to stop making “Airplane!” references…

Wednesday, May 11th, 2022

Bob Lanier has passed away at 73.

Lanier played 14 seasons with the Detroit Pistons and Milwaukee Bucks and averaged 20.1 points and 10.1 rebounds per game. He is third on the Pistons’ career list in both points and rebounds. Detroit drafted Lanier with the No. 1 overall pick in 1970 after he led St. Bonaventure to the Final Four.
NBA commissioner Adam Silver said Lanier was among the most talented centers in league history and added that his accomplishments went far beyond what he did on the court.
“For more than 30 years, Bob served as our global ambassador and as a special assistant to David Stern and then me, traveling the world to teach the game’s values and make a positive impact on young people everywhere,” Silver said in a statement. “It was a labor of love for Bob, who was one of the kindest and most genuine people I have ever been around.”

While this is sad and tragic, and I don’t want to minimize it, at least Kareem Abdul-Jabbar no longer has to drag him up and down the court for 48 minutes.

(Too soon?)

“I’ve got a serious situation here,” the Cessna Caravan passenger was reportedly heard telling air traffic control about 70 miles north of his final destination. “My pilot has gone incoherent. I have no idea how to fly the airplane.”
“Roger. What’s your position?” a dispatcher responded, according to the outlet.
“I have no idea,” the passenger reportedly said. “I can see the coast of Florida in front of me. And I have no idea.”

Spoiler:

“You just witnessed a couple passengers land that plane,” a controller reportedly said over the radio when the nail-biting saga came to an end.

Posted in Movies, Obits, Planes, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: May 10, 2022.

Tuesday, May 10th, 2022

Lawrence sent over an obit for James R. Olson. He passed away on April 17th, but I haven’t seen anybody else cover this. (THR put up a story literally as I was writing this.) Which is odd, because he had a pretty interesting career before he retired in 1990.

After serving in the U.S. Army, Olson moved to New York to study in Lee Strasberg’s Actor’s Studio. He subsequently starred in several Broadway productions in the 1950s and 1960s, including J.B. (1958), Romulus (1962), The Three Sisters (1964), and Of Love and Remembrance (1967). He also appeared in numerous touring productions throughout North America.

He also did a lot of TV and movie work. He was another one of those actors who hit the NBC Mystery Movie trifecta: appearances on all three of the original series (“McCloud”, “Columbo”, “McMillan and Wife”). Other credits include “Moon Zero Two”, “The Andromeda Strain”, “The Bold Ones: The Lawyers”, “Lancer”, “Ironside”, “The Rookies”, “Police Story”, “The F.B.I.”…

…and “Mannix”. (“Game Plan“, season 8, episode 2. “Odds Against Donald Jordan“, season 2, episode 21.)

Jack Kehler. Other credits include “Karen Sisco”, “NYPD Blue”, “NCIS: Original Recipe”, “NCIS: Los Angeles”, and something called “The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards”.

Midge Decter.

Ms. Decter was in the forefront of an ideologically evolving generation of public intellectuals. Cutting their teeth on leftist politics in the 1930s and ’40s, they settled into anti-communist liberalism in the 1950s and early ’60s. Jolted by the turbulence of the student and women’s movements, they later broke from liberals to embrace a new form of conservatism — championing traditional social values, limited free-market economics and muscular American foreign policies — that reached its zenith in the early 21st century in the administration of President George W. Bush.
Ms. Decter wielded her influence as editor of Harper’s and other magazines, as an author and book editor, and as a political organizer and frequent speaker.

…

Ms. Decter’s ideological shift in the late ’60s stemmed from a rising concern that she expressed in her 2001 memoir, “An Old Wife’s Tale: My Seven Decades in Love and War.” Liberalism, she said, rather than speaking to the common man and woman as it had in the past, was veering off the tracks into “a general assault in the culture against the way ordinary Americans had come to live.”
She and her husband, the writer and fellow former liberal Norman Podhoretz, worried about the effect the new thinking, particularly that of the counterculture, might have on their children and succeeding generations.

Also by way of Lawrence: Adreian Payne, basketball star at Michigan State.

Posted in 1970s, Mannix, Movies, Obits, Sports, Theatre, TV | Comments Closed

No man is an Islander.

Monday, May 9th, 2022

Well, that’s not true. Some men are Islanders.

Not, however, Barry Trotz, who got fired this morning as head coach.

Trotz’s record as Islanders coach was 152-102-34 in the regular season and 28-21 in the playoffs.
The Islanders (37-35-10) had a disastrous season in 2021-22, prompted by a poorly timed COVID-19 outbreak that derailed them following a season-opening 13-game road trip.

Posted in Firings, Sports | Comments Closed

Firings watch.

Friday, May 6th, 2022

Las Vegas Raiders interim president Dan Ventrelle is out.

This is kind of interesting because of the circumstances. The Raiders put out a tweet:

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”.

Posted in Firings, NFL, Sports | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: April 25, 2022.

Monday, April 25th, 2022

For the historical record: Orrin Hatch.

Jim Hartz, NBC news guy and former “Today” host.

Sarah Shulze. She was 21 years old and ran track for the University of Wisconsin.

She earned academic all-Big Ten honors in 2020 and 2021 for cross country and in 2021 while running at Wisconsin.

According to her family, her death was a suicide.

The number for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-TALK (8255). If you live outside of the United States or are looking for other help, TVTropes has a good page of additional resources.

Laura Hales. I am not a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, nor had I heard of Ms. Hales previously. However, I have a lot of respect for people who explore the difficult parts of their religion.

Ms. Hales was a writer and podcaster.

The Haleses maintained a website, Joseph Smith’s Polygamy, devoted to examining that contentious aspect of the history of the church and its 19th-century founder. In 2015 they co-wrote a book on the subject, “Joseph Smith’s Polygamy: Toward a Better Understanding.” In 2016 Ms. Hales compiled and edited “A Reason for Faith: Navigating LDS History and Doctrine,” a book of essays by church scholars whose chapters include “Race, the Priesthood and Temples,” “Joseph Smith’s Practice of Plural Marriage” and “Homosexuality and the Gospel.”
But Ms. Hales found an even bigger audience when, in 2017, she created the podcast “Latter-day Saint Perspectives,” which she recorded, edited and hosted. In 130 episodes, before she closed it out last year, the podcast brought on experts to talk about aspects of church history and doctrine.
Some of the episodes were light, like one on Joseph Smith’s dog. But most took a serious look at topics that might be confusing or troubling to church members. “Homosexuality and the Gospel,” “The L.D.S. Church and the Sugar Industry” and “A Global History of Blacks and Mormonism” were among the episode titles.
The church has long been criticized by outsiders and former members for aspects of its history, doctrine and culture. But Ms. Hales, a lifelong church member, approached the subjects from “a faithful but not necessarily devotional perspective,” as she put it in the podcast’s final episode, last May.

…

Ms. Hales took up many topics in her writing and on her podcast, but she dealt with polygamy so often that in 2015 she wrote an essay for The Millennial Star, a blog maintained by church members, entitled “Why I Write About Polygamy.” In the essay, she mentioned that she and her husband had given a number of presentations on the subject.
“The most unanticipated question I have fielded in these forums is why I feel a need to defend polygamy,” she wrote. “Perhaps it is because I don’t see my work as a defense of polygamy so much as an effort to help more people better understand the history of polygamy.”

She was only 54. Pancreatic cancer got her.

The Lustgarten Foundation.

Posted in Obits, Politics, Religion, Sports | 1 Comment »

Stung.

Friday, April 22nd, 2022

James Borrego out as head coach of the Charlotte Hornets. ESPN.

138-163 in four seasons.

…led them to the NBA’s play-in tournament the past two years as the No. 10 seed. They were blown out in both play-in games, however, and never made the playoffs in Borrego’s four seasons.

Posted in Firings, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: April 22, 2022.

Friday, April 22nd, 2022

Daryle 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.

…

The Raiders were 12-1-1 in 1969 with Lamonica throwing for 34 touchdowns, including six in the first half of an October game against the Bills. He threw for another six touchdowns when the Raiders trounced the Houston Oilers, 56-7, in a playoff game, while Namath struggled in the Jets’ loss to the Kansas City Chiefs in the other first-round matchup.

Worth noting, because that’s just the kind of hairball I am:

A sturdy 6-foot-3 and 215 pounds, Lamonica threw for 25 touchdowns and averaged nearly 250 passing yards per game in 1968. Perhaps his finest moment that season was seen by few: He threw the winning touchdown pass with 42 seconds left in the mid-November Raiders-Jets matchup at the Oakland Coliseum that became infamous as the “Heidi game.”

(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.

Posted in NFL, Obits, Sports | Comments Closed

Those Glorious ’70s…

Friday, April 15th, 2022

There’s a high bar that has to be cleared for me to link to something on ESPN.

The story of the [World Football League] is one that includes a mortally wounded NFL dynasty, Elvis Presley, Arnold Palmer, the guy who played Sloth in “The Goonies,” an enraged Canadian Parliament, sheriff raids on locker rooms, and a member of the witness protection program trying to buy a team. It’s a story of a remarkable dumpster fire that damn near kneecapped the NFL.

Bonus: the Canadian Football Act (which isn’t really an act, as it has never been signed into law).

Posted in 1970s, Bagatelle, Sports, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: April 15, 2022.

Friday, April 15th, 2022

Jack Newton, noted golfer.

Newton turned professional in 1971 on the European Tour and won his first event, the Dutch Open, the following year. A week later, he won another tournament at Fulford, England and, in 1974, the tour’s match play championship.
The Australian’s playoff loss in the 1975 British Open at Carnoustie came after Watson had a few rather fortuitous shots. A wire fence kept Watson’s ball in bounds on the eighth hole and the American chipped for eagle at the 14th to claim the Claret Jug by a shot over Newton.

Then, on July 24, 1983, he walked into an aircraft propeller.

His right arm was severed, he lost sight in his right eye and also sustained severe injuries to his abdomen. Doctors gave him only a 50-50 chance of surviving, and he spent nearly two months in intensive care and required lengthy rehabilitation from his injuries.
“Things weren’t looking too good for me. I knew that from the priest walking around my (hospital) bed,” Newton said later. He was 33 at the time of the accident.

…

Not to be denied from playing the game he loved, he taught himself to play golf one-handed, swinging the club with his left hand in a right-handed stance. He regularly had scores in the mid-80s for 18 holes. That translates to a handicap of about 12 or 14, one that most able-bodied amateur players would aspire to.

Mike Bossy, of the New York Islanders.

Bossy played the entirety of his 10-year career on Long Island, earning a place as both a franchise great and one of the best goal scorers the sport has ever seen, before retiring with a chronic back injury. He finished his career with 573 goals, scoring over 50 in nine straight seasons, an all-time record. Famously, he scored 50 goals in 50 games during the 1980-81 season, matching Maurice “Rocket” Richard’s record.

Franz Mohr, who the paper of record describes as the “piano tuner to the stars”. He was Steinway’s chief concert technician for 24 years.

For years, he went where the pianists went. When Vladimir Horowitz went to Russia in the 1980s, Mr. Mohr traveled with him, as did Horowitz’s favorite Steinway. Mr. Mohr made house calls at the White House when Van Cliburn played for President Gerald R. Ford in 1975, and again in 1987, when Mikhail S. Gorbachev was in Washington for arms-control talks with President Ronald Reagan.
Mr. Gorbachev’s wife, Raisa, wanted Cliburn to play one of the pieces that had made him famous — Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 — but there was no orchestra. Instead, Cliburn played some Chopin and, as an encore, played and sang the Russian melody “Moscow Nights.”
“I was amazed that Van Cliburn, on the spur of the moment, remembered not only the music but all the words,” Mr. Mohr recalled in his memoir, “My Life with the Great Pianists,” written with Edith Schaeffer (1992). “The Russians just melted.”

He was also Glenn Gould’s New York piano tuner.

Mr. Mohr not only worked on the piano at the recording studio, he also rode around New York with Gould. “He loved Lincoln Town cars,” Mr. Mohr wrote in his memoir. “That is all he would drive. He once said to me: ‘Franz, I found out that next year’s model will be two inches shorter. So, you know what I did? I bought two Town Cars this year.”

And (as noted in the obit) he wrote a book, My Life with the Great Pianists (affiliate link).

He also attended to performers’ personal pianos. The pianist Gary Graffman, whose apartment is less than a block from the old location of Steinway’s Manhattan showroom, and Mr. Mohr’s home base, on West 57th Street, recalled that Mr. Mohr would come right over when a problem presented itself.
“If he came because I broke strings, he would replace the strings,” Mr. Graffman said in an interview. But if more extensive work was needed — if Mr. Graffman’s almost constant practicing had worn down the hammers and new hammers had to be installed, for example — “he would take out the insides of the piano and carry it half a block to the Steinway basement. He would work on it and carry it back.” (The unit Mr. Mohr lifted out and took down the street is known as the key and action assembly, a bewildering combination of all 88 keys and the parts that respond to a pianist’s touch, driving the hammers to the strings.)

Mr. Mohr was 94 when he passed.

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