Answer: they missed the playoffs.
And Frank Vogel is out as coach.
I saw reports this morning: apparently, everybody but Vogel knew yesterday he was going to be fired.
…
The Lakers were officially eliminated from postseason contention Tuesday, when they lost in Phoenix and the San Antonio Spurs won in Denver.
The Lakers would lose eight games in a row before winning against Oklahoma City in the home finale at [I’m not going to give them free advertising – DB] Arena.
I 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.
Peter Bowles, British actor.
Other than “To the Manor Born”, he was “Guthrie Featherstone” on “Rumpole of the Bailey”, and did guest shots on “Randall & Hopkirk (Deceased)”, “Tales of the Unexpected”, “I, Claudius”, “Space: 1999”, “The Prisoner”, and appeared four times on “The Avengers”, among other credits.
When I published yesterday’s obit watch, Tyler James was the only person confirmed dead in the Andrews County car crash. Since then, the names of the others have been published:
Mauricio Sanchez
Travis Garcia
Jackson Zinn
Karisa Raines
Laci Stone
Tiago Sousa
Henrich Siemans (driver of the pickup truck)
Frank Martin out as basketball coach at the University of South Carolina.
The team was 18-13 this season.
Been a busy weekend, both for me and for sports firings.
Will Wade out as men’s baskeball coach at LSU. Five seasons, 108-54 overall. But: the NCAA has informed LSU that they are investigating a total of 11 violations, including eight “level 1” violations.
…
Wade was suspended at the tail end of the 2018-19 season after Yahoo Sports detailed a wiretapped conversation between him and now-convicted middleman Christian Dawkins. The conversation recorded by the FBI included Wade openly speaking about a “strong-ass offer” he made in the recruitment of former LSU guard and Baton Rouge native Javonte Smart in 2017.
This specific allegation is outlined in the NOA as the first of the seven charges against the men’s basketball team, and was determined to be a Level I violation. In the charge, the Complex Case Unit wrote in this instance Wade “violated the principles of ethical conduct and/or offered impermissible recruiting inducements in the form of cash payments and job offers in order to secure” an unnamed recruit, who is believed to be Smart.
Nino Giarratano out as baseball coach at the University of San Francisco. This is tied to a lawsuit by three former players accusing him of “persistent psychological abuse and repeated inappropriate sexual conduct”.
Tom Crean out as basketball coach of the Georgia Bulldogs. This one seems to have actually been a performance thing: he was 47-75 over four seasons, and they finished 6-26 this year.
Emilio Delgado. He was most famous as “Luis” on “Sesame Street” (for 44 years), but he also did some other work: three of the “Law and Order” shows, a regular role on “Lou Grant”, “Quincy, M.E.”, and the good “Hawaii 5-0”, among other credits.
Elsa Klensch, of “Style With Elsa Klensch”.
Odalis Perez, former pitcher for the Braves and Dodgers (also the Royals and Nationals). He was 44: according to his family, he apparently fell off a ladder at his home.
Bobbie Nelson, sister of Willie Nelson and pianist and singer in his band.
(Hattip on this to FotB RoadRich.)
Actually, no, I still can’t stand soccer.
But this is a fun story.
There was a massive fight at a soccer game between Queretaro and Atlas (who I gather are both teams in the Mexican Liga MX league) on Saturday. 26 people were injured.
Yesterday, punishments were handed down: Queretaro has to play at home with no spectators for one year, barras (supporter’s groups) are banned for three years, the owners were fined 1.5 million pesos ($70,450), and…
…the owners have to sell the team by the end of the year.
Queretaro’s ownership group (Gabriel Solares, Adolfo Ríos, Greg Taylor and Manuel Velarde) will also be banned from league-related activities for five years and the club will be returned to previous owners Grupo Caliente, which owns fellow Liga MX club Tijuana…
Grupo Caliente will be tasked with selling Queretaro by the end of this year, and if unable to do so, it will go under the ownership of Liga MX.
I’ve never heard of an owner being forced to sell a team before. I guess it may have happened in the past, but I’m not aware of it. MLB may have come close with Marge Schott, but they never actually pulled the trigger.
Edited to add: Mike the Musicologist cites Donald Sterling as a possible “forced to sell the team” owner. I’m going to give him the win on points for two reasons. First of all, I’m impressed that he remembered Donald Sterling: if there is a person who is even less of an NBA fan (or sports fan in general) than I am, it is MtM.
The thing is, it isn’t clear to me that he was actually forced to sell. There were suits and counter-suits, and his wife moved to sell the team – he claimed without his authorization – and it seems like the cases were dismissed before there was any vote or a forced sale by the NBA. All that seems clear is that Sterling’s wife managed to get the team sold off to Steve Ballmer before she was stripped of her ownership interest by league vote.
So even though it isn’t clear to me, my second reason for giving this to MtM on points is that the NBA seems to have come as close as any other sport ever has, and probably ever will (except Liga MX) to forcing an owner to sell a team. Certainly closer than baseball came with Schott.
Also:
Michael Fly fired as head basketball coach of Florida Gulf Coast University.
Derrin Hansen out as basketball coach at Omaha. He’d been coach for 17 seasons, but Omaha has only been a D1 team since 2015.
He was 253-260 overall, and 92-122 in D1 play. The team won five games this season and was 10-45 in the past two seasons.
Sam Scholl out in San Diego. 50-67 in “four plus” seasons, but the team was 15-16 this season.
Shane Warne, Australian cricket legend. ESPN.
…
Warne helped Australia win the 1999 50-over World Cup and claimed 293 dismissals in 194 one-day internationals between 1993 and 2005.
In 2000, he was named one of the five Wisden cricketers of the century, alongside Sir Donald Bradman, Sir Garfield Sobers, Sir Jack Hobbs and Sir Viv Richards.
(“Leg spin” and “leg spinner” explained by Wikipedia. Hattip to Lawrence for the obit.)
Edited to add: NYT obit for Mr. Warne.
Farrah Forke, actress. Credits include a recurring role as “Alex Lambert” on “Wings”, and also a recurring role on “Lois & Clark” as “Mayson Drake”.
She was a good Texan, and died at 54.
Alan Ladd Jr. He was a big deal Hollywood producer. Among his credits:
During his tenure, Fox produced some of its most successful films, including Star Wars (1977), which he optioned after Universal rejected it. He championed George Lucas’ movie against the wishes of his board of directors, and the film became one of the most profitable in history.
“The only meeting I had with Laddie about the script, … he said, ‘Look, it doesn’t make any sense to me whatsoever, but I trust you. Go ahead and make it.’ That was just honest,” Lucas once said. “I mean, it was a crazy movie. Now you can see it, know what it is, but before you could see it, there wasn’t anything like it. You couldn’t explain it. You know, … it was like this furry dog driving a spaceship. I mean, what is that?”
More:
As a studio executive and producer, Ladd — the son of screen idol Alan Ladd (This Gun for Hire, Shane) — had a hand in 14 best picture nominees. His imprint can be found on such touchstone films as Young Frankenstein (1974), The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), The Omen (1976), Breaking Away (1979), Body Heat (1981), Chariots of Fire (1981), Blade Runner (1982) and Moonstruck (1987).
Before it was fashionable, Ladd supported films with strong female-centric themes, including Robert Altman’s 3 Women (1977); Julia (1977), starring Oscar winner Vanessa Redgrave; 11-time Academy Award nominee The Turning Point (1977); Paul Mazursky’s An Unmarried Woman (1978), starring Jill Clayburgh; Norma Rae (1979), which earned Sally Field an Oscar for best actress; and the Bette Midler-starring The Rose (1979).
Ladd upped the ante by making a woman the main protagonist in a big-budget action film with Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979), starring Sigourney Weaver, and he greenlighted Thelma & Louise (1991), the icon of feminist cinema toplined by Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis.
He won an Oscar for “Braveheart”.
Kirk Baily, voice actor. Lawrence sent me this obit, but I don’t have a source I am willing to link to.
Lawrence also sent over an obit for Katie Meyer, Stanford soccer goalie, who died too young at 22.
I don’t like linking to ESPN.
Duke sucks.
This is one heck of a piece of writing.
(And I’m sorry, Coach K, but I’ll still be pulling for Gonzaga this year.)
THR obit for Veronica Carlson.
Ralph Ahn, actor. He seems to be mostly known as “Tran” on “New Girl”, but other credits include “ER”, “Walker: Texas Ranger”, and “Hunter”.
Lawrence sent over an obit for Nick Zedd, “founder of the Cinema of Transgression movement and an uncompromising auteur whose crude, no-budget oeuvre influenced filmmakers from Christoph Schlingensief to Quentin Tarantino”.
He shot his first distributed film, They Eat Scum, in 1979 on Super 8 film with funds loaned by his parents and by the movie’s star, Donna Death. The short followed a roving gang of nonactor punks turned zombies, whose peregrinations were set to the earsplitting yowls of local New York bands and, inexplicably, the Village People’s “Y.M.C.A.” Zedd released They Eat Scum under his own Penetration Films imprint, describing it on the cassette label “a disgusting outlay of cheapness, decadence, nihilism, and everyday cannibalism” and an “achievement of noncommittal, unblinking savagery, a true expression of the punk ethos.”
Future films lived up to this promise, among them 1983’s Geek Maggot Bingo, which starred Richard Hell and was panned in TV Guide as “a nothing little zit of a 16mm movie.” Writing in the East Village Eye, Cookie Mueller, who starred in a number of John Waters movies, declared, “I have never in my lifetime of experience with low-budget films seen one this low . . . It lies somewhere below the subculture, even beneath the New York subway system.” Waters himself would later say of Zedd, “Nick Zedd makes violent, perverted art films from Hell—he’s my kind of director!”
Danny Ongais, one of the great figures in auto racing.
…
Video of the crash. I can’t embed it, because it is “age restricted” and “only available on YouTube”.
Dottie Frazier has passed away at 99. This is another one of those folks you’ve probably never heard of, but the obit is relevant to my interests.
Ms. Frazier was a diver. She learned to skin dive when she was young:
She seemingly had as many diving stories as she had dives.
There was the time she faced down a shark in the waters off Mexico. The time a large seal wanted the fish she was bringing back to her boat and slammed into her, breaking four ribs. The time she broke her leg snow skiing and made herself a special wet suit with an ankle-to-chest zipper so she could be rolled into it and thus keep diving with the busted limb.
She wasn’t initially impressed with the early scuba gear, but it grew on her.
…in 1955 she tried to enroll in a Los Angeles County underwater instructors certification course, sending in the required fee. She was sent a letter saying the course was for men only, but when she told that news to a friend and respected fellow diver, Jim Christiansen, he asked, “Did they return your check?”
“When I told him no, they had not, he said, ‘Just be ready; I’m picking you up,’” she told the podcast “The League of Extraordinary Divers” in 2016.
She went on to become one of the first, if not the first, women certified as a diving instructor in the United States.
In addition to her work as a scuba instructor, Ms. Frazier, a member of the Women Divers Hall of Fame, operated the Penguin Dive Shop in Long Beach for 15 years beginning in the 1950s and designed and sold wet suits and dry suits. She learned hard-hat diving as well — the kind used in underwater commercial work — but didn’t pursue the career possibilities because, at about five feet tall and not much more than 100 pounds, she found the equipment too cumbersome and restraining.
Ms. Frazier was energetic and adventurous even in her 90s. At 93 she went ziplining. In 2019, she finally sold the last of her motorcycles. In the “Neutral Buoyancy” interview, she noted that longevity seemed to go along with diving.
“A lot of the original divers have made it to a great age,” she said. “Being underwater does things to your spirit.”
If you’re not interested in basketball…well, neither am I. Another story will be coming along eventually.
Sports Illustrated ran a story today that I found interesting about the New York Liberty of the WNBA, and their $500,000 fine (which was bargained down from $1 million).
What did the Liberty do? You would not believe the gravity of this offense. They…
…chartered flights for their players. There was also an unauthorized team trip to Napa.
Yeah. They were seriously considering pulling the plug on the entire team.
I kid a little about this. The thing about charter flights is: they are banned under the terms of the WNBA’s collective bargaining agreement. Same with the trip to Napa. And the league is serious about this. My regular readers may remember the Las Vegas Aces ended up forfeiting a game because of travel issues. (In that case, the Aces did obtain special permission from the league to use a charter flight, but wasn’t able to arrange one.)
Part of the idea is to equalize the playing field between owners with deep pockets and those who treat their WNBA teams as marginal enterprises:
And that’s one of the points of the article: there’s a dispute between those two groups.
And while many players continued to loudly call for improving travel conditions—charter flights being the most visible part of that effort—the league found the players had an unexpected source of support for that expense from the new owners who view WNBA teams less as businesses to be managed to the last dollar or places to park losses and more as growth opportunities in a developing economy.
New owners—the Tsais in New York, Marc Lore in Minnesota, Larry Gottesdiener in Atlanta, Mark Davis in Las Vegas—found themselves dumbstruck by how little the WNBA could invest in growth. A sale of 20% of the league’s equity at that moment—especially at a valuation of $200 million—felt like a huge loss, even though new investors outside the league’s owners would not control any votes on the WNBA’s Executive Committee.
John Landy, runner, sportsman, and historical footnote.
Mr. Landy was the second man to run the mile in less than four minutes.
On August 7, 1954 (48 days after Landy’s record) he and Roger Bannister went head to head in Vancouver, BC.
As expected, Landy led from the start, building a 15-yard lead. But Bannister — by then Dr. Bannister — closed in on the last lap, and Landy could sense him coming. Rounding the final turn, he peeked over his left shoulder to see where Bannister was. But Bannister was on his right, and as Landy’s head was turned, Bannister stormed by him, and won, in 3:58.8. Landy came in second, in 3:59.6.
It was the first time two men had bettered four minutes in the same race. Today, a statue outside the stadium commemorates the moment.
Mr. Landy cut his foot the night before the race, and ran on four stitches.
Above all, Landy was a sportsman, as exemplified in a startling moment in the 1956 Australian track and field championships in Melbourne, just before the Olympics there.
Landy had entered the race hoping to break the world record for the mile. But with the race underway, a 19-year-old competitor, Ron Clarke, was bumped only strides ahead of him and fell to the track. Landy leapt over him and, as he did, accidentally spiked him on his right shoulder. Landy stopped, ran back to Clarke, brushed cinders from Clarke’s knees and said, “Sorry.”
“Keep going,” Clarke said. “I’m all right.”
Clarke got up, and he and Landy started after the others, who by then were 60 yards ahead. Landy caught them and won in 4:04.2.
Gordon Moyes, an Australian minister who was there, later called it “the most incredibly stupid, beautiful, foolish, gentlemanly act I have ever seen.”
Lawrence sent over an obit for Veronica Carlson, noted actress in Hammer horror films.
The Saturday Night Movie Group watched “Foreign Correspondent” last night.
Summary: it is a damn good movie, though the radio broadcast ending probably went down more smoothly in 1940. Today, it seemed to me to be a bit over the top and somewhat laughable instead of patriotic (which I believe was the original intent). The original ending of the film involved “two of the characters discuss[ing] the events of the film on a transatlantic seaplane trip” but Hitch was expecting war, and called in Ben “The Front Page” Hecht to write that ending.
I never really thought of Hitchcock as being strong on special effects, but the practical effects work (especially the plane crash scene) is outstanding. And much of that is due to William Cameron Menzies, who previously did the burning of Atlanta for “Gone With the Wind”, another movie we watched just a few weeks ago.
The fun thing about “Foreign Correspondent” is that everywhere you look, there’s a rabbit hole to go down.
For example, the movie dialogue was written by James “Lost Horizon” Hilton and Robert Benchley. Benchley seems to be mostly forgotten now, but he was a major humorist and writer, member of the Algonquin Round Table, and even did a little acting. He plays “Stebbins” in the movie.
Laraine Day, who plays the love interest, was only 19 when the movie was shot. She went on to appear in “The High and the Mighty”, and in seven of the nine Lew Ayres “Dr. Kildare” films as his long suffering girlfriend/fiance. She missed the first one, “Young Dr. Kildare”, but appeared in all of them through the eighth, “Dr. Kildare’s Wedding Day”. The studio had other plans for her, so her character was…
She went on to marry, believe it or not, Leo Durocher (husband number two for her).
She was also a member of the The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and a committed Republican, supporting Eisenhower, Nixon, and Reagan.
My favorite rabbit hole, however, is George Sanders, who plays a major supporting role as “ffolliott”. He looks like a villain, but surprisingly turns out to be a decent guy (though I could never shake the feeling he wanted to steal Laraine Day away from Joel McCrea, and I would not have blamed him). I feel like I should have known a lot of this trivia already, but if I did look it up, I forgot it.
Saunders had an interesting career, including voicing Shere Khan in “The Jungle Book”, playing “Mr. Freeze” in a two-part “Batman” (1966) episode, and – the reason I should have known all this – he was “Addison DeWitt” in “All About Eve” (and won an Oscar for that role).
He was married four times. His second wife was Zsa Zsa Gabor: they were married for five years. Lawrence commented that’s about average for Zsa Zsa’s husbands, though she had some really short marriages later on, and Frédéric Prinz von Anhalt kind of skews the numbers.
His fourth wife was Magda Gabor, Zsa Zsa and Eva’s older sister. They were married for a month (December 5, 1970 – January 6, 1971).
Saunders was in poor health, suffered from dementia, lost a lot of money in failed investments, and had an on-again off-again relationship with a girlfriend the last four years of his life. He was deeply depressed.
So on April 23, 1972, he checked into a hotel, called a friend, swallowed five bottles of Nembutal, and died two days later. Quoting Lawrence again, when you swallow five bottles of Nembutal, you’re obviously pretty serious about checking out: this wasn’t any half-hearted “hope someone finds me” effort. Then again, given his described health problems, I can’t say I blame him. He was 65.
The Criterion blu-ray (affiliate link) is nice, and includes a documentary on the visual effects that’s just about the right length.