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TMQ Watch: August 2019.

Monday, August 12th, 2019

Looks like the NFL is getting fired up again.

Yes, the loser update will return this year. We haven’t sat down to consider which teams are likely candidates for the Owen-16 trophy, but maybe we’ll get some time to do that between now and the start of the regular season.

But we are sure everyone is asking this question: what of Gregg Easterbrook and “Tuesday Morning Quarterback”? Has he found a new home, since the “Weekly Standard” folded up their tent and headed into the long dark night? And what of “TMQ Watch”? Will that be a recurring feature next year?

To answer the last question first: sadly, no. No “TMQ Watch” in 2019. Why?

Not our choice, Easterbrook’s. We may try to keep an eye on his Twitter feed for noteworthy items relating to the NFL. But we’ve found that Easterbrook’s Twitter feed is a reliable way of pressure testing our cerebral arteries, so we don’t recommend making bets on how much and how often we’ll be doing that.

Posted in Admin, Books, NFL, Sports, TMQ watch | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: August 9, 2019.

Friday, August 9th, 2019

Rosie Ruiz, historical footnote. She apparently died in early July, but her death was not widely reported until recently.

For the younger set: Ms. Ruiz “won” the 1980 Boston Marathon, with a “finishing time” of 2:31:56.

But suspicions about her victory arose immediately. Spotters had not seen her at checkpoints along the 26-mile course, and after the race she told a television interviewer that she had run only one other marathon, the 1979 New York City Marathon, and that she had finished that race in 2:56:33.

Eventually, it came out that Ms. Ruiz hadn’t actually finished the NYC Marathon:

New York City Marathon officials invalidated Ruiz’s time after reviewing videotape showing that Ruiz had not crossed the finish line in the time she had mistakenly been assigned by a volunteer, who thought Ruiz was an injured runner.
Days later, Ruiz’s victory in Boston was also nullified. Race organizers there based their decision on about 10,000 photographs taken along the last mile of the race as well as on information supplied by the news media and observers along the route. In addition, at least one witness recalled seeing Ruiz enter the course at Kenmore Square, about a mile from the finish line.

Jacqueline Gareau was declared the women’s winner. According to Wikipedia (I know, I know) her time was 2:34:28, which was a record women’s time for the Boston Marathon.

Posted in History, Obits, Sports | Comments Closed

Here’s an odd clipping for you…

Monday, August 5th, 2019

Odd because:

1) I don’t like talking about religion.
II) I don’t like linking to ESPN.
c) I don’t like basketball.

With those stipulations: Shelly Pennefather was one of the great women’s basketball players.

She scored 2,408 points, breaking Villanova’s all-time record for women and men. She did it without the benefit of the 3-point shot, and the record still stands today.

After college, she played in Japan for a while. But she felt a calling, so in 1991…

…she became a cloistered nun.

The Poor Clares are one of the strictest religious orders in the world. They sleep on straw mattresses, in full habit, and wake up every night at 12:30 a.m. to pray, never resting more than four hours at a time. They are barefoot 23 hours of the day, except for the one hour in which they walk around the courtyard in sandals.
They are cut off from society. Sister Rose Marie will never leave the monastery, unless there’s a medical emergency. She’ll never call or email or text anyone, either. The rules seem so arbitrarily harsh. She gets two family visits per year, but converses through a see-through screen. She can write letters to her friends, but only if they write to her first. And once every 25 years, she can hug her family.

Don’t really have much more I want to say about this, other than I recommend you read the linked story.

Posted in Religion, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: August 1, 2019.

Thursday, August 1st, 2019

The paper of record has updated their Hal Prince, “Giant of Broadway and Reaper of Tonys” obit in place.

They’ve also added three corrections. So far.

I do like this a lot:

As both a producer and a director, Mr. Prince was a nurturer of unproved talent. Tom Bosley, for instance, later known as Howard Cunningham on the nostalgic television sitcom “Happy Days,” won a Tony in his first starring role in 1959 as the titular mayor of New York, La Guardia, in “Fiorello!” Liza Minnelli made her first Broadway appearance — and won a Tony — as the title character in “Flora, the Red Menace,” a 1965 politically-inflected musical set in 1935 about a spunky fashion designer who falls for a Communist. Produced by Mr. Prince and directed by George Abbott, “Flora” also featured the first Broadway score by the songwriting team of John Kander and Fred Ebb, who later wrote “Chicago” and two shows produced and directed by Mr. Prince: “Zorba” and “Cabaret.”
A featured actor in “Cabaret,” Joel Grey, was a largely unknown nightclub performer with few theater credits when Mr. Prince hired him in 1966 for what turned out to be a career-defining role: the arch, leering M.C. of the bawdy Kit Kat Club in Weimar-era Berlin.

I think that’s one of the nicest things you can say about anybody in an obit: they were good at spotting and developing unknown talents.

But Mr. Rich was writing on the heels of one of Mr. Prince’s most calamitous failures, “A Doll’s Life,” a musical sequel to “A Doll’s House,” Henrik Ibsen’s domestic drama of a woman’s revolt against the stultifying expectations of womanhood. With book and lyrics by Adolph Green and Betty Comden and a score by Larry Grossman, huge sets and grandiose sound amplification, it closed after five performances, a victim of its outsize self-importance.

Five performances. I thought the original production of “Carrie” ran for eight performances, but no: it only ran for five as well.

Also among the dead: Nick Buoniconti, linebacker for the Miami Dolphins in the 1970s (yes, he was one of the players on the 1972 team).

For many years Buoniconti was an intelligent, articulate and tough player for the Boston Patriots (now the New England Patriots) and the Dolphins, winning All-Pro honors five times in a 14-year pro football career. A former All-American at the University of Notre Dame, he anchored the Dolphins’ vaunted “No-Name Defense” under Coach Don Shula.

Mr. Buoniconti’s son, Marc, was paralyzed in a football accident in 1985. Mr. Buoniconti founded the Miami Project to Cure Paralysis:

For more than 30 years afterward, Buoniconti helped raise nearly $500 million for spinal cord and brain research carried out by the organization. He also played a critical role in directing the research and was a charismatic motivator of scientists and researchers.
Dr. Barth Green, a neurosurgeon and longtime chairman of the Miami Project, said in a phone interview: “People are walking now because of cellular transplants and the latest neuroengineering and bioengineering that has been applied to humans with disability. Nick was a stimulating force in that area, from bench to bedside. And this is someone who probably never took a science course.”

Posted in Media, Music, NFL, Obits, Sports, Theatre | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: July 16, 2019.

Tuesday, July 16th, 2019

Pernell Whitaker, champion boxer.

Whitaker lost his first chance at a championship in 1988, but he rebounded the next year to win the International Boxing Federation world lightweight title from Greg Haugen. He then beat Rafael Pineda for the I.B.F. super lightweight title in 1992 and Buddy McGirt for the World Boxing Council welterweight belt in early 1993.

He fought Julio Cesar Chavez to a draw, though “many observers” believed he’d won outright. He also fought Oscar De La Hoya, but lost the decision (even though he scored the only knockdown of the fight, and even though, again, most observers thought he outpunched De La Hoya).

ESPN.

Michael Seidenberg. This is one of those interesting obits for an otherwise obscure person: Mr. Seidenberg ran a “clandestine bookshop”.

No, not one that specialized in espionage and spy books:

Mr. Seidenberg plied his trade at book fairs and on sidewalks for some years. But around 2008, with the help of George Bisacca, a conservator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, he turned the book-stuffed apartment into a secret bookstore, open at select times or by appointment to friends and admirers. Sometimes a visitor might actually buy a book, but the place was more like a salon, with literary figures and book lovers mingling and sharing a drink at a bar stocked mostly with liquor contributed by patrons.

…

Mr. Seidenberg often described himself as a good book collector but a lousy bookseller.

Posted in Books, Obits, Sports | Comments Closed

Historical note, suitable for use in schools.

Friday, July 12th, 2019

In keeping with our baseball theme, some lazy stupid blogging.

Actually, I wanted to pull together a longer post, but I’m all out of energy this week, plus I’ve posted on this subject before, so:

Ladies and Germans, today is the 40th anniversary of Disco Demolition Night.

“I thought these fans in Chicago were the best because they’re saying `Let’s go Sox! Let’s go Sox!’ ” Petry recalled last weekend at Comerica Park. “They were really chanting `Disco sucks! Disco sucks! Disco sucks!’”

There’s a book (co-written by Steve Dahl).

And the Sox commemorated the occasion before last night’s game, with Steve Dahl throwing out the first pitch.

Enough time has passed for the Sox to come to terms with Disco Demolition’s place in the team’s annals. They showed highlights of that night on the video board, including video of fans storming the field and damaging it so much the Sox had to forfeit the second game of that day’s doubleheader against the Tigers.
“It’s absolutely cool that it’s just part of the history, and not a shameful part of the history,” Dahl said. ‘It’s just something that happened, and honestly, it was just about the music.”

Posted in History, Hysteria, Music, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: July 11, 2019.

Thursday, July 11th, 2019

I am not a musician or a musicologist. I have no talent for music, and I try to leave the musicology to Mike.

But there’s something about the obit for Vivian Perlis that I find touching and interesting. Back in the day, she was a research librarian at the Yale School of Music. She went to pick up some archival material from one of Charles Ives’s business partners.

Thinking that he might have some recollections to share, Ms. Perlis brought along a portable tape recorder. She was fascinated by the stories that Mr. Myrick, an elderly, hard-of-hearing former Southerner, told about the iconoclastic, curmudgeonly Ives.
This led her to conduct a series of more than 60 interviews over several years with people who had known and worked with Ives. A nephew in Danbury, Conn., Ives’s hometown, recounted playing baseball with “Uncle Charlie.” The composer Lehman Engel recalled hearing Ives talk about the “old days,” when the “sissies,” meaning timidly conservative performers, refused to play Ives’s flinty music.

This was the seed crystal from which grew the Yale University Oral History of American Music.

The oral history project includes some 3,000 recordings of interviews with composers and other major musical figures, from Aaron Copland to Elliott Carter, from Duke Ellington to John Adams. The eminent musicologist H. Wiley Hitchcock described it as an “incomparable resource.”

…

“Most composers are part of a neglected minority and are very grateful to have the opportunity to speak,” she told The Times in 2005. “They don’t have another chance to answer critics and say what they think and feel.”

Also among the dead: Jim Bouton. WP (and a tip of the hat to Borepatch for the heads-up.) He was a pitcher with several teams (Yankees, Seattle Pilots, and even the Astros). Apparently, he was not an outstanding pitcher (the paper of record uses the phrase “a pitcher of modest achievement but a celebrated iconoclast”).
He went on to greater fame as the author of Ball Four, one of the early “inside baseball” books.

When it was published in 1970, “Ball Four,” which reported on the selfishness, dopiness, childishness and meanspiritedness of young men often lionized for playing a boy’s game very well, was viewed by many readers, either approvingly or not, as a scandalous betrayal of the so-called sanctity of the clubhouse.

…

In Bouton’s telling, players routinely cheated on their wives on road trips, devised intricate plans to peek under women’s skirts or spy on them through hotel windows, spoke in casual vulgarities, drank to excess and swallowed amphetamines as if they were M&Ms.
Mickey Mantle played hung over and was cruel to children seeking his autograph, he wrote. Carl Yastrzemski was a loafer. Whitey Ford illicitly scuffed or muddied the baseball and his catcher, Elston Howard, helped him do it. Most coaches were knotheads who dispensed the obvious as wisdom when they weren’t contradicting themselves, and general managers were astonishingly penurious and dishonest in dealing with players over their contracts.

…

“Ball Four” is “arguably the most influential baseball book ever written,” baseball historian Terry Cannon told the San Diego Union-Tribune in 2005, “and one which changed the face of sportswriting and our conception of what it means to be a professional athlete.”
Sports Illustrated named it the third-best book written on sports, after A.J. Liebling’s “The Sweet Science,” about boxing, and Roger Kahn’s elegy to the Brooklyn Dodgers, “The Boys of Summer.”

I’ve never read Ball Four, though I’ve heard it described as sceamingly funny. But the obits make it sound like the book is as much about a man struggling to hold on to his dream of being a major league pitcher as much as it is a tell-all about the wild antics of players in the late 60s – early 70s.

“I feel sorry for Jim Bouton,” Dick Young wrote in The Daily News. “He is a social leper. His collaborator on the book, Leonard Shecter, is a social leper. People like this, embittered people, sit down in their time of deepest rejection and write. They write, oh hell, everybody stinks, everybody but me, and it makes them feel much better.”

As a side note, Mr. Bouton has a limited career as an actor: there was apparently a short-lived “Ball Four” TV series in 1976 that I don’t remember. He was also “Terry Lennox” in Robert Altman’s “The Long Goodbye“, a movie you do not want to get me started on.

Edited to add 7/12: Wow. Neil deMause over at “Field of Schemes” has a really nice tribute to Mr. Bouton up.

The image I’ll always retain of Jim, though, was of getting ice cream with him near his home in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, and him looking at my cup and exclaiming, “Sprinkles! That’s a great idea!” and then sprinting back into the shop to get some added to his as well. To the end, Jim Bouton remained boyishly intense about things that were truly important, whether fighting General Electric to save an old ballpark or eating ice cream, and that’s a rare and precious gift.

Posted in 1970s, Books, Movies, Music, Obits, Sports, TV | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: July 6, 2019.

Saturday, July 6th, 2019

Dr. Mitchell Feigenbaum, theoretical physicist.

When Feigenbaum began his career in the early 1970s, the term “chaos theory” did not exist. Generations of scientists dating back to Isaac Newton had worked on problems related to the predictability of complex systems, such as the orbits of the planets in the solar system. By the middle of the 20th century, physicists and mathematicians—inspired by the pioneering work of the French physicist and mathematician Henri Poincaré—had succeeded in characterizing chaotic states, often enabled by computers, by framing such questions as geometric problems. But the boundary between regular and chaotic behavior remained fuzzy, particularly as it applied to real physical systems.
Feigenbaum stepped into this foggy arena, developing methods capable of computationally modelling the period-doubling transition to chaos, which proceeds in a series of geometrically focused steps that remain similar when scaled across orders of magnitude, an example of so-called fractal geometry. He first studied a simple iterated algebraic equation known as the logistic map, and was later able to demonstrate that these steps are “universal:” all physical systems that become chaotic via this period-doubling route to chaos exhibit the same behavior. Feigenbaum also found that this behavior is determined by two universal constants, now known as the Feigenbaum constants.

Gene Pingatore, Illinois high school basketball coach. He holds the state record for most wins, but is perhaps more famous as the coach in “Hoop Dreams”.

Mickey Kapp. No, I hadn’t heard of him before, either, but the story is interesting: he was the provider of mixtapes to the astronauts through the Gemini and Apollo programs.

And it all started with José Jiménez.

At Mr. Kapp’s urging, Mr. Dana booked an appearance at the Kings Inn in Cocoa Beach, Fla., near where the astronauts trained. He usually did the astronaut bit with a straight man acting as interviewer, but for Cocoa Beach he was working alone.
“A few minutes into the routine, a guy in the front row began yelling out the straight man’s lines,” Mr. Thompson wrote. It was Mr. Shepard, who joined Mr. Dana onstage but was laughing so hard that another Mercury astronaut, Wally Schirra, who was there, took over, followed by another, Deke Slayton.

Paul Benjamin, actor. He knocked around quite a bit from the 1970s through to 2016: never did a “Mannix”, but he was in various other 70s cop shows, “Escape From Alcatraz” and was one of the guys on the corner in “Do the Right Thing”.

Sid Ramin.

Mr. Ramin (pronounced RAY-min) was one of two orchestrators — three, if you count the contributions of the composer, Leonard Bernstein, a lifelong friend — on the original Broadway production of “West Side Story,” which opened in 1957. According to “The Sound of Broadway Music” (2009), by Steven Suskin, Mr. Ramin worked on the haunting ballad “Somewhere,” the evocative “Something’s Coming,” the sweetly comic “I Feel Pretty,” the bravado-of-youth anthem “Here Come the Jets” and the irreverent “Gee, Officer Krupke.”

…

Shows whose orchestrations he worked on, in addition to “West Side Story,” included “Gypsy” (1959), “I Can Get It for You Wholesale” (1962), “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum” (1962), Bette Midler’s “Clams on the Half Shell Revue” (1975), “Jerome Robbins’ Broadway” (1989) and “Crazy for You” (1992).

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

Obit watch: July 2, 2019.

Tuesday, July 2nd, 2019

Tyler Skaggs, pitcher for the Los Angeles Angels.

He was found dead in his hotel room a few hours before the Angels played the Texas Rangers. Mr. Skaggs was 27.

ESPN. I’d link to the Dallas Morning News, but they’re being really obnoxious.

No foul play is suspected, and an investigation is ongoing, police said.
A Southlake police spokesperson said it “is not suspected” that Skaggs took his own life, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Posted in Obits, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: June 14, 2019.

Friday, June 14th, 2019

Pat Bowlen, Denver Broncos owner. Not much to say about this, other than it will be interesting to watch the ownership situation play out. NYT. ESPN.

Anthony Price, British author of espionage novels. I had not heard of him before last week, but John le Carré praises his work highly in The Pigeon Tunnel.

Posted in Books, NFL, Obits, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: June 13, 2019.

Thursday, June 13th, 2019

Sylvia Miles, noted actress. She was nominated for Academy Awards for “Midnight Cowboy” and “Farewell, My Lovely”.

She was, however, beginning to acquire a reputation for going to every party possible in whatever town she was in. She would “attend the opening of an envelope,” the comedian Wayland Flowers was said to have remarked.

Gabriele Grunewald, competitive runner. She was first diagnosed with cancer in 2009, and continued her running career despite multiple recurrences.

…she discovered a new mass on her stomach, and surgeons cut a large tumor out of her liver. By 2017, they found new tumors, and she began interspersing chemotherapy sessions with training sessions — racing at an elite level while on her fourth bout with cancer.

She was 32.

NYT obit for Bill Wittliff.

Mary Max, wife of artist Peter Max.

Mr. Max, while still alive, apparently isn’t painting much these days. (I get the impression from the obit that he may have issues.) This led to an ugly legal dispute between Ms. Max (who was substantially younger than her husband) and Mr. Max’s son, who was trying to assert more control over his work.

The police said Ms. Max was found dead of an apparent suicide in her Upper West Side apartment at Riverside Drive and 84th Street at about 8:30 p.m. on Sunday.

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 surprisingly good page of additional resources.

Posted in Movies, Obits, Sports | 1 Comment »

Firings watch.

Saturday, June 8th, 2019

The Houston Texans have fired general manager Brian Gaine.

Lawrence tipped me off to this and forwarded a link to Battle Red Blog, which uses the word “bonkers” to describe this. It does seem odd to me: the season hasn’t started, after all. But it makes more sense to fire him after the draft – especially if the draft was a bust – than to fire him before and leave a new GM scrambling.

But was the draft that bad for the Texans? Honestly, I don’t know. I didn’t follow it closely.

Posted in Firings, NFL, Sports | Comments Closed

Historical note.

Tuesday, June 4th, 2019

I’ve written about this before, but I couldn’t let today pass without noting:

It is the 45th anniversary of Ten Cent Beer Night.

Semi-oddly (I guess because it isn’t a big anniversary) there’s nothing about it on Cleveland.com today. Not seeing anything on MLB.com either, and DuckDuckGo doesn’t turn up a whole lot.

I did find this amusing (but old) article from ESPN.

Let us pause to remember. Cheap nasty beer is optional.

Posted in History, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: June 3, 2019.

Monday, June 3rd, 2019

Leah Chase, New Orleans restaurateur.

I haven’t managed to eat at Dooky Chase yet, though I have heard of it (probably by way of Calvin Trillin). As much as I prefer to link to local obits, I like the way the NYT puts it:

Mrs. Chase possessed a mix of intellectual curiosity, deep religious conviction and a will always to lift others up, which would make her a central cultural figure in both the politics of New Orleans and the national struggle for civil rights. “She is of a generation of African-American women who set their faces against the wind without looking back,” said Jessica B. Harris, who is an author and expert on food of the African diaspora and who said Mrs. Chase treated her like another daughter. “It’s a work ethic, yes, but it’s also seeing how you want things to be and then being relentless about getting there.”

…

Mrs. Chase was as compassionate as she was strict, always adhering to a code shaped in large part by her Catholic beliefs. She held up Gen. George S. Patton of World War II fame as a hero and was a fan of baseball, which she often used as a metaphor.
“I just think that God pitches us a low, slow curve, but he doesn’t want us to strike out,” she said in a New York Times interview. “I think everything he throws at you is testing your strength, and you don’t cry about it, and you go on.”

…

Mrs. Chase believed in corporal punishment, opposed abortion and believed women should dress modestly. But she was always a champion of women, especially young women coming up in the kitchens of America’s restaurants. Her frequent advice to them was, “You have to look like a girl, act like a lady, think like a man and work like a dog.”

I love this, too:

During that period, Mrs. Chase started catering the openings of fledgling artists so they could offer hospitality to people who had come to admire – and, perhaps, buy – their creations. She helped them pay their bills, and she hung their works in the restaurant.
This love of art, born when she studied art in high school, led to service on the boards of the New Orleans Museum of Art and the Arts Council of New Orleans. Mrs. Chase also sat on the boards of the Louisiana Children’s Museum, the Urban League of Greater New Orleans and the Greater New Orleans Foundation.

…

Mrs. Chase regularly provided food for nonprofit organizations’ fundraisers and refused to submit bills, said Morial, the widow of one New Orleans mayor and the mother of another.
“She provided food for the Amistad Research Center and would not take money. That was her contribution,” said Morial, an Amistad board member. “We’d tell her this was a fundraiser. She said, ‘I know, and you need all the money you can raise.’”

My feelings about baseball are well known, but I thought this was an interesting obituary: Marc Okkonen.

Mr. Okkonen, a commercial artist and baseball aficionado with an appreciation for vintage apparel, spotted flaws in the purported uniforms of the Pittsburgh Pirates and Chicago Cubs and wondered why they were not precise replicas of the originals from 1939, when the movie takes place. Given how thoroughly documented baseball’s history is, he thought, accurate details would not have been too difficult to uncover.
But, to Mr. Okkonen’s surprise, he could find no single volume containing images of historic uniforms, so he set out to fill that void. He spent the next five years poring through books, microfilms and archives, including those at the Library of Congress and the Baseball Hall of Fame, to find images of every home and road uniform worn by all major league teams, starting in 1900.

And then he wrote that book: Baseball Uniforms of the 20th Century: The Official Major League Baseball Guide. This is the kind of obsessive historical study that I find admirable, in the same way that (for example) some people document the minute details of Smith and Wesson history…

(Eight days and a wake-up in country, and then I’m off to the S&WCA symposium.)

Roky Erickson, noted psychedelic musician with the 13th Floor Elevators. I wish I had more to say about this, but I pretty much missed the psychedelic era. Also, the treatment of Roky Erickson (and Daniel Johnston) locally seemed, to me, to be kind of “let’s point and laugh at the weirdo”. Not everyone was that way: I’m sure there were some people who were motivated by compassion and love of the music, but I felt like that was an undercurrent running through the scene. Perhaps some of my musician readers will have more to say on the subject.

(Edited to add 6/4: NYT obit for Mr. Erickson.)

Last and least: infamous heroin dealer Frank Lucas, whose life was adapted into “American Gangster”.

Richard M. Roberts, who led the prosecution of Mr. Lucas in New Jersey, had befriended him in recent years but was under no illusions about what he did long ago. “In truth,” Mr. Roberts told The New York Times in 2007, “Frank Lucas has probably destroyed more black lives than the K.K.K. could ever dream of.”

Posted in Books, Clothing, Cops, Food, Law, Movies, Music, NYPD, Obits, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: May 27, 2019.

Monday, May 27th, 2019

Bart Starr, one of the greatest of the Green Bay Packers. NYT.

Starr’s name may have been the most flamboyant thing about him. But he proved to be skilled, sly and, by at least one measure, incomparably successful: He won three N.F.L. championships (for the seasons played in 1961, ’62 and ’65) in the pre-Super Bowl era, and then the first two Super Bowls, in January of 1967 and ’68. That Packers’ run of N.F.L. championships helped bring new attention to professional football as it moved into the Super Bowl era. (With his victory in 2019, Tom Brady has won six Super Bowls with the New England Patriots.)
Starr was named the league’s most valuable player in 1966 and received the same honor in Super Bowls I and II. He was selected to the Pro Bowl four times. And on a team known for running — with the flashy Paul Hornung and the rugged Jim Taylor (who died in October) — Starr was one of the league’s most efficient passers. He led the N.F.L. in that crucial category in three seasons and, on average, for all of the 1960s — even though his rival Johnny Unitas of the Baltimore Colts was often viewed as better. Starr set career records for completion percentage, 57.4, and consecutive passes without an interception, 294.

Murray Gell-Mann, Nobel prize winning theoretical physicist.

Much as atoms can be slotted into the rows and columns of the periodic table of the elements, Dr. Gell-Mann found a way, in 1961, to classify their smaller pieces — subatomic particles like protons, neutrons, and mesons, which were being discovered by the dozen in cosmic rays and particle accelerator blasts. Arranged according to their properties, the particles clustered in groups of eight and 10.
In a moment of whimsy, Dr. Gell-Mann, who hadn’t a mystical bone in his body, named his system the Eightfold Way after the Buddha’s eight-step path to enlightenment. He groaned ever after when people mistakenly inferred that particle physics was somehow related to Eastern philosophy.
Looking deeper, Dr. Gell-Mann realized that the patterns of the Eightfold Way could be further divided into triplets of even smaller components. He decided to call them quarks after a line from James Joyce’s “Finnegans Wake”: “Three quarks for Muster Mark.”

Edmund Morris, biographer. I’m slowly working my way through his Theodore Roosevelt biographies, and I’d argue he’s at least as famous for those as he is for Dutch:

The columnist George Will attacked “Dutch” as “dishonorable,” and the writer Joan Didion accused Mr. Morris of resorting to the fictional device to conceal his own inadequacies as a fact-gatherer.
One of his toughest critics, Michiko Kakutani of The Times, called the book a “loony hodgepodge of fact and fiction” about a president that mimicked “the very blurring of reality and state-managed illusion that that president was often accused of perpetrating.”

No judgment intended here: this is in last place because it is breaking news. Bill Buckner passed away a short time ago.

Buckner was dependable at the plate, registering a .300 batting average in seven seasons and accumulating 2,715 hits and 174 home runs during his two decades in the Major Leagues. He won the National League’s batting title in 1980 and was an All-Star in 1981, when he was with the Chicago Cubs.

He was most famous, unfortunately, for bobbling a play during game 6 of the World Series in 1986, costing the Red Sox the game and probably the Series. But there are other Sox fans who can speak with more authority on Mr. Buckner and his legacy.

Posted in Books, NFL, Obits, Physics, Politics, Science, Sports | Comments Closed

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