Today is the 73rd anniversary of the European invasion by the United States, Great Britain and their allies. If D-Day is not the greatest day in American history, it’s in the top two.
2. Astros-nomical
Hinch
In mid-May the Lastros were swept by the reigning A.L. champs, Cleveland, three straight. Houston has won 11 in a row since and now finds itself with baseball’s best record, 42-16. The Lastros are No. 1 in baseball in runs scored (319) and No. 2 in ERA (3.43) and would be No. 1 if Clayton Kershaw did not exist. But he does.
Do you know who Houston’s manager is? A.J. Hinch. Twenty-five years ago, he was the Gatorade National Player of the Year out of Midwest City (Oklahoma) High. He graduated from Stanford and had a career batting average of .219 in the bigs. In his first two seasons with the Lastros, Hinch has led them to winning records both times. That’s an accomplishment in itself over the previous decade. This, right now, is the best team in baseball.
3. How Sick Is Rachel Maddow?
It has been 10 days since MSNBC superstar Rachel Maddow has been on air. Thanks in large part to Maddow, MSNBC’s prime-time lineup has surged past Fox and was No. 1 in the ratings last month for the first time in 20 years.
So it’s odd to see that Maddow, the most insightful and intelligent opponent to the Trump autocracy, has been MIA this long. I recall seeing her on her last day on air, joking about her illness and how she’d been in bed all day but that she wanted to be a trooper and that the show must go on. Now she’s out for two weeks in air-dates, and this at a crucial time.
And I have no evidence here on which to go on, but there are documented cases of journalistic opponents of Vladimir Putin slowly being poisoned to death. In fact, Maddow herself has reported on these instances. All I’m saying, in this blogosphere, is that her absence intrigues me.
4. Sooners, Later
In the Women’s Softball College World Series, Oklahoma outlasted Florida 7-5 in 17 innings, the longest game in championship series history. The contest lasted more than five hours between the two schools that have won the last four national championships. Shay Knighten hit a three-run bomb in the top of the 17th off the national player of the year, Kelly Barnhill, to put the Sooners over the top. Florida now must win two in a row or Oklahoma needs just one more to win it all.
5. Deadwood
This is pretty much what the views look like for most of the race
Ran the Deadwood/Mickelson Trail Marathon on Sunday. If you’re a runner/marathoner, put this stunningly beautiful trail course on your bucket list. Not easy, though. Miles 1 through 13.7 are relentlessly, and I mean that in the literal sense of the world, an uphill grade. Most of the second half is downhill, but by that time your legs are shot. Still, I’ve never come across a more scenic marathon course and Deadwood is a great town to hole up in unless you’re Wild Bill Hickok.
Music 101
Sugar Shack
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iHzjfGF6MiU
This bouncy tune from Jimmy Gilmer and the Fireballs, recorded in Clovis, New Mexico, hit No. 1 on the Billboard charts in autumn of 1963 and remained there for five weeks. It was the most popular song in America just a fortnight before JFK was assassinated.
Remote Patrol
Clint Eastwood Night on AMC
8 p.m. The Outlaw Josey Wales
11 p.m. Hang Em High
Peak Clint, just before he began co-starring with an orangutan.
Did Stephen Curry carry the ball not once but twice on this play? Perhaps. But no one with a whistle seemed to care (that said, it WAS beautiful).
Six NBA MVP awards between them on this play. Dubs win, 132-113, go up 2-0 in series.
Qatar Off
Six Middle East countries —Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Maldives and Yemen (yes, Yemen) have severed diplomatic ties with Qatar a tiny (2.35 million) extremely wealthy nation that juts out like an upside-down tear drop from the eastern side of the Arabian peninsula. They are accusing Qatar of supporting terrorism and destabilizing the region (yes, Yemen and Saudi Arabia are saying this; I KNOW!) and working with Iran.
Qatar is supposed to host the 2022 World Cup. It was always a terrible idea, but now only more so.
3. Wonder Woman
The Comrades Marathon is one of the world’s more renowned distance runs, a 56-mile jaunt between the South African cities of Durban and Pietermaritzburg (each year, they reverse directions). It is the world’s oldest and most popular ultra.
This weekend, Camille Herron of Oklahoma became the first American to win the female portion of the race since all-time ultra great Ann Trason (the godmother of the ultra) did so in 1997. Herron finished in 6 hours and 27 minutes.
Herron, 35, can now add this to her other major achievement: In 2012 she set the Guinness World Record for the fastest marathon (2:48) ever run by a woman in a superhero costume (Spider-man; why didn’t she go with Wonder Woman? The boots?). She did that at the Route 66 Marathon in Tulsa.
4. A(riana) Grande Gesture
The One Love Manchester benefit concert this weekend was something else. Kudos to Ariana Grande for making this happen less than two weeks after the terrible terrorist bombing took nearly two dozen lives after one of her shows in this same city. This was such an uplifting Whoville response to the hate of ISIS.
There were 14,200 music fans who attended Grande’s concert the night of the bombing on May 22nd. Less than two weeks later, there were at least five times that many who attended the show in a display of solidarity and courage. Listen to the prescient lyrics of the Black-Eyed Peas here. It’s a far more evolved foreign policy than say, this…
We must stop being politically correct and get down to the business of security for our people. If we don’t get smart it will only get worse
Is this the Photo of the Year? This is Theunis Wessels of Three Hills, Alberta, who has more important things to do than worry if that twister is going to smoke him. His wife, Cecilia, snapped the photo.
Music 101
Love The Way You Lie
Eminem. Rihanna. More than ONE BILLION YouTube downloads.
If I had to give the president, Donald Trump, a grade, it would be below C-level. Especially after yesterday’s performance where, mouthing the words of Steve Bannon, he pledged o withdraw the USA from the Paris Accord (we’re now on the same side as Nicaragua and Syria!).
Robert Iger and Elon Musk immediately withdrew from Trump’s economic advisory council, Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein took a break from overseeing fraudulent banking practices to send out his first and only tweet (derogatory toward Trump) and French president Emmanuel Macron responded with a tweet…
….and mayors in Boston, Pittsburgh and elsewhere basically said they’d ignore Trump/Bannon and follow the Accord anyway. What is it with Paris this month, anyway? Serena Williams, Roger Federer and now the USA have all voluntarily withdrawn.
Why is this man running the United States and making decisions that imperil the planet?
2. Kevindication (After Game 1)
Is Durant staring down Rihanna here?
In his first NBA Finals appearance since 2012 (when he averaged a series-high 30.6 points per game, though his Thunder lost to LeBron’s Heat 4-1), Kevin Durant took over the action on the court, scoring a game-high 38 points. Dubs win, 113-91.
Off the court, Rihanna appeared to be the biggest winner.
3. Today’s Best Video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvxQGPAc5Rs
Sent in from a Canadian friend of MH, who has a big birthday, I mean like a really, really big birthday, like a colossal anniversary of birth date, coming up this weekend. This is excellent.
4. Following The Scripps
Yesterday Ananya Vinay of Fresno won the Scripps National Spelling Bee when she correctly spelled the word marocain – a type of dress fabric – to defeat Rohan Rajeev, 14, from Oklahoma.
Presented without commentary, here are the last 10 winners of the National Spelling Bee, counting backwards: Ananya Vinay, Nihar Sai Reddy Janga and Jairam Hathaway (tie), Gokul Venkatachalam, Vanya Shivashankar, Sriram Hathwar and Ansun Sujoe (tie), Arvind Marhankali, Snigdha Nandipati, Sukanya Roy, Anamika Veeramani, Kavya Shivashankar and Sameer Mishra.
I just found it a little curious that ESPN sent Kevin Nagandhi down to Washington, D.C. to cover this event.
5. Medium Happy Book Review
Today’s book recommendation: The Sellout, by Paul Beatty. A darkly comic novel in every way, this satire revolves around a young black protagonist who owns a small farm (chief crops: rectangular watermelons and marijuana) in south central Los Angeles (go with it) whose elderly black neighbor, Hominy Jenkins, a former understudy to Buckwheat on The Little Rascals, asks him to make him his slave.
There’s a lot more going on, but the premise allows Beatty to have a lot of fun with race relations, etc. The 2015 novel won the Man Booker Prize, making Beatty the first U.S. writer to win the award. Beatty claims that he was inspired to write the book because “I was broke.” Very dark and very funny.
Music 101
Top of the World
Leave it to Japanese all-female punk band Shonen Knife to cover a classic by The Carpenters and completely kick ass doing so. This tune came out in 1994 as part a tribute CD, If I Were A Carpenter, that is highly recommended by MH editors and janitors. Earlier that decade, the band had opened for Nirvana on the European leg of the Nevermind tour, because Kurt Cobain was a huge fan.
Remote Patrol
Saturday
UEFA Champions League Final
Juventus vs. Real Madrid
2:45 p.m. Fox
From lovely Cardiff, Wales. If you don’t know why ESPN calls Cristiano Ronaldo the most famous athlete in the world, check this out.
Update: Six year-old spelling prodigy Edith Fuller spelled both of her words correctly yesterday (“nyctinasty” and “tapas”) but did not fare well enough on the written portion of the spelling bee to advance. There’s a written portion?!?
Starting Five
Griffin Done*
*The judges will also accept “Head Tart” and “Kathy’s Career Caput”
What.
Was.
She.
Thinking?
Most of us first met Kathy Griffin when she played a D-minus list comedienne with an irrational hatred of a New Yorker (Jerry) on Seinfeld. Twenty-plus years later, what has changed? I’ll only add that a certain witty woman from the Midwest told the MH staff that “What I was truly offended by was her cultural appropriation [of a Middle Eastern custom].”
2. Paris Or Pais?
It only looks like a Pink Floyd album cover
Do you know all the details of the Paris Accord? I don’t, either, but it seems as if the entire world with the exceptions of Nicaragua and Syria agree on something designed to stave off pollution, that it would make sense to be on that side. Nature (air, water, trees, temperatures, etc.) doesn’t recognize national borders. Anyway, we’ll see if Donald Trump goes full covfefe on this or if he pulls back this afternoon when he makes his announcement in the Woes Garden.
3. “Being Black In America Is Tough”
LeBron James may win the NBA Finals, but that’s, to use a phrase Donald Trump once uttered to describe the end of the USFL, “small potatoes.” Would he ever consider running for president? Though he would be neither the first black or non-college-educated president, LeBron would become the tallest president (and, at the age of 35 in 2020, he’d be eligible to run next cycle while still playing for the Cavs: He could invite himself to the White House).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BAjXrU2Info
I say this because besides being the planet’s best basketball player, James keeps making statements like the one he did yesterday after it was discovered that his Brentwood home had been tagged with a racial slur that sound wise and mature. Besides, the dude is a self-made billionaire and he has already done more to bring back a Midwestern city than most presidents of the post-industrial age. And he could make Kawhi Leonard his Secretary of Defense.
4. Breakdown
In Africa, 44 people die of….thirst after their truck breaks down in the Sahara desert. The travelers were heading from Niger to Libya, the first step in a path most likely to try and cross the Mediterranean. Six survivors, all women, lived to tell the tale. Many of the dead are children.
5. Allie’s Back
Remember Allie Ostrander? Last year I profiled the diminutive cross-country phenom from Alaska, who as a freshman in 2015 finished second in the NCAA cross-country nationals, in Newsweek. Ostrander was pretty much injured all of last autumn but now this young woman who loves chugging up mountains has found the ideal event for herself: the 3,000-meter steeplechase.
In April Ostrander made her steeple debut and ran an NCAA-qualifying time of 9:55 while winning the race. To put her feat into perspective, no competitor at last year’s Olympic Trials ever ran as fast in the steeple in their debuts. Last weekend Ostrander qualified for the NCAA Outdoor Championships in Eugene (June 7-10) by winning the NCAA West Regionals. She’ll be one of the favorites.
Music 101
Bad Blood
The power of YouTube: Neil Sedaka and Elton John’s 1975 hit soared to No. 1 on the Billboard charts for three weeks but has fewer than one million views on YouTube. Meanwhile, Taylor Swift‘s 2015 hit of the same title also went to No. 1 but has more than one BILLION YouTube hits.
Meet Edith Fuller. She just turned six and she’ll be competing in the Scripps National Spelling Bee today. Fuller, a home-schooled student from Oklahoma, is the youngest spell-ebrity ever to qualify for the nationals and she will be more than two years younger than any of the other 290 competitors today. P-R-E-C-O-C-I-O-U-S.
2. Let’s Have Another Cup of Covfefe
This midnight Donald Trump tweet was stopped in mid-tweet (it’s got to be “coverage,” no?) and then deleted by the time you woke up? I’m hoping “covfefe” is the first word Edith Fuller is given today.
Who can figure out the true meaning of “covfefe” ??? Enjoy!
The prime ministers of, in order left to right, Denmark, Norway, Finland, Sweden and Iceland understand something about bullies in general and President Donald Trump specifically: they hate it when you laugh at them.
Thse five prime ministers, whose names are simply too difficult for me to spell, convened in Bergen, Norway (lovely town; DO visit) and posted the photo on social media under the heading, “Who rules the world?”
4. Dragon’s Back Race
The Dragon’s Back, a five-day race across the Welsh countryside that covers nearly 200 miles and asks entrants to undertake an overall elevation gain of 15,500 meters (that’s 9.6 miles) concluded last week. The event is so torturous that it has only been undertaken four times: 1992, 2012, 2015 and this year. The next event is 2019.
Last week’s winners were Marcus Scotney of the U.K. and Carol Morgan of Dublin. Morgan, the top female finisher and the ninth overall finisher, was ideally suited to take part in such a perilous race: she is an advanced emergency room practitioner.
Put me down to do this race in two years…
5. Austin Murphy
Austin with a resident of Austin
When it was announced that Sports Illustrated was laying off five people earlier this month, the sports bloggers pounced on the name Seth Davis because they know him from TV. The other four names have not been made public yet (and I’ll let the other three ex-staffers reveal at their own choosing), but for those of us who’ve spent any time at SI in the past three decades, the truly big name and major personage that SI let go was Austin Murphy.
I first met Austin just a few weeks into my tenure at SI. It was the summer of 1989 and I walked into the 18th floor offices on an off day (Tuesday or Wednesday) to get a little work done. As I walked through the bullpen triangle of reporters’ offices, I spotted someone I assumed was a pro athlete (they bring them in directly for interviews, I wondered) but it was actually just Austin.
There are few people you will ever meet who have the physique of someone who could summit Everest, the charisma of a leading man, the vocabulary of a New York Times Op-Ed writer (he never wrote a story in the early years that did not induce me to look up at least one word, a word I’d later use in a story of my own) , and the literary background of a 400-level course college prof. Now take someone like that and put him in every college football and NFL locker room for 30 years, have him traipse around the Tour de France for a decade or two, and you begin to appreciate Austin Murphy. Add to all of that a Saharan sense of humor and a genuine decency and humility and then you have one of the best people who ever worked for the magazine.
In my first years at SI, I was the college football fact-checker while Austin and the great Sally Jenkins wrote most of the “gamers,” the stories that emanated from the previous weekend’s big games. Austin became an unofficial mentor and big brother to me, especially after we both took a trip to South Bend just five weeks after I arrived (SI made Notre Dame its preseason No. 1) for a college football preview story and I realized he had quoted me (as “a recent alum”) in it.
Anyway, the awe I felt in the presence of Austin soon dissipated as I spent more time around him because Austin, the oldest son of a family of eight from eastern Pennsylvania, has a keen sense of self-awareness and excels at putting people at ease. A few anecdotes from the files:
–When SI laid four of us off in 2001, a number of friends or just staffers sent texts or emails of condolence. Austin phoned and this is what was said: “John. Austin. Better you than me.” I love that. It remains the funniest thing anyone has ever said to me.
–Austin used to write a bi-weekly family newsletter that he occasionally allowed me to peruse. It was titled The Slumgullion Fortnightly (I’m not sure if he still pens it) and it’s truly the funniest, most inspired writing this long-time senior writer at SI has ever done. As prolific and talented a writer as Austin is, he always saved his most inspired and humorous prose for tales that involved his parents and siblings. Occasionally, as in this piece about his younger brother, Mark, being cut by the Detroit Lions, his passion made it into the pages of SI.
–In 2002 or ’03 I decided to run a marathon in Napa Valley because why not? Austin, who was living in Marin County at the time, volunteered to let me stay at his home, then woke up at around 4 a.m. on a Sunday morning to drive me to the start line. And he waited around for me at the finish. He may have even taken me out for an ice cream cone, I’m not sure (he also lent me the family SAAB, whose transmission I may or may not have destroyed. Sorry about that, Austin. Send me the bill; I can now afford to pay it).
–Besides covering college and pro football, the Tour de France, and being SI‘s unofficial ambassador to all who pursue adventure sports over the years, Austin dedicated himself to writing two books that I highly recommend: Saturday Rules, an essential primer for the college football fan, and The Sweet Season, about an autumn spent with St. John’s football and their legendary coach, John Gagliardi. He’s going to take, I imagine, some much-deserved time off and work on his banjo or ukulele, become a better surfer, probably climb Half Dome at Yosemite or bike a few centuries, maybe even run for mayor of his cushy Marin County town.
I really like what our mutual friend Ralph Russo said when he learned SI had let Austin go: “I always thought that Austin and Chuck Culpepper were two people who gave sportswriting more than they got out of it.” I agree. You meet a lot of people in sports writing who let the culture devour them, who relax their personal standards or commitment to self-improvement because the job or the travel just wears them down. That has never been Austin. More than 25 years since I first met him, he still evinces that sense of adventure, of discovery, of self-actualization, all while being one of the funnier humans you’ll ever encounter. He never showed up at a press box dressed like a schlub, or spouting a trite phrase in front of cohorts as the contents of his pre-game meal could be observed in mid-mastication. He has always carried himself with both a sense of humor and a sense of, well, self-respect. You don’t always see that in our business.
If I get a text from Austin later this week telling me “Big wave surfing with Laird. Aloha,” it won’t surprise me in the slightest.
Music 101
Love Her Madly
This song by The Doors appears on the album L.A. Woman and was released in March of 1971. It rose to No. 11 on the charts. Four months later lead singer Jim Morrison was dead at the age of 27; precise cause of death unknown.
Remote Patrol
Stanley Cup Finals, Game 2: Predators at Penguins
8 p.m. NBC Sports Net
Hold on to your catfish, folks. The Preds overcame a 3-0 deficit to tie the score in Pittsburgh on Monday before the Stanley Cup champs prevailed.
