Monthly Archives: April 2019

IT’S ALL HAPPENING!

by John Walters | 3 Comments

by John Walters

Tweet Me Right

https://twitter.com/MollyJongFast/status/1115731723139133440

and…

and…

Starting Five

Among other feats, Dirk patented this fall-away jumper

Dirk & Dwyane

Dirk Nowitzki, 40, played his final home game with the Dallas Mavericks last night. Few NBA players, if any, have ever meant more to their franchise: 21 uninterrupted seasons with the same franchise, the most in NBA history; an NBA championship, the Mavericks’ first and only; an NBA MVP award (in 2007). And he’ll retire as the league’s sixth all-time leading scorer, one of seven to surpass 30,000 points.

The seven-footer from Germany will also retire as the most prolific scorer in NBA history born outside the USA.

Dwyane Wade, 37, also played his final home game for the Miami Heat. An HOF career, if not quite to the magnitude of Dirk’s. Three NBA championships, 13 All-Star Games in 16 seasons (mostly but not exclusively with Miami), 30th in career scoring.

Both legends put up 30 points last night (both have been Finals MVPs).

Jamal Of America

Then there’s Jamal Crawford, 39, presently of the Phoenix Suns, his 8th NBA franchise. Last night Crawford, playing the role of Devin Booker, scored 51 points in the Suns’ loss to Dirk’s Dallas Mavs.

Crawford is the oldest player in NBA history to put up a 50-spot. He’s the only one to do so with four different franchises. He’s the NBA’s all-time leader in 4-point plays (55) and also in Sixth Man of the Year awards (3). He’s started less than one-third of the games he’s played in, yet he is 51st on the NBA’s career scoring list (and if he plays one more season, he’ll move up at least another five spots).

We’ve posted before about how Crawford is criminally under-appreciated. He’s also deserving of a spot in the Hall, we feel.

If you watched ESPN last night, they never altered the narrative. They went in thinking “Dirk and Dwyane” and they weren’t going to be inconvenienced by Crawford’s historic night. Part of being the WWL in the past 10-20 years is almost always siding with frontrunners (which is why we get 24-hour non-stop LeBron and why GameDay will make more trip to Columbus and Tuscaloosa come autumn). That’s just how it is.

“I’ll Take ‘Over This Game’ for $110,000, Alex”


The only singular accomplishment more impressive than Crawford’s yesterday belonged to James Holzhauer, a 34 year-old contestant on Jeopardy! In an episode that was taped on February 11, Holzhauer crushed the game show’s single-day record for cash awarded, taking home $110,914.

What’s weird about that total? Holzhauer’s daughter was born on November 9, 2014 (think about it).

The previous mark, set in 2010, was $77,000. Holzhauer, a professional sports gambler from Las Vegas and, we assume, something of a polymath, has a four-day total of $244,000-plus. He’ll take on two new challengers tonight.

Holzhauer graduated from Naperville (Ill.) High School, his wife was once a contestant on “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire”, and not surprisingly, he is an avid bridge player, a trait common to many highly intelligent people. Us, we still can’t beat our chess computer app that came with the Mac.

Frost-Bitten

Yesterday on CNBC host Wilfred Frost, the son of acclaimed Seventies journalist David Frost, had on as his guest Jes Staley, the CEO of Barclays Bank. Staley, 62, earns a relatively paltry salary of $5 million-plus, but he’s the former CEO of JP Morgan and also worked at Blue Mountain Capital, and he’s probably doing alright.

Which is, you know, bully for him.

Anyway, at the very end of the chat Frost asked Staley about the obscene ratios of CEO pay to the median salary of employees at those CEOs institutions. This was NOT an on-the-fly question, as a graphic was posted as Frost posed the question.

Staley’s mood turned sour on that question, and he simply said he was not about to opine on what other CEOs earn. We get it. But here is where Frost got lost. Why didn’t he push him and ask why not? If there were only some figure in Frost’s life, a role-model perhaps, maybe even a family member, who could serve as an inspiration for holding powerful men to be accountable when conducting an interview with them. To make him a more intrepid interviewer.

For what it’s worth, there are CEOs, not all, but entirely too many (in our opinion), who earn 100x, 200x and even 300x what the median salary of their employees is. If you want to delve into the data, you can start here.

Or here.

Where this issue gets sticky—and it’s a lively debate among six of us high school friends on the same text chain—is that if someone like me asks, “Well, just how much is enough for a CEO?” we are accused of being a socialist. Hardly. We’re capitalist, we’re just not into the whole feudal lord-serf model.

https://twitter.com/HirudoStreet/status/1116011868005568512

One of my friends, a successful dentist who runs his own small shop with five or so employees, wondered if I was just against the idea of people being successful or working hard. I asked him if he pays himself 100x more than his employees. Of course not, he said.

For the record, two of these buddies who own their own small businesses tell me they’ve never paid themselves more than 5 to 10x median salary of their employees.

And that’s healthy.

Another friend is a big-time consultant and when we ask him why he feels free to advise CEOs to lay off workers earning below $75,000 a year but never advises them to trim their salary. His stock reply: “Is the CEO’s salary the reason the business is underperforming?”

My (and others’) reply is, “No more than the guy doing the $75,000 a year gig. Moreover, as the LEADER of a team (be it CEO, king, or whatever), maybe the symbolic gesture of your being willing to sacrifice something, when that sacrifice is so relatively minuscule compared to your employees/loyal subjects, would make for a happier, productive workplace.”

Anyway, we believe in capitalism. We also believe that a ceiling of 100x as the maximum ratio (after perks, mind you) from CEO: median salary would make for a more economically viable country and a happier society.

And if Wilfred Frost is serious about this issue, he and CNBC should devote a half-hour to an hour program on it and invite every CEO they can find (and list every one who turns down their invitation).

Granny Theft


Maybe you have a family member or loved one who is advancing in years. Maybe you’re grappling with the eventuality of them moving to assisted living, and the financial burden.

I’ve had some time to ruminate on this lately, and I believe I’ve come up with a solution to the problem: Rob a bank. Better yet, attempt to rob a bank.

Do you know how much a nice assisted living facility costs these days? We have an extended family member whose costs are in the five figures per month. And even here in sunny and relatively cheap Arizona it’s not unusual to spend $4,000 per month.

Which is why we suggest robbing a bank: to the elderly. Now, imagine this. A car of four octogenarian or older ladies pulls up to a bank (they park in a handicapped spot, which they’re entitled to, for easier egress). They enter and pull a Bonnie and Clyde. Here are the resulting scenarios I’ve envisioned:

A) They get away! Woo-hoo! Now you have funds to pay for that assisted living facility. Probability? Low.

B) They DON’T get away. Nearly as good a result and a much higher probability of occurrence. If you make this an armed robbery, you’re looking at jail time. But who cares, especially if you’re female? Now the state has to pay to house and feed you. You have all the time you need to write birthday and graduation cards to your grandkids. You don’t have to worry about what to wear. Or when to clean the house. Instead of being out $5 to $15K per month, the state is footing the bill. And you have an always available pool of peeps with whom to play bridge or gin rummy.

And seriously, what’s life imprisonment when you’re 87? Especially if you don’t even know who or where you are?

(This may be the best idea we’ve ever had)

For the record, Mama Dubs is on board as long as I can promise her the detention center has Turner Classic Movies. Still looking into it…

Reserves

Quick Hitters: The Baltimore Orioles are handling the Chris Davis Futility Infielder situation all wrong. Take a lesson from Bill Veeck. Celebrate it: bat Davis first and offer fans some type of giveaway if he gets his next hit at the game they attend…Fellow Brophy Prep alum Matt Zemek (read his stuff; he’s terrific) and I have come to the conclusion that the Final Four telecast would be much improved by putting Ian Eagle-Jim Spanarkel on one game and Jim Nantz-Bill Raftery-Grant Hill on the other. Granted, we’d prefer to see the former crew on Monday night. Our guess is that Nantz guards his territory very, very assiduously…Magic Johnson? I really don’t care, but my suspicion is he thought, “Life’s too short to deal with LeBron’s bullsh*t every day. And after all, I was more of a winner (which he was).”

Music 101

Come Sail Away

This one, by Styx, was always an angst-ridden choice at the junior high dance. Is it a slow song? Do we still dance close after the “A gathering of angels appeared above my head…” line, after it makes the transition from ballad to rocker ? This was released in 1977, just a month after Star Wars, and at a time when being intergalactic was really cool. It shot to No. 8 on the charts and was the breakthrough hit the band had been searching for.

True fact: When we first moved to Phoenix in 1978, the local NBC affiliate (Channel 12) would play the closing keyboard part as its signing off music. I wonder if anyone from Styx was even aware they were doing that? The world was such a different place before social media.

Remote Patrol

Manhattan Murder Mystery

8 p.m. TCM

Because “Manhattan Perv Mystery” would’ve been a documentary and not much of a mystery. Anyway, Woody Allen and Diane Keaton team up once again, this time in 1993, as a married couple who believe a neighbor has been off’ed and seek to discover the truth. It’s a comic turn on Rear Window.


IT’S ALL HAPPENING!

by John Walters | 9 Comments

by John Walters

Tweet Me Right

Starting Five

Rags To Riches*

*Though he did score a game-high 27 points, the judges will not accept “Night Of The Hunter”

When, in the course of human events, a No. 1 seed loses to a No. 16 seed, the coach of the former, Tony Bennett, seems destined to become a figure of ignominy. Instead, one year and two-plus weeks later, Bennett and two of the same starters—Kyle Guy and Tyler Jerome—lead that program to a national championship.

Yes, Virginia, you redeemed yourself. Pay attention, Michigan: THIS is what a redemption tour looks like.

We’ll get to the awful calls in a moment, but give the Wahoos credit for not just being resilient, but for having poise. They never cut down the nets with Mamadi Diakite’s tip back to Kehei Clark, who then passed a half-court length ball back to Diakite, who caught and shot in one motion, to take Purdue to overtime in the Elite Eight. They don’t pull up a Warner (the official ladder of March Madness, you know) unless Kyle Guy buries three straight free throws with less than two ticks left against Auburn in the Final Four. And they needed overtime last night.

https://twitter.com/BackAftaThis/status/1115462723339309056

Sorry, Dawg. You were wrong.

By the way, all five of Virginia’s starters are juniors or below and De’Andre Hunter is the only serious threat to turn pro (I’m not sure if that’s his ideal option), which is why they’ve already been tabbed as a favorite to repeat.

Ref Job

Now that we’ve credited the Cavs for a job well done, let’s examine two absolutely horrid officiating mistakes near the end of the game. This one happened near the end of regulation, I believe, and you can understand why Texas Tech’s Davide Moretti thought the refs were full of baloney…and not just because he’s from Bologna, Italy.

This call below feels worse, actually, since it had that “Tuck Rule” aspect of no one’s ever called this play this way before and no one will after this moment, either. This was criminal, and again it involved Moretti.

There’s about one minute left in OT, the Red Raiders trail by two, and Moretti has the ball on an outlet. No, he’s not about to score here, but the game is in transition as Hunter reaches in and slaps the ball out of his hands and out of bounds. The refs ruminate for three to four minutes, Jim an Bill and Grant wax poetic about whatever narrative they’ve predetermined, and somehow, even though the ball clearly never touched another part of Moretti’s body, the ball is given to Virginia.

Somewhere, Jon Gruden was like, Yup. Been there. By the way, Greg Gumbel was on-site for both of these moments.

Not only was this utter injustice, but the matter-of-fact manner in which the CBS crew handled it was wrong bordering on conspiratorial. This play happens in nearly every hoops game and the ball always goes back to the offense. No one ever checks if the leather rubbed off a player’s pinkie after the defender provided the impetus.

Outstanding game. Virginia, a worthy champ. But I stopped caring after this play.

One Zion Moment

Viewers were made to wait 21 minutes after the final buzzer of Virginia’s win for CBS’ presentation of “One Shining Moment”, which is asking much from your East Coast audience since it was near midnight when the game ended.

Then, the montage begins and your first look at Duke’s Zion Williamson is :25 in (“and there you are…”). Depending on whether you also add Zion appearing in UCF’s and Va. Tech’s blown bunnies, he appears seven or nine times in the montage. Not bad for a squad that did not advance to the Final Four.

Gonzaga, which was the No. 1 team for much of the season (and beat Duke) got a quick locker-room celebration moment (Mark Few handstand) and that’s all. No Rui Hachiamura. No Brandon Clarke.

Nine (or seven) Zion moments, including him speaking on camera (the only player who gets audio). Hey, we love Zion, too. This was just laying it on a little thick.

But it did get us to thinking: Has ESPN already designated a Windhorst-ian jock sniffer who will trail Zion throughout his NBA career? They’ve got to have a guy—or gal—in place. Who was it that ESPN had Pedro Gomez gumshoe for a year or two? Barry Bonds, right? They’ll have an Eye On Zion dude. Count on it.

The Muller Report

TCM’s Eddie Muller has been called “The Czar Of Noir” and is a self-proclaimed “Noirchaeologist.” He’s America’s leading authority on film noir, that delightfully dark genre where sex, greed and murder usually all intersect.

Muller hosts TCM’s weekly “Noir Alley“, which inexplicably used to run on Sunday mornings but now, wisely, has been moved to Saturday at midnight (9 p.m. for you West Coasters). Besides showing a film noir classic,Muller appears before and after the screening, providing articulate insight, information and opinion without ever coming off as pedantic or condescending.

Here he is introducing Double Indemnity, the definitive film noir classic. Muller is the son and namesake of a well-known San Francisco boxing writer (back when people read about boxing) and is himself an author of pulp fiction. First and foremost, as you can see here, he’s a scribe.

You can easily imagine sitting next to him at a bar as he downs a bourbon/rocks and shares these gems with you. TCM has not one but two masterful hosts right now: Muller and Ben Mankiewicz. If not the best-kept secret on television, I don’t know what is.

Futility Infielder

Baltimore’s Chris Davis goes 0-5, despite the O’s scoring 12 runs in a win. He’s now 0-49 dating back to last September, and has taken the Major League record for continued futility. Now this is someone for whom I have empathy.

RESERVES


Love In An Elevator

Heard from a few friends on the Elevator Etiquette kerfuffle yesterday—no one will actually comment. Now, of course, these are my friends and most are over the age of 40, but the consensus was, toward the young lady who made the kindly request: Get over yourself.

The tweeps attacked: SHE MADE A SUGGESTION AND YOU CAN’T BE DECENT ENOUGH TO ABIDE BY IT!?!?! I’m sorry. I didn’t realize it was her world and I was only living in it. Most of us, just about every last one of us, step into an elevator and you know what? Her inner sense of well-being is not the very top thing on our minds.

We’re decent citizens. We will be polite. We will NEVER talk on our cellphone in a plane or elevator. We will never stand up and try to exit the plane before our row. We’re not savages. But now you want me to do the equivalent of wearing an “I AM NOT A SEXUAL PREDATOR” t-shirt, an empty gesture signifying nothing, to indulge your sense of safety? Sorry, no.

Go ahead and call me a jerk. Or take the stairs. You have nothing to fear from me. Or 99.9999% of my fraternity (your number). I’m nice. I’m not a door mat. Deal with it.

Hart Attack

We haven’t watched pro wrestling since the Seventies, but on Sunday night Bret Hart was being inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame and a bum rushed him in the ring as he was giving his induction speech. We’d hoped Hart would pile-drive him into the canvas, but alas, security whisked the interloper away before he could even tag his partner outside the ropes.

Music 101

7 Chinese Brothers

On April 9, 1984 —35 years ago today— REM released its classic, “Reckoning.” My friends and I were high school seniors and too busy listening to Def Leppard, Prince, Night Ranger to notice. It was at least two years and a few liberal arts courses before I began to appreciate the genius of the foursome from Athens.

REM is a lot like Springsteen: It’s best songs are inversely proportional to how well they fared on the Billboard charts.

Remote Patrol

Champions League

Tottenham vs. Manchester City

3 p.m. TNT

In the past 4-plus seasons, Tottenham’s Harry Kane has scored 122 goals, more than any other player in the BPL in that span


Eight squads remain in the UEFA Champions League tournament, and four are from the Premier League. This is the only bloke-on-bloke matchup.

IT’S ALL HAPPENING!

by John Walters | Leave a comment

by John Walters

Starting Five

Nielsen Ratings Plunge

Homeland Security Security Kirstjen Nielsen, the Heinrich Himmler to Donny T’s Adolf, has resigned. It may be that she was tired of being yelled at by both the national media and her boss, or maybe she found a job opening at the Bronx Zoo. We don’t know.


What’s that, now 22 or so major cabinet members who have resigned under Trump? The main one who stays is Stephen Miller, because he’s the one guy who’s more Extreme Ghoul than his boss is. It’s like when Dr. Evil looks at Mini-Me and thinks, “No, not that far.”

Felonies And Misdemeanors

Virginia is onto the national championship after a wild and woolly final 10 ticks in Minneapolis. Our thoughts: Yes, you can call that foul on Kyle Guy‘s attempted three-pointer but then certainly you have to call the double dribble on Tyler Jerome in the backcourt.

A few folks will point out that Jerome’s shirt was held—briefly—but if you watch the replay, it would have been impossible for the backcourt official to see that from his angle behind Jerome. The double dribble, though, he could not have missed.

USA Today columnist Dan Wolken took the angle that we as fans should want the game called objectively all 40 minutes. He did so in defending the foul call. I agree, but that’s not the takeaway from this final 10 seconds of action. The takeaway, and anyone who has been watching hoops the past decade can confirm, is that in modern basketball some crimes are felonies and others are misdemeanors.

Fouls on shots are still felonies. Mishandling the basketball, be it traveling or palming or this double dribble, have unofficially been downgraded to misdemeanors. That should not be. But it has become. And so we were left with an unsatisfying conclusion such as Saturday night’s…

GOAT, Not Goat

Kyle Guy still needed to drain at least two of his three free throws for UVA to tie and all three to win, and he needed to do so in a packed football stadium as a national TV audience watched. Swish, swish, swish.

One day later in Tampa Arike Ogunbowale of Notre Dame needed to bury her two free throws in order for the Irish to send their championship game versus Baylor into overtime. Could not do it. Alike missed the first on a cruel bounce, then attempted to miss the second shot but alas, made it.

Baylor 82, Notre Dame 81.

Ogunbowale led the Irish in scoring on Sunday afternoon with 31 points, led them in scoring on Friday night, is the school’s all-time leading score and, of course, led them to last year’s national championship with not one but two buzzer-beating threes. It’s only natural for her to feel that she let her team down in the last seconds, but everyone who pays even the scantest attention to women’s hoops knows that at Notre Dame, Arike is THE GOAT, not a goat.

Snow Wonder

An avalanche in the Himalayas that these climbers were lucky to capture, as opposed to being consumed by.

Red-Hot Dodger

Bellinger, the 2017 Rookie of the Year, is starting his third season off right

Baseball’s hottest player through it’s first week-plus is a dude playing in southern California, but not that dude, the one who signed the $430 million deal in March. The Dodgers’ Cody Bellinger has had a triple crown start to 2019, leading the National League in home runs (7), RBI (18), and batting average (.455).

Mike Trout’s doin’ alright, too: second in the American League in home runs (5) and RBI (12), fifth in batting average.

Also worth paying attention to: Chris Davis of Baltimore is now in an 0-44 funk and if he plays tonight could break the existing Major League record for futility. That 0-46 mark was set in 2011 by L.A. Dodger Eugenio Velez. Davis plays first base so that technically makes him a Futility Infielder.

Final note: the Red Sox, with their 1-0 win at Arizona yesterday, played their 14th consecutive game in the Pacific Time Zone stretching over six months. The record? 5-9 with one World Series championship while losing all three series without being swept in any of them this spring.

Music 101

Take On Me (Weezer)

Rivers Cuomo and his band have now released covers of Toto’s “Africa” and this tune by A-Ha. Can’t wait until he tackles “Undone (The Sweater Song).” Our favorite part of this is seeing Finn Wolfhard of Stranger Things playing teen Cuomo, and let’s face it, Finn Wolfhard is as A-Ha sounding as anyone actually in the iconic Norwegian Eighties band.

Remote Patrol

Texas Tech vs. Virginia

9 p.m. CBS

Matt Mooney’s, Tech’s MOP this tourney, actually began his career at Air Force

A pair of non-ESPN faves, programs that exist outside the Duke-Carolina-Kentucky valence level that play excellent defense and have a couple of Jimmy Chitwood clones in Matt Mooney (Tech), a South Dakota grad transfer, and Kyle Guy (like Chitwood, a Hoosier native). Should be a great show. Some school is about to win its first men’s hoops championship.




See Ya Later, Elevator

by John Walters | Leave a comment

by John Walters

What do we owe our fellow passengers on this ride called life? Do we owe them courtesy and respect? Sure, of course. Do we owe them an unspoken promise that we mean no harm? I certainly hope so. Do we owe them not only safety but whatever will make them feel safe, even if that requires behavior that is out of character for us? I don’t think so, first of all because there is no common standard for what will make one person feel safe as opposed to what will make another feel safe.

If you don’t know where this is coming from, I had an interesting afternoon on Twitter yesterday. It began with a pair of tweets from Mina Kimes, a popular young female TV personality who regularly appears on one or more of ESPN’s weekday afternoon programs. I’ve never met Ms. Kimes, but on TV she comes off as smart and personable. Here is what she tweeted:



One of my first thoughts when I read these tweets was that this would make for an ideal Curb Your Enthusiasm subplot. Larry is chastised by a woman he meets at a hotel for not pushing his floor first (turns out they’re on the same floor) and for waiting for her to exit the elevator. Of course, as soon as he starts adopting these measures, a series of encounters in elevators with women result, each one ending horribly for him as he is scolded for exiting first and not being a gentleman.

One imagines Susie ripping Larry a new one for his absence of manners. Of course Leon would laugh at this new world order and launch into a politically incorrect screed about the elevator pickup. The episode ends with Larry and a woman alone in a hotel elevator, Larry exiting first, and just then the elevator cables snap and she plunges to an untimely demise. And let’s face it, there have been far more contrived Curb endings than that.

Here is what I replied to Mina, against my better judgment (not because I don’t believe in what I’m typing, but because I foresaw the backlash that would ensue):

https://twitter.com/jdubs88/status/1115023706613374976

Here are points that to me appear obvious but let’s lay them down for the record: as a man you never behave in a manner that makes a woman feel unsafe. That’s pretty easy, right? Confined space or not, alone with her or not, you don’t act in such a manner that makes a female feel threatened.

I think we’re all on board with that.

But here is where I part company with Mina. Her advice here is that I am, as a male, an existential threat. It’s not the behavior I’m exhibiting in the elevator that makes her feel threatened; it’s my identity as a man, alone. I can modify my behavior. I cannot modify my identity.

Let’s change the particulars but maintain the principles. A woman lives in a neighborhood where 100% of the muggings are done by the same ethnic group. Never mind that 99.9999% of the people of that ethnic group who live in that neighborhood are not muggers. The woman does not feel safe if she is walking alone at night and someone from that ethnic group is walking behind her on the sidewalk. Can she send out a tweet asking folks of that ethnic group to walk on the other side of the street after sundown?

That’s racist, man! Why? Because I’m saying that I know that even though most of y’all aren’t muggers, I still feel unsafe when one of you is behind me on the street at night? I’m not calling you a mugger. I’m just asking you to respect my fears and cross the street. Identify yourself as someone I can trust by going out of your way to behave in a manner that makes me feel safer.

It’s the same principle. Yes, women have more to fear from men than vice-versa. But as Mina herself acknowledges, “99.9999% of (us) don’t have bad intentions.” So she’s asking all of us to alter our behavior for the actions of a minute few not because of how we act but because of what we are.

Sorry, I’m not down with that. And that doesn’t mean I don’t have empathy for women. If you think that, this must be your first day reading this blog or my tweets. Frankly, the suggestion is laughable, as I am in the midst of having cut out from a job for a month to return home to Arizona to take care of my mother who took a nasty spill (for the record, she’s going to be fine and emitted an “Oh, geez!” when I told her the latest cause for Twitter’s mass enmity toward me).

My obligation, as a fellow human being, is to treat you the way I would want you to treat me. Although someone corrected me on Twitter and said that, No, your obligation is to treat others the way they want to be treated (Did you hear that, Jesus? You got it wrong.) What a person who says that really means is, Treat me the way I want to be treated.

It’s possible, in fact even likely, that I can have empathy for women’s safety while also not wanting to live in a world where I have to announce I’m not Erin Andrews’ peephole peeper to every new female I meet. Does anyone feel that they should have to operate under a presumption of guilt until proven innocent with every chance encounter? Isn’t this the cause of so much agitation, and rightfully so, in minority communities?

But there’s a much simpler solution to all of this, one that will not ask the 99.9999 % (Mina’s figure, not mine; we both know the number is lower) of men without bad intentions to remind themselves to announce that they’re not Ted Bundy to every woman they meet. If Mina finds herself in the situation she described, why not just wait until the man presses his floor first? And if she is catching any creeper vibes and/or if he is hesitating to do so, step out of the elevator.

Now I know that Mina is a young, female, attractive and well-known sports television personality. And I know that I am none of those (and even worse, white). So on Twitter this argument never stands a chance because there’s very little chance the average stranger will separate the argument from the person making it. You know and like Mina; I’m the middle-aged white guy you’ve never heard of.

You can like Mina more than you like me. That makes perfect sense. What I’d ask you to do, what I always try to do on Twitter no matter who is speaking, is evaluate the argument. If I am behaving in any such way that makes you uncomfortable, let me know what I am doing and I will alter it. If what makes you uncomfortable is my gender alone, sorry.

As a New Yorker for 30 years, I’ve ridden countless elevators. In and out of hotels. When alone with a woman I don’t know, I stand as far away as possible. I don’t make small talk unless she initiates it. I mostly stare at the tops of my shoes. I imagine most men behave the same way. If some creeper wants to stalk you, his pushing the floor button first is not going to stop him. It may delay him, but it won’t stop him. Creepers creep.

One last thing: I notice whenever I take a contrarian stand on Twitter, particularly when it’s contra to anything a woman or any oppressed group says, no matter what the topic, is that I don’t just get “I disagree with you.” I get a lot of name-calling and I also receive a ton of “You cannot express that opinion!” although it’s more blunt. It’s thought-fascism.

I don’t care if you disagree with me. I welcome it, and I’m happy to discuss the issues. You’re not right because you’re not white and I’m not right because I am white (and male). But unfortunately (“mansplaining”) that’s too often what (“white privilege!”) it devolves into. And it’s this bizarre phenomenon of bullying people for being honest and disagreeing with your opinion that helped give rise to Trump. And worse, to Clay Travis.

Disagree with me all you want. Attack my points. Make a valid argument.

Final, final thing: Mina herself was never rude to me on Twitter. I chose to go this forum because Twitter and Awful Announcing love a yard fight and I’m not here to provide a show for them. I honestly took issue with what Mina wrote—not because I don’t believe all women have a right to be safe, but because I don’t believe any of us should be made to conform to what someone says makes them feel safe. There’s a big difference.

IT’S ALL HAPPENING!

by John Walters | 10 Comments

By John Walters

WordPress has changed up, without warning, the entire method of posting and we Luddites are still getting used to it. Our irate calls to WordPress HQ are going unanswered largely because they don’t have a contact/help line number. Grizzly bear with us. Thanks.

Starting Five

McGraw-Buttigieg 2020

This answer by Notre Dame coach Muffet McGraw was so on target that you almost wonder if the question was a plant. Then again, the veteran Irish coach knew she’d be asked something related to feminism following last week’s story by Matt Fortuna in which she said she’d never hire a male assistant coach again (she has in the past).

.000

It’s still early, but there’s probably no other everyday player who less needed to call attention to his batting woes than that Orioles’ Chris Davis. The seven-year, $161 million first baseman (now in the fourth season of his deal) went 0-3 in yesterday’s loss to the Yankees to bring him to 0-17 on the season. The Texas native who hit 47 home runs in 2015 has gone from slugger to shrugger.

Eleven of those 17 at-bats have ended in strikeouts. The good news is that if Davis gets hits in his next four at-bats he will exceed his .168 batting average of last season. He’s an Oriole, but he certainly has attracted a plethora of boo birds.

No Touching!

Former vice-president and current Democratic candidate Joe Biden, a serial affection aficionado, is now embarking on his apology tour for being far too hands-on in his approach with women. Biden is bidding to become the 46th president, a job currently held by a man who once bragged—you know where I’m going here.

We still don’t understand why the Democrats feel they need to use the 10 ounce gloves while the GOP keeps punching with the 6 ounce gloves.

deGrom Of Thrones

Again, it’s early, but we feel that this is going to be the Summer of Jacob in New York City. In 30 year-old Jacob deGrom‘s first two starts for the Mets this season, here are his numbers: 2-0, no runs allowed (0.00 ERA, which is a better way, Chris Davis, to put up a triple zero), 24 strikeouts.

It’s not as if we all didn’t know deGrom had Cy Young stuff the last few seasons. It’s just that he never got the run support. Last season the Florida native had a National League-best 1.70 ERA (it’s not easy this decade to top Clayton Kershaw AND Max Scherzer for lowest NL ERA) and 269 strikeouts but only finished 10-9.

Meanwhile, the last pitcher to have taken Gotham City by storm, deGrom’s former teammate Matt Harvey, allowed eight earned runs in four innings last night in his start for the Angels. Harvey is 0-1 in two starts with a 9.00 ERA

On Journalism (Cont.)

If you missed our little essay on what we did not like about sports journalism (yesterday’s post), we invite you to read it here. Consider this the follow-up.

After I tweeted something about one of those stories earlier this week, someone on Twitter asked me when the decline began. So I gave this a little thought. Let’s return to March of 1995. The entire Sports Illustrated editorial staff is whisked away to Orlando for four incredible days of fun and frolic (and potentially marriage-endangering activities). The reason, we are told, is A) to reward us for work well-done and B) because we’d had such a profitable year and the bosses would rather spend the money on a tax-break work outing than hand it directly to Uncle Sam.

Amidst all the fun, the Grand Poobah of the Time, Inc. editorial group, Norman Pearlstine, is invited to speak to us (there’s a hilarious anecdote related to this; a good friend who would later go on to work at ESPN and was considered a rising star at SI was told to introduce Pearlstine. This staffer wrote a short speech that included an off-color joke that landed like a wet fart; it was one of the highlights of my 15 years at SI). Pearlstine warns us about the looming threat of the internet—he’s the honcho who famously uttered the phrase, “Print is dead”—and when a staffer asked him how were media companies like us going to be able to charge readers for internet material, he had no answer.

Nearly 25 years later, nobody does. Still.

Sure, there are a few publications that use a pay model (The New York Times, Washington Post, The Athletic, etc.) but most cannot survive this way. The internet is what got us here because it made content free.

Granted, the internet, like every other technological advance, is agnostic. It has provided countless benefits and I’m all in favor of more voices being heard, which is what transpired. The career of Bill Simmons is the signature example, and there were probably a few Bill Simmons before 1995 who did not have the advantage of the internet and instead went to law school or into aluminum siding.

However, in 1995 every publication had two revenue streams: 1) subscriptions/newsstand price and 2) advertising. The internet pretty much dammed up one stream. And if advertisers are your only source of income, then the only thing that matters is how many eyeballs look at your publication. And, unfortunately, that can be quantified. What readers should realize is that publications should be paying them to read their site/magazine. As opposed to the other way around. You, the reader, are a valued commodity. And this is why most pay models now offer an even more ridiculously low subscription price than they used to when I was a kid and SI would advertise on TV and proclaim that a year’s subscription would get me “79 % off the cover price.”

Anyway, as soon as eyeballs only mattered, and with an explosion of blogs and sites out there to compete for your attention, the established model was doomed. How do you compete with any of them? First, you lower costs. Hire young people, especially those who are willing to work for nothing. In my years at SI On Campus (2003-2005), we offered semester internships (that’s how current L.A. Times columnist Arash Markazi got his start) but there was one young man who had just graduated from college and was ineligible for that. Undeterred, he proposed to our SIOC managing editor (now the top dog at all of SI) that he simply work for nothing. And our guy said, “Sure.”

So here we were, SI, one of the top two names in sportswriting/media, allowing someone to be an indentured servant for an indefinite period of time. Shame on us.

The inmates were beginning to run the asylum and the bosses were too scared about losing their jobs as numbers dwindled each quarter to stand up to the rebellion. Example: When I was writing at SI On Campus I also did a lot of college football stuff. The problem was that my “editor,” now a “content producer,” was a guy younger than me who was also trying to make a name for himself. I was pitching ideas and asking for assignments to a guy against whom I was competing for those same assignments. Guess who won?

It’s not that this person was in any way corrupt or unethical. It’s just that the rules of the game had changed in a way that would have never been acceptable five years earlier. Meanwhile, sure, some writers my age or older—to their detriment—refused to accept the bastard stepchild. Peter King did. Dr. Z did. I did, as this daily blog attests.

(Right about now you should be noting the irony of a guy who writes a blog for free decrying the phenomenon of free content dooming his industry, by the way).

So you have free content and a lowest common denominator: whatever people click on is what wins. In the early days of this strange new world some writers begrudgingly wrote pieces that they might otherwise not have wanted to, knowing it would score clicks. But we’ve now cycled through an entire generation of young writers whose teen esteem may have been boosted by how many Likes their Facebook post received or how many followers they have on Instagram. And for these young journalists, clicks are not a necessary evil of doing their jobs. They’re the metric they use to validate their self-worth as journalists. Which is like saying Two And A Half Men is a better show than Mad Men because, hey, look at the ratings.

I watched the inmates take over the asylum at Newsweek. Writers who barely deserved to write for the Opa Locka Pennysaver knew better than some of us how to write SEO-friendly headlines or make their stories go viral. One young woman, almost the moment she hit “SEND,” whored herself out to every radio call-in show or podcast she could find. Most of her day was spent conducting radio interviews within ear shot of actual brilliant writers like Alex Nazaryan (now at Yahoo! News and one of the top five journalists I’ve ever worked with).

There was an opportunity for editors and management to stop this race to the bottom, but as I asked, Who was going to fall on the sword professionally to curb it? No one. So established, award-winning writers at SI were told they could remain on staff if they went on half-salary (this is still happening). Stories were graded strictly by the number of hits they received.

In my last weeks at Newsweek, managing editor Matt McCallester, a man who needs a walk-in closet for all his skeletons, informed us that each of our stories needed to receive 15,000 clicks. He knew that was an impossible number for most of us to hit (an aside: I never assumed most readers were coming to Newsweek for sports) so it game him a wide berth when it came to layoffs.

The day after I was laid off, I was setting up for a private party where I bartended and I received an email inviting me to call into the Newsweek meeting. Hey, they invited me. So I phoned in and listened. McCallester was now informing the staff that they’d soon need to receive 30,000 clicks per story. Raises? Ha! Oh, and the travel budget was also being cut.

As I grinned (I never signed the severance package NDA contract. F__ that.), one of the male writers said, “That sounds futile.” When I later spoke with him about it, he corrected me. “No,” he said, “I said, ‘That sounds feudal.'”

Exactly.

I grew up in an age where people paid to read the news but would never think of paying for water. Ever. Now it’s the exact opposite. And you know what? Consumers are far more discriminating about water than they’ve ever been.

Free speech is a wonderful thing. Free journalism is not. It’s actually the enemy of free speech. You get what you pay for, both as a consumer and as management at a publication. How many times has some MAGA fan shared news of, for example, “3 million illegal voters in the last election in California.” Where’d you read that?, they’re asked. They don’t know. It’s all garbage. Back when people paid for news, they remembered the source of their information.

In the past 10 years I have worked as a full-time staffer at AOL Fanhouse, at The Daily and at Newsweek. I also work as a contract writer for The Athletic. All those years, though, I have also waited and bartended. I’m hardly alone. I know people who work at the biggest establishments you can think of that are Uber/Lyft drivers. I won’t name them here but it’s more than two.

I wonder if their publications would mind you knowing that. I wonder if these people could do their jobs better if it were not incumbent upon them, upon me, to have a side hustle.

I’d like to add one final note, and this is something I spoke to a veteran in the biz about yesterday. Every healthy tribe, be it the Navajo or Goldman Sachs or a hospital staff, has a distribution of generations within that tribe. It’s what keeps the tribe dynamic, what gives it vitality. You need people in their prime to be the engine room, the rainmakers. But you also need young people to provide hope and innovation and enthusiasm. Similarly, you need older people to provide the wisdom of their experience and to mentor.

Sports journalism has Logan’s Run‘ned its elder class. There are brilliant and seasoned writers/editors in their late forties, fifties and sixties who should be working full-time at publications simply to provide a model for how it should be done to people just emerging from college or J-school. To name-drop just a few: Steve Rushin, Alex Wolff, Tim Crothers, Jeff Pearlman, Lars Anderson and yes, yours truly.

Most of those guys have either gone in to writing books and/or teaching J School, and that’s fine. Many of them (and their families) enjoy them being home most nights of the week. But in my experience many of them exited SI, at least as full-timers, because they were not made to feel welcome there. That’s like a tribe casting out its elders.

(More Irony: You can blame Bill Simmons as being Patient Zero of the new journalism, but he’s the guy who’s now actually doing what I just said is missing. He started his own site and now he spends his days mentoring the next generation of writers. What a concept!)

And this isn’t happening only at SI. We live in a world where people think Barstool Big Cat is worth emulating and don’t even know who Steve Rushin is. It’s the Crazy Dogs story arc from Flight of the Conchords writ large.

Sports journalism is destroying itself, seeking the short-term gain and ignoring holistic health. Worrying about how many clicks (or new subscriptions) a writer brings in as opposed to the quality of his or her writing. Yes, Wright Thompson exists but sadly, he is the outlier.