by John Walters

Ivy’ll Be Seeing You

The first shoe just dropped for the 2020 college football season. The Ivy League, the octet of academic excellence (Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Penn, Princeton and Yale) just announced all sports will be canceled until at least the beginning of 2021.

We said it back on March 12 or so, we’ve been saying it ever since, and we’ll say it again now: it is beyond stupid for sports to start up again until a vaccine or herd immunity comes. It is not only stupid from a public health perspective; it’s stupid from a sports public relations perspective.

Earlier this week Nick Cordero died. Cordero was not a pro athlete, but he was a 41 year-old former Tony Award nominated dancer. To look at Cordero was to see an extremely fit and athletic man. Only six years ago, when he was in his mid-thirties, Cordero was dancing 7 to 8 times a week on the Broadway stage in Bullets Over Broadway.

Then Cordero was infected with the coronavirus. First he had a leg amputated and then he spent the final 90 days of his life in ICU before dying.

Nick Cordero may as well have been an athlete. To think that one or more famous professional or college athletes could die from this virus in the next year simply because their league forged ahead, knowing that there is no cure for the virus, well, that’s just Trump-level dumb.

There. Is. No. Cure.

An athlete probably won’t get as seriously ill as Cordero did. But then again, he might. And there’d be nothing doctors could do to save him. It’s a crap shoot.

The smart move is to wait. It always has been. It will remain so. Right now MLB and the NFL and the NBA and even college football are playing a game of chicken with reality. And what’s steering them toward the head-on collision is TV money. It’s beyond stupid.

At least the Ivies, who are not beholden to television money, have some sense.

School’s Out For Summer/School’s Out Forever!

Students will return to classrooms some day—but not as soon as Don “I’ll Huff and I’ll Puff and I’ll Have Someone Take The SAT For Me” Trump wants them to. Yesterday Trump threatened to pull funding from public schools (he cannot actually do that) if they did not reopen on time later this summer.

Never mind that he said this on the same day that the U.S. set a new record for coronavirus positive tests (more than 60,000), or that the Tulsa area set a new record with more than 266… might have a little something to do with a certain public event held inside the BOK Center a couple Saturdays ago.

Also yesterday Mike Pence stood at a podium and tried to pretend that there is encouraging news with “flattening the curve.” This is like someone saying they can see positive signs with the Knicks. Pence has been practicing his George W. Bush “I’m concerned” drawl overtime of late. He really has the Bush impersonation down. And that’s too bad… because while Bush was often clueless and in way over his head, I truly believe he is a decent man. Mike Pence is not.

Anyway, if you send your kid back to school next month this supposedly “flattened curve” (it isn’t) is going to go full Matterhorn on us. And maybe your 3rd-grader won’t die. But maybe her grandma will because of it.

Once again, less than stupid. It’s sinister.

Don’t be surprised— I won’t be—if teachers simply refuse to show up to school. What’s Trump going to do: fire all of them? Teachers are already overworked and underpaid. Now you’re going to put their health and lives at risk. What are you gonna do, Donald, place an armed off-duty cop at every school to ward off the virus?

Jost Do It

Colin Jost, the Staten Island parents’ wet dream antithesis to the worst nightmare that is Pete Davidson, is out with a memoir titled A Very Punchable Face. You’re thinking what I’m thinking: I like Jost, he’s funny, but where’s the down-and-out in Bushwick portion of this book?

Jost grew up in a stable, upper middle-class family, attended Regis High on the Upper East Side (where all students are on full scholarship), then Harvard, then he was at SNL by age 23 as a writer. He and Michael Che have carved out their own special spot in “Weekend Update” lore as well. And he’s about to marry ScarJo?

Is there a meth habit we don’t know about it? A bad hair day? What? You can read more about it here.

Blow By Blow

We should expand our horizons beyond just The New York Times Op-Ed page, but when someone pens an essay as direct and truthful as Charles Blow’s “Call A Thing A Thing,” well, why go anywhere else? Blow’s premise? There are plenty of euphemisms for what’s going on (“racial tensions,” “racial divide,” “race relationship”) but what it all boils down to is this: You’re either for White Supremacy or you are not (put us in the “are not” camp).

Blow: “Satisfaction with race relations is somewhat correlated with the silence of the oppressed. When they stop being silent, it affects the outcome.”

and

“…whenever people object to their oppression, it is framed as problematic to peaceful coexistence. Furthermore, this tension between the oppressed and the oppressors has always existed and always will.” 

I’m forever amused (disturbed) how white Americans are so easily able to celebrate the Fourth of July and then the next minute turn around and scold anyone who follows the Founders’ lead of fomenting rebellion for the oppressed.

–Sen. Kelly Loeffler (those three words alone are a joke), a co-owner of the WNBA franchise, objected to the league placing a “Black Lives Matter” logo on its courts this season (if there’s a season). Loeffler used the “we need less politics in sports” argument and then suggested the WNBA put American flags on all jerseys. Loafer doesn’t get it: if she wants less politics in sports then no flag, either. Because, like it or not, the American flag now means the status quo. And there’s a whole helluva lotta people not happy with the status quo. It’s a White Supremacy issue disguised as a patriotism issue.

–Tucker Carlson, who never served in the military, had the audacity to criticize a U.S. senator who lost both her legs in the Iraq War. He called her a “moron” and “un-American” because in an interview that aired Sunday night Duckworth (who is a person of color but not African-American) told CNN that it was worth discussing taking down monuments of George Washington, our slave-owning first president.

I don’t happen to agree with Duckworth, but I’d never be the ass Carlson always has been and continues to be this week. Patriotism, to people like Loeffler and Carlson means loving this country on the basis of it remaining a two-tiered system: white people of means and everyone else.

Blow’s essay hit the nail on the head.

by John Walters

Suddenly Absent Trump (S.A.T.)

The headline grabber from the leaked copies of Mary Trump’s memoir is that her uncle paid someone to take his SAT test in his stead. Is every news outlet searching for this phantom test-taker now?

The first rule of Trump is, If he’s speaking, he’s lying.

The second rule of Trump is, If he’s accusing someone of something, he likely already did it himself. Hence, while he spent four years as a private citizen accusing President Obama of not having been born in the United States (in short: that he was a fraud), it was of course Trump who was the fraud as an Ivy League student the entire time.

Is anyone the least bit surprised? Of course not.

Catch A Wave!

There’s only one wave everyone’s riding this summer and here it is above…

Ouchy, Fauci.

Maybe it’s time people begin listening to the scientists? Remember the ones who were saying, when the country was still only double digits in deaths, that we might have as many as 100,000 deaths without social distancing or closing down or wearing masks? Now those same dudes are saying we’ll get to 200,000 deaths by November if we reopen schools and don’t wear masks, etc.

For now, Donald and Mike and the Florida guv don’t seem to care. They still see the virus as a Democrat tool of insurgence. It’s just a virus. Or, as Donald famously said, “Some call it a virus, which it is. Others call it the flu.”

This is the leader of the most powerful country on Earth. Not the smartest country, mind you. Not by a long shot.

Eyes On The Road*

*The judges will also accept “Remains To Be Seen”

In St. Petersburg, Florida, someone out for a run discovered a decomposing human head on the side of the road. Where’s the rest of him/her?

Not much else to say about this except, yeah, Florida.

Bob Costas, Once Again Making Sense

I really miss having Bob Costas share his wisdom on air more frequently (this may be why I occasionally pepper him with emails). Listen to him talking to CNN’s Michael Smerconish about the expectations people have about sports “returning to normal.”

Here’s a gem from Costas near the end of the interview about the extremist views regarding kneeling during the anthem: “At the extremes I don’t think that agreement or support is enough for some people. You can be indicted for insufficient affirmation in this atmosphere.”

A gem.

by John Walters

Propel Culture

Last night I was watching The Defiant Ones, a 1958 film starring Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier in which they portray a pair of escaped convicts chained together at the wrists. This was racy stuff in the late Fifties.

I’m just glad the Cancel Culture Warriors are still too busy working up a lather about Gone With The Wind to have noticed this film. In the very first line, Curtis uses the “N-word” to address Poitier’s character. And not for the last time.

The script is incredible and the more I watch Poitier—this is the third 1950s film of his I’ve seen in the past six weeks—the more I’m wowed. To have such presence and confidence as a black man in the movies in that age, well, he was a generation or two ahead of his time. Most people know him for Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner or In The Heat of The Night, both from 1967. But watch this or No Way Out (where he’s also called the N-word), from 1950, to see how just how much of a rising star it was easy to see he was.

Anyway, no one should ever touch a slide of these films (or Gone With The Wind). Because these films depict how Americans felt about race in general at the time they were made, even if Gone With The Wind is a 1939 depiction of a time nearly 80 years earlier. As such, each of these films are historical documents. We can learn from them. Only true ignorance hopes to conceal something that is the truth. And the truth here is that in 1958 The Defiant Ones accurately portrayed the racial divide, otherwise it would never have resonated with so many.

Also: The final scene of this film is pretty much perfect, no?

Musk-Have Apparel

You have to love this. Elon Musk, trolling the haters, is now selling short shorts on the Tesla website. The appearance of the shorts yesterday caused the Tesla site to crash (and, we assume, burst into flames).

“Run like the wind or entertain like Liberace with our red satin and gold trim design. Relax poolside or lounge indoors year-round with our limited-edition Tesla Short Shorts, featuring our signature Tesla logo in front with “S3XY” across the back. Enjoy exceptional comfort from the closing bell.“

The price: $69.420, which is pretty much a triple-entendre. Genius.

The next step, we assume, will be a Tesla robe for consumers to “cover their shorts.”

by John Walters

Slippery Slopers

I’m curious. I woke up this morning to woke calls for the removal of the Jefferson Memorial in a NYT op-ed, the reasoning being that “the man who wrote ‘All men are created equal’ certainly did not practice that ideal in regards to slavery.”

I’m a little curious here. What if some future generation hive minds it that those who killed unborn fetuses truly did no respect human life? Or that those who ate steak and pork and chicken participated in the mass slaughter and forced slavery of entire species of sentient beings? Am I EQUATING cows to black men and women? No. I’m comparing the offenses by those in power against those without.

Now, before you come at me with at “STEAK AMERICA GREAT AGAIN” campaign, I’ll say this, as a self-described (but maybe not self-aware?) moderate: I understand the desire to remove monuments or flags that literally promote slavery or the bondage of black people or the people who fought to do so or to continue that ethos through dog-whistling out loud (i.e., the Confederate flag). I stop when you condemn every person of that age whose sin was not putting a stop to slavery.

Some day they may say the same about those who did not put a stop to abortions. Or to slaughterhouses. Or to driving carbon-emissions vehicles.

If you want to erase Thomas Jefferson’s legacy, then throw out the Constitution, too. Throw out American independence. Let’s go back to being the vassals of the British empire. It’s not an a la carte menu, folks.

Up, Up And Away

Inconceivable! (You keep using that word. It does not mean what you think it means)

Alright, then, how about Incredible? Or Astonishing? The U.S. possibly set a record for most dead Americans in a three-month span April to June (I don’t know this for a fact but how could it be wrong, as the population has never been this great; maybe during the Civil War?) and yet the stock market had its best quarter in three decades… after, granted, a precipitous decline in March.

But here we are in July, with new coronavirus cases daily setting records and yet the market continues to defy gravity. In just the past month…

Tesla (TSLA): From $940 to $1,328 (up $119 this morning)

Amazon (AMZN): From $2,529 to $3,025.

Zoom (ZM): From $209 to $266

Plug Power (PLUG): From $5.10 to $10.23, more than 100%

Is crazy, no?

What goes up must come down is our first Rule of MH and also a tried rule of investing. Right now, though, the market is snorting cocaine like Johnny Depp early in the second hour of Blow. Craziness.

Calcio Craziness

We finally, after years of different folks recommending it to us, got around to reading The Miracle of Castel di Sangro by Joe McGinnis (who passed in 2014). You should read it before we discuss but my initial thoughts, now that I’m finished, is, “The balls on that guy.” (However you say this in Italian).

And I don’t mean that as a compliment.

McGinnis, who was already a well-established (read: well-off) writer by the time he traveled to the tiny Italian mountain village in 1996 at the age of 53, comes off as the quintessential Ugly American. He’s a recently converted soccer zealot, having only discovered the game three or four years earlier, but he acts as if he knows as much as anyone in Italy about calcio (what it’s called there). McGinnis literally approaches the head coach, with whom he claims to have a good relationship, on game days making his own suggestions for who should start and what the formation should be.

I spent a year around Geno Auriemma and a Connecticut Huskies roster that would ultimately have FIVE first-team All-Americans on its roster. Five. And here’s what I knew, even 20 years younger than McGinnis: Observe and keep your trap shut. You’re a guest.

McGinniss’ audacity makes for some entertaining moments, particularly when dealing with the club’s owner, the local godfather of some notoriety. But through the course of the book he comes off as the typical Irish-Amercan Boston area know-it-all scribe, a little too loud and obnoxious (if only such a writer had emerged during the internet era in sports) for his own good.

The players, to a man, were incredibly gracious and welcoming to him. The entire town was, in fact. Then he burned every bridge he had built (you’ll have to read). As the team’s wisest player, and the one who stuck with him to the end, advised him, “There is a time for the soft voice. There is a time for no voice at all.”

Words of advice I’m sure all of us wish we had heeded in the past.

The book is considered a minor sports classic. And I can understand. But, reading between the lines throughout, I got the feeling that McGinniss attached an outsized importance to himself throughout his stay in the Abruzzo. Locals noticed. When a president not entirely unlike him was elected 20 years later, they must have nodded their heads.

by John Walters

Humble Pie On The 4th Of July

In today’s New York Times, David Brooks with an essay on how 2020 and the pandemic has served up a long overdue double helping of humble pie to an America that is loud, arrogant and obnoxious. And he offers up a few insights:

“It amounts to a refusal on the part of lots of Americans to think in terms of the social whole — of what’s best for the community, of the common or public good. Each of us thinks we know what’s best for ourselves.”

He adds:

 “In the same way as men cannot for long tolerate a sense of spiritual meaninglessness in their individual lives, so they cannot for long accept a society in which power, privilege, and property are not distributed according to some morally meaningful criteria.”

A lot of people look around at the conditions of this country — how Black Americans are treated, how communities are collapsing, how Washington doesn’t work — and none of it makes sense. None of it inspires faith, confidence. In none of it do they feel a part.

In America we make bold proclamations of our patriotism (Let’s display a flag that covers every inch of the football field!) and then go about stiffing the government by collecting unemployment checks when we already have jobs or stiffing our fellow citizens by not wearing masks in public. You visit other countries and they lack oversized flags but they do display a sense of sublimating their egos for the common good. Not here.

Happy Birthday, America.

A Burning Bush In Arizona

Let’s take a moment to (socially) distance ourselves from the idiots and morally repugnant political leaders in Arizona (below):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGp7Ek2Yko0

and find wonder in the natural beauty that the state provides (as a state, Arizona is a beauty pageant finalist: You’re gorgeous, babe, but just don’t open your mouth.)

That tree exists somewhere in northern Arizona and the photo was taken by Peter Pallagi, who discovered the tree on one of his perambulations. I’m almost fearful of posting these because then the Instagram crowd wants to track it down and pose in front of it. But fortunately I don’t have a viral following so I think it’s safe.

Screamin’ A Goes Off On ‘The Bubble’

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-QDiT0FBjY

I don’t know, how long have we been saying this? Three weeks, a month? The idea that NBA players would live in a quarantine situation for two months with only their wives or with only their top-rated girlfriend always sounded comical to us. Adam Silver really needs to watch an episode or two of ‘Ballers, ya know.

(You have to love how the female commentator—Is that Molly Qerim?— protests, “Stephen A., they’re going to have ping-pong tournaments.” The comeback SAS should’ve had to that shoulda been, “It’ll be the first ping-oping tournament to use blue balls.”)

Here’s the other thing that we’ve been thinking about recently: When/if (we still don’t see it) the NBA starts up in Orlando, the headline each morning won’t be who won which game or who scored the most points; the headline will be who tested positive (and players will test positive). And the follow-up story will be how the NBA and/or team plans to deal with that. And whether other players will want to face that player if he remains. And if he doesn’t remain, how it adversely affects his team/the postseason.

This will be the news cycle, day after day after day: how the NBA entered the Indy 500 with two flat tires and a half tank of gas and is shocked—shocked—to have conked out on Lap 38.

Mr. Silver, please. I know those TV contracts are gi-huge, but you’re uncharacteristically missing the forest for the trees here. Someone with decent PR knowledge should be telling you what a disaster this will be. And when it all crumbles you can’t just say, “We went in with the best of intentions.” Not good enough. Nope. You’re not allowed to be this obtuse.

UPDATE: Silver said as recently as two days ago that a large uptick in cases in Florida could delay the NBA’s restart in Orlando. Ya think? Well, the U.S. and Florida each set new coronavirus case records yesterday, Commissioner. So how big do you need to see?

Fall On Me

Here’s “Classic Rock Kid” covering our favorite REM tune and doing a fine job. He particularly nails the Mike Mills backup role, and not only because he’s wearing the specs.

I was a young reporter at SI and late on a Sunday evening, when most of us reporters had to work past midnight, sometimes as late as 3 a.m. or 4 a.m., MTV was airing the now-classic REM Unplugged episode. Maybe for the first time. A few of us were sitting on the couch and chairs in Bambi Wulf’s corner office (she has passed; yesterday was her birthday. Pour one out for Bambi, one of the legends of SI) and I was still, rightly, regarded as something of a poser and dilettante in this journalistic endeavor.

The staff’s ranking REM expert (and there were a few), Tim Crothers, tested me by asking what my favorite song from the band was. I think he expected me to say, “The One I Love” or worse, “It’s The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)” or, even worse and potentially self-terminating, “Love Shack.”

But I replied, truthfully, “Fall On Me.” And I was permitted to remain among the bullpen cognoscenti for another week.

A Giant Fracking Mess

We made a lot of money off Chesapeake Energy (CHK) the past five years—and we lost some, too. This week CHK finally filed for bankruptcy and now the stories can begin to roll out.

Background: You may recall that the company’s bombastic and charismatic founder, Aubrey McClendon, ended his own life by driving into the side of a railroad overpass a few years ago. No skid marks on the road. Yeah, sure it was an accident.

This week comes word that the company had its own wine cave on-site, located behind a broom closet. Also on-site “a lavish campus that was modeled after Duke University, complete with bee keepers, botox treatments and chaplains for employees.” CHK also spent more on NBA season tickets (with the Thunder) than any single company anywhere in the NBA. Also, it had the largest tab of any single client with one of those private jet companies (Wheels Up! or Net Jets or Blade, I forget).

And yet, for all that, you could have bought shares of CHK on June 3 for $14 and by June 8 those shares were worth $70. You’ve just quintupled your stake in five days. That’s a Pump and Dump HoF moment, especially since the shares are now worth less than $5. If only we had a competent and legitimate federal government, someone from the SEC or Dept. of Justice might be looking into that curious uptick.