Starting Five

Our oneth anniversary is just two days away, which explains the back-ups upon entering both the Holland and Lincoln Tunnels this morning. Please drive carefully. Keep your texts to monosyllabic words.

1. Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary

Yesterday on NBC and NBC Sports Network: Not a single moment of coverage of the World Championships of Track and Field from Moscow, where America’s next track phenom, 17 year-old Bronxville, N.Y., senior-to-be Mary Cain was competing in the women’s 1500 semifinals — and, by finishing 4th, locking up a spot in Thursday’s final.

Yesterday on ESPN: A terrific one-hour documentary titled “Runner”, about the Mary Decker-Zola Budd contretemps (did Walters just use “contretemps” before 11 a.m.? Yes, yes he did) at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics. On ESPN.com, a related story by Mechelle Voepel on Decker.

However, not a single word or reference to, or footage of, Cain’s 4th-place finish in Moscow, which qualifies her to become the youngest medalist ever at the Worlds. Mary Cain is 17 and looks like the kid who finished her calculus homework before dinner. This is an incredible story.

Thankfully, I was able to find the race on YouTube.

I can forgive ESPN its negligence. After all, Bristol has no TV rights to the Olympics. Still, if you visit ESPN.com, and then locate the “More Sports” bar, and then press that and find “Olympic Sports”, and then press that to find its home page, you know what? YOU STILL WILL NOT FIND A WORD ON CAIN’S HISTORIC DAY.

Meanwhile, if you’re NBC Sports Network, what the hell are you thinking? You’ve got a cable sports net that can’t begin to touch ESPN, and now Fox Sports 1 is set to debut on Saturday. Your trump card is the Olympics. And you’ve got the breakout star of Rio de Janeiro (I’ll admit, I still have to look that up before I type it for spelling), a young lady filled with sunshine and brightness and light, a personality still unsullied by the dark clouds of Olympic pressure (Cain is a straight-A student; she’ll be just fine even if she never enters another meet), and finally, a girl whose home town sits at the midpoint between your Manhattan-based 30 Rock offices and your Olympics offices in Stamford, Conn. (and I know there are staffers in Stamford who wish NBC Sports Net would have aired this).

The gods just handed you a dream on a silver platter. And on a Tuesday afternoon, when nobody but nobody is watching your network anyway, you choose not to air Cain’s historic race? Set up an anchor in the New York studio, run a live feed of the race and provide commentary from here. NBC Sports Net, your core audience is miniscule, anyway. Why not at least appeal to hardcore track-and-field and Olympic fans and draw a devoted and loyal demo who know that you care about the Olympics as much as you purport to?

In the past year Mary Cain broke national high school records in the 800, the 1,500, the mile, the 3,000 and the 5,000. She is a PHENOM. And yesterday she qualified for the women’s final in the 1,500 meters in Moscow. We never saw a moment of it on broadcast TV. But ESPN gave us an hour of Mary Decker and Zola Budd in the 3,000 meters (a race that was last staged in the Olympics in 1992, by the way) and never mentioned it on its website. NBC completely overlooked it on television.

On Thursday at 1:20 p.m. Eastern time Cain will step to the line for the women’s 1,500-meter final. NBC Sports Network will be airing “Americana Outdoors.”

2. Icahn and iPhone

On Monday, shortly after someone had leaked that Apple’s new iPhone was set to be released on September 10 (my birthday), I bought as many shares of AAPL as I could muster and tweeted, “This could be the last day for awhile that AAPL ($465) is a bargain. Recall, it was <$400 about six weeks ago. I see $600.”

Yesterday morning, having watched the tech monolith eclipse $470 (it was at $702 last September but had since stumbled all the way down to $385 in June), I tweeted, “AAPL up $6 since I told u to buy it yesterday (now at $471). I’ll be VERY surprised if it doesn’t reach $500 by Xmas…or sooner.”

But even I had no idea how much sooner. Like, Boomer Sooner! Yesterday afternoon, a far more influential Twitter voice than I, billionaire investor Carl Icahn of Icahn Enterprises, tweeted, “We currently have a large position in APPLE. We believe the company to be extremely undervalued. Spoke to Tim Cook today. More to come.”

Within an hour after Icahn sent that tweet, Apple stock soared from the low $470s to above $490. As I type this, its stock price is $496.81. Forget Christmas. Apple should eclipse $500 by the time you are able to see “Jobs” in a theater near you this Friday.

I said that I see $600 (I also sold my Facebook stock one day before it jumped 40%, so what do I know?). Icahn sees $700. His twitter bio reads in part, “Some people get rich studying artificial intelligence.  Me, I make money studying natural stupidity.”

He’s right. And so I’ll take his word on $700. Will you?

3. Today In Nontroversies

Yesterday afternoon both “Around the Whorin'” and “Pardon the Interregnum” led with the same item: the supposed friction between Washington Redskin coach Mike Shanahan and second-year quarterback Robert Griffin III over how overprotective Shanahan appears to be concerning the future of the franchise (if there were ever a time that Derrick Rose should’ve been a panelist on ATH, yesterday was that moment).

They do know that the Redskins do not play a real game for at least another three weeks, don’t they? Who cares if Griffin’s annoyed?

When this is your lead item, on two consecutive programs, the graphic may as well read, “If we are this bored by sports in mid-August, why are you even watching?”

The kicker? When Kornheiser (or was it Bob Ryan? I dunno, all those white dudes look the same to me) and Wilbon made their nightly appearance on “SportsCenter”, the topic was, “Is the RGIII/Shanahan rift really a big deal?”

If you have to ask…

4. “It Goes to 11..or 14”

Fifteen games played in the big leagues last night, and six of them, or 40%, went extra innings. The Tigers lost in 11 to the White Sox in a game in which Max Scherzer started, but he was long gone by the time the outcome was decided. In Arizona Paul Goldschmidt hit a game-tying home run in the 9th and a game-winning blast on the first pitch in the bottom of the 11th to seal the win. And in St. Louis left fielder Starling Marte of the Pittsburgh Pirates dropped a routine fly ball in the bottom of the ninth inning. giving the Cardinals a chance to tie it (they did on Allen Craig’s clutch single) and then win five innings later.

Oh, and in Los Angeles, in a contest that finished in the requisite nine innings, the Dodgers beat Matt Harvey and the Mess to move to 22-3 (.880) since the All-Star break. L.A. The Dodgers’ 39-8 run is the best 47-game stretch in baseball in 62 seasons (1951 New York Giants), according to our friend Arash “Guest List” Markazi.

5. Johnny Cash

Here’s that Texas Monthly cover of Johnny Manziel I told you about yesterday, which raises an important question: Should superheroes wear numbers on their costumes? Also, here’s the accompanying piece by Jason Cohen, which claims that Manziel is simply a lightning rod for all of the corruption metastasizing around college football.

Full disclosure: Yesterday I Google-Imaged Manziel and thought I saw a picture of Manziel on the cover of Sports Illustrated, slumped down, with the cover line, “Heisman Hangover.” But after spotting it once, I can no longer find it on the web. Did I dream this? Did SI already run this cover (I can’t locate it in their “Vault”). Did someone post it accidentally and then take it down? Am I the only one who saw this? Or thought that I saw this?

Finally, if you’re scoring at home, Tony Romo is the Lone Star State quarterback who one former teammate called “a thief” and Manziel is the anti-hero. Listen, it’s Texas: this is the state that gave us Doyle Brunson, Rick Perry and J.R. Ewing. No one cares HOW you make your money, only that you did.

Reserves

Medium Happy man crushes: Gareth Bale, Matt Harvey and John Oliver, to name a few. The last name has saved our summer, as he is responsible for the smartest and funniest eight minutes of television four nights a week. Last night Oliver and his Daily Show staff assailed the “Stop and Frisk” policy in New York City. In the brief time allowed, Oliver hit two salient points:

1) Mayor Bloomberg, complaining that his “Stop and Frisk” program is “being unfairly scrutinized even though it’s done nothing wrong” tops the summer’s Irony Chart.

2) If you’re going to stop and frisk New Yorkers whose appearances suggest they are criminals, why isn’t the NYPD down on Wall Street S-F’ing every douchebag in a Perry Ellis tie and slicked-back hair? As correspondent Jessica Williams (“Right now, I’m standing in the middle of one of New York’s most crime-ridden neighborhoods…I’m on Wall Street”) advises, “If you don’t want to be associated with white-collar crime, maybe you shouldn’t dress that way.”

Is anyone anywhere doing anything better on television right now? I don’t think so.

*****

Some of the most unforgettable films of this millennium have been documentaries: “Grizzly Man”, “Man on Wire” and “The Pat Tillman Story” come to mind. We may soon be adding “The Act of Killing” to that list. Filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer interviews gangsters in Indonesia who killed thousands of citizens during a government overthrow in the mid-1960s and asks them to reenact their murderous deeds. It’s the second-highest rated film (98%) on Rotten Tomatoes after yet another doc, “20 Feet From Stardom” (99%). It’s also the second-highest rated film (89%) on MetaCritic.com

It’s only in the big, snooty cities at the moment. Wait for it.

*****
Porno for Pyros

A UPS cargo plane crashes this morning just off the runway in Birmingham, Ala. Presumably, the two-man crew perished. And that’s awful. But no one on the ground died and I’m sure there were a slew of automobile crashes this morning that claimed just as many lives.

So why was it the top story on “Today?” Would it be impolitic of me to suggest that it’s because Today had footage of the wreckage and that the wreckage included flames.

Remember watching “Beavis and Butthead”, when the adolescent pair would practically achieve orgasm whenever seeing an explosion on TV? “Fire! Fire! Fire!” Now try and think of the last summer blockbuster movie that did not feature an explosion.

It is, as the patron saint of this daily blog, William Miller, might say, “Incendiary.”

There are, what, 800 channels or so on television? Why not just have a network that shows nothing but explosions, crashes, and raging fires? The Inferno Network. You’re telling me that wouldn’t work?

You’re STILL reading? Really? Well, then we should tell you that it’s Day 1 of our 3-day “Medium Happy Oneth Anniversary Pledge Drive.” You can hit us up on PayPal at sameriver@hotmail.com. Our goal is to stamp out flatulence in our time. You can make a difference.