by John Walters
Tweet Me Right
Starting Five
Championship Mode
Once again the Warriors fall behind at Portland by at least 17 in the first half, and once again behind Stephen Curry, Draymond Green, Klay Thompson and some fabulous offensive rebounding by role players, they reel in the Blazers and win.
The Dubs are returning to the NBA Finals for a fifth consecutive time, something no NBA squad has done since the 1960s Celtics (the ESPN SportsCenter graphic decided to only go back 50 years and thus did not include Bill Russell & Co. because as we all know sports were not a thing before ESPN existed…or at least they often like to think so).
Meyers Leonard of Portland scored a career-high (as in the NBA AND college) 30 points. Make of that what you will.
Disaster Guru
This is Craig Mazin. He’s the creator, writer and executive producer behind HBO’s Chenobyl. If you’re wondering how a kid from Brooklyn comes by being an expert on natural disasters and meltdowns, you should know that Mazin was also the freshman year roommate of Ted Cruz at Princeton.
Remember the dude who kept tweeting about Cruz before the 2016 presidential election informing people what a clown Cruz is? That was Mazin.
Not Out Of His Depth
Sorry, Sports Twitter, but the most impressive “deep dive” of 2019 will belong not to some writer from The Ringer or Wright Thompson, but to Victor Vescovo, above. The Dallas native, 53, recently set the world record for the deepest dive in maritime history, piloting his submersible to a depth of 10,298 feet in the Mariana Trench.
Vescovo has previously summited Mount Everest. The resume on the private-equity titan/multimillionaire: Stanford, MIT grad school, Harvard business school. Yes, but has he ever assumed the loan debt for an entire graduating class?
Farewell To A Legend
A farewell to Formula One racing champion Niki Lauda, a three-time F1 series champ and the only man ever to do it racing both for Ferrari and McLaren. Lauda passed away yesterday at the age of 70.
If you’ve never seen the Ron Howard film Rush, about Lauda’s return to the sport after a fiery crash in 1976 nearly killed him and severely burned him, well, it may be Opie Cunningham’s best film. Worth knowing: Lauda won the F1 season series title in 1975 and 1977, or in the years directly before and after the crash.
Below, a favorite scene that aptly illustrates the way Lauda thought.
Twister The Night Away
There may be nothing more visually spectacular in nature than a tornado, deadly as they are. More than 20 touched down yesterday in Oklahoma, Kansas, Texas and Missouri. Also, and perhaps related, the period between April 2018 and April 2019 was the wettest on record in some East Coast cities such as Baltimore and Washington, D.C.
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*Gotta truncate this; the restaurant world never rests.