by John Walters
Tweet Me Right
Starting Five
Billy Buck
The score was already tied. That’s what too many fans forget. The Mets had already tied the score 5-5 in the bottom of the 10th at Shea Stadium when Mookie Wilson’s slow roller dribbled between first baseman Bill Buckner’s legs and into infamy.
But, you know, print the legend.
Buckner, who died at the age of 69 from complications related to dementia yesterday, played 22 Major League seasons, collected 2,707 hits, and won the National League MVP (with the Cubs) in 1980. In the 1970s and 1980s, only one player had more hits than Buckner: Pete Rose.
SI(gh)
The magazine I grew up dreaming I’d one day write for (as did everyone with whom I worked there), Sports Illustrated, has been sold for $110 million to a company called Authentic Brands. This company owns the “brands” of dead iconic figures such as Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley, which suggests they’re more interested in what SI once represented than in what it can represent.
Much like Norma Jean Baker and that kid from Tupelo, SI came around in the 1950s and had quite a run. Goodbye, Norma Jean?
Wrong Turn In Boulder
At the 41st Bolder Boulder, the extremely popular Memorial Day 10-K race in the foothills of the Colorado Rockies, one Ethiopian woman beat another because the latter made a wrong turn after entering Folsom Field for the final lap of the 6.2-mile race.
She should have stopped and asked for directions.
Oakland Is “The Land”
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/55900773/821834792.0.jpg)
The Golden State Warriors may be the best team in all of professional sports, but their sports complex neighbors, the Oakland A’s, are the hottest. The Dubs have won six straight games and are headed to their fifth consecutive NBA Finals, which begin Thursday in another country! The A’s have won 10 straight games, though, and the last time they went on such a run Aaron Sorkin wrote a film, adapted from Michael Lewis’ book, about it.
However, this is baseball, where asterisks exist, so you do need to know that since Oakland’s 10-game win streak began, the A’s have played a game versus the Detroit Tigers that was suspended due to rain. That May 19 game will not be completed until both teams have an open date in early September. If the A’s, who were leading, hold on to win the victory will be added to the streak (it would thus stand at 11 games right now). If they lose, however, the streak will have ended at seven games.
This explains why Brad Pitt’s agent is not hyperventilating about a prospective Moneyball 2 right now.
Speaking Of Streaks And Californians
Over the weekend a few southern Californians gathered to pay homage to Jon Sutherland (above), whose streak of running EVERY DAY hit the 50-year mark. As you can tell from the photo, Sutherland is still quite the athlete and he possesses the type of steely resolve and, yes, me-first-ness to a degree, that is needed to maintain such a streak.
We profiled Sutherland for our final story in Newsweek. We were working on it on a May afternoon two years ago when the managing editor emailed and asked us to come in and meet the next day at 10 a.m. He’d never asked to meet before so we knew what that was about. But we really liked Sutherland, having spoken to him at length on the phone, and we wanted his story (which is full of a youth spent in rock-and-roll in the late Sixties) to be told. So we soldiered on and completed the story, filed it, then went in and got the guillotine.
We’re honored to be a tiny, tiny part of Jon’s story. He’s an impressive figure.