by John Walters

Poll tergeist

You know the Orange one is aware of this (one report has it 55 to 41) and all I’ll guarantee is that he’s not going into an election in November down double-digits. He’ll halt the election and cite some obscure Congressional act from 1695 (I know) or he’ll drop out claiming illness or that the lame stream media hasn’t been fair to him.

R.I.P. Wes Unseld

Former Baltimore Bullets/Washington Bullets big man Wes Unseld died last week. He was 74. I met Wes a couple of times, as he was a friend of a friend. This was a very decent man, and a large one.

Item: In his rookie season, 1968-69, Unseld was named NBA MVP after averaging 18 rebounds and 14 points per game. Credit this in part to Wilt and Russell declining and Kareem still being at UCLA, but still. That’s incredible.

Those early ’70s Bullets were one of the best teams to not make the NBA Finals: Unseld and Elvin Hayes were future Hall of Famers with a solid back court of Dave Bing and Phil Chenier plus the poor man’s Dave Debusschere in Mike Riordan. If only they hadn’t had to deal with superior Celtics and Knicks squads in the Atlantic Division.

The Bullets would make two NBA Finals at the end of the decade with Unseld, winning one.

Unseld, “only” 6’7″, finished 6th all-time in rebounds per game at 13.99. He was a LOAD. Not tall but wide.

Finally, Unseld was nearly the first black player at Kentucky in the mid-Sixties, but the Louisville native could smell just how racist Adolph Rupp was and how he was only Rooney Rule-ing him in terms of recruiting him. Unseld chose Louisville, in his hometown. Funny, cuz body-proportion-wise and a little bit facially, he was like an even larger version of homeboy Cassius Clay.

R.I.P., Chris Dufresne

Only heard last week that former Los Angeles Times sportswriter Chris Dufresne passed away in late May. He was one of the good guys.

In college and high school my local paper would occasionally reprint a funny column from one of two funny and sharp LA Times sportswriters and I’d search the byline and it was always either Scott Ostler and Chris Dufresne. Years later I’d see Dufresne in college football press boxes and as I was often, in those early days, Austin Murphy’s water carrier, I’d be introduced to Dufresne and others (everybody liked Austin; why wouldn’t they?).

Chris was always great to me. And, like Austin, he was one of those dudes everyone liked. He’ll be missed.

Cotton Clubbed

This scribe’s knee-jerk reaction upon hearing that New York Times editorial page editor James Bennett had resigned over last week’s Tom Cotton Op-ed was, Uh-oh, Cancel Culture has gone too far again. I agreed with Jeff Greenfield, who tweeted something like, If you only want opinions that bolster your own, you don’t want an Op-Ed page, you want a My-Ed page.”

In other words, Fox News for the Libs.

Then I read Cotton’s editorial. Wow. Have you?

One example up top. Cotton claims that looters in NYC were “smashing and emptying hundreds of businesses.” Is that true? Hundreds? I honestly don’t know. Sounds like a reach, but like I said, I don’t know.

A fallacious argument that Cotton makes is that “elites have excused this orgy of violence in the spirit of radical chic.” That’s false. I’m an elite (by virtue of the fact that I can differentiate between their, there and they’re … most of the time) and I feel comfy saying most of us don’t excuse the looting but we also know that the military wouldn’t be going in and asking, “Oh, you’re only a protester? March on, brother.”

Anyway, read the Op-Ed. I’m all for divergent opinions being on the Op-Ed page and, bottom line, I support the NYT running it. I think the Radical Left’s reasoning that Cotton’s piece went far beyond the norms of democratic decency is just a rationalization for, “We vehemently disagree.” So go ahead and disagree. Write a counterpoint. But this entire intolerance of divergent views is exactly how we got to 2016 in the first place. Bad omen.

Starship Trooper

Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk (whose mom is a hot septuagenarian, but we digress) has told his employees that this conraption, the Starship Rocket, is now the latter company’s top priority. We fully imagine that Musk believes he and a wife or two are planning to be the only beings to escape planet Earth once the shooting starts and his plan is to answer David Bowie’s age-old question in the affirmative a few years from now (“Sailors, fighting on the dance floor/Oh boy, look at those cavemen go…”)

Meanwhile, remember not even six months ago when we tweeted about how you should keep an eye on where Tesla stock would be six months from now? Well, in mid-January shares were selling still for below $500 and this morning they’re well above $900. Cramer believes it’s possible they eclipse $1,000 this week—and that’s after Musk said the shares were too high a month or two ago. Stay tuned.