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Bar Chat

11/06/2008

The Puppy and the NBA

NCAA Football Quiz: 1) Who is Washington’s single season rushing leader with 1,555 yards, initials C.D.? 2) Who is Washington State’s career rushing leader, initials R.M.? 3) Who threw for 4,573 yards for Washington State from 1981-85, initials M.R.? 4) Who is West Virginia’s career passing leader with 8,153 yards, 1996-99? Answers below. 

On behalf of all of us at StocksandNews, I wish our new president the very best. The better he is, the better we all are…that’s my bottom line. 

But his first big decision involves the new puppy for his daughters. I hope he gets one from an animal shelter, a real mutt….like my own dog as a child, Ralph (named after Ralph Kiner), who was part beagle and part wirefox terrier.  

My brother’s family just got a new dog, a mutt adopted from a shelter, and it caught its first bird the other day. But no one was hurt! 

The other big decision Obama needs to focus on is whether or not to be part of an advertising campaign for the NBA, the president-elect obviously being a fan of the sport. I’m talking about him simply saying something like the old campaign, “NBA Fever…it’s fannn-tastic!” 

I strongly urge him not to do this. It’s one thing to tell fibs on the campaign trail, because most observers can separate “politics” from bald-faced lies. But for him to cut an NBA spot would be way over the top and have tens of millions calling for a new election. 

The Greatest U.S. Presidents 

The editorial board and columnists from the generally right of center Times of London had an interesting ranking of our presidents. 

On Grant, consensus: “A controversial president, Grant was a successful general who had led the Union to victory in the American Civil War. He was elected President to oversee the radical Reconstruction of the southern states and succeeded in restricting the violence of the Ku Klux Klan, granting Freedmen voting rights and establishing a public school system. 

“His reputation was destroyed, however, by his administration’s failure to deal with a lengthy economic depression and a string of scandals that affected his officials.” 

But another view, by Camilla Cavendish, was that Grant “Allowed the south to institutionalize racism after reconstruction, setting the scene for 100 years of oppression of the supposedly free.” 

I would have added Grant wrote the best memoir ever, primarily his history of the Civil War. 

In the past few days we learned of the passing of a true Vietnam War hero, Marine Col. John Ripley. During the 1972 Easter Offensive of April 2, 1972, Ripley was credited with stopping a column of North Vietnamese tanks by blowing up a critical bridge. 

At the time, Colonel Ripley was a captain and military adviser to a South Vietnamese Marine unit. He was on the southern end of the Dong Ha Bridge over the Cua Viet River. As described by Dennis Hevesi in the New York Times: 

“On the north side of the bridge, which was several miles south of the demilitarized zone, some 20,000 North Vietnamese troops and 200 tanks were poised to sweep into Quang Tri Province, which was sparely defended. 

“Going back and forth for three hours while under fire, Captain Ripley swung hand over hand along the steel I-beams beneath the bridge, securing himself between girders and placing crates holding a total of 500 pounds of TNT in a diagonal line from one side of the structure to the other. The I-beam wings were just wide enough to form pathways along which he could slide the boxes. 

“When the boxes were in place on the bridge, Captain Ripley attached blasting caps to detonate the TNT, then connected them with a timed-fuse cord that eventually extended hundreds of feet. 

“ ‘He had to bite down on the blasting caps to attach them to the fuses,’ John Grider Miller, author of ‘The Bridge at Dong Ha,’ said on Monday. ‘If he bit too low on the blasting cap, it could come loose; if he bit too high, it could blow his head apart.’” 

The timed-fuse cord gave Ripley a half hour to get off the bridge and moments later the bridge blew, collapsing it into the river. 

There were only 600 South Vietnamese near the south end of the bridge and they would have been overwhelmed had it not been for Ripley’s actions. By destroying Dong Ha, Ripley also created a bottleneck on the other side and the North Vietnamese became easy pickings for American bombers. 

Colonel Ripley was awarded the Navy Cross and remained on active duty until 1992. Fred Schultz, senior editor of Naval History Magazine, commented, “Colonel Ripley is well known in marine circles, but he’s the most revered war hero no one’s ever heard of. This was 1972, and people didn’t pay too much attention to (them) at that time.” 

--Tennessee Volunteers football coach Phil Fulmer is stepping down at season’s end, this after signing a new 7-year extension ($2.4 million per) just last summer. He has a $6 million buyout. It’s hard to believe it was ten years ago that Fulmer, 150-51 in his tenure at the school, guided the Vols to a national title. Tennessee is only 3-6 this year and clearly Fulmer was the victim of alumni rage and the booster club, saying “Our Tennessee family is united in its goals, but divided in the right path to get there. I love Tennessee too much to let her stay divided.” The vast majority of the players support Fulmer and hate the athletic director for forcing him out. 

--I have zero confidence left…in all facets of my life. It’s gotten to the point where I can’t even drink a domestic beer without doubting my decision. But we plow on…and so I put my suddenly miserable 13-14 college football betting mark on the line yet another week. 

Take Oklahoma, giving 25 to Texas A&M
Take Penn State, giving 7 ½ to Iowa
Take Pitt, giving 6 ½ to Louisville
Take USC, giving 18 to California 

Kids, you are about $250,000 in the hole at this point because we squandered our early 8-1 start. Hope you broke the news to your parents before asking for another $75,000 this go around. The more honest you are, the easier it will be to obtain credit from them, even as they themselves are shut out by the banks. 

--Jessica Brinton / London Times 

“It’s probably not all right to buy four bottles of Veuve Clicquot at Reykjavik airport when the country has just gone t**s up, but there it is. I am here for the annual Airwaves music festival, and the shelves in duty free are still well stocked, so who will if I don’t? These are somber times for Iceland. The financial system has crashed – and their crash makes ours [the UK’s] look like a broken wing mirror. There are a lot of crazy figures flying around – that there could be 50% unemployment by Christmas; that the national debt is 12 times the GDP. And nobody, including the government, knows what is next…. 

“By the time we come out (following the concert), it’s 6am. The sun is coming up, and the streets are packed with drunk kids. It feels anarchic…. 

“In every bar, club and restaurant I go into, people are asking how they believed they could live on 215% beyond their income, and how simple living became so frowned upon…. 

“There is talk of ‘new times’: of fresh ideas growing where old ones have fallen; banking being replaced with thermal energy, music, tourism, community. ‘Families are gathering together more now,’ says Andri Snaer Magnason, author of last year’s prophetic bestseller ‘Dreamland: A Self-Help Manual for a Frightened Nation.’ ‘Nobody can afford to pop to London for a meal out any more. Maybe it’s back to normal.’ 

“Is this the end of one party and the beginning of another? ‘The artists and musicians never had any money anyway.’” 

“Bridget Marquardt, the Playboy founder’s lone girlfriend to survive last month’s Mansion shake-up, is hinting that she’s on her way out. 

“ ‘I don’t know how much longer I’ll be there,’ the 35-year-old told US Weekly.” 

The other two girls, Holly Madison and Kendra Wilkinson, are moving out now. [It just takes a while…you understand.] Meanwhile, the 19-year-old Shannon twins are filling the void. 

--I’ll tell you how much I’m screwing up these days. I just got my pictures developed from my western swing and it turns out I had the camera on a panorama setting the whole time. The guy at the camera store pulls out this big folder, hands me all my pics, another guy comes over and they both say in unison, “Those were a lot of panorama photos!” You don’t want to know what it cost. 

Me so stupid!  [The odds of me returning from China are virtually zero at this point.] 

--I was reading a piece by Jeffrey Goldberg in the November ’08 issue of The Atlantic and I just found this passage on airport security a little unsettling. Goldberg was writing about the holes in the “no-fly” list. 

“To slip through the only check against the no-fly list [when you first make a reservation], the terrorist uses a stolen credit card to buy a ticket under a fake name. ‘Then you print a fake boarding pass [ed. easy to do, evidently] with your real name on it and go to the airport. You give your real ID, and the fake boarding pass with your real name on it, to security. They’re checking the documents against each other. They’re not checking your name against the no-fly list – that was done on the airline’s computers. Once you’re through security, you rip up the fake boarding pass, and use the real boarding pass that has the name from the stolen credit card. Then you board the plane, because they’re not checking your name against your ID at boarding.” 

Earlier, Goldberg described how easy it was to get all manner of contraband on board. 

--Ha! Bill James, baseball stats guru, and a panel of nine other experts, judged Derek Jeter to be just the No. 22 ranked major-league shortstop, with one calling Jeter “the least effective defensive player in the major leagues, at any position.” 

As reported by Justin Terranova of the New York Post, James notes in his Fielding Bible Web site that the panel “watched film of every major-league game, and had recorded every ball off the bat by the direction in which it was hit [the vector], the type of hit [groundball, flyball, line-drive, popup, etc.] and by how hard the ball was hit [softly hit, medium, hard hit].” 

Hey, someone has to do this. Jimmy Rollins, by the way, topped the list of shortstops, followed by the Brewers’ J.J. Hardy, and the Braves’ Yunel Escobar. The Mets’ Jose Reyes was 10th. 

Another study this year, this one out of Penn University, ranked Jeter the worst shortstop in the majors. 

MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann, from the world of sports initially, was questioned on the topic by Bar Chat and offered, “Derek Jeter….is the worst…person…in the worrrllldddd!” 

Other winners of the Fielding Bible awards: P, Kenny Rogers, Detroit; C, Yadier Molina, Cardinals; 1B, Albert Pujols, Cardinals; 2B, Brandon Phillips, Reds; 3B, Adrian Beltre, Mariners; LF, Carl Crawford, Rays; CF, Carols Beltran, Mets; RF, Franklin Gutierrez, Indians. 

--The New York Knicks have still not released or traded malcontent guard Stephon Marbury, who is earning $22 million to sit…$22 freakin’ million. These days, numbers like this obviously tick the rest of us off even more than they did six months ago. 

Like Allen Iverson, who was just traded to the Detroit Pistons. Iverson is in the final year of a contract paying him $20.8 million. Going from Detroit to Denver was Chauncy Billups, who is in the second season of a four-year deal worth $46 million, a relative pittance. The Pistons also shipped Antonio McDyess, who just received a two-year extension for $13.5 million, and he’s a shell of his former self. 

This is for the NBA…which no one cares about. Like with all professional sports, this will change as attendance begins to implode in 2009-2010. 

--Along these lines, I was glancing through the list of baseball free agents. Sure, CC Sabathia is set to break the bank, but I’d love some of the others to get a taste of the real world. 

Like Jason Giambi, who earned over $23 million last season with the Yankees, who then declined to pick up his option thus putting him on the market. 

Team Executive A: “Sure, Jason. At 37 you can still hit some so we’re prepared to offer you $42,000 over three years, though we’d have to add a strict weight clause to the contract. How does that sound?” 

Giambi: “$42,000 a game, right? So like $6.8 million per season?” 

Exec: “No, $14,000 each of the next three seasons.” 

--Want to buy a golf course? Lots of them are becoming available these days. BusinessWeek had a story that, for example, you can buy Three Ponds G.C. in Water Mill, N.Y., for $68 million. “Includes a Rees Jones-designed golf course, 60 acres of rolling farmland, 20,000-square-foot estate house, grass tennis court, 14 gardens, and a 75-foot pool.”  

But as the report notes, “The most common financial bogey – at least for courses in the Northeast and Midwest – is weather. A run of rainy days can put a big dent in cash flow. One fellow who operates Owl’s Nest in Campton, N.H., noted that July is “normally a good summer month for us, but this year we had 22 days of rain.” Of course it’s almost impossible to get a loan to finance a huge purchase like this anyway. 

We also all know golf is going to suffer big time during this increasingly severe recession. I know I have to make some big decisions soon regarding my own club membership. I live near some well-known clubs that cater to the Wall Street crowd and anecdotal evidence is already coming in of sizable resignations, or reductions in status. 

And then you have the PGA Tour. Alan Shipnuck of Sports Illustrated recently wrote of one aspect already taking a hit…travel. Now I don’t expect anyone to feel sorry for these guys, but it’s the ripple effect some need to be concerned with. Shipnuck writes of Davis Love. 

“Love is fifth on the all-time money list, with more than $36 million, and lives pretty large, but thinking ahead to next year, he says, ‘I’m definitely looking to cut back. The easy way to do that is the [private] plane. Right now guys are spending $200,000, $300,000 a year to $1 million-plus. It’s definitely a luxury.’ 

“Some players have already begun to downsize, according to Ed Lynch, the player liaison for Sentient Jet, the official private jet company of the Tour. ‘We’ve seen players start to change their habits a little,’ Lynch says. ‘If they make the cut, they fly private on the way home; if they miss the cut, they fly commercial. Everybody’s being cautious about their spending.’” 

Tyler Hansbrough (UNC), Darren Collison (UCLA), Stephen Curry (Davidson), Luke Harangody (Notre Dame) and Blake Griffin (Oklahoma) 

Top 3 songs for the week of 11/6/76: #1 “Rock ‘n Me” (Steve Miller) #2 “Disco Duck” (Rick Dees & His Cast of Idiots) #3 “The Wreck Of The Edmund Fitzgerald” (Gordon Lightfoot…insufferable)…and…#4 “If You Leave Me Now” (Chicago) #5 “Love So Right” (Bee Gees) #6 “Muskrat Love” (Captain & Tennille) #7 “She’s Gone” (Daryl Hall & John Oates) #8 “Tonight’s The Night” (Rod Stewart)  #9 “Magic Man” (Heart) #10 “Just To Be Close To You” (Commodores…your editor is a freshman at Wake Forest, on the way to a 2.5 GPA his first semester…which would prove to be about the best in what would turn into an, err, interesting four years) 

NCAA Football Quiz Answers: 1) Corey Dillon is the Univ. of Washington’s single season rushing leader with 1,555 yards in 1996. 2) Reuben Mayes is Washington State’s career rushing leader with 3,519 yards. 3) Mark Rypien quarterbacked Washington State from 1981-85. 4) Marc Bulger is West Virginia’s career passing leader with 8,153 yards from 1996-99. 

Next Bar Chat, Monday…from Hong Kong. Unless I get on the wrong plane and end up in Myanmar.

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