Growing up in Arkansas, I had no geographic affinity for any professional sports teams. I was free to pick and choose my favorites based on such key criteria (for an 8-year-old) as “cool helmets” (hello Oakland Raiders) and “unique court design” (Boston Celtics). In those prehistoric times, the only exposure to televised baseball was the NBC’s Saturday afternoon “Game of the Week” with broadcasters Curt Gowdy and Tony Kubek.
The Cincinnati Reds were on the Game of the Week quite often back then — it was the era of the Big Red Machine — and I fell head over hillbilly boots for Joe Morgan, Johnny Bench, Tony Perez, Davey Concepcion…
But my favorite player by far was Pete Rose. A gritty grinder, tough as nails. “Charlie Hustle.” I remember when he was Sports Illustrated’s Sportsman of the Year.
The accompanying article in SI mentioned how Pete was so obsessed with getting better at the game that he had a satellite dish installed at his house so he could study opposing pitchers. (With the gift of hindsight, we now know the satellite TV was just a way for him to track his bets.)
My friend Ned and I were at Riverfront Stadium in September of 1985 when Pete broke Ty Cobb’s record.
All hail the new Hit King!
Less than a year later, I got my first real job, working in the marketing department at Turfway Park, a thoroughbred racetrack in Northern Kentucky. Imagine my sheer elation when Pete Rose showed up in the press box where I worked. The 8-year-old inside me was doing cartwheels: “OhmygawditsPete! Pete! Right here! Be cool! Don’t say anything stupid…”
My joy lasted about as long as a six-furlong race. I realized Pete was a bit of an entitled jerk, and clearly hooked on gambling. My bosses allowed him and his cronies (muscle-headed butt kissers – and as we later found out, Pete’s errand boys for booking his bets) and their pneumatic girlfriends/spouses to hang out in the press box, with free food and beverages, because they were really good at increasing the track’s daily receipts. Finally, their loud, boorish behavior got to be too much for those of us trying to earn a living at the track the hard way, so management moved them to another smaller spot (“The Rose Room”) adjacent to the press box. (We could still hear them hooting and hollering, but it was muffled.)
A few years later, Pete was back on the cover of Sports Illustrated, but for a totally different reason:
I didn’t need the results of the official MLB investigation. There was NO doubt in my mind that Pete bet on baseball while he was the manager of the Reds.
“Never meet your heroes” is the old adage, and in this case it certainly was true. Pete was always unabashedly, and unapologetically, Pete, for better or for worse. And it was usually worse. If he could’ve just walked away from the seamy underbelly of sports, he might’ve earned a bit of forgiveness from both MLB and the general public. But that same hard-nosed persistence that made him such a tough out on the field worked against him off it. He set up camp at every casino and race track in the country, selling autographs so he could wager that money right back to his hosts.
Yes, as countless others have already mentioned, now MLB is in cahoots with the gambling that was once so verboten.
But rules are rules, and Pete broke them, and lied about breaking them… he only came “clean” when it helped him sell more books.
I DO think Pete belongs in the Hall of Fame for his feats on the field. This Substack post from Mark Whicker does a nice job profiling a warts-and-all version of Pete. Money quote:
The baseball Hall needs Rose the way the country music Hall needs George Jones or the chess Hall needs Bobby Fischer. It’s not the Hall of Well-Adjusted People. It should be the place where players of impact are recognized. There is no question that baseball was a brighter, richer place because Pete Rose was at its core, or that people who didn’t know a slider from a playground slide knew who Rose was, and that if we all loved what we did the same way Rose loved the game, our national GDP would be unmeasurable.
R.I.P. Charlie Hustle. I’ll always admire your baseball skills, but your off-the-field antics took the bloom off the Rose.
Those great Danes in Copenhagen came up with a great idea this summer: tourists could earn rewards (free lunch, tickets to a museum, etc.) for doing something good for the environment (cleaning the beach, riding a bike instead of driving, etc.) while they were visiting the city. You can read more in this piece from The Guardian.
Thanks to cheap airfare and immediate access to travel info, the world is a lot smaller these days. But that often means the most beautiful destinations around the globe are in danger of being trampled by tourists.
Kudos to Rikke Holm Petersen and the other folks at Visit Copenhagen who dreamt up the CopenPay pilot project and brought it to life.
“We want to make tourism a force for positive change not an environmental burden,” she says. “We want to inspire a greener mindset in tourists while they are visiting Copenhagen and [for them] to take that home with them.”
It’s the best of both worlds for our shared world. Tourists (Rikke Holm Petersen prefers the term “intermediate locals”) get to explore and enjoy the city, while also doing something positive that reminds them — in a gentle way — of the environmental impact of their travels.
More ideas like this, please! Maybe it’ll lead to fewer scenes like this:
It’s been less than two weeks since President Joe Biden addressed the nation and revealed his decision to withdraw from the 2024 election. What a difference a fortnight makes, eh?
But while most of the media will focus on the horse race aspect of this year’s “new and improved” presidential election, I think it makes sense to pause for a moment and consider the record of Joseph R. Biden, the 46th (and still current) President of the United States of America.
He laid it out quite nicely in his speech:
Today, we have the strongest economy in the world, creating nearly 16 million new jobs — a record. Wages are up, inflation continues to come down, the racial wealth gap is the lowest it’s been in 20 years. We’re literally rebuilding our entire nation, urban, suburban, rural and tribal communities. Manufacturing has come back to America.
We’re leading the world again in chips and science and innovation. We finally beat Big Pharma after all these years, to lower the cost of prescription drugs for seniors, and I’m going to keep fighting to make sure we lower the cost for everyone, not just seniors.
More people have health care today in America than ever before. And I signed one of the most significant laws helping millions of veterans and their families who were exposed to toxic materials. You know, the most significant climate law ever, ever in the history of the world, the first major gun safety law in 30 years. And today, violent crime rate is at a 50-year low.
We’re also securing our border. Border crossings are lower today than when the previous administration left office. And I’ve kept my commitment to appoint the first Black woman to the Supreme Court of the United States of America. I also kept my commitment to have an administration that looks like America and be a president for all Americans.
Yes, he’s fading a bit these days. Show me another 81-year-old with a schedule as mentally, physically and emotionally demanding as his. But it’s clear from the facts above (facts, not claims) that “Sleepy Joe” was never asleep at the switch. Heck, strip his name from his record and show it to most Americans and they’d vote for that person for president in a heartbeat.
If you want to blindly follow the world’s biggest bloviator, that seems weird to me, but you’re free to do so (for now… Day 1 Dictator plans to gut a lot of our freedoms, including voting. ). But I’ll take a strong record of productivity over the cult of personality all day, every day.
America is going to have to choose between moving forward or backward, between hope and hate, between unity and division. We have to decide, do we still believe in honesty, decency, respect, freedom, justice and democracy? In this moment, we can see those we disagree with not as enemies, but as fellow Americans. Can we do that? Does character in public life still matter?
I believe you know the answer to these questions because I know you, the American people, and I know this, we are a great nation because we are a good people.
Bob Newhart passed away Thursday at the ripe old age of 94. His humor, on the other hand, will never grow old and never leave us.
There are very few other comedians — if any — who could get laughs out of just one side of pretend phone conversations.
Bob did more with the pregnant pause than most comedians could do with 20 lines of dialogue. He was perfectly content to play the “normal” guy surrounded by wacky characters. And he crushed it for decades, starting with a best selling comedy album in the 60s, then The Bob Newhart Show in the 70s, Newhart in the 80s (with one of the best show finales ever).
Papa Elf in Elf in 2003, a guest actor Emmy in 2013 on The Big Bang Theory… He guest-hosted for Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show 87 times, and always told great stories on the late-night talk shows, especially the ones about his bestie Don Rickles.
LOS ANGELES – MAY 31: Legendary comedians and their wives (L-R) Don Rickles, Barbara Rickles, Ginnie Newhart, and Bob Newhart pose for a portrait backstage at the Las Vegas Convention Center at the AARP convention in Las Vegas, Nevada on May 31, 2013. (Photo by Jim Steinfeldt/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)
And he was a lovable off-camera as he was on it.
“He was as kind and nice as he was funny. “
Carol Burnett
Oh, and he was married to his wife “Ginny” for 60+ years until she passed last year.
Not bad for a failed accountant.
Bye, Bob… the world misses your warmth and humor already.
When I was growing up in Arkansas (back in the Mesozoic era), we’d see TV commercials for a grocery chain called The Mad Butcher. Every commercial ended with a caricature of “the Mad Butcher” accompanied by some maniacal laughter, straight out of the Vincent Price bag of tricks:
My dad could imitate that laugh perfectly – it cracked us up as kids.
We’re not laughing anymore.
This was a week ago. In Fordyce, Arkansas, a town of 3,000.
Normally the folks roaming the aisles of a small-town grocery store are called “shoppers.” In the blink of an eye, they became “targets of opportunity” and “victims.”
The perpetrator didn’t really have a criminal record. It’s doubtful tighter gun restrictions would’ve prevented this tragedy. Meanwhile, closer to home last weekend:
This one could’ve been prevented.
A bottle of water. Kids arguing. It should’ve been nothing more than a petty squabble. But add a gun to the equation and it ends with a teenager dead. Yet the story gets even sadder:
[Full story from the Cincinnati Enquirer is here.]
Three generations of gun violence. We can do more to stop the cycle. We should do more to stop the cycle. We must do more to stop the cycle.
Our grandkids aren’t old enough to know better. What’s our excuse?
The “Heat Dome” has descended upon the Midwest. Welcome to the Terror Dome.
Meanwhile, Southern Florida got flooded last week.
We have only ourselves to blame, really. By ignoring the warnings from scientists. By turning a blind eye to alternative energy sources instead of incentivizing them at scale.
“Given that we’ve seen an unprecedented jump in global warmth over the last 11 months, it is not surprising to see worsening climate extremes so early in the year,” said University of Michigan environment dean Jonathan Overpeck. “If this record pace of warming continues, 2024 will likely be a record year of climate disasters and human suffering.”
And the ones who suffer the most are the poor and elderly.
Help is on the way. It just needs to get here sooner. Here’s an excerpt from the 6/1 post on Bill McKibben’s excellent — and aptly named — Substack called “The Crucial Years”:
But here’s the thing: At the exact same moment—the same string of months—that the planet is beginning to unravel, human beings are finally accelerating the only real response we have: the rapid rollout of sun, wind, and batteries. The rate at which we’re adding renewable energy capacity jumped fifty percent last year. A new report this week found that wind and sun aren’t just growing faster than fossil fuels—they’re growing faster than any electricity source in history.
The rise of wind and solar has been stemming the growth of fossil fuel power, which would have been 22% higher in 2023 without them, Ember says. This would have added around 4bn tonnes of carbon dioxide (GtCO2) to annual global emissions.
Nevertheless, the growth of clean electricity sources needs to accelerate to meet the global goal of tripling renewables by 2030, Ember says.
Meeting this goal would almost halve power sector emissions by the end of the decade, and put the world on a pathway aligned with the 1.5C climate target set in the Paris Agreement.
Even in India, the share of electricity generated by coal dropped below 50 percent for the first time since 1966. There’s every sign that, globally, 2023 saw the peak in global emissions; all those solar panels are not just accounting for growth in energy demand any more, but beginning to cut into the actual consumption of fossil fuels. Now the job is to make the decline so steep that we build enough momentum to begin catching up with the physics of global warming.
It is a terrible story, almost unbearably tragic. But its ending hasn’t been written yet.
The more we harness the sun, the fewer unbearable heat waves we’ll have to endure. The more we lasso the wind, the fewer destructive hurricanes we’ll have to witness.
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