Weekly Mail September 24, 2023

                 Hopefully the weather gets better around here

Hey Everyone:

I think it’s safe to say this weekend was a washout, both in terms of weather and the state of our sports teams. The sun will eventually make a return, our teams? Not so much. 

FOOTBALL- GIANTS JETS DISASTER 

I didn’t see the Giants-Niners game on Thursday night, but my understanding was that it wasn’t as close as the 30-12 final score indicated. That’s not good.

As for the Jets, I’m not even going to give out about Zach Wilson who is clearly in over his head.  I’ve cut him as much benefit of the doubt as I can. He’s just not cut out for this. 

But he’s not getting any support either. Tony Romo who called the game for CBS is a blowhard, but he had a point when he said that they should let Wilson throw downfield on 1st down. At this point they have nothing to lose. And the two running backs they have aren’t doing much either, mostly because their offensive line sucks. And to me the biggest disappointment has been this defense that one of the players said could be as good as the 85 Bears! What? They’re not as good as today’s Chicago Bears right now. 

Losing to Bill Belichick is always painful. Losing to him when his team sucks is excruciating. The Patriots are not good, and no matter how much of a genius the world thinks he is, he’s not smart enough to get this team to a winning record. Unless he can schedule the Jets more than the one more time they are scheduled to play again this year. 

I’ll wrap up the disastrous Mets and Yankees seasons next week. And not that I follow the WNBA much, but the Liberty are the top ranked team in the East, and they lost their conference final game 1 to the Connecticut Sun. Like I said. A washout. 

TV Series Review: Winning Time Season 2. 

Jeff Pearlman, the author whose book Showtime was what this HBO series was based on, took to all his social media accounts to plead with people to tune into the show in order to generate ratings so that the higher ups would green light the series for a third season. Because of the writers strike that has now been resolved apparently, the stars of the show were unable to promote it. 

Alas as the last episode of season 2 was about to be rolled out, word came down that HBO had indeed cancelled the series. Leaving it off after Game 7 of the classic 1984 NBA Finals. 

SPOILER ALERT The Celtics won the 1984 NBA Finals END SPOILER ALERT. 

I feel bad.  It was a very entertaining show and brilliantly acted. I’m not a big John C Reilly fan, but he pulled off Jerry Buss brilliantly. And Adrien Brody became Pat Riley, there’s no other way around it.  Even the Commish/Vic Mackey himself Michael Chicklis was a more than believable Red Auerbach. 

But I’m also wondering if the lack of controversy hurt the show in season two. Recall that last year Jerry West was threatening to sue HBO for the show’s portrayal of him. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar lambasted the show for suggesting the that he told the kid from Airplane to fuck off. Bob Ryan of the Boston Globe took Pearlman to task publicly (and Pearlman responded in kind) and Magic Johnson urged viewers not to tune in. I mean if someone tells you not to tune in, what’s your first instinct? 

There are like a million ways to watch TV Shows now. There’s got to be a way for a show like this to land on its feet. It’s not likely, but hopefully someone has the brains to put this back on the air. 

BOOK REVIEW: The Last Miracle: My 18 Year Journey with the New York Mets

By: Ed Kranepool.

I wanted to like this book because as a Mets fan, this is someone who should be easy to root for. Drafted by the Mets right out of James Monroe High School in the Bronx, 17 year old Kranepool made his Mets debut in their very first season. He went on to play for them all the way through the 1979 season. 

And yeah, there were a few really good and interesting stories he told. 

But I had a few issues with the book, and while they may seem petty and insignificant, it led me to not enjoy the book as much as I thought as I would.

The first thing I didn’t like was that he called all his old teammates, managers and coaches by their last names. I mean like in the entire book, he never once talked about anyone and referred to them by their first name. I know that sounds like a small thing, but I mean the Mets have had some guys with colorful first names. Kranepool referred to Stengel, Berra, McGraw, Staub and Harrelson, where most of the books about the Mets I’ve read those guys are almost always called, Casey, Yogi, Tug, Rusty and Buddy. I mean even if you mention Willie and Cleon, we would know who you were referring to, but Kranepool insisted on calling them Mays and Jones. It was especially annoying with Cleon Jones, because Jones is such a common name, I had to think about who he was referring to. Maybe I need to get a life or something, but I found it very annoying.

And too often IMHO, he came off as an old grouch, bitching about how he could have been a perennial  all-star if not for this, that and the other thing. Hey, it’s his book, he can say whatever he wants, if he thinks he could have been another Ted Williams, that’s his right, (he didn’t actually say that, I guess I should point out, but that was kind of where he veered off sometimes) He also had no issues calling out folks he felt did him wrong, like former Mets GM’s Bob Scheffing and Joe McDonald. He also has little use for Joe Torre. 

The title suggests that he was grateful to have been part of the organization for all those years. Too many times throughout the book, it was awfully hard to tell. 

Everything I heard about Kranepool from people in the organization I have a ton of respect for have said he is a warm, friendly man, a wonderful ambassador for the franchise. And he may be, but this book made him sound like someone who would tell you to get off his lawn. 

2.0 Auggies. 

***************************************************************************************

My worst nightmare when I send my kid off to school every day is some maniac with an automatic rifle and bad intentions getting in there. Right behind that is what happened to those poor band kids from Farmingdale. He is always on buses, going to meets and on trips. I saw the alert on my phone saying a school bus carrying kids from Long Island crashed, and my heart went to my throat. None of the kids in the band died but two adults, band director Gina Pellettiere and retired social staudies teacher Beatrice Ferrari were killed. Just a heartbreaking tragedy. 

As always folks, please Stay Safe

and Have a Great Week

Weekly Mail September 17, 2023 (Season Premiere)

 

Hey Everybody: 

I hope everyone had a great last couple weeks of August and is getting back into the swing of things that September brings. 

People who know me know how I struggle with the end of the summer, but I'm getting better with it. I try to focus on the good things that the fall brings, like for example more comfortable weather, or getting together with friends who were gone for the summer. Tim has already had two cross-country meets and those are always fun to watch. 

Part of the issue is that Tim's birthday is August 30th, just as summer break is ending and school is starting. Last year, his first day of school was the day after his birthday and that broke my heart. (He on the other hand, didn't give a $h-t, in fact he was over the moon because he made the varsity cross-country team). This year, the kids went back the Tuesday after Labor Day, which made me happy. 

Anyway, we're back in business here at WM and looking forward to another year of hopefully entertaining you with my $0.02 on sports, politics and show biz. 

EDITORS NOTE… I ended up having to do some last minute stuff around the house on Sunday night, plus as you will see at the end of this blogpost, I have some sad news to report. I’m strongly considering moving the publishing date for WM to Monday night, better to have gotten all the weekend activity in. Next week will definitely be a Monday night publication. We’ll see how it goes. 

On that note, let's get started. 

FOOTBALL: R.I.P Aaron Rodgers Jets' Career..

There were a lot of feelings and emotions emanating through me last Monday night as I watched our brand new QB Aaron Rodgers stand up, then almost immediately crumble to the turf with what ended up being an at least season ending Achilles injury. There was anger, humiliation, sadness and resignation. There is also hope that perhaps Zach Wilson has taken some lessons from Rodgers and some of the other new additions to the roster and has grown up some (more on that in a second), but I can tell you one emotion or feeling I did not have, and if there was some gallows humour in all this, it was that I giggled a little any time I heard someone in the media say the word, because, I mean seriously?

Shock.

Shock?

You were shocked that a 39 going on 40 year old 18 year veteran quarterback who played all of his previous home games on a field they called "The Frozen Tundra" and is now playing behind an offensive line that would be more useful bullfighting somewhere in Spain, got injured? You were shocked that a team that hasn't been to the Super Bowl since the last week of the Lyndon Johnson administration lost the QB that they traded a boatload of draft picks for and paid a shitton of $$$ to, got hurt on the very first possession of the season? 

Shocked?

You know what shocked me? That he didn't get hurt in the preseason game against the Giants.  My sister and I were at the game in 2003 when Chad Pennington got hurt against the Giants in the preseason. I remember Mark Sanchez getting hurt when Rex Ryan had to have that preseason Giants game back in 2013, ushering in the Geno Smith era. Smith of course became a serviceable QB, 10 years after he left the Jets. 

I'm more convinced than ever that Joe Namath, sometime during those two weeks between the 1968 AFL Championship game and Super Bowl III, made a deal with the devil, probably over cocktails at some Miami nightclub. Very few people thought the Jets had a prayer of beating the Colts on January 12, 1969, but Broadway Joe was going around telling everyone that would listen that he was guaranteeing they'd win. It's still considered one of the biggest upsets in sports history. 

And now the Jets have joined the Rangers as two of my teams that have championship droughts of at least 54 years. The Jets will most likely now do my Blueshirts at least one year better come February.

That is unless, of course as I mentioned before, Zach Wilson all of the sudden finds the magic elixir. 

I know most people are down on Wilson, after his meltdown last year. I know the reason the Jets went out and got Rodgers was due in large part because of Wilson's lack of development. 

On the other hand, Wilson is a year older and hopefully a year smarter. He had an entire training came watching how Rodgers carried himself and if you watched any of HBO's Hard Knocks, you saw that Rodgers was more than willing to advise and counsel not only Wilson but the other QBs in camp. 

Also, I look at the guys that Joe Douglas has brought in here, Sauce Gardner, Garrett Wilson, Breece Hall, and I can't imagine that he swung and missed as badly as the so called experts are saying he did. If he saw something in Zach Wilson, I still believe that something is still there. And maybe new OC Nathaniel Hackett can bring it out, (with some help from Rodgers of course)  

Who knows, maybe I'll go back and read this post in January after another disastrous season and wonder if the dude who wrote this in September perhaps was sniffing glue. Maybe I'm just trying to hard to be positive. Maybe it's all I have to hang my hat on after all the hype and all the hope of the offseason went down the drain after 4 plays. Like Ellis Boyd Redding said in Shawshank Redemption....

Especially if you root for any of my teams. 

Zach didn’t do my case any favors this afternoon in Dallas, but TBH, I didn’t see much of the game so I can’t really give you a fair assessment. The stat sheet wasn’t pretty. He can really help his case next week by beating a Patriots team that really is not that good. I realize Bill Belichick hates the Jets as much as I despise him, so he will move heaven and earth to beat us. Next week would be a really good time for Zach Wilson to exorcize his demons, if he is ever going to. 

One of the challenges of writing this every week is finding good material to write about. When I take a break for a week or two, it's that much more material I get to work with. We've been off the last 4 weeks, so there was a bunch of topics we could have covered, and we'll get to some of them shortly. But one gift we received was that the Congresswoman from Colorado's 3rd district decided to go see Beetlejuice in Denver last Sunday night-with a date..

LET'S GET LEWD-starring LAUREN GROPERT

I saw this story originally on Twitter (or X as they now want us to call it), but all I saw originally was that Congresswoman Boebert and her date was being escorted out of a live performance of Beetlejuice because she was laughing and singing too loud and also may have taken some pictures which they tell you before the performance you are not allowed to do. 

OK, I think we've established the Bloebert is not the sharpest tool in the shed, and I'm guessing she hasn't attended too many plays or musicals in her life. That's fair. Not all of us are lucky enough to live just over the bridge from Broadway. 

But then it started to come out that she was vaping during the performance. Even a dunce like her had to know that wasn't allowed. To be honest, I'm more offended by that than I am about what she ended up really getting in trouble for. 

The security footage in the theatre showed that Boebert couldn't wait to get back to the Motel 6 you know they had to be staying at to give her date a hand release, and while she was telling him to cough, he was playing doctor with her bresses. 

And look, they've written Top-40 songs about going to the movies and getting busy with your date. I don't want to say we've all done it, but I would venture a guess most of us have gone to see a movie we know was going to be a stinker so that we could make out a bit with the gal or guy you were dating. 

But most of us did that when we were young, like in our teens and early 20's. None of us did that while at a live performance, and none of us were serving in the US House of Representatives  when we did that. And I'm not even going to get into the fact that this pea-brained bimbo is championed by the family values wing of her party. How a 37 year old recently divorced grandmama can be praised for her family values, especially since it seems like her kids received automatic rifles around the same time us normal kids got our first bicycles, is beyond me. 

Paul Reubens, the late actor best known for his character Pee-Wee Herman, was arrested and lost his job for public lewdness when he was caught masturbating in while watching a porno in an adult movie theater. Boebert was in a theater where kids and families were, including apparently a pregnant woman behind her who was breathing in the smoke she was vaping. 

And she'll probably get re-elected. 

*******************************************************************************

A couple of obits since we've been gone.

Bob Barker- There were some clever things written about the legendary host of the Price is Right when he passed away on August 26 at age 99. One of them was that he made it almost to 100 without going over, in reference to the rules of the show. But my favorite was all the people, some older and some younger than myself, who said that Barker was their companion when they were home sick from school. Indeed, I've told many people that I was home from school in January 1986 when the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded. That part is true, but I wasn't watching the launch, and I didn't see the explosion when it happened. No, I was watching the Price is Right, which is why I spent the rest of that day with Dan Rather. (Till my father got home and he switched it over to his guy, Peter Jennings.)

Bob Barker, game show host, animal rights activist and friend to millions of kids who stayed home from school. 

Jimmy Buffett- My favorite Jimmy Buffett story has nothing to do with his music. It was the time the Knicks were playing the Miami Heat and Buffett from his court-side seats at American Airlines Arena in Miami was giving out to the referees and ended up being ejected from the arena. Then Heat coach Pat Riley tried to intervene on his pal's behalf by asking the ref if he knew what a Parrot-Head was, and almost got himself tossed. All this happened on a Sunday afternoon on national television. 

I was unaware that my wife fancied herself a Parrot-Head, so we spent the Sunday of Labor Day listening to Sirius/XM's Radio Margaritaville, which included one of Buffett's last concerts in Key West.  Great stuff, the man knew how to entertain his peeps. 

Steve Harwell of Smash Mouth also passed. He was way too young. 56.

*********************************************************************************

I had actually written a whole other story that I was going to publish, but sometime on Sunday night, I got the news that my friend and colleague at the Post, CJ Sullivan had passed away. 

I will let others who worked with him more closely tell you what a phenomenal reporter he was for the Post, his work speaks for itself. 

I’ll give you one example though… He wrote an article (not for the Post) about how Babe Ruth attended Mass at St. Angela’s Church in the Bronx when he played for the Yankees back in the 20’s. He donated the altar in fact. St. Angela’s was my mom’s parish when she was growing up in the Bronx. Amazing.  

I can also tell you that he was another guy who never treated me like I was the help, or someone who thought it was my idea to call him up at 11:30 on a Saturday night to give him a Sunday morning assignment. 

He was as big a fan of mine as I was of his, and because he spent time at Donovan’s, he was one of the few Posties who referred to me by the name I got from my many nights at that famous Woodside establishment, Wild Bill. 

I have written so many times on these pages about how I’ve met some of the most amazing people in my coming up on 20 years at the Post, so many people that it has just been an honor and privilege to know. Yes, for the work that they do, but mostly for the people that they are.

CJ Sullivan was at the top of that list. What a good guy. What a sad day for us at the Post. He’ll be greatly missed.

RIP.

I know this song is out of season, but last year when I listed my top Christmas songs, CJ made it a point to let me know that Fairytale of New York was hands down the best Christmas song of all time. (I had it at number 3) I’m posting it here and playing it tonight and toasting a NY Legend. 

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=j9jbdgZidu8&pp=ygUWZmFpcnl0YWxlIG9mIG5ldyB5b3JrIA%3D%3D

Thank you everyone.

Stay Safe

and Have a Great Week

Weekly Mail September 11th Special 2023

 

September 11, 2023

22 years on, this is what comes to mind as we look back on that horrible day....

Usually around the time I finish up my last WM of the summer, something comes up that I wish to discuss regarding 9/11. It might be something I saw on TV, or on-line or a conversation I had with someone. Sometimes it's newsworthy or sometimes it's just an observation. 

But this year, nothing seemed to come up. 

I thought about writing about Rudy Giuliani,  about how he went from being a hero in many people's eyes that day to now having to grovel for money to pay for his legal fees-necessary because he chose to hitch his wagon to Donald Trump and all his baloney of a stolen 2020 Presidential Election. 

But that may be a blogpost for another day. On this day, and for this blog,  it's about remembering, and working through the feelings we all have about what happened and how we all coped with it. 

I've said it countless times before and I'll say it till my dying day, for all the pain and the fear and the sadness that came out of September 11th, what I will always remember is the days that followed, all the rescue workers that went down there, who spent hours that led into days digging out what remained of the World Trade Center. All the people who went to the staging areas around the city to load up trucks with food and supplies for the rescue effort. (Shea Stadium's parking lot was one of them) 

I recently just watched an ESPN Documentary about the 1972 Olympic Massacre in Munich. Peter Jennings, had been the chief correspondent to the Middle East for ABC News, and ABC Sports president Roone Arledge asked him if he wanted a break from the tension in the Middle East to cover some news events at the Olympics. Instead, he ended covering the biggest Middle East crisis that year. As Jennings was recalling the events in 1972, he also thought back to how he covered the events of 9/11, (the documentary was made in 2002), and it showed a clip from 9/11 talking on the air about how he had gotten to speak with his kids in the little time he had that day where he wasn't on TV, and he urged anyone who had a parent or a child they hadn't reached out to yet to "call 'em up" as he barely held on from bursting into tears on national TV. I remember watching that live. 

I'll never forget it. 

Those are the stories that stick with me now. Yes, the anger still burns. The thought of kids who lost parents that day, especially the ones now who are young adults, 22, 23 years old, just babies, never really knowing their lost parent, except through the stories their surviving relatives tell them. The even more heartbreaking thought of parents who lost kids that day. Having spent so much time in Rockaway in my life, there were so many guys around my age who either worked in finance or were FDNY, who died and left behind a devastated mother and father. 

The anger still burns. It will never flame out. And the sadness, that will always remain.

But also the hope.

The hope that we'll remember how we all came together and left our differences behind to help the healing. It didn't matter what side of the aisle you were on, you just wanted to help. Donate blood, help get supplies to Ground Zero, help a neighbor, all of that was part of it too. 

I don't know if we'll ever get back to that, I really don't. But on this day, as we remember what happened, as we work through those feelings of despair, anger, sadness and fear, I think it's worth a shot to remember how we all cared about each other those first days after the attacks. 

And we can put some of our hope into that. 

God Bless everyone we lost that day, and all who were left behind.

God Bless those who worked down at Ground Zero, who continue to suffer from 9/11 related illness. 

God Bless all of us who deal with the memories of that day, that we as Mr. Rogers used to say, "look for the helpers."

And May God Bless America

Weekly Mail returns next Sunday