The White House last week was displeased that Red Sox slugger David Ortiz and his new endorsement-deal pals at Samsung exploited a “selfie” Ortiz took of himself standing with President Obama, to push Samsung products. Odd, Ortiz normally does his posing at home plate.
Seems the Samsung folks didn’t know better, or chose not to know.
But this wasn’t the first time a serving US president became an unwilling, unwitting party to a sell.
In October 1989, I was invited, along with a few sportswriters and sportscasters, to the White House for lunch with President Bush I. The luncheon was designed to promote the coming World Series.
That summer, I had vacationed in Kennebunkport, Maine, where the Bush family has a compound along a jetty. I played at Cape Arundel Golf Course, a nothing-fancy semi-private track where President George H. W. Bush occasionally played.
Within the Cape Arundel GC clubhouse and pro shop, one could read print ads that included a photo of President Bush using an extended-shaft putter — a two-grips “belly” putter, uncommon at the time — while playing that course. The ads presented Bush as at least tacitly endorsing this putter. Info on how to buy one was included.
It struck me as odd, almost impossible, that the President of the United States had a golf club deal. Anyway, I pocketed one of the ads, just for show-and-tell kicks and keeps.
Before I left for the White House, I remembered the ad, took it with me. At the end of that luncheon, I showed it to President Bush. His eyes widened; he frowned while shaking his head. He seemed, for a few seconds, angry.
“Do you mind if I keep this?” he asked.
“Not at all,” I told him. “I had a feeling you wouldn’t be happy.”
“I’m not,” he said.
Phelps failed to force education issue while at ESPN
Another woulda, coulda, shoulda. Throw him on the pile with the other big-name disappointments.
Digger Phelps, 20 years a lead college basketball analyst for ESPN, last week was let go — “retired” by ESPN — via contract non-renewal.
Having signed with ESPN after 20 years coaching Notre Dame, Phelps was another with the knowledge, name and forum to at least try to help right big-time college basketball’s gone-mad course. He knew the score — and that the bad guys were winning.
But Phelps chose the easy route, the easy money, the path of no resistance. He spent 20 years on ESPN either ignoring or praising the most dubious and suspect programs in “student-athletics.” He became a panderer who didn’t want to make waves or enemies on behalf of the truth.
Perhaps most disappointing was that Phelps, as a coach, often mentioned the academic achievement of his players as one his strong points. There was speculation that, upon leaving Notre Dame, he would be named the nation’s Secretary of Education.
But such a high regard for education — real or self-imagined — never was apparent from Phelps while on ESPN. He made that clear, almost from his start.
When John Calipari’s mid-1990s UMass teams suddenly became world-beaters, UMass was on an extended road trip from which it could have returned to school to attend at least two days of classes. Instead, as Phelps noted, Calipari kept the team on the road.
Ah, here was the moment when Phelps would muscle up! Surely, he would knock Calipari and UMass for placing basketball over education!
Instead, Phelps praised Calipari for an excellent decision, one that allowed his team to remain entirely focused on basketball.
Phelps was just another big-name TV analyst who chose for us darkness instead of even a little light. He didn’t even do the least he could do.
There’s a special comedy attached to golf broadcasting, the kind that turns plain-speakers into, well, crazy-talkers, people who say things they never would say while playing golf, such as, “The ball has come to rest safely on the putting surface.”
Charlie Rymer, as a PGA Tour player, was a good interview for his light, casual and countrified honest answers to questions.
Thursday, calling the Masters on SiriusXM’s PGA Ch. 93, it seemed Rymer wanted to simply say that on such a nice day he expected lower scores. Instead, he said that lower scores “have not been forthcoming.”
There might be trouble
Peter Gammons, endorsing MLB’s replay rule additions on Mike Francesa’s show Wednesday, made me LOL when stating there will be a few bumps — nothing that can’t be worked out — along the way.
Such a bump, he said, could come when, with the bases loaded, bottom of the ninth, a line drive first ruled foul shows up fair on replay. The umps, he said, then will determine what might have happened had the ball first been called fair. But no big deal.
Thus, they will have to determine where all the runners might have wound up and how many runs might have scored based on a stack of “might-haves” that exclude might-haves such as the runner who might have fallen, or might have missed third, or the wild or good throw that (italic) might have been thrown toward the plate — or any other base — presuming the cut-off man first was hit.
Thus, the conditions Gammons suggested we could live with are games — perhaps a World Series game — determined by what’s seen on a TV monitor followed by an extended discussion to determine the outcome predicated on what might have happened — a determination based on pure guesswork.
Sooner, rather than later, that’s going to happen. And that’s called “getting it right.”
On-the-job steroids-reliant pro wrestling star Ultimate Warrior (Jim Hellwig) last week dropped dead at 54. For WWF/WWE McMahon family headliners, that’s not too bad. Many don’t reach middle age, let alone enter it.
And finally, someone on TV who gets it, someone who understands that the piles of died-young pro wrestlers over the last 35 years — real people, not just cable TV cartoon-like action figures and fleeting pop culture stars — are victims of an industry that hired and promoted based on muscle-massing, death-defying drug abuse.
Colin Cowherd’s intelligent, impassioned take on this sustaining, dead-serious matter, Friday on ESPN, was what I had waited to see and hear on TV for more than three decades.
Cowherd now likely will be vilified by pro wrestling’s legions who just don’t want to know the truth because, in the end — the dead end — it briefly ruins their fun.