WTF?!?! Why are all the good people being taken????https://t.co/tOyf93qxm6
— ššTHEE Side-Eye Pinkie Pie is KHivešš (@NYPoliticalMom) September 30, 2024
Two sports obituaries, two different legacies…
Charles P. Pierce, at Esquire — “Dikembe Mutombo, Who Died at 58, Was a Man of His Home and a Man of the World”:
… [W]hat marked Mutombo’s life was not his unsurpassed ability to block shots, nor was it the iconic finger wave that he gave to the unfortunate victims of his hijacks. It was that Dikembe Mutombo was a man of his place, and also a man of the world. His charitable efforts in his native Democratic Republic of the Congo, and all over the continent, were as vast as his work in spreading the sport of basketball in Africa. Both he and Hakeem Olajuwon, born in Nigeria, opened the continent to the NBA and to the world. Now African stars are all over the Association, from Pascal Siakam to Joel Embiid.
I first encountered him during my last years of covering college basketball, when Mutombo was a mystery recruit at Georgetown whom John Thompson had paired with established star Alonzo Mourning. Thompson kept all of his players under wraps, but he was especially stringent with Mutombo. But even with the limitations on access to him, Mutombo’s intellect and humor shone through. This all blossomed as his career went along. This great tower of a man was obviously brilliantāhe spoke nine languages, including five African onesābut he could be positively impish. There were very few NBA players who were both as respected and as liked as he was. He became the NBA’s first Global Ambassador.
Meanwhile, Mutombo’s efforts in his home country were legendary. He built a hospital in Kinshasa that has treated over half a million people since it opened. He worked constantly to improve education and health care in his embattled homeland. And, in a week in which the former president* went out of his way to scare people with his lie about Congolese convicts flooding into America, Mutombo’s pride in his country and his people stands out as hope for a better, more empathetic world. His life was a celebration of life and a celebration of hope. Dikembe Mutombo Mpolondo Mukamba Jean-Jacques Wamutombo died on Monday at 58 of brain cancer. May his memory be the blessing that his life was.
======
Tom Scocca, at Indignity — “Exit the hustler”:
… PETE ROSE IS dead. He was, by most accounts, a creepāa showoff, a liar, a cheater, a compulsive gambler, a credibly accused sex offenderāand his signature accomplishment was essentially a fraud, writing his own washed-up bat into the lineup day after day as a player-manager so that he could chase the record for the most hits, at the expense of his team’s success. His most famous play was a cheap shot in the All-Star Game that ruined catcher Ray Fosse’s career, lowering his head and smashing into Fosse on purpose as the catcher looked away to reach for an arriving throw from the outfield, then standing over the injured player to taunt him. At his peak, he was about 90 percent as good as the real best player on his own team.
He did grimly stalk down the hits record and wrest it away from Ty Cobb, using corked bats to get there. He finished 67 hits ahead of Cobb, in 2,787 more plate appearances, or about four extra years’ worth. Thanks to that falsely extended career, he could and did say that no one has ever accumulated more hits than Pete Roseācheap, crappy hits, like Smaug on a hoard of grimy pennies. Elsewhere, in a part of the record book closer to where games were won or lost, five players still scored more runs than Rose, despite coming to the plate 2,000 fewer times (or 5,000 fewer, in the case of Babe Ruth)…
eclare
I wondered when TCFG ranted about gang members from Congo if he had watched something on the news about Dikembe.Ā And so “Congo” got planted in his pea size brain.
columbusqueen
I think we should call the shitgibbon the Pete Rose of presidents. They seem to have a lot in common.
piratedan
Pete Rose was a helluva baseball player, he was NOT a good person.
Rusty
I’ve come to loath making a person’s performance, be that athlete, artist, actor, executive, etc. as an excuse for the persons bad behavior.Ā You can be a decent person first (you don’t need to be a saint, just not an asshole), and then you can be those other things.Ā People are complicated and messy, we all fall from the ideal in our lives, but there is basic decency and behavior.Ā Ā No athletic performance, artwork,Ā and more excuses abusive behavior or taking advantage of others.Ā I don’t follow the NBA but I can see why my friends are sad at Mutombo’s passing, Pete Rose on the other hand was an unredeemed jerk.
NotMax
@eclare
I strongly doubt he knows Congo refers to two distinct countries. It’s a stand-in in his shriveled peabrain for saying Africa. Or the dark continent. Or Peekabooland.
NotMax
To channel a slice of the electorate,
Walz is a guy you want to have a beer with, Vance is a guy you want to throw a beer at.
eclare
@NotMax:
Or shithole countries.
brantl
@piratedan:Ā As said above, he wasn’t even that great a baseball player, just one of the meanest, just like his idol, Ty Cobb. Cobb used to go into second base with his spikes up, even when there wasn’t a play. Two buffoons, that showed very little off a lot, high on their own supply.
p.a.
As someone said, sport doesn’t build character, it reveals it.
David šKHiveš Koch
At least Ty Cobb didn’t have a bad hair cut
TBone
@NotMax:
https://x.com/Betches_Sup/status/1841297344865652919
š
SFAW
@brantl:Ā ā
Cobb was certainly not sweetness-and-light, but his playing “style” (that everyone likes to point out to show his evilness or whatever) was not that different from a lot of other players of that era.
But he was a much better player than Pete Rose — one of the greatest ever. Yeah, Rose had 67 more career hits. Big deal; it took him almost 2800 more plate appearances to reach that figure.
As far as I can tell, Rose was a much worse person than Cobb.
ETA: And Cobb certainly wasn’t a buffoon.
SFAW
@TBone:
Thanks for the Xeet. We can only hope some variation of “they told me there would be no fact checking” goes viral.
Baud
@SFAW:
Based on reddit this morning, it’ll probably be the most remembered line from the evening
ETA: I was told there’d be no
mathfcat checking.Baud
@Baud:
Fcat = fact
TBone
@SFAW:
@Baud:
The lying liar LOST the whole thing with that one statement.
GOOD DAY SIR.
Last night I was almost looking for a swastika emoji when he uttered “those who deserve to be here.”
Also, a RWNJ “reporter” was demolished in the spin room when a kid reiterated the powers that Vice Presidents do not possess.Ā Basic civics.
waspuppet
I was always completely mystified by the appeal of Pete Rose. Just a shit person at all times, and even my 8-year-old self in 1972 was looking around at all his idolizers like āWTF is the matter with you people?ā
Sportswriters loved him because praising his fake hustle (I always rooted for him to pull a hamstring on one of those fake-hustle sprints to first on a walk) was a thinly veiled way to attack Black players and players who wanted to be paid properly.
Princess
@TBone: Vance looking very eye-linery in that shot.
rikyrah
@NotMax:
And, a substitute for what he really wants to say …
Those BLACK PEOPLE IN AMERICA šš
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: fcat = fatcat.
Matt McIrvin
Good God, Harris’s Facebook fundraising appeals are hyping the fear to the point that they sound like they’re coming from a floundering campaign that is losing the election. Democrats do something like this in every cycle, but I always wonder if they’ve taken it too far to the point that people will be reluctant to give them money.
schrodingers_cat
@Matt McIrvin: I am not a fan of the sky-is-falling messaging either.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
Experts don’t always make the right decisions, but I’m confident that their metrics tell them that fear-based solicitations are the most money-generating. I’d be surprised if they don’t measure response rates in real time and adjust their messaging if they see that they’ve gone too far.
What I don’t know is whether fundraising solicitations, which tend to go under the radar, has an effect on campaigning and turnout, which would be harder than fundraising to measure in real time.
eclare
@schrodingers_cat:
When do you fly home?
geg6
@rikyrah:
THIS!
And good morning to you.
Geo Wilcox
Hubby used to be a pilot for Delta based in Cincy. They used to have to recruit (bribe, force) flight attendants to fly the Reds around because they were such shitty people.
Kay
The edge with independents is really good news – it’s all that matters at this point.
Did anyone else notice Vance parrotted Harris with “it’s rich that…”
She used that phrase with Trump. I noticed it because you don’t hear it often.
schrodingers_cat
The whole immigrants are taking my housing sounded very Nazi-like to me. I muted potato face after he said in the debate and only heard what Walz had to say.
schrodingers_cat
@eclare: IDK how long I will stay.
Matt McIrvin
@Baud: Some of the people getting the terrifying fundraising solicitations may be the same people writing Democrats-in-disarray “analysis” articles.
Matt McIrvin
@TBone:
It’s a longterm Republican attitude–citizenship is a privilege to be earned (even for the native-born); residence in the US is a privilege to be earned; basic human rights are privileges to be earned. Who decides whether you’ve earned it? They do. You don’t. I’ve seen it in online arguments going way back.
Matt McIrvin
@schrodingers_cat: A friend of mine noted that he made a donation to some Democratic political campaign and was immediately deluged with “we are losing, we are outspent” messages from dozens of different candidates, and it made him feel almost like he’d done something wrong to make all that happen.
Geminid
Headline from anĀ Oil PriceĀ article posted this morning: “Oil Prices Climb on Expectations of Further Escalation.” Iran says that its ~190 missile barrage at Israel last night concluded its retaliation unless Israel retaliates, in which case it will deliver a “crushing” response. Israel says this exchange is not over. The widely-sourced Barak Ravid has an Axios article about this. The UN Security Council will hold an emergency meeting on the crisis today.
Meanwhile, anotherĀ OilĀ Price article from this morning is headlined, “Saudi Arabia Warns Oil Prices Could Drop to $50.” The Saudis warned its OPEC+ partners that if they keep exceeding their quotas it will take back market share even if that depresses prices. The reporter identified Iraq, Russia and Azerbaijan as the overproducers.
JML
@waspuppet: Rose was a rotten person, but I don’t think that was fake hustle. Frankly, everything was pretty real with Rose, which ended up being a big part of his downfall: he could never spot trying to win at everything, which is why he couldn’t admit he’d been wrong forever, and was always trying to get back into baseball on his terms (had to “win” the conflict with MLB), etc.
But he was a bad dude, even if he was a great player for a long time.
Mutombo is a much bigger loss: a great player who was also a great humanitarian and did real good in the world long after his playing career was over.
Honus
@SFAW: Cobb was an awful person but one of the best players of his era, and maybe all time. Ā Pete Rose was never even the best player on his team.
Geminid
@Honus: I sometimes wish I ciuld manipulate baseball’s timeline so that I could see Ty Cobb face Bob Gibson. That would be quite a confrontation.
satby
@eclare: seems obvious. I did too.
The Thin Black Duke
@Geminid: I loved the scene inĀ Field of DreamsĀ where Cobb tried to play baseball with the other players in Ray’s cornfield and they told him to “stuff it”.
Honus
@Geminid: that might be fun but I feel pretty good about actually seeing pitchers like Gibson, Seaver, Koufax, Carlton, Jenkins face Clemente, Mays, Aaronā¦
Gibson and Cobb would be fun for the dynamics though. I think Cobb might be getting up off the ground a couple of times.
Geminid
@The Thin Black Duke: Bob Gibson might have said “No, let Cobb bat. I want him.”
Geminid
@Honus: I wonder if you caught the anecdote I posted about Dusty Baker, Hank Aaron and Bob Gibson.
The Thin Black Duke
@Geminid: (mic drop)
Honus
@Geminid: no, where is it?
Honus
@Geminid: This kind of defines a pitching duel. Ā And itās not like the Braves and Giants didnāt have any hitters:
https://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/SFN/SFN196307020.shtml
RevRick
As shitty a person Pete Rose was, he could never be as shitty as Donald Trump or JD Vance. Or the entire cast of GOP politicians who are either enthusiastic backers of Trump or his cowardly enablers. Or the shadowy billionaires who finance them and the rightwing ecosystem.
Athletes at the professional or major college level are entertainers. They trade their bodies for our cheers and $. I donāt mean to diminish their own inner drives for success, but what they participate in isnāt called spectator sports for nothing. And whether theyāre consciously aware or not, those spectators are seeking a spiritual experience. They not only want to watch the event, but also want to feel immersed in something greater than themselves.
And I suppose thatās why we feel so invested in whether a particular athlete is a good or bad person. And make a big deal about it. It feels as if we ourselves are tainted or elevated by rooting for them or the team.
SFAW
@Honus:Ā ā
I cut Cobb a little slack because (if my recollection is correct) his father was, shall we say, not a good dad. [There is a reasonable possibility that my memory is wrong.] And therapy — not that he would have addressed his issues, of course — was not exactly available in the early 1900s.
But whatever the reality of his upbringing, he was still a better person than Rose.
Geminid
@Honus: I think I read the story in the Washington Post. Baker was talking about the first time he faced Bob Gibson. DustyĀ was having a good rookie year for the Atlanta Braves, and had a 20+ game hitting streak going when St. Louis came to town. The day Gibson was to pitch Hank Aaron gave the rookie some advice:
Baker said he was left wondering what was gonna happen to his hitting streak. It ended that night.
SFAW
@RevRick:
This cannot be said often enough.
Not ignoring the rest of your excellent comment, but this stood out.
Annie
I donāt believe Rose ever told the complete truth about his baseball bets. Ā IIRC he dribbled out lies and half-truths ā he didnāt bet, heād bet but not on baseball, then he did bet on baseball just not on the Reds . . .
Sure Pete. Ā Fool us once, shame on you. Ā Fool us twice shame on us.
Just Some Flyover
@SFAW:
Apples to oranges. Ty Cobb didnāt face the kind of pitching Rose did from the early 1960s to the mid 1980s. Cobb wasnāt facing the likes of Sandy Koufax, Don Drysdale, Bob Gibson, Nolan Ryan, etc. There were very good pitchers in Cobbās day to be sure but no one was throwing like the pitchers could in Roseās time. And team defense would have also markedly improved by Roseās day as well.