Shirt Pocket Notes - Memorial Day and NBA Edition

Let's kick off this edition of The Grandstander with this picture that I took at the American Cemetery in Normandy, France when we visited there in 2018.

It was a group of French school children taking a tour of this remarkable place.  It was wonderful to see that the French continue to teach what happened there to younger generations of their citizens.  

This was perhaps the most moving visit to anywhere that I have ever taken, and it is a perfect representation of what Memorial Day is all about.

Now, on to less serious matters.....

I have gotten completely involved and immersed in the NBA Playoffs this year, especially so as the Eastern and Western Conference Finals commenced.  It is interesting that whenever I make a comment on social media about the NBA, I usually get hit with a bunch of "I-can't-stand-pro-basketball-the-college-game-is-better" or "If-the-NBA-Playoffs-were-being-played-in-my-back-yard-I'd-pull-down-the-blinds" type of comments.  Well, if that's the way you feel, all I can say is that (a) I don't agree, and (b) if you can't appreciate basketball as it is played at its highest level, then I just would tell you to do one thing:

Watch the San Antonio Spurs over an extended period of time, not just highlights, but entire games, and if you don't marvel over the play of Victor Wembanyama, then I don't know what to tell you.

On PTI the other day, Kendrick Perkins made the statement that 25 or 30 years from now, when the debate takes place as to who was the greatest basketball player ever, the debate will include only three names: Michael Jordan, LeBron James, and Victor Wembanyama.  He's that great.  Only injuries can stop him.

Game One of the WCF between the Spurs and the defending champion Oklahoma City Thunder was an epic.  It was a double overtime victory for the Spurs, and Wembanyama scored 41 points and had 20 rebounds.  It was one of those games that was the perfect example of why we all follow sports.  The fact that it was the first game what is, essentially, a semi-final series will mean that it might not be remembered.  A game like that should have been Game 7 of a Finals series.  It was that great.

In the East, I have found myself taking a liking to the New York Knicks. 

Led by Jalen Brunson and Carl Anthony Towns, they put out a starting line-up of five really good players.  I'm rooting for them.  Plus, it's fun seeing all the celebs at court side at the World's Most Famous Arena.  I mean, how can you not like seeing what Walt "Clyde" Frazier and Spike Lee will be wearing on any given night?

As it stands right now, the Knicks have a 3-0 lead over the Cavaliers, and the result of this series is a forgone conclusion.  Maybe Cleveland will snag a win at home tonight, but they are not going to beat the Knicks four straight games, so we can expect to see New York in the Finals.

The West Finals now stand at 2-2 after San Antonio's big win last night (33 points from Wemby), but OKC aren't the defending champs for nothing.  Two time MVP Shea Gilgeous-Alexander is a superstar who can win games all by himself.  I can see this series going seven games.  The winner will be favored in the Finals, but the Knicks are on one of those rolls that teams get on some times.  Whomever the Knicks end up playing, it's going to be a great Finals series.

Four Movies

I have watched four movies over the last week and want to share some thoughts on them with you.  Two are older movies, and two are brand new, released just this month on Netflix.

Marty, Life Is Short

This is a documentary about actor and comedian Martin Short, directed by Lawrence Kasden.   Short, of course, came to the attention of most people in the United States when he was a part of Canadian SCTV back in the late 1970's/early 1980's.  He went on to greater things on television (one season as regular on Saturday Night Live), guest appearances  on talk shows and acting roles in movies and countless television series.  I remember him in movies like "The Three Amigos" and "Father of the Bride", but I had no awareness of just how prolific an actor that he is (116 acting credits in IMDB), including his latest huge success in the streaming series "Only Murders In The Building".

This documentary includes home movies that Short himself made of both his family growing up and of his own family and friends.  And those friends are a Who's Who of show business today: Steve Martin, Stephen Speilberg, Catherine O'Hara, Tom Hanks, and many, many more.  The movie also tells of Short's resilience in the face of tragedy: his oldest brother was killed in an accident when Martin was 12, his mother died when he was 18, and his father died two years later.  Then, he lost his wife of thirty years, Nancy Dolman, to cancer in 2010.  His words about what he went through at that time and in the time that followed were particularly meaningful to me.  Not included in the film was the news of his daughter Katherine's  suicide earlier this year, which occurred after the film was finished.  It is dedicated to her.

Two great lines from the film that sum up Short perfectly:

Steve Martin: "Say you're having a dinner party and you invite Marty.  Then Marty tells you that something came up and he can't make it.  You then cancel the party."

Tom Hanks:  "Marty operates at the speed of joy."

You will laugh a lot watching this movie, and you will fell pain as well, but, ultimately, you will feel the "joy" to which Hanks refers.

Four Stars from The Grandstander.

Remarkably Bright Creatures

Sally Field plays a widow working as an overnight cleaning woman at a public aquarium in Washington state.  It keeps her occupied and active.  Lewis Pullman plays an unemployed musician who arrives in town on a mission to collect money that he feels is owed to him. They're drawn together when his crummy van breaks down and he has to take a job as Field's substitute cleaning person at the aquarium.  They become tied together by their affinity for the aquarium's star attraction, an octopus named Marcellus, who serves as the voice-over narrator of the movie.

I know, doesn't make a lot of sense and it sounds terrible when you spell it out like I just did, but, trust me, this is a charming little story, and how it ends and how the characters tie together make for a delightful movie. 

A word about Sally Field.  She will turn 80 later this year, and she is wonderful in this movie.   She has over seventy acting credits in IMDB dating back to 1962.  She has done comedy and drama. She has won two Oscars and three Emmys and is a Kennedy Center Honors awardee.  She played Mary Todd Lincoln for crying out loud! She has come a long way from Gidget and The Flying Nun, and, as this movie has shown, she continues to do wonderful work.  She is a real treasure.

Three Stars from The Grandstander.

The Outlaw Josey Wales

(1976)

Back in March, I wrote THIS PIECE about movies that will turn fifty years old in 2026.  While researching for that post, one of the movies that I found on every list for that year, but that I had never seen, was this western that starred and was directed by Clint Eastwood, and I finally got around to seeing it, fifty years after the fact.

It is classic Eastwood stuff.  Josey Wales seeks revenge on a band of renegade Union soldiers who murdered his wife and son and burned down his home as the Civil War was coming to an end.  Along the way he meets up with an all-by-himself Indian and a family of settlers from Kansas who are seeking a better life out west.  He also has to fight off various bandits, hostile Indians, and, of course, those soldiers who killed his family.  Lots and lots and LOTS of people get killed in this movie and there is a lot of shooting and somehow lone man Josey/Clint manages to out wit, out shoot, and out kill all of them, no matter how outnumbered he always seems to be.  

Josey Wales is the 1860's precursor to the 1970's Dirty Harry Callahan. If, like me, you are a Clint Eastwood fan, then this is a movie for you.

Three Stars from The Grandstander.

The Bride Wore Black

(1968)

French film director Francois Truffaut was an unabashed admirer of Alfred Hitchcock, and this 1968 movie was his tribute to him.  If you watch it, you will see the influence that Hitchcock had on Truffaut in scene after scene.  (FUN FACT:  The Bride Wore Black is based upon a novel of the same name by author Cornell Woolrich.  Woolrich also write the short novel "Rear Window", which was, of course, adapted by Hitchcock into my favorite movie of his.)  Jeanne Moreau played the title  character.  We learn early on that her husband was shot and killed on their wedding day, and she then sets out on a mission of revenge against five men responsible for the killing.

I recorded this one off of TCM.  It was in the original French with English subtitles. I was anxious to see it because back in 1968, this movie was shown at the Forum Theater in Squirrel Hill, where the then seventeen year old Grandstander was employed as an usher.  I can remember that I liked the movie because "it was like a Hitchcock movie".  However, the movie was especially memorable because of this scene that featured a topless Miss Moreau:

In watching the movie this week, I realized that this scene took up about two seconds of actual screen time.  It ain't much by today's standards, but to a 17 year old boy in 1968, it was pretty hot stuff.

All that aside, it is still a pretty good movie.  A suspenseful thriller and an apt tribute by Truffaut to Hitchcock.

Two and One-Half Stars from The Grandstander.

To Absent Friends - Ted Turner

 

It would not be an exaggeration to say that Ted Turner, who died at the age of 87 earlier this week, was one of the most significant persons of our times over the last forty or so years.  This editorial cartoon that I stumbled upon says it best, I think.

Yep, all of those logos sum up what Ted Turner did in his lifetime.

He took a small UHF television station in Atlanta, put it on cable systems across the country and created television's first "Super Station".

He bought the Atlanta Braves and put it on this Super Station, now called Turner Broadcasting System, or TBS, and in the process created Braves fans throughout all fifty states of the country.

He captained his yacht, Courageous, to victory in the quadrennial America's Cup races, and earned the nickname Captain Outrageous in doing so.

In what may be his most significant accomplishment, he established the first 24 hour cable news network, CNN.  This forever changed the way the country and the world receives the news of the day.

His Turner Broadcasting empire grew to include TNT, Cartoon Network, TruTV, and my personal favorite, TCM - Turner Classic Movies.  

The fact that you can now watch four basketball games simultaneously during the first weekend of March Madness can in large part be attributed to Ted Turner.

Become one of the country's foremost environmentalists and conservationists.

He married Jane Fonda!  If ever there was such a thing as a "Power Couple", that was it.

Obituaries and tributes to Turner abound in the internet.  You should seek them out and read them.  He was a real game changer.

RIP Ted Turner.

"Captain Outrageous"

One of my favorite things!

World Series winner with the Braves in 1995

"He came into my life, a gloriously handsome, deeply romantic, swashbuckling pirate and I've never been the same. He needed me. No one had ever made me feel needed before, and this wasn't your average person needing me, this was the creator of CNN and Turner Classic Movies, who had won the America's Cup as the world's greatest sailor. He had a huge life, a brilliant mind and an incredible sense of humor."

- Jane Fonda

"Telegraph Days" by Larry McMurtry

 

I stumbled across this 2006 Larry McMurtry novel in a used bookstore a few months back, and I finally pulled it off of the shelf and read it last week, and what a delight.

The novel opens grimly in 1876 when our narrator, 22 year old Marie Antoinette "Nellie" Courtright describes the suicide of her father.  The old man was an aristocrat in antebellum Virginia, and he decided to leave there "head west" to start a new plantation on the post Civil War western frontier.  He fails, we are told, and along the way, his wife and all but two of his children die, before he takes his own life.

Like I said, it's a grim note on which to start a story, but "Telegraph Days" is anything but a grim tale. 

Nellie and her 17 year old brother Jackson decide to leave the failed plantation, and head to the dusty little western town of Rita Blanca that consists mainly of a jail house, an abandoned telegraph office, a general store, and a bunch of saloons.  in short order, Nellie arranges for Jackson be named deputy sheriff, and she becomes the telegraph operator.  In even shorter order, Jackson becomes a hero by killing all six members of the notorious Yazee Brothers outlaw gang,  Nellie writes a dime novel about the event, and becomes famous herself.

Like McMurtry's epic Pulitzer Prize winning novel "Lonesome Dove", this story captures what it was like in the fading days of the Old West, only he does it with more humor and in about 300 fewer pages in this one.  Nellie tells her story as she encounters just about everyone that you have ever heard of from those days: George Custer, Billy the Kid, Wild Bill HIckock, The Earp Brothers, Doc Holliday, and, especially, Buffalo Bill Cody.  In fact, Nellie becomes the manager, or "majordomo" for Buffalo Bill as he promotes and stages his Wild West shows and sells them to the people across the country and the world who want to see just what the "old west" was like.  I especially loved this bit of dialog between Nellie and Bill as he was convincing her to come on with him to manage his business affairs.

"It's a harebrained scheme," I said, "pay fighting Indians to pretend to fight?"

"Yep, and to pay sharpshooters to shoot and acrobats to tumble and trick ropers to twirl big loops and cowboys to ride broncos and all the rest of the folderol that goes with a Wild West pageant," he elaborated.

"This is making me dizzy," I admitted. "Nobody in their right mind would pay good money to see a place that looks like Rita Blanca. Even Yankees aren't that dumb."

"Sure they are - as soon as something's ended, people will start flocking to at least get a glimpse of what it was like before it was over," Cody said. "It's human nature."

"I'm a human, and it's not my nature," I assured him, but even as I said it I knew my remark was partly a lie. Why read Walter Scott if not if not to catch a glimpse of what life was like in older times - times that were surely gone forever?

That's some good writing there, and Nellie Courtright is one of the most engaging characters you will ever come across, as she somehow manages to hold her own against scheming reporters, grungy cowboys, drunks, and outlaws proving that you didn't have to be a man to survive on the sometimes perilous old west.   Not that she had anything against men, you understand.  In fact's Nellie's matter of fact need and the sheer joy that she takes in the act of "copulation" is one of the more delightful aspects of her character. 

Nellie lives long enough to see the glory days of the Old West through which she lived be glamorized in the newest art form of the twentieth century - motion pictures, and in fact, she even played a part in the production of those early movies.

"Telegraph Days" is a fun and lively tale, and Nellie Courtright is a terrific tour guide as she tells her story.

Three Stars from The Grandstander.

To Absent Friends - Bob Skinner

 

Bob Skinner

1931 - 2026

One more member of the Pittsburgh Pirates 1960 World Series Championship team left us yesterday when Bob Skinner, the regular left fielder on that team, died at the age of 94.  

Skinner had a 12 year major league career, which included nine seasons with the Pirates.  In that magical 1960 season, Skinner hit .273 with 15 home runs and 86 RBI.  I recall that he was injured early in the World Series and only played two games against the Yankees with one hit in five at bats and an RBI.  Over the course of his twelve year career, he hit .277 and averaged 12 home runs and 62 RBI (prorated over 162 games).  He also was a role player on the Cardinals' 1964 World Series championship team, going 2-for-3 with an RBI against the Yanks in that Series. 

It is always significant when the member of one of Pittsburgh's most memorable and beloved teams leaves us, and Skinner's death is especially significant in that it now leaves only one member of that team still alive, ace pitcher Vernon Law, now 96 years of age.  I made the comment on Facebook yesterday that Law, as the last survivor of that 1960 squad and the last survivor of that theorhetical tontine, now gets to drink from the special bottle of champagne.  It was then pointed out to me that as a devout Mormon, Law would not drink this alcoholic beverage.  I was making a metaphor, of course, but that is somehow fairly ironic, is it not?

These first months of 2026 have been hard on that team as it has seen the passing of three of its vital members, Roy Face, Bill Mazeroski, and now Bob Skinner.

I wonder what Vernon Law is thinking today.

RIP Bob Skinner.