One last reward for "The Boss"

On Monday, it was announced that the late New York Yankees owner, George Steinbrenner, would be on the Veterans Committee's ballot for consideration for the Baseball Hall of Fame's class of 2011. Said committee will also consider three other Yankee greats of note, including pitchers Ron Guidry & Tommy John and Steinbrenner's favorite whipping boy during the 70's & 80's, Billy Martin, who won 5 World Series titles total, 1 as a manager, and 4 more as a player in the 50's.

Steinbrenner is virtually a lock to be elected on the first ballot, since it would be a year after his passing if he is inducted next July. If "The Boss" goes, then it would only be fitting that Martin, who shared many a back page headline in the New York tabloids with Steinbrenner, would go in with him. Would Guidry and/or John go in with them? Right now, I'm not so sure.

Steinbrenner & Martin, though, might not be the only posthumous entries. Longtime Seattle Mariners announcer Dave Niehaus passed away on Wednesday, and you have to believe there will be some politicking going on in the Pacific Northwest for him to go in as well.

I cannot recall if there's ever been any other time where anyone has earned posthumous induction into Cooperstown within a year of his passing. If it hasn't happened, then Steinbrenner's would be the first. The WWE, whose Hall of Fame doesn't have a tangible location at present, but should, to mollify its detractors, inducted the late Eddie Guerrero in 2006, less than 6 months after his passing, so there is a precedent, after a fashion.

Steinbrenner's memorial became the centerpiece of Monument Park at Yankee Stadium II over the summer, representing his larger-than-life standing as a baseball icon. The only thing bigger would be the celebration of his induction into the Hall of Fame. The only thing that would stand in his way would be the suspensions in the 70's & 90's, but that would be offset by the 7 World Series titles the Yankees won under his stewardship (1977-78, 1996, 1998-2000, 2009). They point to the fact that Steinbrenner restored the Yankees' winning tradition, though it took three years to reach the playoffs (Steinbrenner bought the team in 1973), and was at the forefront of the free agent feeding frenzy that has spiraled out of control since its inception in the mid-70's. 38 seasons (1973-2010) as owner. 7 Championships. 11 AL pennants. A zillion headlines, and multi-media appearances by the dozen. There is no question about when or if he goes in. It's virtually a slam dunk.

Best use of scoreboard animation in a music video (You Make the Rain Fall, 2010)

Kevin Rudolf's "You Make the Rain Fall", which features a rap by Flo Rida, is also the theme to WWE NXT for its current cycle. The series is now on WWE's website after being dropped by SyFy at the end of September, but this video appears on one of Time Warner Cable's Music Choice on Demand channels, and, well......judge for yourself, pilgrims. Rudolf has one of those VEVO channels on YouTube, from whence we get the clip.....



The censors blotted out the words, "loaded gun", which I don't think they would've done 20 years ago, but it wasn't blotted out when WWE uses this same song. Go figure.

On DVD: Four Star Playhouse: The Dick Powell Anthology, Volume 1 (1953-55)

Four Star Playhouse was one of the studio's first television series, and a showcase for the four partners in the company. The three constants were Charles Boyer, David Niven (both of whom would star in The Rogues) and Dick Powell, the former film & radio star who was, essentially, the major domo in charge until his passing in the early 60's.

Of the four episodes selected in this Alpha Video collection, only one, "The House Always Wins", has the full opening. Alpha engaged in a little bait & switch by emphasizing the presence of comedy legend Jack Benny, but Benny only appears in a brief cameo in this episode. Powell plays a nightclub owner in this episode, trying to keep the existence of a gambling casino within the club a secret from a prying police detective (Regis Toomey, later of Burke's Law). Also, Powell is seen as a lawyer (defending Charles Bronson), a cab driver (paired with one of the men who brought The Shadow to life on radio, Bill (billed here as William) Johnstone), and an executive in need of a vacation, whose daydream sequence looks like the kind we'd see on Rod Serling's Twilight Zone just a few years later. Dina Merrill (Mrs. Cliff Robertson) co-stars in this tale, which leads off the disc.

Edit: 4/11/14: Here's "The House Always Wins". It served as a pilot for the subsequent spin-off series, Dante, which starred Howard Duff in the title role:



Powell had already been known for his versatility as an actor long before making the transition to television, but by this point was spending more of his time behind the cameras. It's a pity they don't try to revive the anthology format in television nowadays. Networks would rather spend the money developing as many "reality" shows as possible to save money and create stars out of average folks, or give established stars some additional shine. I'd rather have something like this on cable than endless marathons of Jersey Shore or any other mindless "entertainment".

Rating: A-.

Troy, NY----City of Champions?

What hath the Tri City Valleycats wrought?

The hits just keep on coming in Troy. First, it was the Valleycats winning the NY-Penn League title nearly 2 full months ago, defeating Brooklyn to bring their first championship home. Then, the Troy Fighting Irish, representing the city in name only (home games were in Schenectady for some unknown reason), won their semi-pro football league title. Now, championship fever has reached down to high school level.

One year after falling in the Class A Super Bowl to Burnt Hills, Troy High, back in Class AA, won the championship Friday night in Colonie, dismantling Shenendehowa with surprising ease, 38-0. Of their 10 wins this year, Troy has posted 6 shutouts, a far cry from the luckless, winless, dark days when I was a student there 30 years ago. With the tradition that Shen has, you'd think this would've been a shootout that would've ended up, say, 45-44, or something. Nuh-uh! I watched the game on TV, and was stunned. Troy's defense was as advertised, and shut down Shen star Bronson Greene. The game was essentially over after the 3rd quarter. Shen's Hall of Fame coach, Brent Steuerwald, had warned in Friday's Albany Times-Union that his Plainsmen couldn't afford to fall behind early against Troy. Unfortunately, the message didn't get through fast enough.

Tonight, Lansingburgh will try to do what Troy couldn't a year ago, and that is beat Burnt Hills for the Class A title. If they succeed, it will be another notch on the belt for the city. Meanwhile, Troy rolls on to represent Section II in state playoffs, presumably against Section IX champ Monroe-Woodbury.

Back when I was at Troy, the football team was so bad, they couldn't execute a simulated goal-line offense-----at a pep rally! It was that bad. No, I take that back. If they were dared into a pickup game of touch football with the cheerleaders, they'd probably have lost that, too. Just kidding.

Now, if only they could do something to make the basketball team more competitive at the start of the season........

Weasel of the Week: Charles Nagel

There is a fine line between fandom and fan obsession. Charles Nagel, supposedly an aspiring songwriter from Philadelphia, crossed that line when he began stalking and harassing actress Kathryn Erbe (ex-Law & Order: Criminal Intent). On Friday, Nagel was found guilty, but was cleared of interstate stalking charges.

Nagel went so far as to convince his 12-year old daughter to say that she, not her dad, drew a picture of a cockroach on a picture of Ms. Erbe's daughter, coupled with a caption balloon that says, "I'm ugly". I cannot see how a child at that age can buy into her father's delusions to take such steps, and so I believe the younger Nagel was coerced somehow into taking the rap for the graffiti. Nagel himself has claimed he was duped by an online "imposter". Right. The jury didn't buy that defense one iota. While there have been people pretending to be others, including other celebrities, on social sites like Facebook & MySpace, it's easy to tell an imposter from the real star. Seeing as how I am not on either of those sites, I couldn't give you an honest, first-hand account, but if you asked the right questions....!

What Nagel needs, more than anything, is psychiatric help. Jail isn't going to be much help unless he seeks treatment and reconciles himself to the fact that he was in the wrong.

For implicating his own child in his delusional actions, Nagel earns the weasel ears.

The curse of being Vince McMahon

Once hailed as a visionary in professional wrestling, Vince McMahon can't seem to make any headway in any other venture, and that misfortune has extended to his wife, Linda. Consider the litany of McMahon's failures over the last 20 years.......

The World Bodybuilding Federation (early 1990's). McMahon started to make an inroad into the bodybuilding market that was virtually monopolized by the Weiders around 1990. First, there was a magazine comparable to the fluff mags that McMahon produced for the then-World Wrestling Federation (now WWE). In 1991, McMahon launched the WBF, and followed that by adding a weekly TV show, BodyStars, which debuted on USA in April 1992, only to be cancelled 9 months later. The WBF folded at the end of 1992.

ICOPRO (1990's). McMahon sunk his money into this line of nutritional supplements, which his WWE & WBF talent promoted weekly on TV. Today, ICOPRO is just a faded memory, and McMahon sort of poked fun at this folly a few years back, hiring wrestler Mike Bucci to play a heel fitness guru named Simon Dean, a flopped negative parody of fitness icon Richard Simmons.

Xtreme Football League (2001). In 2000, McMahon began beating the drums for a winter-spring football league that would help gridiron fanatics deal with the NFL's offseason. Franchises were placed in markets large (NY, Las Vegas, Los Angeles) and small (Birmingham, Memphis, Orlando). However, McMahon reckoned without the media bias that had been built up against him over the "Attitude era" content of his wrestling programs. Gadflies like Phil Mushnick of the New York Post (and, at the time, TV Guide) essentially warned viewers away, for all the wrong reasons. It didn't help that McMahon also relied on some of his own announcers, including Jim Ross, Memphis legend Jerry "The King" Lawler, and Jonathan Coachman (now with ESPN), to call the games. The XFL lasted just the one season, folding in April 2001 after the league crowned its only champion.

WWE Studios (2006-present). McMahon has only had one real box office hit, and that came when he was given an executive producer credit for "The Scorpion King" (2002), which jet propelled Dwayne Johnson (formerly The Rock) into superstardom as an action hero by going straight to #1, despite negative reviews from some critics. Jonathan Foreman, writing for the New York Post, blasted the movie, even though it read as if he hadn't really seen it and slammed it just because of the WWE tie-in.

4 years later, with Johnson long gone from WWE, McMahon decided to launch his own film division. The critics have savaged virtually every film to come from WWE, with one lone exception to date. "Legendary", which paired John Cena with screen vets Patricia Clarkson & Danny Glover, received glowing reviews before a brief 2 week run in theatres in September. While the movies aren't making hay at the box office, McMahon is making his money back in DVD rentals/sales, and that's why he continues to crank out the flicks. Cena has another one due next year, and there are also films on the board starring Randy Orton and Triple H (who has 2 in the can), the latter of whom hasn't made a movie since "Blade: Trinity" 7 years ago.

Finally, there was Linda McMahon's run for US Senate as a Republican candidate from Connecticut. As I noted last night, there's been no connection between the McMahon family and the Tea Party movement, not that the Tea Party would've been of any help. Vince McMahon, as I suggested last night, sabotaged his wife's campaign with an ill-advised comedy skit on Monday Night Raw, failing to realize that a regional Senate race is of little consequence to a world-wide audience. As of press time, there were indications that Mrs. McMahon might give it another try in 2012, but if I were Linda, I'd make sure Vince stayed far, far away from the fray this time.

Try as he might, Vince McMahon may never be able to succeed outside his own professional balliwick, if you will. If Donald Trump taught him anything about business, McMahon probably ignored it. His loss.

The easiest of elections

The Governor's race in New York, despite the back & forth attack ads between Democrat Andrew Cuomo and Tea Party-backed Republican Carl Paladino, was a foregone conclusion long before New Yorkers took to the polls this morning, and word from various news outlets confirms it.

While I have not bothered to follow election night coverage on local channels---I hardly do anymore---I let my curiosity get the best of me and I decided to check a couple of local sites, to see the result, rather than wait for the morning papers.

It turns out that New Yorkers made history today by electing Cuomo, son of former governor Mario Cuomo, as the next governor, replacing David Paterson, who opted not to seek election amid a scandal at the beginning of this year. Paladino, realistically, never had a chance despite "upsetting" luckless Rick Lazio in the primary 2 months ago. In fact, Paladino killed his chances himself by contracting foot-in-mouth disease with some of his remarks the last few weeks. That created the perception in voters' minds that Paladino, who could've passed for a lookalike of the late actor Dennis Hopper, in this writer's opinion at least, was too much of a loose cannon to be counted on to lead the state for at least 4 years.

This marks the 2nd straight election that voters chose a sitting attorney general as governor (Eliot Spitzer, now a CNN talk show co-host, was elected in 2006). Cuomo, though, wasn't the only AG to move up in rank, if you will.

Over in Connecticut, in a race that gained national attention, that state's AG, Richard Blumenthal, held off former (and likely soon to be) WWE CEO Linda McMahon, but in truth, Linda's husband, Vince, may have sunk his wife's chances with an ill-advised comedy skit last night on Monday Night Raw, in which Mr. McMahon tried to sell the audience on the idea that he's been in a coma for at least 4 months, after an on-camera beatdown in the ring. Actor Freddie Prinze, Jr. ("Scooby-Doo", "Wing Commander"), back in the employ of WWE, played the attending physician while McMahon wore a hospital gown littered with bumper stickers of his wife's campaign and a Blumenthal poster hung on his backside.

What killed that skit dead was the public knowledge that McMahon stumped for his wife at a WWE event in Hartford on Saturday afternoon, his first public appearance at a WWE event since June. Last night, McMahon jokingly suggested while in character that maybe he'd make a run for the White House in 2012 (he'll be 67 by then), but, considering his wife's defeat tonight, that plan is but a pipe dream by now.

At no time during the campaign, though, was Mrs. McMahon even considered to be a part of the Tea Party, which thus can breathe a sigh of relief.

At this rate, no matter how much the Tea Party wants to push former Alaska governor Sarah Palin, who failed in a VP bid 2 years ago, as a Presidential candidate in '12, voters would be more likely to vote in a ventriloquist dummy by then than stomach Mrs. Palin, who has become way more overexposed than any of McMahon's wrestlers combined, for 4 years.

Don't scoff at that last paragraph. It may be written in jest, but stranger things have happened, and probably will.