That sounds like I’m trying to be an asshole, right? It sounds like I woke up this morning and read that Mike Flanagan had committed suicide, and I’ve got no tact or personal connection to the man or his family so I came up with something jokey and tasteless for a headline. That’s what we do on the Internet, right? Joke about these things until they don’t matter?

I wish that were the case.

Flanagan’s body was found outside his Baltimore County home yesterday afternoon. He was 59.

Police have not released an official cause of death … But WBAL-TV Sports Director Gerry Sandusky confirmed with sources that Flanagan committed suicide “despondent over what he considered a false perception from a community he loved of his role in the team’s prolonged failure.”

Unbelievable.

Flanagan, in many respects, was as “Baltimore” as the city itself. He lived in Baltimore County. From 1975 until 1992, he played all but four of his 18 seasons in the Major Leagues there. He won a Cy Young for the Orioles in 1979 and a World Series in ’83, and in his post-playing days stuck around in Baltimore as a pitching coach, broadcaster and executive vice president of baseball operations. That would’ve been a general manager in most places. The Baltimore Orioles haven’t had a winning season since 1997, but as weird as it is to hope there was some reasonable explanation for a man taking his own life, you’ve got to hope that there was more to it than that.

The Baltimore Sun has started posting reactions from various Orioles players and executives, including a statement from Peter Angelos and this from Cal Ripken, Jr. I don’t think I can handle a sad Cal Ripken.

“I am so sorry to hear about Mike’s passing. He was a good friend and teammate and our thoughts are with Alex and his family. Mike was an Oriole through and through and he will be sorely missed by family, friends and fans. This is a sad day.”

Even sadder is Jim Palmer, who had to react to the news in the middle of last night’s game.

Rest in peace, Mr. Flanagan, and thank you for trying.

Texas is in the middle of a heatwave and drought that will take us through 40-plus days of 100-degree-plus weather. How hot is it? It’s so hot, farmers are feeding their chickens crushed ice to keep them
from laying hard boiled eggs. I saw a dog chasing a cat and they were both walkin’. It’s so hot a Plano, Texas, assistant football coach collapsed and died after his school’s first football practice on Monday afternoon!

Wait, what? Oh. Oh my God, I’m so sorry.

According to the Associated Press and everyone in Texas with a video camera, Prestonwood Christian School coach Wade McLain was taken down by the severe temperatures on the 31st consecutive day of inhuman weather and died, leaving behind a wife and five children. I think the only way I can write about something like this and not become a hermit in my refrigerator is with stupid pictures of dogs and bad jokes, but as a resident of central Texas and someone who feels like he’s in Lawrence of Arabia going from his front door to his car I can’t imagine how this poor guy must have felt, and my sincere condolences go out to everyone involved.

Here’s report with a few more details on what went down, by way of Prep Rally.

“Tragedy” gets thrown around a lot for stuff like this, but damn, you’d hope things like this could be avoided. The report says McLain is now in the presence of Jesus, so hopefully he’ll tell him to bring us some g.d. rainfall.

I spent all morning trying to figure out whether or not I should write about this. We aren’t a Faces of Death website and my job description is basically “take anything that happens and make jokes about it on the Internet”. The only other way to take it is in the “my thoughts and prayers are with his family” direction, but if your thoughts and prayers are really with his family you wouldn’t be writing about it, or posting a video of it, or posting a comment about it after searching for and finding it on YouTube. Or would you? I spent all morning trying to figure this out. I spent my entire life trying to figure out how humanity works, and when I thought I had the answer, people changed the question. Mostly with cell phone cameras.

But anyway,

On Thursday, July 7, 2011 during a game between the Texas Rangers and Oakland A’s, Conor Jackson hit a foul ball which ricocheted off the left field wall. Fans yelled for Josh Hamilton to give them a souvenir ball. Josh threw the baseball up and a fan who has not been named fell over the railing to catch the ball. He tumbled and fell head first.

I go to a lot of baseball games, but I’ve never been that guy who brings his glove and shoves people over to catch a foul ball. At the same time, I can’t tell you with any honesty that when the Fun Bunch comes around with a t-shirt gun I’m not standing on my chair, waving my arms yelling OVER HERE, OVER HERE. It’s unsettling to think how easily this could’ve been me, with “me” as sort of an everyman qualifier meaning “if Josh Hamilton tossed me a ball, I would try to catch it no matter where I was standing”. Most of us would. It’s easy to say we wouldn’t.

And the writing starts to get maudlin.

Read the rest of this entry »

NBA journeyman Armen Gilliam died on Wednesday at the age of 47. He had a heart attack while playing a pick-up game of basketball at his local LA Fitness in Collier Township, probably the least “LA” place in the United States. They rushed him to a hospital, where they declared him dead.

Stat recaps are never a fun thing to do when someone dies too young, but they’re a heart-in-the-right-place way of lining up a man’s public accomplishments and saying “hey, this is what he did, and you can remember him for it”. He was a former No. 2 overall pick of the Phoenix Suns in 1987 and played for nearly everyone at one point or another, the Charlotte Hornets, Philadelphia 76ers, New Jersey Nets, Milwaukee Bucks and Utah Jazz. His first name used to be “Armon”, but he changed it. He retired in 2000 after 13 seasons of being “The Hammer”, a nickname given to him for his powerful, physical style of play and because it was a great pun.

He was never a superstar, so we’re allowed to let the people who knew him best make their own eulogies.

“I’m all shook up,” former UNLV coach Jerry Tarkanian told the Las Vegas Sun today. “He was such a great person. He would take the shirt of his back for you.”

I think that’s the kind of legacy I’d like to leave.

In a bizarre turn of events that is just begging me to make a bunch of tactless puns about death, Justin Honeycutt, a 30-year old Magic Midway employee who also happened to wrestle locally under the name “Ryze”, died Saturday by falling off of the Star Flyers ride at the Orlando amusement park.

Honeycutt was trying to repair the ride about 90 feet in the air when he fell about six feet. Most reports are vague about how a guy died by falling six feet, but the phrase “rescue crews found Honeycutt unconscious, suspended in the air by a safety harness” makes me feel uneasy. When I was a kid I saw somebody fall out of the big swing carousel at a Busch Gardens, and I haven’t gone near those things since. I guess the only way you can die falling six feet in a safety harness is if you hit something on the way down, had a Gwen Stacy situation where the fall and sudden stop killed you, or you had a f**king heart attack because you were about to fall off of a 90 foot carnival ride.

From the Orlando News 13 report:

“It is under investigation,” said Mark Smothers, spokesman for Orange County Fire Rescue, “we will turn it over to [FL Dept. of Agriculture], and the sheriff’s office will treat it as a death investigation.”

Investigators are not yet sure why the worker fell. Magical Midway reopened Sunday. Star Flyers will remain closed while it is inspected by the FL Bureau of Fair Rides Inspection.

And then there’s the little footnote, which is sure to cause instant facepalming for any wrestling fan reading this.

Star Flyers is billed as “America’s only carousel on steroids.”

I thought I was going to be done for the day, but the punny reprobates at the New York Post have dragged me back in. In their report of Randy Savage’s death, they wrote the following.

Savage’s passing follows the deaths of several other prominent wrestlers from the 1980s, including Yokozuna, Ultimate Warrior, Bam Bam Bigelow and Savage’s one-time female partner and wife, Miss Elizabeth.

The problem here is that Ultimate Warrior isn’t dead. In fact, he’s more the Warrior now than he was in the 80s, because he changed his name to WARRIOR (legally, in all caps). The whole “the original Ultimate Warrior is dead” rumor/running gag was born in that wonderful time when dumb wrestling fans figured out they could say what they “heard” to other dumb wrestling fans and they’d believe it. I think I read the same rumor about Yokozuna joining the Hart Foundation for two and a half years.

So yeah, hey New York Post, Warrior isn’t dead. You run a terrible operation, and make it hard for people of worth to get jobs in journalism. Warrior is alive, Yokozuna is never going to join the Hart Foundation, the original Undertaker is the same stupid Undertaker being the Undertaker right now, and stop getting dX420suckIt from the back pages of the Torch to write your articles.