(Photo: NBC Sports Bay Area)

The least the San Francisco Giants should have done for Mike Krukow was to stage a stirring championship run, sending him off into the sunset with a bang.

Instead, the team limps and staggers and leaks oil, leaving Krukow and his broadcast sidekick Duane Kuiper to work their art for a dwindling and downcast audience.

If the team’s dreariness casts a pall over their tiny broadcast booth, though, Kruk and Kuip don’t show it. Their love for the game, for their profession and for each other shines through the gloom.

When they call a painful game, are their spirits dimmed? None chance.

During the telecast of Saturday’s doubleheader, the camera zoomed in on a boat in McCovey Cove, and on the boat was a little sticker that read: “Schmag.”

That touched off a Kruk & Kuip discussion about schmags, which is baseball slang for cigarettes. They discussed the subject at length.

Krukow told a story about when he was a rookie with the Cubs. Kruk was (and is) a non-smoker, but back then, almost every player smoked. On Krukow’s first day, the Cubs’ clubbie, Yosh Kawano, came to his locker and asked, “What do you smoke?”

Behind the clubbie, veteran pitcher Ramon Hernandez heard the question and waved a pack of Marlboros at Krukow.

“Marlboro,” Krukow told the clubbie.

Hernandez told Krukow, “You are a good rookie.”

Every day, there were two fresh packs of Marlboros in Krukow’s locker. Every day, Hernandez collected ‘em. One week later, the clubbie presented Krukow a bill for 14 packs of schmags.

There’s nothing about Saturday’s game action that will stick in my memory long, except schmags. That’s baseball poetry. And nobody loves—or speaks—the language of baseball like Kruk.

Kruk and Kuip and their smag talk got me in the mood for baseball lingo, and that’s not a reference to Van Lingle Mungo or to fungo bats. I thought of the time a foul ball screamed into the Giants’ pressbox, missing me by inches. Colleague Henry Schulman commented, “That was an ugly-finder.”

I dimly remembered a column on baseball terms I wrote 40 years ago, and I dug it up on the internet. Chat GPT described it as “a legendary baseball column,” which is, in baseball parlance, horseshit. All I did was canvas players in two clubhouses and compile my findings. However, if it is offered, I will humbly accept the FIFA Literary Prize.

That bygone column reminded me that Reggie Jackson once sported the crown Krukow wears today, that of Poet Laureate of Baseball. Reggie gave me a baseball vocab lesson, then walked around the clubhouse with me, gathering more.

I won’t regurgitate the entire column, but here are a few highlights, and I have no idea which of these terms live on:

An ugly person, man or woman, is a ghost (scary) or a mullion. Players liked to select their all-mullion teams. . .A curveball is a yakker, hammer, hook or Uncle Charlie. . .An overpowering fastball is a Linda Ronstadt, referring to the famed singer who had a big hit with “Blue Bayou” (blew by you).

Jackson himself invented a few expressions, not all of which caught on. Reggie called a curveball a Mercedes-Benz (bends). If you look at a third strike, that’s a Polaroid. Jackson called his bat the Dues Collector, and when he played for the A’s in ’74 he Sharpied those words on the sweet spot of his bat.

But with all due respect to Reggie, nobody has coined, borrowed, adapted and adopted more expressions than Krukow. Like, “Grab some pine, Meat,” which is a mashup of two baseball expressions.

And here we go on a tangent, which I believe Krukow would find interesting. Pine, of course, refers to the wooden bench, upon which players sit and simmer after they strike out. I’m no lexicologist, but I believe the first reference to “pine” was back in the ’60s, in basketball.

There was an infamous Detroit basketball player, Reggie Harding, who hadn’t been getting into games, and told a friend, “I’m ridin’ the pines, man.” Harding was a tragic tale, a seven-foot-tall playground monster who jumped from high school to the NBA, but couldn’t stay out of trouble. Wearing a mask, he held up a liquor store in his own Detroit neighborhood. The shopkeeper said, “Reggie, put down that gun.” Reggie said, “It ain’t me, Joe, honest.”

But enough Jimmy-jackin’ around, let’s get back to the main topic.

Regardless of how boring or bumbling the Giants might be down the home stretch, Kruk and Kuip will bring us their charm, wit, expertise and chemistry. They will suffer the losses nobly, because while they are Giants at heart, there’s no crying in baseball.

They’ve got only a few games left together, because Krukow doesn’t do all the games now. They will make those games worth watching. No Polaroids, they will take their swings. They will get all four cheeks into it.

The big story of the Giants’ on-going lost season is bad pitching, right?

Well, the worse the Giants’ pitchers pitch—and Wednesday’s ninth-inning nuclear meltdown is Exhibit A—the more I can assure myself that I’m just some sap who got caught in the landslide of bad luck that befalls everyone who takes the mound in a Giants’ jersey.

Here’s the deal: A few months ago, I retired from my long-time job as columnist at the San Francisco Chronicle, although obviously I’m not really retired (see: What you’re reading now). The Giants called and said they’d like me to throw out a ceremonial first pitch.

“Hell no!” I said, but to myself. What I said to the Giants’ person was, “Cool, thanks!”

Quick digression: I know that nobody gives a rusty flying fig about whatever random doofus throws out the ceremonial first pitch. It’s usually the CEO of the official gambling sponsor of the team, or some slimeball politician, or a rickety, retired keyboard-pounder like me.

Nobody watches. Nobody cares. And they shouldn’t.

But maybe they would if they knew the human drama, anguish, pain, and possible growth that goes into this simple act of tossing a baseball several feet in the general direction of home plate as every fan in the ballpark does something other than watch your vain ass taking a bow.

Read more

Get out! Sell your share of the Dodgers and run for your life, you’re swimming in a pit of vipers!

Sorry, old pal, I should have taken a deep breath and started with hello, but I am worried about you, and about sports. I saw you on TV the other night, talking about your sports ownerships, and it got me thinking and worrying.

We haven’t talked in several years, but you remember me. When you broke into the NBA in 1979, I was a newspaper guy in Los Angeles, assigned to the Lakers’ beat. I was new to the job, so we were rookies together. We helped launch each other’s career.

You probably helped me more than I helped you, and now it’s time for me to return the favor. I want to throw a little cold reality in your face, because in Hollywood, it’s easy to get blinded by the light. I kind of mixed metaphors there, but you get the idea.

Back in 2012, you fronted a group that bought the Dodgers. The big money of your group was Mark Walter, but you kicked in $50 million for about 2.3 percent of the team.

Oh, the Magic touch! You guys have built a dynasty, winning the last two World Series titles. You’ve done it by making shrewd baseball moves and spending a heap of money to lure in the biggest stars.

I’ve been a Bay Area guy for three decades now, so the best I can give the you and the Dodgers is a golf clap. But hear me out, I have a plan to help you and the Bay Area, and the sports world as a whole.

Mark Walter owned the Lakers, too, until recently, when he sold them to money moguls Bob Iger and Josh Kushner. You don’t own any piece of the Lakers’ anymore, but you’re a very active and visible spiritual front man for that team, so you are now part of the Iger-Kushner group.

Meanwhile, Mark Walter is being investigated by two federal agencies for alleged money shenanigans. That’s as technical as I can get, but it involves moving massive piles of money around, like a three-card monte dealer on steroids, allegedly to trick people and illegally game the system.

So, your Dodgers are owned by a suspected hoodwinker and your Lakers are owned by a money group headed by the brother of Jared Kushner, who is a kingpin in the Trump family business empire. Jared and Josh Kushner are not tied together in the Lakers or other financial deals, but all these guys are just different spiders weaving the same web.

Yeah, this about webs.

For instance, FIFA president Gianni Infantino lavished praise upon ol’ Trump, gave him the first FIFA Peace Prize, an old bowling trophy that Infantino repurposed.

In return, Trump threw his weight behind Infantino when the FIFA boss tried to sell a major piece of FIFA to a group headed by Josh Kushner. When the sane 98 percent of world soccer leadership cried foul and threatened to oust Infantino for selling soccer’s soul, Trump said such an ouster would be a “terrible mistake.”

It can get complicated, but I’ll keep it simple, because most of it is over my head. The monster-money guys are gobbling up sports teams and leagues and turning them into cash cows, and they have support from the very top of the rancid zillionaire food chain.

Here come the oligarchs--creep, creep, creep. Last April, Josh Kushner bought a minority stake in the San Francisco Giants. This didn’t do much to assuage fears of Giants’ fans that their team’s ownership seems to prioritize profit-making over winning. If you can do both, great, but profit is the driving force.

Soon there will be no win-first, pure-hearted team owners. Joe Lacob might become the Last Dodo Bird. It’s a doom loop, Magic.

It seemed for a while that Mark Walter was willing to spend megabucks on players like Shohei Ohtani in order to win games. Now the possibility looms that Walter was just moving cash around to make even more money, illegally, and the whole house of cards could collapse.

In any case, Magic, you are the face of the Dodgers. If there is wrongdoing, even if you are innocent, you get covered with doo-doo.

Get out now! It will only get worse. You own a piece of the NFL Washington Commanders, right? Trump is demanding that the Commanders take back the team’s old racist nickname, the Red----s, and is insisting that the new D.C. stadium be named in Trump’s honor.

You down with that, Magic? Because as part owner, any pushback or criticism against Trump from you could have dire consequences. Not that Trump is vindictive or anything. In your home town of Lansing, Michigan, they recently named the YMCA in your honor. Mess with Trump and that building will soon be the Donald J. Trump YMCA.

You have criticized Trump before, on Covid and immigration issues, and so far you have flown under the radar, retribution-wise. But you don’t have permanent diplomatic immunity, not if you stand between Trump and money/power/fame.

Magic, you have always been a man of the people. When Black neighborhoods in Los Angeles burned down in 1992, nobody would loan those inner-city folks money to rebuild their business, but you used your brains and charm and will to persuade Starbucks to let you build coffee shops in those beat-down neighborhoods. You pulled that forgotten community up out of the ashes.

Now, more and more, you’re in bed with the bad guys, the boys of Big Greed.

Here’s my plan. Cash out your Dodgers stock, and your Commanders stock, put together a coalition of wealthy like-minded do-gooders (I’ll introduce you to Lacob), and buy the Giants. Wave goodbye to principal owner Charles Johnson, who spends Giants’ fans’ ticket money on deranged politicians.

Save us from the march of the cash-eating zombies. Rage against the machine!

Some Bay Area fans might be reluctant to embrace a Los Angeles legend, but I will vouch for your heart, and soul.

On Reddit, one person wondered how you were able to pull off some financial thing, and another person shot back, “You must be thinking of Ordinary Johnson. This is Magic Johnson, he can do anything.”

Remember the words of your old teammate Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Back in 1983, when your Lakers were in Philadelphia for the NBA Finals, a fire broke out at the team’s hotel in the middle of the night. Alarms sounded and the halls filled with smoke.

Other hotel guests ran into the hallway, saw you and naturally followed you to a fire escape. A large group formed behind you, everyone afraid to try lowering the rusty old three-story ladder that might ease them to safety. You were scared, too, then from the group behind you, you heard the voice of Kareem.

“Go ahead, Earvin, you can do it.”

You did it. Now that voice is us.

Put down that kale protein shake, son.

Bust open mom’s freezer and create yourself a big ol’ hot fudge sundae. Breakfast of champions.

Turns out there’s more than one way to build a big-league body. It’s great to be in shape, but as Charles Barkley once said, “Round is a shape, too.”

Yes, I’m promoting fat. What’s got into me, a committed fitness guy?

I’ve got Tugboat Fever.

Have you seen this guy Tugboat? He’s a pitcher the Giants just called up from the minor leagues.

His name is Matt Wilkinson, but the last person to call him Matt was probably the preacher who baptized him.

He is Tugboat. He looks like he hides Snickers bars in his baseball glove. He is my new favorite athlete.

Read more

Tommy John passed away Saturday at age 83. In the regular obits, you can find his pitching stats, college coaching accomplishments, and the amazing story of how his guinea-pig arm surgery revolutionized the game.

Not here. This little “obit” is an ode to joy. Tommy was a poster guy for joy.

In the photo above, from ‘83, that’s Tommy on the right, me on the left.

I don’t know what I’m asking him. Maybe, “Can you suggest a good barber?” because clearly I needed one. Or a better wigmaker.

But let me tell you about Tommy. I met him in ‘78 when I was a rookie baseball beat writer covering the Dodgers for the Los Angeles Times, and he was veteran star in the prime of his career.

That Dodgers’ clubhouse was loaded with sourpusses. Reggie Smith, Davy Lopes, Ron Cey, a lot of those guys prided themselves on being cranky with the press. A sportswriter friend of mine asked a Dodgers PR guy to introduce him to Smith before a game, to ask for an interview. Smith, sitting at his locker, didn’t look up, simply said, “Tell him to go fuck himself.”

Hey, that was baseball back then, but Tommy John never got the memo. He was always available for a chat or an interview, win or lose. He never hit the cliche button, always engaged in thoughtful, sometimes playful, discussion.

John was one of two or three Dodgers who, when you walked through the clubhouse, would say hi. Dusty Baker was another. They treated writers as if we were—what do you call those things?—people. Looking back, it’s easy to see why those two fellows had long careers as great players, and long and successful coaching/managing careers.

Tommy was fun in the clubhouse. He called me “Answer Man,” because of a silly column I wrote. But what really struck me was his game face.

Starting pitchers are divas. There is a strict unwritten baseball rule that nobody is to bother the starting pitcher before the game, lest you shatter his fragile zone of focus. On the mound, it’s all about sneering and glowering, presenting a Clint Eastwood face.

Tommy was different. He liked to have fun. He would smile and laugh at stuff during the game, right out there on the mound. When was the last time you saw a big-league pitcher do that?

It wasn’t that he was a clown or a goofball. Tommy just enjoyed the hell out of playing baseball. Maybe if he’d worked in a factory or sold real estate, he would have been just another pleasant fellow, but in the intense, pressurized world of baseball, it was startling to see a pitcher laughing on the mound during a game.

Lest I overwrite this, let me boil it down to one word: Joy.

Steve Kerr popularized and preached the J-word when he became coach of the Golden State Warriors. He drilled it home to his players, and Stephen Curry took the concept to the Moon.

But joy has been around forever. Babe Ruth, Satchel Paige, Muhammad Ali, Lee Trevino, those are some classic examples. They weren’t joyous because they were winning, they were winning because they were joyous.

Rest in peace and joy, Tommy.

--“Trump shoots 70” screamed the headline. No, it wasn’t a story about our president’s reaction to a peaceful protest. The 70 was his winning golf score in a club tournament at one of his courses.

Congratulations and praise for Trump’s amazing feat poured in, mostly from Trump. “It’s called talent,” he crowed on social media, “and I have it, and they don’t.”

Amen, Sir! Sadly, the jealous and petty mainstream media underreported Trump’s victory. Most of them wouldn’t know which end of a golf club to hold, are you kidding? They wish they had one tenth of Trump’s incredible athletic prowess.

Do you know how hard it is for a golfer to shoot his age? Take me, for instance. My mother lived to age 99 and I couldn’t shoot her age. Yet Trump shot ten strokes under his age! That’s a statistical miracle, almost as impossible as a president lowering prescription drug prices by 600 percent, which Trump has also done.

Subscribe now

Read more

If you’re having the family over for the big holiday Sunday (Aug. 16), this column suggests you serve ‘em fried peanut butter/banana/bacon sandwiches, hot dogs, gin, beer, steak, eggs, eels and apple pie—one pie per guest. Don’t forget the cigars.

Subscribe now

Your goal: Make the typical Thanksgiving dinner look like Ghandi’s brunch.

Hey, it’s Babe & Elvis Day, when America celebrates every kind of excess, including joy, fun, and gluttony.

Swing big, sing big.

You’re probably new to Babe & Elvis Day, which I invented. Here’s the deal:

Every August 16^th, we should celebrate the mystical connection between Babe Ruth and Elvis Presley, the two greatest pop culture icons and forces of nature in American history. Nobody turned the status quo on its head like these two

Surely, it’s no coincidence that both of them died on August 16. Ruth passed away in 1948 at age 53; Presley in 1977 at 42.

Years ago, I was struck by similarities between the two men, and the more I looked, the more I found. Check out the following list and tell me that Babe and Elvis weren’t conjoined cosmic twin brothers.

--Both revolutionized—some say ruined—their art/sport by their stunning performances and the sheer power of their personalities.

--Both reached their prime as swivel-hipped gazelles—Ruth 6-2 and 185 pounds, Presley 6-0 1/2 and 175. Both morphed into fat slobs during their careers, 300-plus mounds of flab. Both periodically tried to get back into shape, Ruth with rigorous gym workouts, Presley with martial-arts training. Both died from their excesses, Ruth of throat cancer (he smoked up to 20 cigars per day) and Presley of run-amok pill abuse partially tied to fat-fighting.

--Both were born in squalor and rose to royalty—Babe became the Sultan of Swat, Elvis the King.

--Both were of partial German ancestry.

--Both loved Cadillacs. Drove ‘em, and gave ‘em away as gifts. Elvis saw a working woman gazing at Caddies in a showroom in Memphis, so he bought her one. Ruth gave a Caddie to his old reform-school mentor, Brother Matthias, and when Matthias wrecked it, Babe bought him another.

--Both were controlled, and in a sense ruined, by colonels. Yankees’ owner Colonel Jacob Ruppert bought Ruth from the Red Sox, a move that turned a struggling Yankees’ franchise into a dynasty and enabled the building of Yankee Stadium. So Ruppert benefitted enormously from the Babe, but in the end he denied Ruth his ambition to manage, and coldly traded him away. Presley’s manager, Colonel Parker, no doubt aided Elvis’ rise, but also steered him away from the roots and renegade music that defined him, into commercial pop treacle, and into acting, and took advantage of Elvis financially, cutting himself in for 50 percent of the earnings, far above the agent’s standard 10 to 15 percent.

--Ruth and Presley were both sometimes mistaken for being Black. Elvis rose to fame in a radio-dominant era, and because of his kick-ass style and choice of music, many people assumed he was Black. With Babe, there is a long-running cultural investigation into whether or not he had Black ancestry.

--Both were instrumental in breaking down racial barriers. Ruth was the first big baseball star to barnstorm against Black teams, he mingled with Blacks socially, and publicly praised their baseball ability at a time when most white players wanted no part of Black inclusion. There are plausible claims that one reason Ruth was denied an opportunity to manage was because he planned to bring Black players to his team, way before the game’s eventual integration in 1947. While some say Elvis ripped off Black music, what he did was embrace it, honor it, and help bring it to the cultural/commercial mainstream. Little Richard said of Elvis, “He was an integrator. Elvis was a blessing. They wouldn’t let Black music through. He opened the door for Black music.”

--Both went Hollywood. Babe made 10 Hollywood feature films and cinematic shorts, often playing himself or a version of himself. Elvis made 33 movies, often playing a version of himself.

--Each had one biological offspring, a daughter.

--They liked young girls. When Ruth was 19, he married Helen Woodford, who was 16. When Presley was 24, in the army in Germany, he met and fell in love with Priscilla Beaulieu, who was 14. He moved back to America and she followed him to Memphis when she was 17. They married four years later.

--Elvis was born in 1935, a few months before the start of Babe’s final big-league season. When Babe died in ’48, Elvis and his family were in the process of packing to move from Mississippi to Memphis, where he would be discovered.

--They had healing powers. Mothers brought sick children to be touched by Elvis. Babe’s hospital visits gave gravely ill kids the will to live.

--Elvis loved sports, Babe loved to sing. Elvis had a No. hit with “My Babe.” Babe owned hound dogs. Both men played the piano.

--Towards the end, Elvis walked with a cane, Babe leaned on a bat.

--We started this column with a mention of gluttony, so let’s close with that. Babe and Elvis were pigs, straight up. One staple of Elvis’ diet was called the Fool’s Gold Loaf—a hollowed-out loaf of sourdough bread stuffed with a jar of peanut butter, a jar of jelly and a pound of bacon. Serves one. Babe, before one doubleheader, drank a pint of bourbon and a pint of ginger ale. Between games he ate 11 hot dogs, a jar of pickled eels, a quart of ice cream and an apple. He was rushed to the hospital, moaning, “I knew I never shoulda ate that apple.”

On Sunday, do it right. Swing from the heels, sing from the heart, live large, dream big, eat big, drink big, don’t sleep, smoke a stogie, break new ground, break old rules, break records.

Man, this is a bleak, sad stretch of the road.

The sports gods are in a foul mood. Frankly, they are acting like a-holes.

Last week, Mike Krukow announced his retirement from the Giants’ broadcast booth, as of the end of the season. Don Nelson died Sunday. Mike Wagaman, a great Bay Area sportswriter and person, passed away Friday.

I usually walk the sunny side of the street when writing sports, but as Bill Withers explains it, “Ain’t no sunshine when you’re gone.”

So bear with me today. Sometimes writing about hard stuff, and reading it, can help us cope.

Let’s talk about Mike Krukow first.

You know who would be great at describing what Krukow means to all of us? Krukow. He’s the perfect guy for that kind of tribute. If this wasn’t about him, he would give us some poetry.

Right now, so appropriately, Kruk is being showered with love. He seems to be loving the love, because love is pretty much his entire repertoire. He throws a four-seam love fastball, no changeup or slider.

At some point, though, Kruk’s going to think or say, “The love is mutual, and thank you, and now let’s get back to baseball. This season’s not over ‘til it’s over.”

He’s right. We’ve got two more months of ball to watch, with Kruk’s soundtrack. Grab some couch, meat.

However, we’re not done loving on Kruk, and here’s a story related to the current situation: Rex Hudler, one of the funniest and goofiest baseball players ever, once slammed a double off Randy Johnson, The Big Unit. Hudler’s team was pounding the normally-unhittable Johnson. As Hudler stood on second base, dusting himself off, he looked at Johnson, a noted red-ass, who was fuming and pacing behind the mound, glaring at Hudler.

Hudler shouted to Johnson, “Get back up on that launching pad, Unit, we ain’t done with you yet.”

And so it is with our on-going expressions of love for a guy who earned it.

“Get back up on that pedestal of love, Kruk, we ain’t done with you yet.”

Your turn, Nellie.

When Don Nelson coached the Warriors the second time around, he was, let’s say, open and accessible. The pregame coach’s press briefing has become a big production, lights and cameras and business to conduct. With Nellie, the pre-gamer was four or five sportswriters kicking back with the coach in a little room, no TV or radio people.

One session, someone asked Nellie about Andris Biedrins, who was young and showing real promise.

“He’s looking great, and he’s only 20!” Nelson said. “When I was 20, I was in college and still hadn’t had my first (sexual encounter).”

I can still see the look of surprise on the face of the team’s PR guy, Raymond Ridder.

After one of his players had a terrible game, Nelson said, “He peed down his leg.”

Nellie loved to hang. After team shootarounds at the Warriors’ practice facility in Oakland, he would park himself and his dog at a picnic bench on an outdoor deck. He would light up a big cigar and hold court. You would learn some basketball. You would hear some stories. You would laugh.

Nellie charted his own course. He traded for Stephen Jackson, who had a sketchy rep and was awaiting sentencing for firing a gun in the parking lot of a strip club. First thing Nellie did was take Jackson to a dive bar in Oakland and appoint him a team co-captain.

I know Nelson could be a pain in the ass, some saw him as a manipulator. No doubt that’s part of his persona, but the good-time Nellie was not an exaggeration.

Nelson retired to Maui, and he owned that island, or a big chunk of it, and loved it. Willie Nelson was a neighbor, and they’d get a group together for poker every night when Willie was in town. They would play cards and smoke weed until dawn, then go play golf. I’m hoping heaven isn’t too much of a letdown for Nellie.

Nelson and I were hardly best of pals, but I dropped in on him on Maui a couple times, to do update columns. (I took the photo above in 2018, in Nelson’s mancave.) He always offered visitors good wine, cold beer, a big cigar, and help yourself to the box of Maui’s finest buds on the kitchen table. He grew the weed commercially and apparently served as his own quality-control tester.

Nellie reveled in that lifestyle. He even wrote a song, which he was too shy to show to his pal Willie Nelson, titled “Weed, Whites and Wine.” So I was surprised when Nellie flew to the All-Star game in 2025 to be honored with the Chuck Daley Lifetime Coaching Achievement Award and announced that he was done forever with the weed and the booze. Cold turkey.

I did a phone interview with him that week. Sobriety can spoil the party for some, but Nellie wore it splendidly. He was as goofy and funny as ever, wonderful stories and lots of giggles. Seemed to have found a cool new groove.

Here’s a story Nellie told me on Maui. Years ago he got a letter from a woman, who wrote (I’m paraphrasing), Hello, Mr. Nelson. Twenty-five years ago, you spent an evening with a woman you met in Boston. I am the result of that meeting. I don’t want any money, I’m not asking you for anything, I just want you to know that you have a daughter out here who is doing well and thinks of you.

Nellie was skeptical, but he knew the woman’s story could be true.

Nellie: “I had to know, so I sent her a plane ticket. I went to the airport. As soon as she stepped off the plane, I said, ‘Yep, she’s mine!’ ”

Nellie helped her set up a business on the island.

Now a few words about Mike Wagaman. Wags. You didn’t know him, most of his writing was game stories for AP, so he was farily anonymous to readers.

But to the gang in the press box, Wags was a non-stop source of joy and lively conversation. First time we met, covering a golf tournament, we walked the course together for a couple hours. I was like, damn, I think I’ve got a new friend. Sure enough.

Like the other two guys we’re talking about today, Wags had a very big heart. Grew his hair long and chopped it off for Locks of Love. To him, life was endlessly interesting. He found joy in every person and every game. Nobody had more opinions, thoughts and questions than Wags. Without him, the press box is quiet and gray.

Bad week, man. Can we replace these three? None chance.

Kruk, Wags and Nellie got bum-rushed off the stage the same damn week by the sports gods. In my scorebook, those

sports gods struck out on three pitches. Good morning, good afternoon, good night. Grab some pine, meats.

Here we go.

When Steve Kerr steps down as coach of the Golden State Warriors, his successor should be Natalie Nakase.

Nakase is the coach of the Golden State Valkyries.

Joe Lacob owns both teams, so this would be a simple transfer.

It would also be enormously complicated, because breaking down barriers is always fraught with peril. Fortunately, Lacob and Nakase are old hands when it comes to bucking the system and making breakthroughs in the face of skepticism and criticism.

They both pride themselves on their toughness and determination, so they’re perfect for this move.

The main obstacle to overcome will be the criticism, not unjustified, that Lacob is demeaning the women’s game by making a move that implies that Joe’s men’s team is more important to him than his women’s team is.

Lacob would explain that his two teams, like two of his children, carry equal weight in his heart. He would explain that Nakase is the best candidate he could find for the Warriors’ job, regardless of gender.

And he can’t say this, but dammit, if he doesn’t hire a woman NBA coach, who in the hell will?

Nakase would have to be on-board with this switcheroo, of course. That’s not automatic. She has found a great groove as coach of the Valks, in a very short time in her first head coaching gig. She already is a master at creating a culture, and at gaining the trust and respect of her players, and at coaching the damn game.

She has helped create the hottest team in sports. Considering the current state of the two Golden State teams, becoming head coach of the Warriors might be a demotion. Why go through all that just to prove an obvious point—that women can coach in the NBA?

Here’s why: It would be an important and long-overdue breakthrough.

The NBA simply does not hire women head coaches. Teams like to pretend that they might. Becky Hammon, with her WNBA success and her considerable NBA assistant-coaching experience, has interviewed for four NBA head coaching jobs and is 0-for-4.

Somebody’s got to break through that hardwood ceiling. Somebody’s got to start the process of normalizing what should be normal.

This is not an exact comp, because race and gender are separate things, but Raiders’ owner Al Davis hired the first NFL Black head coach, Art Shell, in 1983. Do you believe that before 1983 there had been no Black men qualified to coach an NFL team?

If Davis doesn’t make that hire, the NFL might have gone another decade ignoring legit Black candidates.

Remember back in 1987 when Dodgers’ general manager Al Campanis publicly stated that Blacks lack “the necessities” to be baseball managers or general managers? Well, most of baseball at the time seemed to share his opinion, judging by their hiring practices.

It’s like that in the NBA, where we don’t need words. Just look at the who’s not getting hired. Only one way to change that perception.

Here’s why Joe would at least give this idea some thought:

He is a risk taker and innovator. He loves putting fresh faces in new positions. He gave Mark Jackson his first (and only) NBA coaching job. He hired Kerr with zero coaching experience. He hired a rookie general manager (Bob Myers) and a rookie team president (Rick Welts).

With the Valkyries, Lacob hired a rookie GM, a rookie team president and a rookie head coach. All of them women. He hired a female arena PA announcer and a female PR chief.

Joe is an unabashed women’s basketball pioneer and believer.

Nakase is also a pioneer and a believer. She has been the first Asian American woman in several of her jobs, including a long stint as an NBA assistant and G League coach.

Nakase is not afraid to make a statement. In the heated debate over trans women playing women’s sports, she did not dodge the issue, but quietly and firmly planted her flag on the side of inclusion.

Valkyries’ fans, and WNBA fans in general, would be crushed by losing their already-beloved coach, but they would realize that they’re taking one for the team—Team Humanity.

Nakase would kill it in the NBA. Her quietly commanding presence and understated swagger would absolutely work—with players, media and fans.

The Bay Area has always led the progressive movements in sports. Al Davis was a Bay guy, so was Shell, and Frank Robinson and Bill Russell, the first black managers/coaches in MLB and the NBA. The Bay Area is the cradle of American women’s pro basketball.

We show the world how to do the right thing. Within a couple of years, we’ll have another opportunity.

When someone asks Buster Posey or anyone else in the amorphous ownership group what the hell happened this season, they have a simple, effective answer:

Our centerfielder got run over by a fire truck.

Kind of explains everything, right?

The problem is, it’s a slick explanation for a complex problem. And it is misleading. Crazy-bad luck isn’t the reason the Giants are succotash. They suck because they have an owner (or ownership group) that does not suffer.

The Bader incident, and other sideshows—the Pride Night debacle, the Rafael Devers mini mutiny, the Logan Webb social-media war--shroud the bigger problem.

We’re cursed by the baseball gods, the Giants’ owners can say, citing the case of Bader v. Fire Truck. The Giants signed Harrison Bader as a free agent, the answer to their centerfield defensive woes. He played 30 games, failed to hit his weight (he weighs 219, he hit .170). Then a sore foot put him out of action. On the eve of a big foot exam, Bader went clubbing in hipster Cow Hollow and crashed his motorized scooter into a fire truck, which then ran over his already-bad foot.

In fairness to Bader, it was only his second such incident. In college, he crashed a scooter into a parked truck. So much for the scouting report on Bader: “He can really scoot.” Do not ask him to parallel park that thing.

Bader has caused the team owners to suffer, but it’s not the kind of suffering that results in building winning teams.

Read more

I always thought writing was supposed to be hard. Pain and suffering are part of the deal, right?

Maybe not. Maybe I’ve had the wrong mindset.

Recently I came across a social media post that showed Ian Fleming’s daily schedule. Fleming, of course, wrote the James Bond novels. He cranked out lively, imaginative, exciting stuff, and tons of it. He must have suffered like crazy producing all those novels, no?

No.

From the looks of Fleming’s typical daily schedule, writing was a day at the beach, literally.

Here’s what his day looked like:

7:30 am – Get up with the birds and bathe in the ocean, then back for breakfast, scrambled eggs, and sit in the garden until 10 am.

10 am – Sit down and write 1500 words without looking back.

12: 15 am – Snorkel around the bay looking for lobsters, then come back and have a couple of pink gins with lunch.

2:30 – 4 pm – Siesta.

4 pm – Sit in garden for an hour, then go for another swim.

5 pm – Write another 500 words, put them in a folder and have a couple of powerful drinks.

7 pm – Dinner and Scrabble with wife Ann.

10 pm – To bed.

Hey, Ian, give me a break! Where’s the suffering? You called yourself a writer?

But wait, I thought, maybe there’s a lesson here. Maybe I should try to have an Ian Fleming day. So I tried. Here’s how it went:

7:30 am – Get up with the birds, wonder why the birds have to make such a racket when I’m trying to sleep. If I was Hemmingway, I’d grab my shotgun. Throw open the drapes, lean out and flip the bird to the birds, who chirp back mockingly. Go for breakfast, a Clif bar, and sit in the garden for two minutes, until the gnats and yellowjackets realize I’m holding a gooey Clif bar.

10 am – Sit down and write 1500 words without looking back. Think, “That’s a badass way of writing about your writing, ‘without looking back.’ ” Then I look back, and delete the 1500 words, giving myself a mulligan, ignoring the reality that only crappy, sad, phony golfers need a mulligan.

12:15 pm – Rummage around the garage, searching for my snorkel. Get sidetracked by a box of old high school yearbooks. “Most likely to succeed.” Make a mental note to write an apology letter to all my old classmates. Then think, “Why makes them so high and mighty? Are any of them cranking out 1500 words every morning before they go lobster snorkeling?”

2:30 pm – Siesta. My ass. Discover a hole in the hammock, chewed by squirrels. Worse, one of the bushy bastards is still laying in the hammock. And he is not, apparently, hammock-broken.

4 pm – Sit in garden. Wife leans out window and says, “You’re sitting in the garden? Must be nice. You’ve got all that spare time, maybe grab that hoe and hack down some weeds before the neighbors report us.” Consider going for a swim in the ocean, then realize I don’t live by an ocean, but if I did, I would swim in it a couple times a day, like some spy author I could name, and that would clear my head and make writing easy. Fleming did more swimming than Michael Phelps. Hey, whatever works. Make mental note to move to an ocean.

5 pm – Write another 500 words and put them in a folder. Wonder how soon I’m going to run out of room for all these folders. Wonder if this was the problem for Trump, he had no room to store all those classified documents he kept, so he stacked some of them in a public bathroom at Mar-a-Lago. Consider that, even though storing classified documents that way is illegal and puts our nation in grave danger, it is also a thoughtful courtesy to Trump’s guests. You sit down in the bathroom, sometimes you need something to read.

7 pm – Dinner with Kathy. Not lobster. Scrabble with Kathy. Lose again, my losing streak becoming DiMaggioesque. She wins with the word “lobster.” I explain to her that I save my best words for my writing. She gives the charming eye-roll that made me fall in love with her.

10 pm – Go to bed feeling better, realizing Ian Fleming and I are more alike than I had thought. Feel less guilty about all those stiff drinks. Have a nightmare: A giant lobster has my nose in its claw. Great opening scene for my next spy novel. It will write itself!

Ask Pat Riley. Riley, at age 80, is still kicking ass and building teams as the President of the Miami Heat. He recently lured Giannis Antetokounmpo to Miami, a power move trumped only by the 76ers’ snagging of LeBron James.

Had Lakers’ coach Jack McKinney not fallen off a bicycle in 1979, Riley almost surely would never have become a coach. He would have become just another pretty face on TV, bringing you the sports news instead of making it.

This is about fate, and about a coach falling off his son’s bicycle.

Subscribe now

Shanahan, one hopes, will fully heal, unlike McKinney, the poor fellow.

Let’s go back to 1979. The Lakers had a new owner, Jerry Buss. He needed a coach. Jerry West had coached the team back to respectability, but was burned out and quit coaching forever. Buss was on the verge of hiring Jerry Tarkanian away from UNLV, but a mob hit on a Tarkanian friend spoiled that deal. Whew.

Read more

What is it with these guys?

Here’s the deal: Kyle Shanahan, the 49ers’ head coach, was involved in a two-car accident on July 14. Very serious smashup. Shanahan sustained injuries that will put him out of full-time coaching for an indeterminate length of time.

This is headline news! Yet, media reports of the accident and Shanahan’s injuries didn’t surface until July 25. For 11 days, the accident was kept under wraps. That’s a big secret, kept for a long time, in an era when insider newshounds make their living scooping the world on Steph Curry’s latest sneaker-drop.

A lot of fans are wanting to know who in the media knew what, and when, and why they kept quiet, if indeed they did know about the accident.

That’s fair, and we’ll kick that around in a moment.

But first: Why did the 49ers’ ownership and management go all Secret Sam for 11 days?

There’s a word for that kind of information control: Coverup.

Read more

Buster Posey would be the person doing the actual firing, of course, he’s the Giants’ President of Baseball Ops. But Buster welcomes the input of fans, sportswriters and rando pontificators. Much like I welcome a fly surfing in my beer mug.

Let’s talk about Vitello. It’s a topic that’s not going away, because the Giants likely are in for a painful slog to the finish line this season, and nobody’s going to say, “The Giants suck, but their skipper sure looks good!”

In a moment, I’m going to tell you why I lean to firing Vitello at season’s end.

First, a disclaimer: Firing managers and coaches is not my specialty. There are journalists and social commentators who are trained for that task. I believe you need a license of some kind.

I don’t want to be a willy-nilly skipper-flipper. Before I use my platform to demand the firing of a manager, I need solid rationale. Something meatier than “He’s lost the players.” That phrase always makes me think of Little Bo Peep.

Read more

Read more