Friday, July 25, 2025

July 25, 2000: Luís Figo's Defection Begins the "Galácticos" Era

July 25, 2000, 25 years ago: Real Madrid Club de Fútbol sign Luís Figo to a contract. This begins the team's "Galácticos" Era.

The Spanish soccer team define themselves by the UEFA Champions League, the tournament known from its 1955 establishment until 1992 as the European Cup, which is still the name of the trophy given to the winner. They won the 1st 5 in a row, from 1956 to 1960. They won it again in 1966. Then they didn't win it again until 1998. From 1966 onward, managers have been fired for not winning it, even after seasons when they won Spain's La Liga.

They won it in 2000, in large part because they had signed one of the best players from England, Liverpool FC's Steve McManaman. Inspired by this, and newly installed as the team's president, Florentino Pérez was determined to keep it. So, hearing that Figo, the most popular player for their arch-rivals, FC Barcelona, was disgruntled and wanted to leave, they paid €62 million for him.

The reaction in Catalonia was fury and a sense of betrayal: One banner at an El Clásico match between the teams read, "We hate you so much, because we loved you so much."

Pérez also signed Claude Makélélé from Spanish team Celta Vigo. He and Figo were added to a team that already included Fernando Hierro, Raúl (González), Guti (real name: José María Gutiérrez), Roberto Carlos, Fernando Morientes, Míchel Salgado, and goalkeeper Iker Casillas.

But Real were eliminated from the 2001 Champions League in the Semifinal, by Germany's Bayern Munich. So Pérez poached perhaps the best player in the world at the time, spending €73.5 million to get French midfielder Zinedine Zidane from Italian team Juventus. It worked, as Zidane led Los Blancos to win the Champions League in 2002.

But enough was never enough. Pérez shelled out €45 million to get the world's best forward, 2002 World Cup winner Ronaldo of Brazil, from Italian team Internazionale Milano. A generation later, it can now truthfully be said that Cristiano Ronaldo is not even the greatest Ronaldo to play for Real Madrid in the 21st Century.

But in 2003, Juventus knocked Real out in the Semifinals. So Pérez splashed the cash again, giving English champions Manchester United €37.5 million for the most famous (though hardly the best) player in England, David Beckham. It wasn't enough: In 2004, AS Monaco eliminated Real on penalties in the Quarterfinal. So Pérez made another entreaty to England, getting Michael Owen from Liverpool. But the injuries that curtailed Owen's career were already taking effect. The era was fizzling out, and Real did not win the Champions League again until 2014 -- although that started a run of 5 in 9 years, giving them 14, twice as many as any other team.

The Galácticos concept inspired other teams. In 2003, Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich bought West London team Chelsea FC, and spent them to glory, including buying Makélélé. The royal family of the United Arab Emirates bought Manchester City, and did the same thing. The prices of players went up, up, up. A player whose talents might have cost €5 million in 2005 would, by 2015, have cost €50 million, leading to the joke, "Did somebody forget a decimal point?"

And, of course, teams in North American sports have tried the "superteam" concept. Long before most Americans knew Real Madrid even existed (I think a majority still don't know), the New York Yankees tried it in the 1920s, the 1930s, the 1950s, the late 1970s, and the late 1990s, with great success; and kept trying it in the 2000s, with limited success. The Los Angeles Lakers have tried it over that period, with some success, but also -- particularly in 2004 and since their 2020 title -- with considerable disappointment.

It's worked in the NBA for the 2008 Boston Celtics and the 2012-13 Miami Heat, but it failed for the early 2020s Brooklyn Nets. In the NHL it worked for the Toronto Maple Leafs in the 1960s, the Montreal Canadiens in the 1970s, the New York Rangers briefly in 1994, and the Detroit Red Wings in the late 1990s and early 2000s; but, since then, no other team has been bold enough to try it. And in the NFL, the New England Patriots did better when they didn't try it than it did when they did.

July 25, 1985: Rock Hudson's AIDS Diagnosis Is Revealed

July 25, 1985, 40 years ago: Yanou Collart, publicist for actor Rock Hudson, publicly confirms a rumor that had been swirling around show business circles: Hudson has AIDS, Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome. He was among the earliest mainstream celebrities to have been diagnosed with the disease.

Born on November 17, 1925 as Roy Harold Scherer Jr., in the Chicago suburb of Winnekta, Illinois, Hudson became a Hollywood star and heartthrob in 1954, in the film Magnificent Obsession. This was followed by Giant in 1956, in which he co-starred with Elizabeth Taylor and, in his last performance before the car crash that killed him, James Dean. In 1959, he began a series of romantic comedies with Doris Day, with Pillow Talk. In 1961, he starred with Italian bombshell Gina Lollobrigida in Come September

His dashing looks, and his co-starring with Taylor, Day and Lollobrigida, although all of them were married to others, made people imagine that women fell over themselves for him, and that he was happy to oblige. But Hudson was gay, and while the general public didn't know, it was one of the worst-kept secrets in Hollywood. In 1955, to help quash the rumor, Hudson's manager, Henry Willson, convinced his secretary, Phyllis Gates, and Hudson to marry. It lasted only 3 years, because she found out the truth. Neither ever married again.

Not happy with the films he was offered in the 1960s, Hudson turned to television, starring with Susan Saint James in the NBC crime drama McMillan & Wife from 1971 to 1977. But his years of heavy smoking and drinking began to catch up with him. In 1981, he began filming The Devlin Connection, a private-detective series for NBC, but had a massive heart attack, and his recovery pushed the show back a full year. The momentum was lost, and it was canceled after just 13 episodes.

In December 1984, he began appearing on the ABC evening soap opera Dynasty. But, unbeknownst to his castmates, he had been diagnosed with HIV, Human Immunodeficiency Virus, which causes AIDS, the preceding June 5. It is not known if he got it through sexual transmission or through tainted blood in a transfusion from his heart surgery. Regardless, his Dynasty co-stars easily saw the decline in his health. When it became clear that he could no longer continue, he was written out of the series, and his character was later said to have died.

Hudson traveled the world, looking for a cure, or at least a treatment to slow the progression of the disease. Nothing worked. On July 16, 1985, he joined his old friend Doris Day for a Hollywood press conference announcing the launch of her new TV cable show, Doris Day's Best Friends. She was 63 (although she usually lied about her age, claiming to be 2 years younger), and looked terrific; he was 59, and looked 10 years older.
Like her contemporary Betty White, Day was
an animal-rights activist who especially loved dogs.

On July 18, he went to Paris for another round of treatment. On July 21, he collapsed in his room at the Ritz Hotel. His American publicist, Dale Olson, released a statement to the media that he had inoperable liver cancer, and denied that he had AIDS. But on July 25, Hudson's French publicist, Yanou Collart, admitted the truth. On July 30, he was flown back to Los Angeles, and spent a month at UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles. They released him to private hospice care at his home in nearby Beverly Hills, where he died on October 2.

Up until then, AIDS had been considered a disease of gay men only, which already wasn't true. Evangelicals considered it "God's punishment for homosexuality." As if gay people weren't facing enough bigoted nonsense.

Earlier that year, As Is, the 1st Broadway play to discuss AIDS, premiered. Its author, William M. Hoffman, said, "If Rock Hudson can have it, nice people can have it. It's just a disease, not a moral affliction." Comedian Joan Rivers, who had a devote gay fanbase, said, "Two years ago, when I hosted a benefit for AIDS, I couldn't get one major star to turn out. Rock's admission is a horrendous way to bring AIDS to the attention of the American public, but by doing so, Rock, in his life, has helped millions in the process. What Rock has done takes true courage." Actress Morgan Fairchild said, "Rock Hudson's death gave AIDS a face."

In a telegram Hudson sent to a September 1985 Hollywood AIDS benefit, Commitment to Life, which he was too ill to attend in person, he said: "I am not happy that I am sick. I am not happy that I have AIDS. But if that is helping others, I can at least know that my own misfortune has had some positive worth."

Shortly after his death, People magazine reported: "Since Hudson made his announcement, more than $1.8 million in private contributions (more than double the amount collected in 1984) has been raised to support AIDS research and to care for AIDS victims (5,523 reported in 1985 alone). A few days after Hudson died, Congress set aside $221 million to develop a cure for AIDS." Hudson's former co-star Elizabeth Taylor became a major fundraiser for AIDS research, as did openly gay rock star Elton John. Both began hosting fundraising "afterparties" following the annual Academy Awards.

But the stigma of AIDS still did not go away. It would take more, including the transfusion-induced illnesses of tennis star Arthur Ashe and teenager Ryan White, and the admission of the very heterosexual basketball star Earvin "Magic" Johnson, for people to understand that AIDS could happen to anybody.

President Ronald Reagan and his wife Nancy, both former actors and friends of Hudson's made no public statement concerning Hudson's condition. However, the President phoned Hudson privately in his Paris hospital room where he was being treated in July 1985 and released a condolence statement after his death.

Afterward, Reagan stopped ignoring AIDS, and asked Congress to increase federal funding for research into it. I call it "The Rock Hudson Principle": Conservatives never care about something that hurts others, until it begins to hurt someone they care about. (Then again, in 1981, Reagan was shot by a mentally ill man who should have had a gun, and nearly died, and in the 2020s, they still don't give a damn about gun control.)

The increased enabled new treatments to be developed, much of it under the National Institutes of Health, in a unit led by Dr. Anthony Fauci, who would later lead the fight against COVID-19.

A personal note: Online, I've talked to a few people who claimed to have met Rock Hudson. Some of them said they knew at the time that he was gay. Others said they didn't know. But they all said he was a wonderful person. Certainly, he didn't deserve to suffer the way he did.

July 25, 1965: Bob Dylan Goes Electric

July 25, 1965, 60 years ago: Bob Dylan crosses a rock and roll Rubicon. He performs with The Paul Butterfield Blues Band at the Newport Folk Festival in Newport, Rhode Island. They use electric instruments, something the festival had never allowed before, as folk music has traditionally been all-acoustic.

Dylan had been born Robert Allen Zimmerman on May 24, 1941 in Duluth, Minnesota. He grew up in Hibbing, Minnesota, but found life there dissatisfying on multiple levels. Early early rock and roll stars of the mid-1950s appealed to him, and so anyone who had studied his entire life from 1941 to 1965 should have seen this coming. But most people didn't know about that when they became fans of his in the early 1960s. 

In 1961, having dropped out of the University of Minnesota, he came to New York, renamed himself for Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, and started singing folk music in the clubs of Manhattan's Greenwich Village, where Thomas had lived and performed for the last few years of his life, dying there in 1953. (I have an entry for his death.)

Bob had adopted a persona like that of earlier folk singer Woody Guthrie, with scraggly clothes and a nasal twang. He combined traditional folk songs with his own new compositions, and it didn't seem to matter that he couldn't sing in the traditional sense, or that he wasn't an especially good-looking guy. People were mesmerized by his performances. Soon, men wanted to be him, and women just wanted him.

On April 16, 1962, at Gerde's Folk City at 11 West 4th Street, he first performed "Blowin' in the Wind," and it was a sensation, with its 3 short verses citing the civil rights and antiwar movements. This was less than a year after the Freedom Rides, but a year before American TV viewers saw the firehoses and police dogs of Birmingham, and most hadn't yet heard of Vietnam, let alone realized that we already had troops fighting, killing and dying there. To them, "war" still meant World War II, a "just war," or maybe the Korean War, which didn't seem worth it.

Bob's self-titled debut album had been released on Columbia Records the preceding March 19. Shortly after the Gerde's premiere, he began recording The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan. Released on May 27, 1963, it included "Blowin' in the Wind," "Masters of War," "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall," and "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right" -- the latter the first in a long line of great breakup songs he would write. 

Any 1 of those 4 songs would have been a great triumph for any writer. Dylan had all 4 on 1 album. He was 3 days past his 22nd birthday, and he was already a musical legend.

That July, he appeared at Newport for the first time, along with the biggest active legend of folksinging, Pete Seeger. Guthrie, to whom Seeger had introduced Dylan, was still alive, but sidelined by the condition that would kill him 4 years later.

Also there were Peter, Paul and Mary (Peter Yarrow, Noel Paul Stookey and Mary Travers), the folksinging trio who recorded what remain the biggest hit versions of "Blowin' in the Wind" and "Don't Think Twice." So was Joan Baez, the leading female soloist of "the folk revolution," who helped make Bob famous, then became his girlfriend. Together, these and others closed the show by joining hands and singing a song Seeger, though he didn't write it, made the anthem of civil rights: "We Shall Overcome."

Dylan then began recording his next album, finishing it before President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, but not released until afterward, on January 13, 1964: The Times They Are A-Changin'. It included the title track, "Ballad of Hollis Brown," "With God On Our Side," "Only a Pawn In Their Game," "When the Ship Comes In," and "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll." His previous burst of creativity was thus proven to be no fluke.

Just 25 days after that album's release, The Beatles arrived in America. They and Dylan each influenced the other tremendously, and it may have been The Beatles who influenced Dylan to switch to electric instruments.

Before he did though, he recorded Another Side of Bob Dylan. Released on August 8, 1964, he told Nat Hentoff, the music critic of The Village Voice, New York's underground weekly newspaper, "There ain't no finger-pointing songs." There was "All I Really Want to Do," "Chimes of Freedom," "It Ain't Me, Babe," and "My Back Pages," on which the 23-year old Dylan closed each of 6 verses by singing, "Ah, but I was so much older then. I'm younger than that now." 

The Byrds, who would record several of Bob's songs, recorded "My Back Pages," but, to cut it to single length, dropped the 3rd and 4th verses. Both they and Cher would have a hit with "All I Really Want to Do"; while "It Ain't Me, Babe" would be a hit on the pop chart for The Turtles (their first hit), and on the country chart for Johnny Cash.

Fame and the expectation of his peers were getting to Dylan. Until now, except for a couple of songs on the latest album where he had played piano, it had been just him, his guitar, and the harmonica he wore in a neck harness; with no other musicians. (The harmonica in the neck harness would be copied by many performers, most notably Neil Young and Billy Joel.) For his next album, he went electric, and it was titled Bringing It All Back Home.

Released on March 22, 1965, this was a revelation. It was a reminder of his rock and roll roots, about which his "folkie" fans seemed to know nothing. It began with "Subterranean Homesick Blues," with its angry declaration that, "You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows." (This would inspire a radical offshoot of Students for a Democratic Society to call themselves the Weathermen, and later the Weather Underground.)

It included "Maggie's Farm," whose lyrics certainly suggested folk roots, but the electricity behind it give it a bigger punch. It included "Mr. Tambourine Man," which he recorded in 3/4 time, but The Byrds would later switch it to 4/4 time, and give him his 1st Number 1 hit as a writer. (The song has 4 verses, but Byrds lead singer Roger McGuinn sang only the 2nd between the choruses.)

It included "It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)," with its declaration, "He not busy being born is busy dying." If that wasn't a message to the people who wanted him to remain the 22-year-old golden boy of the Greenwich Village clubs forever -- just as there were others who got upset when The Beatles moved beyond being "The Lovable Mop Tops" -- then the last song on the album certainly was: "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue." 

And on July 20, he released a standalone single, a 6-minute reminder of how their delusions of him, not himself, had let them down: "Like a Rolling Stone." (Rolling Stone magazine was named for this song, not the new British band of the same name.)

So when Dylan, backed by The Paul Butterfield Blues Band, took the stage at Newport on July 25, nobody knew what to expect. Here's what he gave them: "Maggie's Farm," "Like a Rolling Stone," and "It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry," each electric.

There was booing, but there's dispute over why. Some have said it wasn't because the electric instruments were blasphemy to the folkies, it was because the sound system was bad, and Bob and the band couldn't be heard properly. The surviving film suggests that this is true, because the songs don't sound much like they did on the records. 

Another legend, that Pete Seeger yelled at show producer George Wein to turn the amps off, and that, having been refused, the "purist" Seeger tried to chop the cord with an ax, were denied by Seeger himself. He admitted that the problem was the sound system, not Dylan's audacity. If any folkies felt betrayed that night, Seeger was not one of them.

Dylan played 2 more songs, just him, his guitar, and his harmonica: "Mr. Tambourine Man" and, providing a definitive last word for them, "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue." He soon wrote one of the nastiest songs ever written in the English language: "Positively 4th Street," opening with, "You got a lot of nerve to say you are my friend," and going on to really let them have it.

By this point, he had further enraged the folk music community by breaking up with Joan Baez, and marrying someone else, Sara Lowndes, for whom he wrote some of his more interesting songs thereafter.

Dylan would go through many more changes to his career, and did not appear at the Newport Folk Festival again until 2002. As of July 25, 2022, he is 81 years old, and still performing. Few people now doubt that going electric was good for him, and good for music.

Also, not counting individuals implied as being part of a group, like the Beatles and the performers at Woodstock, Bob Dylan is 1 of 4 people mentioned in Billy Joel's 1989 song "We Didn't Start the Fire" who are still alive. The others are Brigitte Bardot, Chubby Checker, and 1984 New York "subway vigilante" Bernhard Goetz.

Thursday, July 24, 2025

Yanks Do Not Send Message to Jays

The Yankees headed up to Toronto to face the Blue Jays, who have surged as the Yankees have stumbled, and were 3 games ahead of the Yankees in the American League Eastern Division.

The Yankees went into the Rogers Centre with a chance to send a message: "You've had your fun. Now, it's over. Remember who you are, and remember who we are. We're taking this Division back."

The Yankees did not write that message.

Carlos Rodón started on Friday night, got into and out of trouble in the 2nd and 4th innings, and got a 4th inning home run from Giancarlo Stanton, to lead 1-0 after 4. But the bottom of the 5th was a disaster: Walk, single, double; then a flyout and a popup; then a single and an error by shortstop Anthony Volpe. It was 4-1 Jays, and that's how it ended.

The Yankees took the field on Saturday night as if they meant to make the Jays pay dearly for that, with Jazz Chisholm hitting a 3-run homer off "Warrior God" Max Scherzer, to put them up 3-0 before the Jays even came to bat. But Cam Schlittler, making only his 2nd major league start -- it was Scherzer's 463rd -- allowed a run in the bottom of the 1st. Cody Bellinger hit a home run in the 5th, but the Jays worked their way back against the Yankee bullpen, and tied the game 4-4 in the 6th.

Ben Rice led off the top of the 9th with a home run, and Devin Williams nailed down the save for Ian Hamilton. Yankees 5, Blue Jays 4. It was the kind of game that would be nicknamed "The Ben Rice Game" -- if the Yankees end up winning the Pennant, and if Rice doesn't have a more dramatic moment along the way to a title.

The usually-reliable Max Fried started on Sunday afternoon, and, with Jasson Domínguez hitting a home run in the 2nd inning, took a 1-0 lead into the bottom of the 4th. But after getting a popup, he fell apart, allowing single, double, groundout, walk, single, single before getting out of the inning with a groundout. It was 2-1 Toronto.

Volpe tied the game with a home run in the 5th. But Fried got wild in the bottom half, walking 2 batters and making an error on which the go-ahead run scored. Officially, when the pitcher makes an error, any run that results is still charged as an unearned run.

Aaron Judge hit a 2-run homer in the 6th, to tie it at 4-4. But Fried allowed a triple and a double before Aaron Boone finally went to the bullpen, to no avail. It was 6-4 Jays at the end of the inning, and 8-4 Jays at the final.

The Yankees should have sent those pesky Blue Jays a message. They did not. They were nearly swept, and perhaps deserved to be. They left Toronto 4 games out of 1st place, with 60 to play. They have tonight off, and then the Philadelphia Phillies come into Yankee Stadium, which will be a tough series.

Top 10 Superhero Movie Lines of All Time

Rank. Title, Year, Screenplay Author. Explanation. Line. Further explanation, if necessary.

10. Batman & Robin, 1997, Akiva Goldman. At the beginning of the film, we discover that, after the destruction of the Batmobile in the previous film, Batman (George Clooney) hasn't built a new one in which he and Robin (Chris O'Donnell) can ride together, as in the comics and in the 1966-68 TV series.

Robin has a motorcycle, but says, "I want a car!" He knows Batman can afford it, but, instead, chooses to justify it by saying, "Chicks dig the car!" Batman responds by saying, "This is why Superman works alone."

Unlike the 1960s TV series, Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight Trilogy, and, so far, Matt Reeves' Epic Crime Saga, none of which make any suggestion that there are other superheroes in their world, this line confirms that there are other superheroes in the 2 Batman films directed by Joel Schumacher films, and implies the same for the earlier 2 films directed by Tim Burton. But it also suggests that there is, as yet, no Justice League.

It's a fun line. Unfortunately, the movie goes downhill from there.

9. The Dark Knight, 2008, brothers Christopher and Jonathan Nolan. Harvey Dent, the District Attorney, tells Bruce Wayne, who he doesn't know is Batman, "You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain."

He already had a point. One of the last episodes of the Batman TV series, in 1968, featured a hypnotized, un-costumed Bruce doing the bidding of a villain. There was the synthetic-Kryptonite-affected Superman of Superman III in 1983. And, under a false impression, people had turned on Superman in a 1993 episode of Lois & Clark. After this, the Arrowverse of 2016-24 led to heroes seeing evil versions of themselves or their inspirations; the 2023 Flash movie saw an alternate version of the hero go too far; and the new Superman movie sees a clone used by Lex Luthor as the villain Ultraman.

In The Dark Knight, Dent ends up being tortured and tormented by the Joker, becoming the villain Two-Face. And, an order to save Dent's reputation, Batman has to let himself be publicly seen as the villain.

Dishonorable Mention, because it's delivered by a villain. In this case, though, it's not the Joker, but the secondary villain: Dr. Jonathan Crane, the evil psychiatrist who calls himself the Scarecrow.

Batman tries to break up a deal between Crane and some small-time crooks -- and two copycats try to do the same. He has to stop Crane, and he has to stop the "copybats" so they don't get hurt. One says, "We're trying to help you!" And Batman says, "I don't need help!" And Crane says, "Not my diagnosis!"

Honorable Mention: The next line is the copybat asking, "What gives you the right? What's the difference between you and me?" Batman says, "I'm not wearing hockey pads!" Translation: I'm wearing armor, you're not, so you're a lot more likely to get yourself killed by pretending to be me.

8. Spider-Man, 2002, David Koepp. It's not the hero who says it. Not Spider-Man, a.k.a. Peter Parker. It's his aunt, May Parker. After the Green Goblin attacks the Parker house, May is hospitalized, and Peter asks, "Can I do anything for you?" She says, "You do too much: College, a job, all this time with me. You're not Superman, you know." Proving that, at least in the universe where Spider-Man is played by Tobey Maguire, DC Comics exist.

Honorable Mention: Stan Lee wrote it at the end of the first Spider-Man story, in Amazing Fantasy #15 in 1962: "With great power, there must also come great responsibility." It a retcon, it's Peter's uncle, Ben Parker, who says it, and he says it in this film.

Dishonorable Mention, because it's said by the villain. And, Cliché Alert: The Goblin says to Spidey, "You and I are not so different." Spidey says, "I'm not like you. You're a murderer." And the Goblin says, "Well... to each his own."

7. Wonder Woman, 2017, Allen Heinberg. Why Wonder Woman's origin story was set in World War I, not World War II as usual, I don't know. At any rate, Steve Trevor warns her against trying to cross the "No Man's Land" between the Allies' and the Germans' territory, telling her, "We can't save everyone in this war. This is not what we came here to do." And she says, "No, but it's what I'm going to do." And she does.

6. The Avengers, 2012, Zak Penn and Joss Whedon. Iron Man, for the moment without any version of his armor, is taking a big risk by threatening Loki, who is determined to conquer the Earth with his Chitauri army. But the key line isn't when Tony responds to Loki's "I have an army" with "We have a Hulk."

It's right after that, when he tells an overconfident Loki, "You're missing the point. There's no throne. There is no version of this where you come out on top. Maybe your army comes, and maybe it's too much for us. But it's all on you. Because if we can't protect the Earth, you can be damned well sure we'll avenge it." (Which they ended up having to do, in Avengers: Endgame.)

The implication of Stark's line is, "If we lose to your army, we're coming after you, and your army won't be able to protect you from us."

Honorable Mention: A few minutes later, Loki tells the Hulk, "I am a god, you dull creature!" The Hulk grabs his leg and smashes him around the room, walks away, and says, "Puny god." (The Hulk calling opponents, real and perceived, "puny" is a common feature of the comics.)

Honorable Mention: Earlier in the movie, in Germany, Loki tells the people to kneel before him. And an old man, old enough to remember living under the rule of Adolf Hitler, stands, and says, "Not for men like you." Loki, who thinks of himself as a god, not just as a guy with super-powers, says, "There are no men like me." And the old man, correctly, says, "There are always men like you." 

Honorable Mention: Loki tries to blast the old man, and that's when Captain America arrives to deflect the blast with his shield. Cap tells Loki, "You know, the last time I was in Germany, I saw a man standing above everybody else. We ended up disagreeing."

5. The Incredible Hulk, 1977, Kenneth Johnson (who also directed). This film aired on CBS as a pilot for the TV series of the same name, so, even though it was never released in theaters, it counts.

The Hulk's origin story was re-written so that Dr. David Banner (not "Bruce" like in the comics) is believed dead in an explosion caused by the Hulk, so his story becomes a cross between Frankenstein and The Fugitive -- only, in this case, Dr. Frankenstein, Dr. Kimble, and the Monster are all the same person. Pursuing the man, the creature and the story is an investigative reporter for a trashy supermarket tabloid, Jack McGee.

In a clip that got played in the opening sequence of every episode, McGee makes Banner angry, and Banner, trying to stay calm, because he already knows what will happen if he doesn't, says, "Mr. McGee, don't make me angry. You wouldn't like me when I'm angry." The line has been associated with the Hulk ever since, and has been used, and even parodied, in the 21st Century Marvel movies.

4. Superman, 2025, James Gunn (who also directed). After he's beaten Lex Luthor, who still considers him not human and a threat to Earth -- or, at least, to Luthor's plans, and that much is true --  Superman explains it to him, in a way that not only affirms Superman's humanity, but exposes Luthor as full of shit: "I'm as human as anyone. I love. I get scared. I wake up every morning, and, despite not knowing what to do, I put one foot in front of the other, and I try to make the best choices I can. I screw up all the time. But that is being human. And that's my greatest strength."

3. Watchmen, 2009, David Hayter and Alex Tse. In prison, vigilante Walter Kovacs, a.k.a. Rorschach, has just defended himself from an attack by a fellow inmate in the cafeteria. Everyone is staring at him, and he says, "None of you seem to understand: I'm not locked in here with you, you're locked in here with me!"

2. The Dark Knight Rises, 2012, Christopher and Jonathan Nolan. Just before Batman (Christian Bale) takes off in the Batcopter to get the bomb away from Gotham City, Commissioner Jim Gordon (Gary Oldman) tells him, "I never cared who you were." Batman says, "And you were right."

Gordon: "But shouldn't the people know the hero who saved them?" Batman: "A hero can be anyone. Even a man doing something as simple and reassuring as putting a coat around a young boy's shoulders, to let him know that the world hadn't ended." That's when Gordon remembers being a young cop, 30 years earlier, putting his coat around a boy named Bruce Wayne, who had just lost his parents.

It's the kind of line we wouldn't expect from dark, brooding Batman. It's a reminder that, under the cowl, he's still human.

But we would expect that kind of line from Superman:

1. Superman, 1978, Mario Puzo. Superman (Christopher Reeve) catches a falling Lois Lane (Margot Kidder), and says, "Easy, Miss: I've got you." And she says, "You've got me? Who's got you?"

Honorable Mention: When the sequence is done, Lois asks, "Who are you?" Clark, not yet having chosen a name -- it's Lois who comes up with "Superman" -- simply says, "A friend."

Monday, July 21, 2025

Yanks Turn Hopeless Series vs. Braves Around

The Yankees began the official, if not numerical, 2nd half of the regular season with a 3-game Interleague series against the Atlanta Braves at Truist Park in suburban Cumberland, Georgia.

For the 1st 14 innings, it was a disaster.

Starting pitchers Gerrit Cole and Clarke Schmidt are out for the season. Luis Gil is only now making rehab appearances in the minor leagues.

General manager Brian Cashman hasn't seen fit to acquire a new starter, or to promote one from the minor leagues. And field manager Aaron Boone refused to accept that Will Warrem was on 4 days' rest, and Max Fried was on 5.

Put it all together, and the Friday night game was planned as a "bullpen game." And it was awful. Ian Hamilton allowed 3 runs in the 1st innings. Rico Garcia, 31 years old and newly selected off waivers from the Mets, made his Yankee debut, and allowed 3 runs in less than 2 innings.

A 7th-inning comeback was woefully sufficient, and the Braves won, 7-3.

The Saturday afternoon game began worse. Will Warren was okay for 3 innings, then fell apart. And nobody in the bullpen seemed to ha e anything, either. It was 5-0 Atlanta after 4 innings, and 7-2 after 5.

Then the Yankees once again proved that they can turn any stadium into a "little league field." Anthony Volpe hit 2 home runs, and homers were also hit by Cody Bellinger and, as a grand slam in the 9th, Trent Grisham. Yankees 12, Braves 9. Luke Weaver pitched a scorless inning and 2/3rds for the win.

Yesterday, Marcus Stroman had his best start of the season so far, allowing just 1 run over 6 innings. Aaron Judge hit his 36th home runs of the season, and the Yankees won, 4-2, to take a series that looked hopeless and make it 2 out of 3 on the road.

Judge's home run was the 351st of his career. That ties him for 6th on the Yankees' all-time list:

1. Babe Ruth 659
2. Mickey Mantle 536
3. Lou Gehrig 493
4. Joe DiMaggio 361
5. Yogi Berra 359
6. Aaron Judge 351
T. Alex Rodriguez 351

As broadcaster Michael Kay would say, Those are not just big names, those are iconic names.

*

The Yankees now head to Canada to play the Toronto Blue Jays, who lead them by 3 games in the American League Eastern Division, with 63 games to play. Here are the projected starting pitchers for the series, with all games having a scheduled starting time of 7:07 PM:

* Tonight: Carlos Rodón vs. Kevin Gausman.
* Tomorrow: Cam Schlittler (in his 2nd major league game) vs. Mark Scherzer (in his 472nd).
* Wednesday: Max Fried vs. Chris Bassitt.

Thursday will be an off day, and then the Yankees come home to face the Philadelphia Phillies, who are leading the National League East by a game over the Mets. So it doesn't get any easier.

July 21, 1925: The Scopes Monkey Trial

Clarence Darrow (left) and William Jennings Bryan

July 21, 1925, 100 years ago: A verdict is reached in the trial of The State of Tennessee vs. John Thomas Scopes, what has gone down in history as "The Scopes Monkey Trial."

Four months earlier, the Tennessee legislature passed the Butler Act, a law banning the teaching of evolution in its public schools, following news reports of children coming home from school and telling their parents, "The Bible is all nonsense." The law was named for its sponsor, State Representative John Washington Butler, who was also the head of the World Christian Fundamentals Association.

The American Civil Liberties Union chose to challenge this law. They found John Scopes, a 24-year-old Kentucky native who was teaching science and coaching football at Rhea County High School in Dayton, Tennessee, about 40 miles north of Chattanooga. Since the only penalty for teaching evolution in a public school in the State was a fine of $100 -- about $1,816 in today's money -- and he wouldn't be sent to prison, Scopes agreed to do it. On May 5, 1925, he was charged with violating the law.
John Scopes

Tom Stewart, a future U.S. Senator, was the lead prosecutor. Joining the prosecution team was William Jennings Bryan. The former Congressman from Nebraska had been nominated for President by the Democratic Party in 1896, 1900 and 1908, losing by a wider margin each time. He had served as Secretary of State in the 1st 2 years of Woodrow Wilson's Presidency, 1913-15.

In spite of an overall record that was very liberal for the time, he was a fundamentalist Presbyterian, and enthusiastically supported the law. His only misgiving was the fact that he hadn't tried a case in 36 years.

The ACLU needed a defense attorney. They wrote to H.G. Wells, the great science fiction writer, and a known Socialist and atheist. He wrote back and declined, saying that he had no legal training in his native Britain, let alone in America. John R. Neal, a professor at the University of Tennessee School of Law in Knoxville, volunteered.

But the ACLU thought he wasn't enough. So they called upon the foremost defense attorney of the day, Clarence Darrow. A year earlier, Darrow, a Chicago-based agnostic, had managed to save "thrill killers" Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb from the death penalty for their brutal kidnapping and murder of a 14-year-old boy. The ACLU believed that, if he could argue effectively that the death penalty was wrong, they could argue that the law banning the teaching of evolution was wrong -- and that, while they were unlikely to win this case, they could later get the law overturned as unconstitutional.

Darrow was a brilliant man. At first, he turned them down, knowing that the Leopold-Loeb trial had become a media circus, and he didn't want the same thing to happen here. They talked him into realizing that this was a ship that had already sailed. The proceedings would be broadcast nationally on the new medium of radio.

Journalists had come from all over the world, including H.L. Mencken, the nationally-syndicated columnist from The Baltimore Sun, who had agreed to pay Scopes' legal fees. (But not his fine.) On the other hand, he had called the defendant "the infidel Scopes" in his column, and had also given the case the name it has had ever since: "The Monkey Trial."

Bryan, the foremost political speechmaker of his era -- an era that had certainly passed by this point -- decided to go with the circus atmosphere, as it suited his style. He mocked evolution as a theory, for teaching that humans were descended "not even from American monkeys, but from Old World monkeys."

As with the murderous Leopold and Loeb, Darrow knew that the nonviolent Scopes had, beyond any question, committed the crime for which he was charged. He knew there was no hope of winning the case -- in this round. But he understood the possibility of getting the Butler Act overturned as unconstitutional by a higher court.

So he went after it on that ground: He said that the Bible should be preserved in the realm of theology and morality, and not put into a course of science. Then he took the dramatic turn of attacking his opponent: He said that Bryan was waging "a duel to the death against evolution," and said, "There is never a duel with the truth."

On the 7th day of the trial, the Judge, John T. Raulston, ordered the proceedings moved to the lawn of the Rhea County Courthouse, because it was simply too hot inside: Air conditioning was still rare. On that day, Darrow took a truly radical step: He called Bryan, his opponent, to the stand, as "an expert on the Bible." Bryan made a key mistake: He accepted, mainly because his ego had been bruised by Darrow's previous speech.

Darrow asked Bryan about some of the more fantastical stories in the Bible: Whether Eve was created from one of Adam's ribs, how their son Cain could have found a wife if Eve was still the only woman on Earth (Bryan: "I will leave the agnostics to hunt for her"), whether Joshua could make the Sun stand still in the sky, and so forth.

In 1955, Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee wrote the play Inherit the Wind. Unfortunately, the best line from the play appears to have been made up for it, and didn't happen in real life. The Darrow character, named Henry Drummond, holds a rock, and asks the Bryan character, named Matthew Brady, how old the rock is. Brady says, "I am more interested in the Rock of Ages than in the age of rocks." 

In the play, Brady sticks to the "Biblical chronology" of the Irish archbishop James Ussher, who published a paper in 1654 stating that the Creation told in The Book of Genesis occurred in 4004 BC. Drummond said that the rock in question was not 6,000 years old, but millions of years old. (For comparison's sake: Ussher said that Noah's Flood happened in 2348 BC, the Exodus in 1446 BC, and the death of King David and the accession of his son King Solomon in 970 BC. The most common date given for the destruction of Troy in the Trojan War is 1275 BC, and the founding of Rome is said to have been in 753 BC.)

After 2 hours of testimony, Bryan was looking forward to cross-examining Darrow, which, under most circumstances, he would have had the right to do. But Judge Raulston ruled that all the arguments against the Bible were immaterial to the case, and therefore irrelevant. He was right: Nothing that Darrow alleged in his statements and questions addressed the trial's central fact, which was whether or not Scopes broke the law as it then stood. The law's fairness was not at issue in the trial.

Bryan was furious: He had been denied his chance to make the speech of his life, surpassing even his pro-free silver "Cross of Gold" speech at the 1896 Democratic Convention in Chicago. Like so many old people -- he was now 65 -- he recognized that he had far more yesterdays than tomorrows, and was thinking more about death, and clinging more toward the hope that his religion gave him for an afterlife. As a result, he was now sounding more an more like a modern-day evangelical Republican than as the intellectual founding father of the modern Democratic Party, as he sometimes seems to be.

The trial took 8 days. The jury's deliberations took 9 minutes. They found Scopes guilty. Raulston ordered the $100 fine paid. He could have set the sentence aside, but ordered it. Once he did, Scopes, who did not testify on his own behalf, spoke for the only time in the proceedings:

Your honor, I feel that I have been convicted of violating an unjust statute. I will continue in the future, as I have in the past, to oppose this law in any way I can. Any other action would be in violation of my ideal of academic freedom; that is, to teach the truth as guaranteed in our Constitution, of personal and religious freedom. I think the fine is unjust.

Nonetheless, the fine was levied. The ACLU, as they promised, paid it.

Over the next 5 days, Bryan delivered some speeches in Tennessee. But on July 26, 1925, he had a stroke, and died at his hotel in Dayton. Most people, at the time, thought that the trial had a deleterious effect on his health, although this was not proven, since there was no autopsy. He was buried at Arlington National Cemetery in Washington.

Darrow continued to practice law in Chicago until 1938, when he died of heart disease at age 80. Judge Raulston wanted to increase his political profile with the case, but was defeated for re-election in 1927. Representative Butler was also defeated for re-election in 1927. Neither ever won another office: Raulston ran for Governor and lost. He finally admitted that he no longer believed that the State should pass laws like the Butler Act. Butler died in 1952, Raulston in 1956.

Scopes lost his teaching career in the Great Depression, and he, his wife and 2 sons had to move in with his parents in Paducah. He entered politics, and ran for the State House of Representatives in 1932, as a Socialist, and lost. Then he did something very un-socialist: Having gotten a master's degree in geology, he worked for an energy company that would later be bought out by Pennzoil, in Houston and later in Shreveport, Louisiana.

On October 10, 1960, he and two men claiming to be him were guests on the TV game show To Tell the Truth. Scopes was an ideal subject for that show: Since his fame came before the age of television, his name was well-known, but his face wasn't.

In 1967, Gary Scott, a science teacher in Jacksboro, Tennessee, was fired for teaching evolution. He sued, following Darrow's idea that the law itself should one day be challenged as unconstitutional, and said that forbidding its teaching was a violation of the 1st Amendment's protection of speech. The school board got scared, and reinstated him. He didn't care: He went forward with his suit. Three days later, on May 18, 1967, 42 years after the Scopes Trial, the State legislature passed a law repealing the Butler Act. The same day, Governor Buford Ellington signed it into law. Scott dropped his suit.

Scopes' thoughts on the repeal are not recorded: He wrote a memoir, but it wasn't published until a few days after the repeal. He died of cancer in Shreveport in 1970, at 70.

As I mentioned, in 1955, the play Inherit the Wind was written, using a fictionalized version of the Scopes Trial as a critique of McCarthyism. Ironically, the title comes from the Bible: Proverbs 11:29 reads, "He that troubleth his own house shall inherit the wind, and the fool shall be servant to the wise of heart."

When it was first staged on Broadway, Darrow/Drummond was played by Paul Muni, and Bryan/Brady by Ed Begley Sr. A young Tony Randall was also in the cast. It was filmed in 1960 with Spencer Tracy and Fredric March. It was adapted for television in 1965, with Melvyn Douglas and Begley. (As far as I know, his son, Ed Begley Jr., has never appeared in a version of the play.) A 1988 TV-movie had Jason Robards and Kirk Douglas. A 1996 Broadway revival had George C. Scott and Charles Durning. A 1999 TV-movie had Scott switching roles to play Bryan/Brady, and Jack Lemmon as Darrow/Drummond. A 2007 Broadway revival had Christopher Plummer and Brian Dennehy.

Thursday, July 17, 2025

July 17, 1975: The Apollo-Soyuz Mission

Back row, left to right: Tom Stafford and Alexei Leonov.
Front row, left to right: Deke Slayton, Vance Brand and Valeri Kubasov.

July 17, 1975, 50 years ago: For the 1st time, the only 2 nations that have yet sent human beings into space team up.

The 1972 arms talks between American President Richard Nixon and Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev, and the subsequent end of the Vietnam War, improved relations between the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, a condition that became known as Détente, a French word meaning "relaxation."

But a meeting of American and Soviet spacecraft, in space? There were issues beyond politics. Engineering, for one. Each side had concerns over the way the others' craft were designed, and whether they could actually work together. By 1975, these concerns were alleviated, and the combined Apollo-Soyuz flight could go forward.

The American commander was Thomas P. Stafford, who had flown on Gemini 6 and Gemini 9, and commanded Apollo 10. The command module pilot was Vance Brand, making his 1st spaceflight. And the docking module pilot was Donald K. Slayton.

"Deke" Slayton had been one of the original Mercury 7, the only one who hadn't flown in Project Mercury, as he was grounded for health reasons. He was cleared for spaceflight in 1972, but, by then, Project Apollo was winding down, and he didn't fly on any of the Skylab missions, either.

The Soviet commander was Alexei Leonov. In 1965, aboard Voskhod 2, he became the 1st person to make a spacewalk. He was chosen to be the 1st "cosmonaut" on the Moon, but mechanical issues led to the cancellation of the Soviet Moon-landing program. The "flight engineer" was Valery Kubasov, who had flown on Soyuz 6.

Soyuz 19 launched on July 15, 1975, at 8:20 AM U.S. Eastern Time, from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazahkstan. Apollo 18 launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, at 3:50 PM the same day. On July 17, at 12:12 PM Eastern, the capsules docked. At 3:17, Stafford and Leonov entered their respective docking capsules, opened the door between them, and shook hands, with the docked craft over Metz, France.
A few minutes later, Slayton and Leonov
posed for this zero-gravity picture.

Mission Control at the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center in Houston patched in a phone call from President Gerald Ford. The Soviet equivalent read a message from Brezhnev. Music from each country was played: "Tenderness," a 1966 hit by Maya Kristalinskaya; and "Why Can't We Be Friends?" a recent hit with an ironic title by the funk band War.

Scientific experiments were conducted aboard each capsule, which couldn't have been easy, since each capsule had a seating capacity of three. Because of Stafford's drawl, Leonov said 3 languages were spoken on the mission: English, Russian and "Oklahomski."

They separated on July 19, both having stayed in Earth orbit without heading for the Moon. Soyuz 19 landed (the Soviets always landed on land) on July 21, and Apollo 18 splashed down (the Americans always landed on water) on July 24.

This was the end of Project Apollo. The decay of Skylab's orbit and delays on the Space Shuttle program meant that America did not return to spaceflight for 6 years.

The Apollo 18 command module is on display at the California Science Center, next-door to the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. The Space Shuttle Endeavour is also there. The Soyuz 19 descent module is at the RKK Energiya museum in Korolyov, outside Moscow. An Apollo module and a Soyuz module, but not the ones from this mission, are at the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum in Washington.

In the 1983 film The Right Stuff, Slayton was played by Scott Paulin.

Kubasov was the only member of the Apollo-Soyuz crew who ever flew in space again, aboard Soyuz 36 in 1980. Slayton died in 1993, Kubasov in 2014, Leonov in 2019, Stafford in 2024. As of July 17, 2025, Brand is still alive, age 90. Stafford delivered one of the eulogies at Leonov's funeral.

July 17, 1955: Disneyland Opens

July 17, 1955, 70 years ago: Disneyland opens in Anaheim, California, 26 miles southeast of Los Angeles.

Walt Disney, head of the film studio that bore his name, based it on Henry Ford's Museum and Greenfield Village, in the Detroit suburbs, having enjoyed its Main Street concept and steamboat rides. He had also been inspired by such places as Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia and the 1939-40 New York World's Fair.

The opening day was a disaster. It was open only to invited guests and the media, but about half of the 28,000 people there had bought counterfeit tickets or climbed over the fence. Traffic to get in was as bad as for a major sporting event.

And the temperature was 101 degrees. (Most of Southern California had been desert before L.A. was built on it and then expanded out, after all.) The local plumbers' union was on strike. As a result, the water pressure was such that Disney was given a choice of having working drinking fountains or working public toilets. He chose the toilets, which was unquestionably the right move. But since Pepsi-Cola was one of the sponsors, having non-working drinking fountains made it look like a cynical move to sell more Pepsi.

And the vendors didn't have enough food. The heat also meant that some of the asphalt that had just been poured didn't have time to fully cool, and some women's high heels sank into it, tripping them up and injuring some.

Usually being media-savvy, Disney wanted the events televised nationwide, and got ABC to broadcast it, with some of his conservative Hollywood friends like Art Linkletter, Bob Cummings and... Ronald Reagan. But many guests tripped over the large TV camera cables of the era. Cummings was caught kissing a dancer. Linkletter tried an "over to you" to Cummings over and over again, but a technical issue made it impossible, and he ended up looking very foolish on live TV. (It was Linkletter's birthday, too: He was 43.)

For the rest of his life, Disney referred to the day as "Black Sunday," and accepted the next day, July 18, as Disneyland's "official birthday." After his death, though, the park began to restore the July 17 birthday.

The original park had 5 main sections, which have since been added onto. Main Street, U.S.A. was patterned after a typical Midwest town of the early 20th Century -- specifically, the one Disney himself grew up in, during the 1900s and 1910s: Marceline, in north-central Missouri, which now has a museum in Disney's honor. 

Adventureland was "designed to recreate the feel of an exotic tropical place in a far-off region of the world," as Disney put it, "far from civilization, in the remote jungles of Asia and Africa." Being in the Western U.S., and this being the early days of television, when Western movies were big, there pretty much had to be a Wild West-themed place, and it was named Frontierland.

Fantasyland was inspired by such Disney cartoon classics as their versions of the stories of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Cinderella, Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan. Its centerpiece, and the park's symbol, is the 77-foot-high Sleeping Beauty Castle. And Tomorrowland was especially inspired by New York 1939, as an idea of what the future would look like -- keeping in mind that, in 1955, space travel was still just a concept.

All of which allowed Disneyland to rebound from the lousy Day One to become what it billed itself as: "The Happiest Place On Earth," one that denied the existence of the troubles of post-World War II America: The Cold War, smog, suburban banality... and racial strife. It would be a while before Disneyland's employee roster was desegregated, and even longer before there was enough of a black middle class in America to provide enough of a black customer base.

On October 1, 1955, 76 days after Disneyland opened, The Honeymooners premiered on CBS. Formerly a sketch on The Jackie Gleason Show, Gleason spun the show off as a half-hour sitcom. The premiere episode featured Gleason's Ralph Kramden facing the demand of his wife Alice, played by Audrey Meadows, for something they did not yet have, but most families now seemed to: A television set. But Ralph hadn't even gotten a telephone -- or, something that always bugged my mother, a kid at the time, curtains for the kitchen window, the only window visible on the stage set.

Ralph told Alice he worked hard for his money -- no question about that, he was a bus driver in New York -- and that she should be lucky to live the way she does, in their small apartment in Brooklyn, without modern amenities. Alice went along with it, in the most sarcastic of fashions: "It's a regular Disneyland!"

She pointed out the window, at the tenements, and the laundry lines between them: "That's my Fantasyland!" She turned on the faucet of the kitchen sink. What came out of it? Water? Nope, just a weird knocking sound. "I never know what's going to happen with it," she said. "That's my Adventureland. That stove and that icebox: That's Frontierland. The only thing missing, Ralph, is The World of Tomorrow. I have nothing in my Disneyland from The World of Tomorrow!"

Ralph: "You want The World of Tomorrow? I'll show you The World of Tomorrow: You're going to the Moon!"

In 1966, two and a half miles to the east, across Interstate 5, what is now Angel Stadium of Anaheim opened, as the home of the baseball team then known as the California Angels, but now again called, as they originally were, the Los Angeles Angels. Jokes about the Angels playing "at Disneyland" have abounded ever since. But, between them, the Angels and Mickey Mouse have made the City of Anaheim grow by leaps and bounds, to the point where it's no longer just a giant suburb of L.A., but a real city in its own right, of 350,000 people.

*

October 1, 1971: Walt Disney World opens in Bay Lake, Florida, 15 miles southwest of Orlando.

Okay, why a 2nd park? Was "Uncle Walt" simply greedy? No: By 1959, he was seeing figures showing that, at the time, 75 percent of America's population lived east of the Mississippi River, but only 5 percent of Disneyland's visitors came from there. And he didn't like some of the businesses that were sprouting up near Disneyland. So he wanted a place convenient to the East, but with more land, so he could control what went up around it. If there's one thing that a powerful person desires more than money, it's control.

He had an idea he called "EPCOT": Experimental Prototype Community Of Tomorrow. In other words, while there would be a Main Street, U.S.A., a Fantasyland and a Frontierland as with Anaheim, the place would be more about tomorrow than yesterday.

The project was barely in the planning stage when Disney died from cancer on December 15, 1966. His brother Roy Disney saw it through, but only the original part of the park, known as the Magic Kingdom, opened in 1971.

"The Most Magical Place On Earth" was built over a series of tunnels that allowed employees or guests to move through the park out of sight. As with its California counterpart, the centerpiece is a castle, this one named Cinderella Castle, and reaching a higher peak, 189 feet.

All the water in the park is kept moving. Not having standing water nearly -- but not completely, as nothing is 100 percent effective -- eliminates one of the biggest problems with being in Florida: Disney World has hardly any mosquitoes.

Disney's Contemporary Resort also opened on the Magic Kingdom's opening day. It is a hotel, and a terminus for the park's monorail system.

November 17, 1973: On vacation, trying to get away from the troubles of the Watergate scandal, and staying at the Contemporary Resort, President Richard Nixon decides to hold a press conference. He gets mad at the questions about his integrity, and finally says, "I welcome this sort of examination, because people have gotta know whether or not their President is a crook! Well, I'm not a crook! I've earned everything I've got!"

The line becomes remembered as "I am not a crook." And, technically speaking, he wasn't a "crook." He was an arch-criminal. His recently-resigned Vice President, Spiro Agnew, forced out over charges of bribery and tax evasion? He met the definition of a crook.

October 1, 1982: Epcot, as Walt imagined it, finally opened, crowned by a "Spaceship Earth." It included several sections devoted to various countries around the world, inspired by the Busch Gardens theme parks in nearby Tampa and in Williamsburg, Virginia.

March 8, 1983: Another Republican President took time off to go to Orlando -- although the speech in question was not given at the Disney World complex. Addressing the National Association of Evangelicals, 28 years after the former actor had helped open Disneyland, Ronald Reagan gave a speech appealing to the anti-atheist, and therefore anti-Communist, views of the attendees, attacking the Soviet Union -- not with bombs, but with words:

I urge you to beware the temptation of pride, the temptation of blithely declaring yourselves above it all and label both sides equally at fault, to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire, to simply call the arms race a giant misunderstanding and thereby remove yourself from the struggle between right and wrong, and good and evil.

Uncle Walt would have approved.

November 4, 1986: I visited Disney World with my family. My parents had wanted to go for a long time, and could now afford it. I wasn't crazy about the idea, but my sister was then 7 years old, so it was more for her than for anything else.

The place quickly grew on me, and, despite the distaste I eventually developed for Disney the man, it was a great experience. At one point, I lost my wallet, and it was found and returned within 2 hours. At the time, I was relieved. As time went by, I become very impressed with the efficiency of the place.

My parents noticed just how much of it had been bought by Disney from the 1964-65 New York World's Fair. My grandmother was with us, and kept saying, "That wasn't the real World's Fair," remembering the 1939-40 edition, But she enjoyed it, too. (We also visited nearby Sea World, the John F. Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral -- my father and I, both science fiction fans, insisted -- and, at the other end of Florida, a cousin of my father's outside Tampa. While some members of my family have been to California, none of us has ever visited Disneyland.)

January 26, 1987: The day after the New York Giants won Super Bowl XXI, a commercial began airing. To the tune of "When You Wish Upon a Star," from the 1940 Disney cartoon Pinocchio, highlights of the game were shown, mostly of the game's Most Valuable Player, Giant quarterback Phil Simms.

Halfway through, an unseen announcer said, "Phil Simms: You've just won the Super Bowl! Now, what are you going to do?" And Simms looked into the camera and said, "I'm going to Disney World!" Sure enough, Simms and his teammates attended a parade in their honor at Disney World, and a tradition was born: Not just for Super Bowl MVPs, but for other sports stars. (Mark McGwire did it after breaking * Roger Maris' home run record in 1998.)

What I didn't know for several years was that 2 versions had been filmed, one for the East, and one for the West, in which Simms said, "I'm going to Disneyland!" Since the game was played at the Rose Bowl, on the other side of Los Angeles, they went to Disneyland first.

May 1, 1989: Disney's Hollywood Studios opens on Disney World land, to compete with the nearby Universal Studios theme park.

June 1, 1989: Disney's Typhoon Lagoon, a water park, opens.

November 4, 1989: Orlando becomes a major league sports city, with the debut of an NBA team. It is named in honor of the Magic Kingdom: The Orlando Magic. The team has made the Playoffs 16 times in its 1st 32 seasons, including 2 trips to the NBA Finals. But it has never explained what "one Magic" is called. Then again, neither have their Florida arch-rivals, the Miami Heat.

April 1, 1995: Disney's Blizzard Beach, a water park with a contradictory name, opens.

April 22, 1998: Disney's Animal Kingdom opens, based on the safari at Six Flags Great Adventure in Jackson, New Jersey and the nearby Busch Gardens park in Tampa.

Wednesday, July 16, 2025

July 16, 1950: Maracanazo

July 16, 1950, 75 years ago: The last game -- officially, not a "Final," since this edition was not a knockout tournament in the traditional sense -- of the World Cup is played at the Estádio do Maracanã in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Given the goal difference, all that hosts Brazil had to do was gain a draw, and they would be World Champions on home soil. Uruguay, on the other hand, had to win.

The 1st half ended scoreless. Shortly after play resumed, Albino Friaça put Brazil on the board. The gigantic crowd of 199,854 was ecstatic. Being 1-0 up in the 2nd half made it look like the tremendous pre-tournament and pre-game hype and confidence had been worth it.

But Uruguay's Captain, Obdulio Varela, was smart: He went to the referee, an Englishman named George Reader, and disputed the validity of the goal. Varela didn't speak English, and Reader didn't speak Spanish. An interpreter was found, and Reader learned Varela's objection: He believed (or said he did) that Friaça was offside. Reader called the linesman over, and the linesman denied it. Reader made his decision final: The goal stood.

Varela didn't get everything he wanted, but he got a big thing that he wanted: He stopped Brazil's momentum. They were standing around, waiting for play to be allowed to resume. Their fans had calmed down a bit. The home-field advantage had been dented. Reader handed the ball to Varela, who took it to the center of the field, and shouted to his teammates, "Now, it's time to win!"

And they did as he wanted: They attacked. Brazil didn't have a defense as good as their offense, and, in the 66th minute, Pepe Schiaffino equalized for Uruguay. That didn't matter much: If that 1-1 score had held, Brazil would still be World Champions.

In the 79th minute, Alcides Ghiggia ran down the right sideline, and fired a low shot that went under Brazilian goalkeeper Moacir Barbosa. It was Uruguay 2, Brazil 1. Every Brazilian -- on the pitch, in the stadium, and listening on the radio -- was in shock. Brazil attacked the rest of the way, but couldn't find the all-important equalizer. The home crowd was quiet.
Alcides Ghiggia

Shortly after 5:00, Reader blew his whistle to end the match. Uruguay had now won 2 of the 1st 4 World Cups. Brazil had lost the world championship of their national sport, in their national stadium.

In that stadium, 3 fans died from heart attacks. Another, who had brought a gun in, killed himself.

There was no public ceremony after the game. FIFA President Jules Rimet wisely chose to present the trophy that would later bear his name to Uruguay in their locker room. Brazil manager Flavio Costa had to leave the stadium in disguise -- as a nanny. Yes, like some deposed dictators have done, he left in drag, so as not to be recognized.

The loss was a blow to the national psyche of Brazil, so often wrapped up in this sport of soccer. It is known as Maracanazo in Spanish, Maracanaço in Portuguese: "The Agony of Maracanã." The 1950 World Cup was supposed to be a statement for Brazil, showing the world that it was a modern country, worthy of respect and admiration around the postwar world. This was the country's coming-out party, and it was ruined.

Minister of Sport Aldo Rebelo said, "Losing to Uruguay in 1950 not only impacted on Brazilian football, it impacted on the country's self-esteem." Instead of hating Uruguay for the ruination, Brazilians blamed themselves.

Brazil have gone on to win the World Cup a record 5 times: Beating Sweden in the Final in Sweden in 1958, beating Czechoslovakia in the Final in Chile in 1962, beating Italy in the Final in Mexico City in 1970, beating Italy in the Final again in the Rose Bowl in 1994, and beating Germany in Japan in 2002. They have also lost the Final to France in Paris in 1998.

You will notice that none of those 5 wins have been in Brazil. The World Cup has returned to that country only once, in 2014, and Brazil got to the Semifinal, but had an even more stunning loss at the Maracanã. It wasn't that they lost to Germany, who then beat Argentina in the Final. It wasn't even that they were looking forward to beating Argentina in the Final in the Maracanã themselves. The truly shocking part was the score: Germany beat Brazil, in the Maracanã, by a score of 7-1.
The Maracanã is 1 of 2 stadiums to have hosted 2 World Cup Finals, along with the Estadio Azteca in Mexico City. And it's 1 of 5 stadiums to have hosted a World Cup Final and be the main stadium for the Olympic Games. The Azteca is not 1 of the other 4: Although it was used during the 1968 Olympics, it was not the main stadium for those games. The others are the old Wembley Stadium in London, the Olympiastadions in Berlin and Munich, and  the Stade de France outside Paris.

Much as the 1980 and 2008 World Series wins have not fully erased the humiliation of the blown 1964 National League Pennant for Philadelphia Phillies fans, Brazilians still have not gotten over Maracanazo after 72 years, despite winning 5 World Cups and the admiration of the rest of the world.

Because of the soccer connection, it remains the most famous building on the entire continent. It is home to Rio’s 2 biggest teams, Flamengo and Fluminense, and "the Fla-Flu Derby" is the event of the year in Rio. (Aside from that whole Carnival business.)

Outside of soccer, in 1980, it hosted the largest crowd ever to watch a volleyball match, 95,000 to see the national teams of Brazil and the Soviet Union. It hosted the preaching of Billy Graham in 1960 and 1974, and Pope John Paul II in 1980, 1987 and 1997.

Frank Sinatra sang before 175,000 in 1980, and "Rock In Rio" brought more than that for Sting in 1987, Tina Turner in 1988, Paul McCartney in 1990, a-ha in 1991, Madonna in 1993, and the Rolling Stones in 1995.

In 1966, the stadium was officially renamed Estádio Jornalista Mário Filho, for a sportswriter who had just died, but everybody still calls it the Maracanã. A conversion to all-seater and renovations for the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics has reduced capacity to 78,838, making it still the largest stadium in South America.