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Bolt was best remembered for his temper and tendency to throw golf clubs. The AP article below reports this thoroughly. What the wire service fails to report, is Bolt’s impact on present day golf. Namely the Senior or Champions Tour. The Liberty Mutual Legends of Golf event in 1979 probably launched the Champions tour. The event in only its second year of existence, put on a show of golf that has hardly been matched since. A playoff between two teams, Bolt and Art Wall versus Julius Boros and Roberto DeVicenzo that lasted six holes before Boros and DeVicenzo came out on . The playoff that saw great shot after great shot till the very end and the high ratings it received and excitement this caused led then PGA Commissioner Deane Beman to begin forming a tour for Senior players. All Champions Tour members today owe a debt to Bolt, Boros, DeVicenzo and Wall. It’s disgraceful but predictable that AP forgot that tour’s greatest moment. When former US Open champ Orville Moody died recently, AP also forgot to note ‘Sarge’ was a former PGA Player of the Year.RIP Tommy.
CHEROKEE VILLAGE, Ark. (AP) — Tommy Bolt, the 1958 U.S. Open champion who had one of golf’s sweetest swings and most explosive tempers, has died. He was 92.
His wife, Mary Lou Bolt, said he died Saturday after “his liver shut down.”
“He was the best man I ever knew,” she said Wednesday.
Bolt won 15 Professional Golfers Association events and several more titles on the seniors tour. Yet his temper gained him the most notoriety.
Nicknamed “Terrible Tempered Tommy” and “Thunder,” Bolt was often fined and suspended by the PGA Tour for slamming clubs and using abusive language. He set up a special fund from his winnings to pay the fines.
“I’ve busted a few clubs in my time,” Bolt recalled after retiring from the Tour. “I think it’s all right for a man to break his golf clubs, every one in the bag if he wants to. They’re his clubs. He’s the one to suffer.
“As for throwing clubs, that’s something else. That could be dangerous.”
Bolt joined the tour in 1950 and won his first title, the North and South Open, the next year. Bolt won at least one tournament through 1955, a year he won four times.
In 1958, he won the U.S. Open by four strokes over 22-year-old Gary Player. He also won the Colonial Open that year. His last PGA win came at the Pensacola Open in 1961.
Bolt enjoyed success in the seniors ranks. He won the U.S. National Seniors Open five times, the PGA Seniors, and the 1978 Australian Seniors.
“I’m converted,” he said about his calm demeanor on the course. “I’m sweet as pie now.”
Bolt served overseas with the Army during World War II. Survivors include a son, Thomas Walker Bolt.
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Former Dallas Cowboys offensive lineman Frank Cornish died in his sleep Friday night. He was only 40.
 Cornish, an offensive lineman, played for five NFL teams during a six-year career that started in 1990 when he was a sixth-round pick out of UCLA by the San Diego Chargers. He played with the Cowboys on Super Bowl-winning teams in 1992 and 1993, starting five games.
[...]
“The Bruin family sends our deepest, heartfelt sympathy to the Cornish family,” said UCLA head coach Rick Neuheisel, a Bruin assistant for most of Cornish’s college career. “I was a coach when he was a player, and he was just a gifted guy. Frank was a great guy in the locker room and a huge personality and a fun guy to be around.”
Cornish’s father, Frank played in the NFL in the late ’60s and ’70s.
Frank Cornish IV is survived by his wife, Robin, three daughters and two sons.
Truly sad.
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Dodd | Thursday, August 21, 2008 |
 Gene Upshaw, Hall of Fame offensive lineman and executive director of the NFLPA, has died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 63.
Upshaw played for the Oakland and Los Angeles Raiders from 1967 through 1981. He was a seven-time Pro Bowl selection and an 11-time All-Pro, playing on two Super Bowl-winning teams with the Raiders. He was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1987, but has been better known for the past 25 years as the executive director of the NFL Players Association.
From his involvement with the NFLPA as a player through his tenure as executive director, Upshaw took part in negotiations of the 1977, 1982 and 1993 Collective Bargaining Agreements between the NFL and NFLPA, and extensions of the CBA in 1998, 2002 and 2006.
Upshaw was born on Aug. 15, 1945, in Robstown, Texas, and played collegiately at Texas A&M. He was a first-round draft pick of the Oakland Raiders in 1967 and became the starting left guard as a rookie. He quickly became part of one of the NFL’s most dominant offensive lines, lining up between fellow Hall of Famers Art Shell at tackle and Jim Otto at center. Upshaw became the first player who was exclusively a guard to be enshrined in the Hall of Fame.
It is no exaggeration to say that Upshaw had as much of an impact on the shape and success of the modern NFL as any owner or group of owners. His influence on the game and his advocacy for and on behalf of players (past and present) was a major factor in making football such a popular sport. R.I.P.
UPDATE (James Joyner): Truly a sad and unexpected loss. Driving in this morning, I heard the news on Sirius NFL Radio. They were stunned that Upshaw hadn’t told anyone but, as it turns out, he only learned of his illness this past weekend.
I started watching the NFL on a serious basis with the 1979 season, during which I also collected the Topps player cards. Here’s the front and back of Upshaw’s card from that year (via Milo’s Cards):
 
I should note, too, that when I tuned into the middle of the Sirius discussion about how the upcoming labor talks would go without Upshaw, I presumed he had been fired. In recent months, there was a movement within the union seeking to replace Upshaw because he was perceived as too cozy with ownership. They’ll soon find out, to their chagrin, how good they had it.
Virtually unknown, Moody’s win at the 1969 played at the Champions GC in Houston Texas ranks as one of my most stunning out of nowhere wins in USGA history. Moody never won again on the PGA Tour, but had a highly successful career on the senior tour. If I recall right, Moody was never even a decent putter. When he came out on the Senior tour, a daughter of Orville’s worked as his caddy and helped her father with putting. Moody won 11 Senior tour events including the 1989 US Senior Open. I used to watch the Seniors in those days, and remember Moody well. Including his teaming with Bruce Crampton in the Legends of Golf team tournament. The AP article reports none of us, or that Moody had a stroke recently or that he was 1969 PGA Player of the Year. Why am I not paid to write about pro golf instead of the know nothing error prone hacks employed by Associated Press? RIP Sarge.
PONTE VEDRA BEACH, Fla. — Orville Moody, the U.S. Army veteran who won the 1969 U.S. Open for his only PGA Tour title, died Friday. He was 74.
The PGA Tour said Moody, a part Choctaw Indian from Chickasha, Okla., died in Texas. The tour did not give a cause of death.
Called “Sarge” because of his 14 years in the service, Moody was the last player to win the U.S. Open after going through local and sectional qualifying. He shot a 72 in the final round at Champions Golf Club in Houston for a one-shot victory over Deane Beman, Al Geiberger and Bob Rosburg.
“I am so sorry to hear that Sarge has passed. Barbara and I send out our most heartfelt thoughts and condolences to his family and what I know is a very large circle of friends,” Jack Nicklaus said. “Sarge was a good player and a terrific guy. He had this sort of dry sense of humor that everyone truly enjoyed. He was one of those people you couldn’t help but enjoy being around.
“The fact that Sarge was a U.S. Open champion validates the kind of player he was, and the fact he battled through local and sectional qualifying to get there, reflects, in some way, the type of person he was. Sarge contributed a great deal to the game of golf. I guess you could say Sarge served his country and the game of golf very well.”
Moody was a five-time runner-up on the PGA Tour and won tournaments in Hong Kong, Morocco and Australia.
“We are all going to miss Sarge, who was a patriot first and a professional golfer second,” PGA Tour commissioner Tim Finchem said. “He embodied a bit of golf’s everyman whom we all could identify with.”
A long putter helped revive his career when he joined the 50-and-over Senior PGA Tour in 1984, and his 11 victories included the 1989 U.S. Senior Open.
“The USGA was proud to call Orville Moody an Open and Senior Open champion,” USGA executive director David Fay said. “While his victory in the 1969 Open at The Champions was a surprise, Orville’s superb ball-striking talents were, thankfully, showcased over the next quarter century, both on the regular and senior tour.
“The expression, ‘He could golf his ball,’ certainly applied to Orville.”
Moody made the last of his 513 Champions Tour starts in the 2003 Constellation Energy Classic. He last played in the unofficial Demaret Division for players 70 and older at the 2007 Liberty Mutual Legends of Golf, teaming with Jimmy Powell.
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Longtime Atlanta Braves announcer Skip Caray died in his sleep Sunday. He had been suffering from myriad health problems the last couple of years. Tim Tucker eulogizes him for the AJC:
 Skip Caray made the call when the Atlanta Braves won the World Series in 1995: “Yes! Yes! Yes! The Atlanta Braves have given you a championship! Listen to this crowd!”
He made the call when Sid Bream scored on Francisco Cabrera’s pinch-hit to win the National League Championship Series for the Braves in 1992: “Here comes Bream! Here’s the throw to the plate! He iiiiiiiisssssssss … safe! Braves win! Braves win! Braves win! Braves win! … Braves win!”
And he made the call in the late innings of a lousy game in the lost season of 1979: “You have our permission to turn off the TV and go to bed now … as long as you promise to patronize our sponsors.”
Harry Christopher “Skip” Caray Jr. moved from St. Louis to Atlanta in the 1960s partly to escape the professional shadow of his father, the iconic and inimitable baseball broadcaster Harry Caray. Over the next four decades, with a style very much his own, Skip Caray became as much the voice of baseball in the Southeast as his father had been in the Midwest.
Caray died in his sleep Sunday at his Atlanta home, the Braves announced. He was 68.
“I got to talk to him yesterday and I told him I loved him and he started laughing because I was stuck in New York,” said Chip Caray, who flew from New York to Atlanta after he got the news on Sunday, rather than joining the Braves in San Francisco. “It was our own private little joke. I at least got to tell him I loved him which was the last thing I said to him, so I’m grateful for that.”
Owing to the combination of having moved outside the Deep South just as the Braves went from a national team to a regional one and having gotten married, I watch hardly any Braves games these days. For about a decade, though, I had Caray and the rest of the TBS crew in my living room for two to three hours 150-odd nights a year during a great era for the Braves. Even though I never met the man, I felt like I knew him well.
Caray was the most controversial of the Braves announcers, as he was the most opinionated and stylized. You either loved Skip or you hated him. I was firmly in the former camp.
Carroll Rogers reports on the reactions of the Braves:
News of Skip Caray’s passing hit the Braves family hard — his longtime broadcast partner, and players who identified this organization with Caray long before they ever became a part of it, even the most veteran of players, Tom Glavine, Chipper Jones and John Smoltz.
Smoltz and Caray’s broadcast partner Pete Van Wieren were on the Braves’ charter flight to San Francisco when they learned of Caray’s death. “It’s a sad day,” Smoltz said. “There are no words. Sad doesn’t do it justice. I will always remember Skip for his humor and his ability to go about life the way he did. I gained so much respect for what he did and how long he did and how he did.”
Jones was at home with his family on Sunday evening when he was informed. “I figured Skip Caray is as much a part of Atlanta Braves baseball as any of us,” said Jones, who will rejoin the team in Arizona later this week. “We all grew up listening to Skip, whether it be on TV or radio. Any time the guys on ESPN imitate [you] calling the highlights, you’re pretty much a legend. From a fan’s standpoint, he’s going to be a huge loss for them because he relayed the games to fans for so long.”
The loss transcends the game for players. Jones said his friendship with Caray was formed over long charter flights and daily visits in the clubhouse. “He always made a note to come by my locker and shake my hand, ask me how I was doing, how the family was, how my kids were,” Jones said. “Personally over the last 15, 16, 17 years, I haven’t gotten his play-by-play on the radio or TV, but I had a lot of plane flight conversations with him. I really respected him, as well as the whole Caray family. They have a pretty good legacy working over there. It’s a sad day for Braves baseball.”
Said manager Bobby Cox: “This was completely unexpected and is a complete loss. I had just spoken with Skip this week when we did the radio show and I didn’t know he wasn’t feeling well. He seemed in his normal good spirits. We’ve all lost a very good friend. For me, he was a good buddy — at the park and away from the park. We always had a lot of great laughs. He will be very sorely missed.”
Fans related so well to Caray, Van Wieren said, because he told it like it was, even if he couched it in humor. “But behind the humor there was an honesty and a commitment to telling it like he believed it to be that never, ever varied,” Van Wieren said. “If he didn’t like it that a game was two minutes late getting started, everybody knew about it. If he had an opinion on a player, he said it. And he had a way of saying it that was sometimes humorous. The way he could take a bad ball game, in some of those bad years especially, and turn it into a fun broadcast, whether it was by talking about something in the game or whether it was talking about something that didn’t have anything to do with the game, maybe it was a movie that was coming up after the game or maybe it was a restaurant that he’d gone to. It could have been anything. He was just a very entertaining broadcaster and a very good one. The game was still the most important thing, but if game was decided by the fourth or fifth inning, people would still watch the rest of the game just to hear what he had to say about things. That’s a very, very unique ability.”
AJC staff writers compiled other reactions, including the star of the 1980s Braves.
“I knew that he had been battling some health issues, but I was just really shocked and saddened when I got the e-mail,” former Braves star Dale Murphy said upon receiving the news that longtime Braves broadcaster Skip Caray died Sunday at his Atlanta home. “And I was grateful for the many years I was able to be with Skip from 1976 until 1990. Skip saw the funny side of things and enjoyed making people laugh when we weren’t giving them too much to smile about during some of those years that I was with the Braves.”
Mark Bradley:
Skip Caray was to Atlanta professional sports what Larry Munson is to the Georgia Bulldogs — the voice and the conscience, the history and the hilarity. Skip told us what was happening, yes, but Skip also told us what Skip made of what was happening, and over the course of four decades Skip’s prism became ours.
He came here with the Hawks, and he became part of our extended family — a crusty uncle, if you will — through his work with the Braves. The SuperStation beamed his imperfect voice from sea to shining sea, and though there were always others alongside — the Professor and Ernie at the beginning, Don and Joe later on — Skip was the one we thought we knew best. He was the funny one, the snarky one. He was Harry Caray’s son and Chip Caray’s dad, but somehow he was always just Skip.
As Munson is to worry, Skip was to grousing. He wasn’t from the neo-announcer’s school of happy talk. Skip hated the Wave and the Infield-Fly Rule and said as much at every opportunity. When he did a call-in show on WSB in the ’80s, he suffered clever callers only grudgingly and the bozos not at all. But because he was Skip, we didn’t much mind.
Indeed, that was the beauty (and the incongruity) of Skip Caray: In an industry predicated on likeability, he really didn’t care if you liked him or not. He said what he thought — near the end of a lopsided game, he famously intoned: “If you promise to patronize our sponsors, you have permission to go walk the dog” — and if he happened to ruffle the tender sensibilities of listeners or management … well, tough.
It’s cliche but true: We’ll never see his like again.
RELATED ON OTB: Fathers Day for the Carays - A Special Day at the Park
 John Mark Stallings, the son of former Alabama head football coach Gene Stallings, died Saturday morningat the age of 46. Gentry Estes of the Mobile Press-Register notes that, “He suffered from Down syndrome, and became an unforgettable part of the Crimson Tide’s football family during his dad’s successful tenure in the 1990s.”
Mal Moore, Alabama’s athletics director, issued a statement on behalf of the ‘Bama family:
“I’ve known John Mark Stallings his entire life,” Moore said. “I want to extend my deepest sympathy to Coach Stallings, Ruth Ann and the entire Stallings family. For someone who never played or coached a game, I think John Mark may have touched more Alabama fans than any other person ever did. I would like to thank the Stallings family for sharing their love for John Mark with all of us.”
John Mark was indeed a fixture at the Capstone during his dad’s too-short tenure there. He’ll be missed and all of Bama Nation’s hearts go out to the Stallings family.
The left handed Stobbs came to the Major Leagues for the first time in 1947 and stayed around till 1961. He won over 100 games, but with a losing record. Mostly because he played most of his career with one of the worst teams(The Senators) in the American League. His one claim to fame or infamy, was giving up a 565 homerun to Mickey Mantle. My memories of Stobbs comes from my playing past seasons of Strat-O-Matic baseball. His luck in most of the games I recreated were no better than Stobbs was in real-life. RIP.
SARASOTA — The Washington Senators were just playing out the string and it wasn’t even his turn in the rotation, but left-hander Chuck Stobbs gamely took the ball for the 1957 season finale.
Facing the indignity of suffering his 20th loss of the season, Stobbs battled the visiting Baltimore Orioles for 10 innings before dropping a 7-3 decision at Griffith Park. The fact that he cemented his spot in baseball lore that Sept. 27 day overshadowed Stobbs’ competitive spirit.
That same competitive spirit served the Sarasota resident well the last seven years as he battled cancer. Surrounded by friends and family, the 79-year-old Stobbs succumbed to the disease early Friday morning.
“What I will always remember is that he didn’t complain once during the last seven years,” Stobbs’ son, Charley, said.
Born in Wheeling W.Va., on July 2, 1929, Stobbs attended one year of high school in Vero Beach before his family moved to Norfolk, Va. He starred in football, basketball and baseball at Norfolk’s Granby High School.
He was later recognized by the Granby High School Hall of Fame and the Virginia Sports Hall of Fame. The Virginian-Pilot newspaper named Stobbs as one of the Tidewater-area’s greatest athletes of the 20th century.
Stobbs received a $50,000 bonus when he signed a contract with the Boston Red Sox organization prior to the start of the 1947 season. He made his major-league debut on Sept. 15 of that year
against the Chicago White Sox at Fenway Park.
Stobbs was the youngest player in the majors during the 1947 season and the youngest player in the American League in 1948. The legendary Ted Williams once took the youngster along on a clothing shopping spree in New York City.
After compiling a record of 33-23 in five seasons with the Red Sox, he was dealt to the White Sox on Nov. 13, 1951. Following the 1952 season, the White Sox traded Stobbs to the Washington Senators.
The Senators were perennially one of baseball’s worst teams. Fans joked, “First in war, first in peace, and last in the American League.”
In his first season with the club, the 6-foot-1, 185-pound Stobbs gave up a “565-foot” home run to Yankee slugger Mickey Mantle. The blast, which was recognized by the Guinness Book of World Records, was the first of its kind described as a “tape measure shot.”
Stobbs was credited with throwing the longest wild pitch in history during the 1956 season. The pitch reportedly traveled into the 17th row in the grandstand.
Stobbs joined the St. Louis Cardinals after being released in July 1958 by the Senators. The Cardinals released Stobbs in the offseason and he rejoined the Senators, staying with the organization through its first season as the Minnesota Twins in 1961.
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Mike Souchak won 15 tour events in a career that lasted over a decade. He was an accomplished college football player and shot the lowest score ever in PGA history for 72 holes at the 1955 Texas Open. That record stood for over four decades. RIP.
DURHAM, N.C. (AP)—Former PGA Tour professional and Duke Sports Hall of Fame member Mike Souchak has died.
The school said the 81-year-old died Thursday in Belleair, Fla.
Souchak won 15 events on the PGA Tour from 1955-66 and had 11 top-10 finishes in major championships. He finished third at the U.S. Open in 1959 and 1960, and played on the winning U.S. Ryder Cup teams in ‘59 and ‘61.
He set a tour record for four-round low score at the 1955 Texas Open, opening with a 60 and finishing a 257. That record stood until Mark Calcavecchia’s 256 at the 2001 Phoenix Open.
At Duke, Souchak lettered three seasons in football and four in golf, helping the Blue Devils win two Southern Conference golf titles.
He died in a auto accident late last night. If not for Kiel’s arrest for shipping cough medicine two years ago, I would most likely not even remember him. RIP.
SAN DIEGO - Former Chargers safety Terrence Kiel was killed after he was thrown from a Chevy sedan he was driving, police said Saturday.
Kiel, 27, was driving alone after leaving a party at about 10:15 Friday night when he hit a wall in San Diego’s upscale Scripps Ranch neighborhood and was thrown from the car, police Sgt. Alan Hayward said.
Kiel was barely breathing when paramedics reached him and he died about an hour later, Hayward said.
Friends had tried to keep Kiel from driving home from the party, Hayward said, and witnesses told police he appeared to be driving in the wrong direction when he crashed.
Police would not know whether Kiel had been under the influence of drugs or alcohol until toxicology tests were performed, Hayward said.
A second-round draft pick out of Texas A&M in 2003, Kiel played four years in the NFL from 2003-2006, all with the Chargers.
In February 2007 he pleaded guilty to felony and misdemeanor drug charges for shipping prescription cough syrup to Texas, the most significant of several scrapes with the law.
He was released by the team after his plea.
Kiel had been led off the practice field and arrested in the locker room by Drug Enforcement Administration agents in September 2006, suspected of shipping at least two parcels of prescription cough syrup, apparently to be mixed with soft drinks to make a concoction known as “lean.”
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Jones joins Jim McKay as the second well recognized sportscaster to die in the last week. Like McKay, Jones was a professional at bringing the events on the sporting fields to life for viewers. Unlike some announcers today who will go on and on about absolute nonsense while play is happening on the field. RIP Charlie.
SAN DIEGO (AP) — Charlie Jones, the deep-voiced sportscaster whose career as a play-by-play announcer dated to the beginning of the American Football League in 1960, has died. He was 77.
Jones died of a massive heart attack Thursday at his home in the La Jolla district of San Diego, said his wife, Ann.
Jones, who retired in the late 1990s, had been in poor health for several years, she said.
Jones worked for ABC and NBC in a career spanning 38 years.
“He said, ‘I never felt like I ever went to work,’” Ann Jones said Friday. “He loved it. He said, ‘I’ve got the best seat in the house.’ ”
Jones started at ABC in 1960, the year the AFL made its debut. He moved to NBC in 1965, remaining with that network until 1997.
Jones announced 28 different sports, while with NBC, from golf to tennis, baseball to figure skating. He called events at the 1988 Seoul Olympics and the 1996 Atlanta Olympics.
“He really liked them all,” Ann Jones said. “He really did. He wasn’t particular, because they were all so different.”
NBC Sports chairman Dick Ebersol called Jones “one of the great pioneers of NBC Sports. His work in particular on the NFL, golf and the Olympics left a lasting legacy.”
Longtime agent Martin Mandel said Jones was “one of the legends of sports broadcasting.”
“He had a wonderful kettledrum voice. He was known for that and his versatility,” Mandel said.
Jones will be cremated and his ashes spread over the Pacific Ocean. A celebration of his life will be held Wednesday afternoon at the La Jolla Beach & Tennis Club.
“He had it in his will that men cannot wear ties,” Ann Jones said.
Jones also is survived by two children and three grandchildren.
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