Brothers Judd Blog

NOT THE MOST SHAKESPEAREAN (profanity alert):

“Who Do You Think You Are? I Am!” The Oral History of the Greatest Outburst in Sports History (Alan Siegel, 3/13/25, The Ringer)

After growing up in the shadow of his distinguished father, Dick, the first face of the sport, he became the hard-partying, trash-talking, trophy-collecting bad boy of bowling. His personality made him, well, polarizing. “Half of the staid bowling community hated Pete because he seemed to buck tradition,” says Tom Clark, commissioner of the Professional Bowlers Association. “His father was the perfect ambassador. It would be like if Arnold Palmer had this wild son who became Happy Gilmore.”

That comparison isn’t quite apt. “Only because in that specific analogy, Happy had no idea about the game,” says current PBA superstar and former Weber rival Jason Belmonte. “I think Pete is, for all intents and purposes, just one of the most gifted players to ever throw a ball down the lane.”

Weber turned pro as a teenager in the late 1970s. As a young man, he talked openly about his cocaine use and drinking. He got suspended twice from the tour for “conducting unbecoming of a professional.” Yet somehow his theatrics—the WWE-inspired crotch chops, the spiking of sunglasses, the verbal outbursts—never fully derailed his career. In fact, like John McEnroe, he tended to feed off confrontation. Over 40-plus years, he piled up 37 total PBA tournament titles, 10 majors, and $4.1 million in prize money.

His most famous victory, the moment you might know him for even if you know nothing about bowling, was Weber at his most pure: deeply melodramatic, extraordinarily clutch, and bizarrely charming. On February 26, 2012, in North Brunswick, New Jersey, he won his record fifth U.S. Open championship by a single pin. When he clinched it on his final roll, this leapt out of his mouth: “Yes, goddamn it, yes! That is right, I did it! Number five! Are you kidding me?! That’s right! Who do you think you are? I am! Damn it right!”

At first, the nonsensical celebration was treated like a punch line. “I made all the halls of shame,” Weber says. Then, something strange happened. The lowlight turned into a highlight. “All of a sudden, it was a catchphrase,” Weber says. Strangers shouted it at him. High-profile athletes began repeating it triumphantly. Thirteen years later, it’s one of the most famous explosions in sports history.

PLEDGE DUTY:

What’s brewing with Red Sox? A chaotic coffee run from two top prospects (Jen McCaffrey, Mar. 13, 2025, The Athletic)

“He’s like, ‘We have to get coffee for every single person in the org,’” Mayer recalled. “And I’m like, ‘What are you talking about?’ He shows me a list. There were 40 coffee orders already.”

Marcelo Mayer’s coffee run led to a big day at the plate. (Mike Watters / Imagn Images)
Like preparing for the next day’s opposing pitcher, they had to develop a game plan. They picked a Starbucks on Alico Road about 6 miles from JetBlue Park, and the night before, they drove there and asked for the manager.

“I’m like, ‘You better bring your A squad tomorrow morning at 5 a.m. because we’re ordering 76 coffees,’” Mayer said. “They weren’t just all black coffees, everyone had a separate order.”

Mayer and Anthony begrudgingly woke up at 4:30 a.m. to get to Starbucks right when it opened.

The four-person staff was well-prepared for the Thursday morning madness. But making the process more chaotic, Anthony had to read off each individual order and pay one at a time. That way each cup would have a player’s name on it and they could keep track of who had which coffee.

After about 20 orders, Anthony’s credit card was declined, with the company suspecting fraud due to the flood of successive coffee purchases. Mayer started paying.

Over roughly an hour, Mayer and Anthony watched as the Starbucks crew brewed, shook, pumped, steamed and stirred the coffees, organizing them into cardboard trays.

“They did a very good job of pumping them out,” Anthony said. “It was crazy.”

“You’d think they did that (large of an order) every morning,” Mayer said. “They were really good.”

A few unlucky customers came through the Starbucks drive-thru during the Red Sox coffee crush, but thankfully for the staff, no one else arrived in the store during the early morning madness.

When it was all said and done, the bill came to more than $600, which Mayer and Campbell split, making sure to leave the baristas a hefty cash tip for all their efforts.

In the chaos of their morning, Mayer didn’t think to use his Starbucks app to pay for the order, which would have earned him stars toward future purchases.

“I would have had free coffee for a month,” Mayer lamented.

WHY CONSERVATIVE REGARD FOR COOLIDGE IS MISPLACED:

The dark parallels between 1920s America and today’s political climate (Alex Green, 3/10/25, The Conversation)

Other Americans were concerned about the possible rise of communism in the U.S., as well as the arrival of many immigrants. This led extremists to introduce and implement hate-based policies at the federal and state level that targeted nonwhite immigrants and disabled people.

Among the most significant results of that political moment was the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act, a restrictive immigration policy that, among other changes, prohibited immigration from Asia.

Another pivotal movement was the Supreme Court’s 1927 Buck v. Bell decision, which affirmed that the state of Virginia had the right to sterilize intellectually and developmentally disabled people.

The Johnson-Reed Act prompted a major shift in American immigration policy, based on the fear of something that former President Theodore Roosevelt and others called “race suicide.”

The law introduced rigid restrictions keeping people out of the country who were not from Northern and Western Europe. The immigration quotas that it established would continue to be enforced into the 1960s.

The U.S. politicians who lobbied for this law were successful because they supported their effort by presenting evidence that showed purportedly scientific proof that almost all people in the world were biologically inferior to a group they called the Nordic Race – meaning people from Northern Europe – and their American descendants, who formed a group they called the “American Race.”

By restricting immigration from all other groups, these legislators believed they were counterbalancing a crushing period where war and pandemic had killed off what they saw as the country’s best people.

Different groups preyed on Americans’ grief about the war and pandemic and directed it against minority groups.

From Maine to California, a revived Ku Klux Klan attracted millions of followers with its belief that white people were superior to all others, and that Black people should remain enslaved. At the same time, a group of scientists, doctors and psychologists found enormous success in persuading the public that there were scientific reasons why hatred and discrimination needed to be incorporated into American government.

Their proof was something called eugenics, a pseudoscience which argued that humans had to use advanced technology and medicine to get people with good traits to reproduce while stopping those with bad traits from having the opportunity to do so.

Harry Laughlin, a eugenicist based at a research laboratory in Cold Spring Harbor, New York, was one of this movement’s most vocal representatives.

Laughlin worked for several different eugenics research organizations, and this helped him become successful at creating propaganda supporting eugenics that influenced public policy. He then gained a spot as an expert eugenics adviser to Congress in the early 1920s. With his position, Laughlin then provided the pseudoscientific data that gave the supporters of Johnson-Reed the claims they needed to justify passing the measure.

Nazism is just the German version of the science of American Progressives.

THE DRAGON HAS NO TEETH:

The End of the Chinese Dream (Yi Fuxian, Mar. 10th, 2025, Project Syndicate)

Back in 2016, I told the New York Times that China’s aging population and shrinking labor force would prevent its economy from overtaking America’s – a conclusion I had arrived at in the 2007 and 2013 editions of my book Big Country with an Empty Nest. Chinese authorities were not happy. I immediately went from being a state guest to a name on the government’s blacklist. Then, in 2019, I angered the authorities again by publishing a commentary bearing the headline: “Worse than Japan: how China’s looming demographic crisis will doom its economic dream.”

According to the dominant narrative at the time, the “Chinese century” was “well under way” (as The Economist put it). Nonetheless, my findings met with a receptive audience. In the introduction to a November 2020 Brookings Institution book on “the future of US policy toward China,” my commentary was the sole reference listed. (The author, Jeffrey Bader, had been one of the principal architects of the Obama administration’s “pivot to Asia.”) Since then, the dominant narrative has shifted, with many more analysts warning of China’s “Japanification.”

Japan’s experience has confirmed that demographics matter for economic growth, and this will remain the case regardless of whether one looks at Germany, France, China, or any other country. Owing to a rapidly growing workforce and a young population, Japan’s GDP grew from a mere 9% of US GDP in 1960 to 73% in 1995, and its per capita GDP grew from 17% of America’s to 154% in the same period. By 1990, Americans had come to regard Japan as their chief rival, with polls showing that three times more Americans feared the economic threat posed by Japan than the military one posed by the Soviet Union.

Yet Japan’s GDP growth rate has been lower than America’s since 1992.

Fear of a rising China is just a function of Sinophobia.

WHITER BUT POORER!:

Trump to Wall Street: Brace for Impact (Peter Coy, 03.11.25, Free Press)

[S]tock prices have fallen at least in part because investors are coming to the painful realization that Trump doesn’t seem to care so much for them anymore. In his first term, Trump viewed the market as his personal scorecard. Now? “You can’t really watch the stock market,” he told Maria Bartiromo on Sunday.

With the market nearing correction territory—defined as a 10 percent drop—since its mid-February peak, I asked Mohamed El-Erian, the bond whiz who is now president of Queens’ College, University of Cambridge, whether this realization was part of the reason stocks had fallen over the past month. He agreed. The steadfast belief that Trump would do whatever it took to keep the stock market happy was termed “the Trump put.” (A put is a derivative that protects its owner from price declines.)

Confidence in the Trump put began to erode when Trump and his economic team started talking about bond yields, rather than stock prices, as their metric of choice, El-Erian said. (Bonds can do well even if stocks are doing poorly.)

Even before this past weekend, the market had been falling, partly thanks to the specter of high tariffs. But then, over the weekend, Trump and others on his team seemed to say that even a recession would not cause the administration to pull back from its tariff strategy.

And because the tariffs could lead not only to slower economic growth but also higher inflation—stagflation, it’s called—investors can’t count on the Federal Reserve to bail them out as it has in the past, El-Erian told me. (That’s called “the Fed put” on Wall Street.) The Fed will hardly be eager to cut interest rates aggressively if tariffs are pushing up prices, he said.

Stocks rose after Trump was elected because investors were looking forward to deregulation and tax cuts. Yes, they assumed that Trump might use the threat of tariffs to gain concessions from trading partners. But he surely wouldn’t be so foolish as to erect high and long-lasting tariff walls. Instead, El-Erian said, “The things that the market really likes haven’t come yet,” and the thing the market doesn’t like—tariffs—are turning out to be more than just tactical threats.

Destroying the economy makes America less attractive to immigrants. The nihilism is intentional.

MONEYBALL BEFORE IT WAS COOL:

Earl Weaver, Baseball Lout and Legend: REVIEW: ‘The Last Manager: How Earl Weaver Tricked, Tormented & Reinvented Baseball’ by John W. Miller (Matt Lewis, March 9, 2025, Free Beacon)

Behind the theatrics, however, was a guy who viewed the game differently. While everyone else was obsessed with batting averages, Weaver cared more about on-base percentage and timely home runs. He came to despise the sacrifice bunt (why give away an out?). He turned shortstops into power hitters, moving 6’4″ Cal Ripken Jr. from third to short and paving the way for future MLB stars like Derek Jeter. He platooned players before it was cool, squeezing 36 homers and 98 RBIs out of a three-man rotation in left field in 1979. This is to say, he re-created star players “in the aggregate.” Billy Beane and the Moneyball crew should’ve sent him royalty checks.

Where did this knack for data and analytics come from? Miller suggests it came from his Uncle Bud, a bookie who helped raise him in St. Louis. Whatever the inspiration, Weaver was thinking in probabilities decades before the sabermetric crowd made it standard practice. And he wasn’t just a numbers guy. He was the first manager to use a radar gun. His ingenuity even extended to the field itself. He had the Orioles’ groundskeeper doctor the field—muddying the basepaths to slow fast opponents, and hardening the infield to create tricky hops for bad defenders. It was brilliant, it was petty, and it worked.

He even helped develop a baseball video game that eventually led to John Madden Football. Think about that: Earl Weaver is at least partially responsible for the most dominant sports video game of all time. Not bad for a guy who looked like he spent his afternoons drinking Pabst Blue Ribbons and screaming at neighborhood kids to stay off his lawn.

ONCE WERE NEWSPAPERS:

The Last Sportswriters of New York (Dave Kaplan|Mar. 9th, 2025, New York: Intelligencer)

Along with 75-year-old Steve Serby and 74-year-old Larry Brooks, Mushnick is part of a holy trinity of snowy-haired sportswriters who anchor a section that trumpets itself as the “Best Sports in New York” — a claim that has gone virtually unchallenged since the New York Times shuttered its sports section and the Daily News, the Post’s fiercest competitor for decades, has been reduced to a skeleton operation. The paper covers the city’s sports scene like it’s still 1985 while navigating a vastly changed sports-media landscape. Locker rooms are now filled with what former Times columnist George Vecsey calls “the thumb people” — less-seasoned reporters constantly scrolling and tweeting updates. “It’s kind of interesting walking in there and seeing kids 50 years younger than me,” admits Brooks, who has been writing about the Rangers since the mid-1970s. Serby, who’s been covering the Jets and the Giants for over four decades, says, “Some of today’s athletes have no concept of what it means to be a reporter or columnist.”

In an industry ravaged by layoffs and early retirements, Brooks, Mushnick, and Serby are an endangered species — tab men from the old school.

INFINITUDE:

When I lost my intuition: For years, I practised medicine with cool certainty, comfortable with life-and-death decisions. Then, one day, I couldn’t. (Ronald W Dworkin, 3/03/25, Aeon)

Researchers have long recognised intuition’s relevance to professional judgment. In 1938, the businessman Chester Barnard wrote the now-classic book The Functions of the Executive, in which he described two distinct forms of managerial decision-making, logical and non-logical, with intuition an example of the latter. In 1957, the scholar Herbert Simon coined the phrase ‘bounded rationality’ to illustrate the same division. The psychologist Daniel Kahneman spoke of two systems for decision-making: ‘System 1’ for intuition, and ‘System 2’ for deliberate and analytical thought. In the 1960s, the neuroscientist Roger Sperry attributed logic and reason to the brain’s left side, and intuition to the brain’s right. More recently, the division has been used to distinguish between personality types, as in the Myers-Briggs personality model, where a person can be ‘intuitive’ or ‘analytical’.

Intuition was pigeonholed in this way not merely to try to understand it, but also to control it. For, within the secular world, intuition is the sole survivor from those primitive days when people credited human behaviour to mystical and spiritual forces, and science was inseparable from divine doctrine. Most of those forces were elbowed out of existence in modern life, and consigned to the religious sphere. But intuitive thinking was too useful a professional tool to simply be tossed aside. Even today, more than 60 per cent of CEOs rely on intuition, or ‘gut feeling’, to guide their decisions. Under some circumstances, 90 per cent of intuitive decisions prove correct. Nevertheless, the concept of intuition threatens science, upon which much of modern professional life is based. Science uses logic, observation and measurement to find truth, while intuition, derived from the word intueri, which means ‘to look within’, seeks truth through inner contemplation. The latter method harkens back to a dark age before clarity and frankness came to dominate the realm of thought. Thus, while given its due, intuition had to be contained within a well-ordered system that downplayed its connection with mystical thinking.

‘Intuition is nothing more and nothing less than recognition’ prompted by a cue, Simon wrote. In the mind sit memories stored away in oblivion, which, when cued, return to consciousness because a temporary use for them has been found. Simultaneously, a feeling of certitude arises. There is nothing miraculous about any of this, researchers insist.

Yet, it is when professionals lose their intuition that its mystical value shines through. For, in tough cases, when facts are lacking and the path forward is unclear, intuition arrives like a revelation. Intuition is an article of faith we assent to when reason has reached its limits. Belief in that revelation is what puts intuition on an altogether different plane of cognitive experience. There can be no relation between intuition and reason, not because they work through different sides of the brain. Instead, it is like the difference between the infinite and the finite; the infinite is out of all proportion to the finite, so that no comparison or analogy can be established between them.

CAIN WON:

Abundance and Its Discontents (James Livingston, 3/07/25, Project Syndicate)

[T]he vision Klein and Thompson offer makes the idea of abundance sound like what awaits the Tribulation Force of the Left Behind film franchise, whose members prove they are worthy of joining the Raptured in heaven by working hard against the anti-Christ on Earth. The abundance we need and deserve cannot be incentivized by monetizing it and attracting private investors and contractors emboldened by relaxed regulations and officials who are willing and able to bend the rules. Nor does it have to wait on the arrival of another “political order” that will deliver the goods because it tells a “better story,” as per the historian Gary Gerstle’s periodization of the US political party system (eagerly cited by Klein and Thompson). Abundance is here and now, abiding in the simple fact that economic growth doesn’t require more savings, more work, and more fossil fuels (and thus the incineration of the planet), because growth – at any pace – no longer demands larger inputs of either capital and labor.

It’s impossible tyo overstate deflationary pressures.

DOWN-N-OUT:

The Tale Of The Early-Round KO Of Muhammad Ali’s Champburger (Dan McQuade, February 28, 2025, Defector)

“In 1916,” Adam Chandler wrote in the book Drive-Thru Dreams, “Walt Anderson first performed the magical, calculated act of crafting tiny ground beef patties and then smashing them flat onto a steaming, onion-laced griddle.” To reassure customers scared of the meat industry after reading works like Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, Anderson had his employees cook the burgers on a griddle right in front of patrons. The sliders made Anderson $3.75 in profit on his first day. The motto of his restaurant, White Castle, was “Buy ’em by the sack.”

“White Castle made this big effort to provide this place that looked really clean,” Chandler told Defector. “They would grind the meat in front of the customers and they’d made a big show of everything being choreographed down to the second. Every bit of the experience was just really, really managed. And all the stores look the same, too, and that was meant to convey comfort and familiarity in a sense that you’ll be safe in any of these places wherever you go. Now we think of that as kind of being soulless and corporate, but back then that was a big deal.”

White Castle was an instant and smashing success. Knockoffs with names like Blue Castle and White Tower failed to capture the same magic, but by the 1960s, the country was dotted with chains like A&W, Tastee-Freez, and Dairy Queen. By the time places like Champburger were opening, McDonald’s was well on its way to becoming the largest chain in the country. Franchisee Ray Kroc bought out its founders, the McDonald brothers, and pushed through an ambitious program of expansion that continues more or less to this day. That globe-bestriding empire, and many only slightly smaller ones, was built through franchising.

The franchise system was a boon to company owners. In exchange for a percentage of profits and a franchise fee, franchisees received the rights to operate their restaurants under a set of guidelines laid out by the companies whose recognizable brands gave those franchises value. Those guidelines were generally quite strict; chains still strived for comfort and familiarity even after The Jungle was well out of customers’ minds. From a business perspective, the franchisee took on most of the material risk. Eventually companies would turn to making money from the land under their own restaurants, which they leased to franchisees.

Many of those franchises were start-ups from people in the industry. Kroc was a milkshake machine salesman; McDonald’s was one of his customers before he made his start as a franchisee. The company spread under Kroc; competing fast food franchises like Burger King and Kentucky Fried Chicken also found success. It was not long until celebrities started getting in on the action—not as franchisees, but as the faces of brands that wanted to expand in the same ways, if not on the same scale, as White Castle or McDonald’s.

The week before Ali reported to prison, Joe Namath was in Miami to open a Broadway Joe’s restaurant. Miami News sports editor John Crittenden described the scene: “When Joe Namath opened his restaurant here last weekend, it was done at great expense—extensive advertising, houseboat cocktail parties, the employment of buxom damsels wearing football jerseys to serve hero sandwiches.”

The celebrity fast-food craze can primarily be traced to the success of Gino’s Hamburgers, a restaurant founded by Joe Campanella, Louis Fischer, Alan Ameche, and Gino Marchetti in the late 1950s. All four had played for the Baltimore Colts, and the first location was in the city’s suburbs. In a city that loved its Colts, a restaurant owned by four of them predictably became a hit.

After that, it was just a matter of waiting for the Blue Castle/White Tower types to arrive. Those knockoffs came in varying forms, but they all had a celebrity attached. Namath had Broadway Joe’s. Johnny Carson had Here’s Johnny’s! Ron Santo had his own pizzas at Wrigley Field. Bart Starr owned drive-ins. Plans were in the works for something called Mickey Mantle’s Country Kitchen. While still with the Steelers, Brady Keys opened All-Pro Chicken. At one point his restaurants were so successful that they partnered with KFC to open Brady Keys’ Kentucky Fried Chicken locations in black neighborhoods. The colonel was pushed aside by a Pro Bowl cornerback.

Other companies attempted similar ideas. Minnie Pearl’s Chicken operated in white neighborhoods. It served the same food as gospel singer Mahalia Jackson’s Glori-Fried Chicken, a name that feels almost but not quite sacrilegious. Glori-Fried Chicken locations were either attached to Gulf gas stations or standalone properties designed by black architectural firm McKissack and McKissack and made to look like a church. (This part feels notably more sacrilegious.)

“It’s getting ridiculous,” an anonymous stockbroker told the Detroit Free Press in January of 1969. “A celebrity sticks his name on a chicken shack and suddenly it’s $50 a share.”

Champburger was the brainchild of three white Miamians: Edward Gale, Leonard Lurie, and Philip Brooks. They worked with the Ali associate and Southern Christian Leadership Conference lawyer Chauncey Eskridge to put together a prospectus for the business and looked for investors.

The Champburger prospectus was not promising.