June 21st 2012
LeRoy Neiman, a globetrotting artist whose celebrity often eclipsed that of the famous athletes and entertainers he portrayed in vibrantly colored, boldly expressive paintings, died June 20 at a hospital in New York. He was 91.
Mr. Neiman’s signature style included sheets of splashy color, yet the central figures of his paintings always remained recognizable and full of vigor. Though seldom loved by critics, his bright, colorful artworks managed to capture the glamour, spectacle and drama of sports.
Of all the sports he was asked to cover, Mr. Neiman said there was only one he refused to paint: professional wrestling. Once, in Canada, he was sketching the wrestler Mad Dog Vachon at ringside, when Mad Dog tore up his drawings.
“Next thing I know, I’m yelling at him and, all of a sudden, he throws me into the ring, then picks me up and starts spinning me over his head,” Mr. Neiman recalled in 1995.
“I’m seeing the arena lights go round and round and round and the crowd is going crazy and then ‘ooof!’ he tosses me out of the ring onto the floor. I messed up my arm.
“That was it. I wanted nothing to do with wrestling any more.”
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June 4th 2012
Dawson died Saturday at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center from complications related to esophageal cancer. The actor, who had been living in Beverly Hills, was diagnosed with the disease about three weeks ago, said his son Gary.
Dawson's key gimmick on "Family Feud" was something that had never been done by a game show host, and is seldom seen today — he kissed all the women players on the lips.
His son said the tradition started almost by accident; "There was a girl on the show who was very nervous, and my dad was trying to calm her down. So he said he would give her a kiss for luck, and he did. Then when he went to the next female player, she said, "Well, don't I get a kiss?' That's how it started and it just became this thing."
The kissing also sparked complaints from viewers who said that Dawson was getting a bit too familiar. He finally asked viewers to write in and tell him whether he should discontinue the kissing. "The mail flowed in, and it was overwhelmingly positive that he keep kissing the women," said Gary Dawson.
Dawson later parodied his game-show image in "The Running Man," a 1987 action movie starring Arnold Schwarzenegger about a game show in which contestants are forced to fight for their lives. Dawson played Damon Killian, the show's Machiavellian host and creator, and rewrote almost all of his lines in the script.
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May 11th 2012
Carroll Shelby, the charismatic Texan who parlayed a short-lived racing career into a specialized business building high-performance, street-legal cars, died Thursday. He was 89.
Shelby died at Baylor Hospital in Dallas, according to an announcement by his company, Carroll Shelby Licensing. A cause was not disclosed.
While trying to fend off an anticipated heart attack, he drove in a 200-mile race in 1960 with nitroglycerin pills underneath his tongue, finishing third at Laguna Seca Raceway in Monterey.
“If I hadn't slowed down each time I popped one of those pills, I might have won,” he said, then announced his retirement as a driver later that year after clinching the U.S. Road Racing championship series at Riverside International Raceway.
Five years earlier he had replaced a plastic cast on his broken elbow with a fiberglass one and had his hand taped to the steering wheel so he could help Phil Hill drive a Ferrari to second place in a 12-hour race at Sebring, Fla.
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May 7th 2012
Seth Clips Vol. 14
April 19th 2012
Levon Helm, the widely respected and influential singer and drummer with the Band, whose Arkansas drawl colored the group's signature hits, including "Up on Cripple Creek" and "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down," died Thursday in New York of throat cancer. He was 71.
One of three lead singers of the group that first gained fame backing Bob Dylan when he "went electric" in 1965, Helm and the Band largely created the template for a genre now labeled "Americana music" for its blend of rock, country, folk, blues and gospel strains.
"Levon is one of the most extraordinary, talented people I've ever known and very much like an older brother to me," the Band's guitarist Robbie Robertson said in a statement. "I am so grateful I got to see him one last time and will miss him and love him forever."
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