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Ken Venturi, Golf Champion and Broadcaster, Dies at 82

May 18, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Venturi’s son, Matt, told The Associated Press that his father died in a hospital in Rancho Mirage, Calif., and that he had been hospitalized the last two months for a spinal infection, pneumonia and an intestinal infection.

Venturi had a five-way heart bypass surgery and valve repair in December 2006.

Venturi, who had recently been elected to the World Golf Hall of Fame, won 14 tournaments between 1957 and 1966 in a career cut short by circulatory problems in his hands.

He first gained notice in 1956 as an amateur when he led the Masters by four shots entering the final round, only to shoot an 80, losing to Jack Burke Jr. by a stroke. He was the runner-up at the Masters again in 1960, a shot behind Arnold Palmer, who birdied the final two holes.

But Venturi’s signature moment came at the Congressional Country Club in Bethesda, Md., on a Sunday in June 1964. Temperatures were approaching 100 degrees, and the humidity seemed unconquerable as the players struggled to play 36 holes, the last time the Open staged its final two rounds on a single day.

Venturi had not won since the 1960 Milwaukee Open, had considering quitting and had been required to participate in two qualifying events before being allowed into the Open. He almost collapsed from the heat on the 17th green of his morning round but carded a remarkable 66.

Going into the final 18 holes, Venturi was two shots behind the leader, Tommy Jacobs. After a 45-minute break, Venturi virtually staggered through the final round, trailed by Dr. John Everett, who was monitoring the players and who had warned him against continuing out of fear he would die from heat prostration.

Everett gave Venturi ice cubes, iced tea and salt pills as he played on, instinct triumphing over the pressure and the exhaustion. Venturi overtook Jacobs and sank a 10-foot putt on the final hole to close out a 70, besting Jacobs by four shots.

“I dropped my putter and I raised my arms up to the sky,” Venturi told The A.P. in 1997. “I said, ‘My God, I’ve won the Open.’ The applause was deafening. It was like thunder coming out there.”

Venturi was so weak that he could not reach into the hole to get his ball, so Raymond Floyd, his playing partner, did it for him.

“I felt this hand on me, and it was Raymond Floyd handing me the ball,” Venturi remembered. “I looked at him, and he had tears streaming down his face.”

As Floyd later told The A.P.: “He was running on fumes. If you had asked him his name, he could not have told you. It is one of the most heroic things I have ever seen.”

Venturi was helped off the green by the United States Golf Association official Joe Dye and was so woozy that he could not read his scorecard. Dye assured him that it was correct and that he could sign it.

Venturi was named PGA player of the year for 1964 and was selected for the 1965 Ryder Cup team. By then, he had developed carpal tunnel syndrome and had surgery, hoping to relieve cold and numbness in his hands. But he never regained his form and soon retired.

He overcame a stammering problem as a child and was hired by CBS to provide commentary on the PGA Tour; he remained with the network for 35 years, retiring in 2002.

“With that exhausting, emotional victory, Venturi established a bond with viewers,” Peter McCleery wrote in Golf Digest in 2002, recalling Venturi’s triumph in the Open. “His strength as an analyst has been the passion and conviction he brought to the booth. He said things with such authority and in such absolute terms that you believed him, or wanted to.”

Venturi was born and reared in San Francisco, where his father, Fred, a skilled workman on the docks, ran the golf shop at the Harding Park municipal golf course. He began playing as a youngster and honed his game by playing repeated fade and draw shots in solitary drills.

Venturi became the San Francisco interscholastic golf champion, and he played at San Jose State University, where he received a degree in physical education. Byron Nelson, whom Venturi idolized as a youngster, later tutored him.

He is survived by his third wife, Kathleen, and two sons, Matthew and Tim, according to The Associated Press.

Venturi engaged in many charitable endeavors while working as a broadcaster, most notably the Guiding Eyes Classic, an event in New York that included blind golfers and raised more than $6 million to provide dogs for the blind.

He told Golf Digest in 2004 how a guide dog from the program saved his owner, a man named Omar Rivera, in the Sept. 11 terrorist attack, leading him down 71 floors of the World Trade Center’s North Tower.

As Venturi recalled it: “At a Guiding Eyes gala at Rockefeller Plaza, Omar came forward and told his story. Toward the end, he said, ‘This dog came from Ken Venturi.’ I cry easily enough as it is, but I cried buckets that day.”

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/18/sports/golf/ken-venturi-us-open-golf-champion-and-broadcaster-dies-at-82.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Media Business Tagged With: , ,

Bits Blog: Best Sellers From a Vanished World

January 24, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Kindle Fire.Mark Lennihan/Associated PressKindle Fire.

In the last two months, five million or so people got a Kindle Fire. Some of them were upgrading from earlier Kindles. They know the ropes. But millions of others must be new at this, and are stumbling around with their tablets looking for content. If they are like the rest of us and still paying the holiday bills, they want it free. That would be Angry Birds, of course, but also the Kindle Top 100 Free best-seller list. Some of these books are out of copyright — “Dracula,” Jane Austen — and some seem to have originated with Amazon itself. But at the top and interspersed all the way through are novels written by living if somewhat obscure authors. Romances, mostly, often with a Christian theme.

The idea of a free best-seller list is a contradiction in terms. These books are not, after all, “selling.” Furthermore, where is the larger pool of books from which these titles are drawn? The number of contemporary novels on Amazon that are free is small; if I publish my novel through Kindle, I must charge at least 99 cents. I understand that established writers are submitting their books and Amazon is picking and choosing, but no details are provided as to how the process works. The books on the list change rapidly, so I assume — unlike a normal best-seller list — that titles are booted after a period of time. Perhaps a better way to think about this list is simply as a group of titles that Amazon is allowing writers and publishers to give away for a set period. Don’t ask any questions. They’re free.

Gore Vidal wrote a famous essay in 1973 about reading the top 10 fiction best sellers, then only available in your neighborhood bookstore or library. He concluded that contemporary writers, even the egghead ones, wrote the way they did because they had seen too many movies. Everything was a screenplay. The Kindle Free list awaits its Vidal but as a stopgap I downloaded the top half-dozen novels and spent a flight from New York to San Francisco reading in and among them.

Cynthia Ruchti’s “They Almost Always Come Home” is about Libby’s search for her missing husband. Did he drive off the road, is he on the lam, is there something nefarious going on? But I had a separate mystery I was trying to decipher: Where was his cellphone?

It wasn’t until location 314 of 3212 — this is how Kindle does page numbers — that I figured it out. Libby is recalling a meal: “Greg ordered brown sugar-smoked lake trout with wild mushrooms and dried cranberries over basmati rice. I had the grilled salmon with mango salsa and cilantro puree on a bed of fiddlehead ferns.” Then I got it: They were eating in my 2012, but the action was taking place in an alternative universe where the Internet was not a factor in people’s daily lives.

Take another Kindle best seller, Barbara Freethy’s “Ryan’s Return,” about a renowned photojournalist returning for the first time in 12 years to the small town in Northern California where he grew up. Many shocking revelations await him, such as the fact that his high school sweetheart, who had married his brother, is dead. “I can’t believe you don’t know,” says the cop who welcomes Ryan back to town by giving him a ticket.

I couldn’t either. Wasn’t Ryan friends with his ex-sweetheart on Facebook? Didn’t he get an Evite to the memorial service? Didn’t he ever Google her when he was trapped in some forsaken place by his work and musing on what might have been, and then see her obituary?

Apparently not. “Ryan’s Return,” although it first appeared several years ago, was copyright 2011, which usually implies an update or a rewrite. But its world was not the one I knew, and I had a hard time suspending my disbelief.

So many romances as well as other contemporary novels depend on characters not knowing things about each other. In the age of the Facebook Timeline, either readers are going to have to become willfully oblivious or writers are going to have to get more skillful. One of the other free best sellers, “The Lady of Bolton Hill,” was able to evade the whole issue by being set 150 years ago. Maybe whole genres will recede from the present and become completely historical.

Otherwise, technology, even as it facilitates the old-fashioned art of reading, will render it irrelevant. By the time I was over Denver, I had gone back to Angry Birds.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=d7f2438159acc2041128697e1f8a9940

Filed Under: Business News Tagged With: , ,

Strategies: Funny, but I’ve Heard This Market Song Before

June 19, 2011 by Leave a Comment

“Concerns Over Europe Flare Again, Pushing U.S. Shares Lower,” one said. “Fear of a Double Dip Could Cause One,” said another. “Slowdown Fear Hits Market,” a third declared.

There was a catch, however.

Although the headlines aptly described events of the last two months, they were published in May and June 2010. All of them.

What should we make of this odd recurrence? “History doesn’t repeat itself but it often rhymes,” as Mark Twain is often reputed to have said. (I’ve found no compelling evidence that he ever uttered that nifty aphorism. No matter — the line is too good to resist.)

In a telephone interview, Laszlo Birinyi, the veteran market strategist, said he selected those headlines to make a point. “If you feel you’ve seen this before, well, you have,” he said. “The market is in a correction — but so what? We’ve had about five corrections of one kind or another in this bull market. It’s not the end of the world.”

But during long stretches this spring, it may have seemed that it was. The market managed the barest of gains last week, with the Standard Poor’s 500-stock index edging up a mere 0.3 percent. Until then, it had declined for six consecutive weeks, with the S. P. dropping almost 7 percent, wiping out nearly all its gains for 2011. Market declines of that duration are unusual: the S. P. last dropped for six weeks in 2002, with a total decline of almost 15 percent, according to Yardeni Research.

Still, considering the scale of the rally that began in March 2009, the recent losses have been modest. As a technical matter, the decline isn’t even a correction, because stocks haven’t fallen 10 percent from their recent peak. Over all, the S. P. 500 remains almost 90 percent above its 2009 low.

Even if the market’s fall has not been severe, it could easily become so. There are numerous reasons for this spring’s unpleasantness, and they have been alternating in the headlines. On the top of the charts last week: the Greek debt crisis and fears of contagion throughout Europe and beyond.

On Wednesday, for example, Tad Rivelle, chief investment officer for fixed income at TCW in Los Angeles, an asset manager, said that there had been a “very substantial” decline in Treasury yields as investors moved to safer positions. Why? On that particular afternoon, he said, traders worried “that the day of reckoning for Greek bonds” — in which bondholders take losses as a requirement for bailouts — “may be coming sooner than the market had expected.”

The same day, the Irish finance minister said bondholders should share in the losses of battered Irish banks. And Moody’s Investors Service placed three of the largest French banks on review for a downgrade because of their holdings of Greek debt — illustrating the ramifying effects of the debt problems in Europe.

European officials were thrashing out these issues over the weekend, but other troubles are weighing on the markets, too. Take your pick.

It can be argued that investors have been reacting primarily to a slowdown in economic growth in the United States and other developed countries. Rising interest rates in emerging markets like China, where authorities are trying to control inflation by curbing growth, have not helped, either. Nor has a spike in energy prices, albeit one that has abated in recent weeks.

Americans tend to focus on the domestic economy, which grew at a rate of only 1.8 percent in the first quarter. A Labor Department report on June 1 shook up the markets. It said that unemployment had gone back up to 9.1 percent, and that only 54,000 nonfarm payroll jobs were created in May, down sharply from 244,000 in April.

“The monthly jobs report was probably the single most disturbing piece of data” among many items suggesting that the economy is sputtering, said Rich Bryant, head of Treasury trading at MF Global.

Then there is the awkward timing of the Fed’s experiment in quantitative easing, its purchases of longer-term securities. Last August, amid talk that a double-dip recession was imminent, the Fed signaled that it would resume these purchases — promptly dubbed QE2. That announcement helped end the summer doldrums, sending stocks on another leg upward.

But from the very first, QE2 was scheduled to start winding down at the end of this month. Fed officials now say they may delay actually shrinking their gargantuan portfolio — it has swollen to more than $2.8 trillion — until economic conditions improve. Further details may be forthcoming after Fed policy makers meet in Washington this week.

Crucially, however, Fed officials have indicated that they intend to keep short-term interest rates near zero for months to come. If inflation stays low and the economy remains weak, the bond market could well rally further, pushing down yields on 10-year Treasuries to as low as 2.5 percent, Mr. Bryant said.

That assumes timely resolution of another big problem: the dispute over the federal debt ceiling. If Congress doesn’t act by Aug. 2, the United States could default on its debt, an event that could be calamitous.

“The market is assuming that won’t happen,” Mr. Bryant said.

Mr. Rivelle assumes that there will be no default, but that Congress and the White House “will continue wrangling” about budget deficits for months while the economy remains weak. “That would be positive for bonds and negative for stocks,” he said.

As for Mr. Birinyi, he cites what he calls “the Cyrano Principle”: “If the problem is as obvious as the nose on your face, the chances are that everyone else knows it, too.” The markets, he said, are very good at digesting this news and adapting to it. Sooner or later, he says, “unless there is some truly dramatic surprise — and not just something the market is well aware of” — stocks will resume what he expects to be a long run higher.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=6ba44a8fc98450892eaea77a3d7cdd00

Filed Under: Economy News Tagged With: , ,

Economix: In the Jobs Report, One Big Question

June 3, 2011 by Leave a Comment

In each of the last two months, I’ve posed five big questions about the jobs report on the eve of its release. This month, there is only one big question: Has job growth slowed, as many economists now fear?

I won’t be doing as much blogging Friday as I usually do on the day of a jobs-report release. So I’ll offer my usual advice in advance: don’t pay too much attention to the unemployment rate, whatever it does. It’s based on a much smaller sample (from a survey of households) than the monthly estimate of changes in employment (which comes from a survey of businesses). The unemployment rate can also be affected by how many people have stopped looking for work and not counted as officially unemployed.

Instead, keep your eyes on three numbers: 1) the employment change in May; 2) the employment change in April (the most recent estimate, set to be revised, was a gain of 244,000 jobs); 3) the employment change in March (last estimated to be a gain of 221,000 jobs)?

Not long ago, policy makers and Wall Street forecasters were predicting that job growth would be accelerating through most of this year. So far, that has been the case. Will it still appear to be the case on Friday morning?

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=e524b0067c310aca74035efb71a32923

Filed Under: Economy News Tagged With: , ,

DealBook: Galleon Chief’s Lawyer Presses His Argument for Acquittal

April 22, 2011 by Leave a Comment

9:13 p.m. | Updated

Raj Rajaratnam’s lawyer on Thursday concluded his defense with the argument that Mr. Rajaratnam took advantage only of publicly available information

All of the inside information that Mr. Rajaratnam, the co-founder of the Galleon Group hedge fund, is accused of trading on, said his lawyer, John Dowd, was already public in the form of news articles and research reports speculating about deals and events.

“He took advantage of public information available to the whole world, and that’s why you must acquit,” Mr. Dowd told jurors.

The defense’s assertion stands in stark contrast with the insider trading case that federal prosecutors have endeavored to build over the last two months, using trading records, cooperating witnesses and most important, secretly recorded phone calls.

Mr. Dowd finished his closing statement on Thursday, and the case is expected to go to the jury in Federal District Court on Monday.

Raj Rajaratnam, the Galleon Group's co-founder, leaving federal court on Thursday as his insider trading trial heads toward a conclusion.Louis Lanzano/Bloomberg News Raj Rajaratnam, the Galleon Group’s co-founder, leaving federal court on Thursday as his insider trading trial heads toward a conclusion.

Mr. Rajaratnam, who is accused of pocketing more than $50 million in illicit profits, faces up to 25 years in prison if convicted.

During the government rebuttal on Thursday, jurors were asked to imagine themselves as the average investor, with the flurry of information that surfaces every day on the Web and in their e-mail boxes.

“Now imagine that you have all that plus you have an insider at a bunch of companies,” Jonathan Streeter, the prosecutor, told them. “Which do you think has a huge advantage?

That dispute between what constitutes insider information versus rumor and speculation remained the focus in the final days of the trial. Both sides are trying to sway jurors about the importance of knowing details of things like mergers and earnings before companies make their announcements.

Mr. Dowd spent time on Thursday disparaging the government’s cooperating witnesses, who pleaded guilty and testified about the details of the scheme.

Rajiv Goel, a former Intel executive who took the stand to tell jurors of tips he secreted to Mr. Rajaratnam, was “belligerent, hostile, uncooperative and downright bizarre,” Mr. Dowd said.

At times, Mr. Dowd seemed to take their cooperation personally, calling the arrangement one had with the government a “sweetheart deal” to avoid prison time for lying about Mr. Rajaratnam.

The Galleon networkAzam Ahmed and Guilbert Gates/The New York Times Click on the above graphic to get a visual overview of the Galleon information network.

And just as the government used recordings and transcripts of conversations to bolster their argument to jurors, so, too, did Mr. Dowd. Though he played just one recorded call, Mr. Dowd relied heavily on transcripts from the trial to highlight what he considered inconsistencies in testimony from government witnesses.

“Thank God for cross-examination,” said Mr. Dowd, who said that several of the cooperators had cracked when subjected to questioning.

Mr. Dowd spoke in a gravelly monotone with few gestures, his glasses perched atop his nose. Unlike Reed Brodsky, the prosecutor, who shouted and roamed before the jurors with an intense energy during his summation on Wednesday, Mr. Dowd had an avuncular manner and remained behind his lectern, reading notes from a binder.

Mr. Dowd tried to cast doubt on the government’s interpretation of a secretly recorded conversation in September 2008 during which Mr. Rajaratnam told his trader that he had purchased Goldman stock because “I got a call saying something good is going to happen to Goldman.” The government said that Mr. Rajaratnam was referring to Warren E. Buffett’s $5 billion investment in Goldman — news that a member of the bank’s board was accused of leaking to Mr. Rajaratnam.

“You can’t take the words ‘something good’ and turn them into Warren Buffett,” said Mr. Dowd, who argued that Mr. Rajaratnam had bought Goldman shares because of the prospect of a government bailout of the banks.

Mr. Dowd also criticized the prosecution for not calling some of Mr. Rajaratnam’s supposed accomplices to the witness stand. The government has accused Mr. Rajaratnam of engaging in an insider trading conspiracy with Roomy Khan, a former Intel employee and a trader who has pleaded guilty to passing tips to Mr. Rajaratnam from corporate insiders. But the government did not ask Ms. Khan to testify, instead relying on trading and phone records to prove its case.

“This is an insider trading conspiracy, but you haven’t heard from any of the insiders or any of the co-conspirators,” Mr. Dowd said.

He repeatedly reminded jurors that there needed to be only a reasonable doubt for them to acquit his client — even in instances when bits of the supposed tip were not yet public.

“You can’t convict Raj by splitting hairs,” he told jurors.

Mr. Dowd also sought to dismantle the government’s accusations that Mr. Rajaratnam tried to cover up his crimes. He said prosecutors were “grasping at straws” by showing an instant message in which Mr. Rajaratnam told an associate to call him instead of sending him an e-mail.

“You’ve never sent an e-mail to someone and said, ‘Call me?’ ” he asked jurors.

Mr. Streeter, the prosecutor, whose rebuttal began near the end of Thursday’s session, tried to simplify what has become an increasingly repetitive back and forth between the government and defense lawyers.

He suggested that the stock charts of the companies that Mr. Rajaratnam was said to have obtained inside information from spoke for themselves. He showed charts from Google and PeopleSupport.

Nearly all the charts showed a spike in the company’s price after the incident under scrutiny.

“The principal argument of the defense as far as I can tell is that this information was public,” he said. “The information that insiders had was not public, and the way you know that is those price charts.”

The jury’s patience with the nearly two-month long trial appeared to wear thin. As Mr. Streeter continued his summation past 5 p.m. — the hour at which the court usually breaks for the day — two jurors groaned. Another rolled her eyes and put on her coat. The prosecution continues its rebuttal on Monday. There will no court session on Friday.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=0abeaaf448f8ebe9868ce36d7059cf7d

Filed Under: Business News Tagged With: , ,