Author Archives: Tom

The Mickelson Affair

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Mickelson%20050107.jpgPhil Mickelson has had quite a year already — one PGA Tour win, blowing another one on the 18th hole, replacing swing coaches. But none of that compared to the firestorm that Philly Mick provoked last week when he got a pass from the PGA Tour brass on playing in the Byron Nelson Golf Tournament Pro-Am because bad weather prevented him from flying into Dallas the night before the Pro-Am. Normally, missing a Pro-Am — which is considered a necessary nuisance by most PGA Tour players — means that the offending Tour player is not allowed to play in the tournament. However, an exception was made in Mickelson’s case, even though it is pretty clear than Mickelson could have made his tee time if he had been willing to get up early enough and fly into Dallas on the morning of the Pro-Am. PGA Tour member Robert Allenby spoke for the vast majority of players:

“He came here, was on site and he elected to go somewhere else, knowing the weather was going to be crappy. He took the risk. Take the risk and you pay the penalty.”

And Doug Ferguson chimes in with this piece about the Tour’s double-standard with regard to playing in Pro-Am’s:

In 2005, Chad Campbell wanted to play the 84 Lumber Classic ñ the tournament even had his wife sing at one of its functions ñ but he asked out of the pro-am Wednesday to attend his grandmotherís funeral. The Tour made him choose between the pro-am and the funeral, and Campbell withdrew from the tournament. [. . .]
Wes Short Jr. wanted to skip out on a pro-am because his father was about to have quadruple bypass surgery, but he had to choose between the pro-am and spending time with his father.

But leave it to a Houstonian — the always entertaining Steve Elkington — to bring a sense of perspective to the situation:

“They’ve opened themselves up to a dangerous precedent,” Elkington said of the tour. “Next time it’s raining in Houston, I might call and say I can’t get there.”
“That being said, this tournament needs Phil Mickelson. Look at the crowds. You’ve got to give the guys who carry the tour a bit of slack. That’s always been there. We’re in the business of entertaining people.”
As Elkington spoke, thousands of spectators swarmed along the 18th hole, trying to catch a glimpse of Mickelson, . . .

By the way, Geoff Shackleford — the best golf blogger around in my book — has put together an entire category of blog posts attempting to keep up with Philly Mick.

More on the Tiger Chasm

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PGA_TourLogo2.gifIn this column, the Chronicle’s chief golf writer has seen the Tiger Chasm that is gobbling up Texas’ PGA Tour events and he does not like what he sees:

If the first half of the season is any indication, the gap between the marquee events and all the others is getting wider than ever. For every WGC event that has dibs on the top 64 players, there’s a Bob Hope making do with only one player ranked in the top 10 when the season began. For every Nissan Open landing every top-10 not named Woods, there’s a New Orleans event without any star power.
Look for the summer events to suffer a talent drain, because the top players will be bracing themselves for a season-ending, four-week playoff run.
Maybe the season will build to a crescendo as the playoffs draw closer, but that isn’t helping Tampa, Houston, Dallas, Fort Worth, New Orleans or Memphis much.
A show of hands from all of those captivated by whether Kenny Perry can hold on to his one-point lead over Steve Lowery for the 144th ó and final ó playoff spot. The white coats will be along shortly with the straightjackets.
Yes, 144 players will make the first round of players. In other words, 19 players who aren’t good enough to finish in the top 125 ó the threshold for keeping a tour card ó will make it to the playoffs. Even the NCAA knows better than to water down its basketball tournament that much. . . .
Make no mistake: The new system should produce a season with a better flow. The season has some sort of ending instead of fizzling out in the fall. Clearly, though, there is too much disconnect between the marquee events and the mundane.

Campbell goes on to wonder whether the Texas PGA Tour events have seen the last of Tiger Woods:

Has Tiger Woods played a PGA Tour event in Texas for the last time?
Woods skipped the only Texas tournament in his regular schedule, the Byron Nelson, for the second consecutive year. With Nelson no longer around to answer, don’t be surprised if Woods forsakes that event unless it lands a date more suitable to his schedule.
Woods’ only appearance at the Texas Open in San Antonio was in 1996, when he was trying to earn his PGA Tour card. He played Colonial in 1997, tying for fourth, and hasn’t been back since. Though Woods has never played the Shell Houston Open, he has teed it up in Houston four times. Woods played the Tour Championship at Champions Golf Club in 1997 (12th), 1999 (won), 2001 (13th) and 2003 (26th). With Atlanta’s East Lake established as the home of the Tour Championship for the foreseeable future, it’s highly unlikely Woods will make another competitive appearance in Houston.

An appropriate image

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Yao%2005_04_23_vs_mavericks2.jpgThe Houston Rockets are engaged in a first round Western Conference playoff series with the Utah Jazz, which plays a style of basketball that reminds one of professional wrestling. Inasmuch as the Rockets play a rather plodding style of ball that revolves around their two stars — Tracy McGrady and Yao Ming — and attempts to minimize below-average players at the point guard and power forward positions, the first four games in this series have bordered on being unwatchable.
The fifth game in the series took place in Houston last night and began in the same boring manner as the first four. Then, midway through the second quarter, seemingly out of nowhere, the style of play quickened for both teams, players on both teams began hitting shots that they had previously missed for much of the series, and presto! — a real NBA playoff game broke out. The Rockets went on to win the surprisingly entertaining affair to take a 3-2 lead in the best of seven series.
One of the absurdities of NBA basketball is that the referees are often wildly inconsistent in the way in which they call fouls on certain dominant centers, allowing the opposing teams to pummel away on the big guys relentlessly without calling fouls, while calling fouls against the center that the refs wouldn’t think of whistling if the same action was inflicted on the center. Wilt Chamberlain was probably the first NBA center to endure this treatment, but many others — including Shaquille O’Neal recently — have experienced the same thing.
Well, the Rockets’ Yao is definitely experiencing this syndrome in the current series as the Jazz players hammer away on him with impunity. One image from the end of last night’s game speaks volumes about the absurdity of this syndrome. With over three seconds left in the game with the Rockets up by four points, Yao grabbed a rebound of a missed Utah shot and was grabbed by Utah’s Carlos Boozer to stop the clock. Although Utah’s chances were slim at that point, 3+ seconds in an NBA game is still enough time to get off a shot or two. Nevertheless, the referees refused to call a foul on Boozer, no matter how much he grabbed Yao. With a resigned look of “what the hell,” Yao finally just tossed the ball to one of the refs as the final few tenths of a second ran off the clock and started trudging toward the locker room, with scatches and bruises all over his arms clearly visible.
So it goes in the life of a big NBA center.

The Hurwitz conviction

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Hurwitz050207.jpgYou probably have already heard by now that Dr. William Hurwitz (previous posts here) was convicted this past Friday afternoon on 16 counts of drug trafficking for prescribing opioid prescriptions to his chronic-pain patients. The New York Times’ John Tierney — who deserves an award for his coverage of the trial and the sad case of Dr. Hurwitz — interviewed three of the jurors after the trial and his findings are disturbing:

[The jurors] said that the jury considered Dr. William Hurwitz to be a doctor dedicated to treating pain who didnít intentionally prescribe drugs to be resold or abused. They said he didnít appear to benefit financially from his patientsí drug dealing and that he wasnít what they considered a conventional drug trafficker.
So why did find him guilty of ìknowingly and intentionallyî distributing drugs ìoutside the bounds of medical practiceî and engaging in drug trafficking ìas conventionally understoodî? After attending the trial and talking to the jurors, I can suggest two possible answers:
1. The jurors were confused by the law.
2. The law is a ass (to quote Mr. Bumble from ìOliver Twistî).
I canít blame the jurors for being confused, because thatís the norm in trials of pain-management doctors. The standard prosecution strategy is to charge the doctor on so many counts and introduce so much evidence that the jurors assume something criminal must have happened. Their natural impulse, after listening to weeks of arguments, is to look for a compromise by digging into the mountain of medical minutiae ñ and getting in so deep that they lose sight of the big picture.

According to Tierney’s inteview, the Hurwitz jury essentially convicted Hurwitz of not examining his patients adequately. Remarkably, the jurors were candid with Tierney that they did not understand the legal standard of “outside the bounds of medical practice.” Rather, they just decided “to go with our gut.”
Sound familiar?
Dr. Hurwitz’s conviction is troubling for medical professionals on several levels, not the least of which is described by a doctor in the following comment to Tierney’s post:

The Hurwitz persecution scares the bejabbers out of me. If I refuse to treat pain adequately that is a criminal offense. If I over treat pain that is a criminal offense. If I cannot tell a smooth, practiced, professional liar from real pain that is a criminal offense. I am expected to be all things to all people, omnipotent and infallible – and if I fail I will be stripped of my license or sent to prison.
Just recently I received a phone call that one of my patients was selling my narcotic prescription on the street. Was this real, a crank call, or a sting operation by the prosecutor? My only avenue of survival was to immediately file a complaint against the patient with BAYONET (a narcotics strike force). Welcome to 1984, Hurwitz jurors. So now that you have forced me to survive by turning people in to the secret police, how do you feel about coming to me and discussing your personal issues?

The message is clear. Pain specialists better be careful who they treat — and undertreat those patients who they elect to take on — or risk going to jail as a result of America’s draconian drug prohibition policy. The doctor-patient relationship has just become much more complicated. And not for the better.

O’Toole on Houston’s urban planning

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rotoole.jpgCato Institute fellow Randal O’Toole was in town last week as the invitee of a Houston Property Rights Association luncheon and, by Tory Gattis’ account, provided an entertaining lecture on the overreaching nature of centralized urban planning and wasteful rail transit systems in various cities around the country. The Chronicle’s Rad Sallee caught up with O’Toole while he was in town, and notes the following observation by O’Toole on the impact of Houston’s biggest urban boondoggle:

Question: You say that for the most part, Houston gets it right, while Portland (Ore.), where you used to live, is a textbook example of government gone wrong. A lot of people would say it’s just the reverse.
Answer: Except for the light rail part, Houston really is a model for how urban planning ought to be done ó which is privately.

By the way, O’Toole has a new blog focusing on urban economics called the Antiplanner. Check it out.

OTC.07

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OTC_logo_450.jpgOne of the biggest and most interesting annual Houston conventions is taking place this week at Reliant Park, the 2007 edition of the Offshore Technology Conference (previous posts here). See my previous posts for background on the conference, and the Chronicle’s Tom Fowler is blogging this year’s conference. Regardless of whether you are involved in the energy industry, the exhibit area of the OTC is fascinating and well worth a few hours if you can score a ticket.

The myth of clutch hitting

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biggiomissing043007.jpgAs the Stros’ hitters continue to strand baserunners by the dozens, most of you are undoubtedly having to endure comments on the radio and elsewhere such as “the Stros are not good at hitting in the clutch” or they “are not good at situational hitting.”
As this hilarious Fire Joe Morgan post explains, those comments are mostly blather. Extensive statistical analysis of baseball statistics over the years has shown that there is rarely any meaningful difference between a hitter’s performance in “clutch” versus “non-clutch” situations. Rather, a combination of bad luck and weak overall hitting are the true reasons why teams go through periods such as the Stros are enduring now in which they leave a large number of runners on base.
The fact that the Stros are 10th out of the 16 National League clubs in both on-base average and slugging percentage has much more to do with the Stros leaving a large number of runners on base than any lack of “clutch hitting.” By the way, after Sunday’s loss, that $100 million off-season acquisition, slugger Carlos Lee, has generated 5 fewer runs than a merely average National League hitter would have created using the same number of outs as Lee has made so far this season, a .290 on-base average and a paltry .738 OPS.

Is it the farm subsidy? Or the processed food subsidy?

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junkfoodjunky.jpgMichael Pollan, the Knight professor of journalism at the Cal-Berkeley and the author of ìThe Omnivoreís Dilemmaî (earlier post here), has been writing a series of op-eds for the New York Times in which he is addressing in an abbreviated manner various nutritional issues that he covers in his book. In this recent piece, Pollan examines why calorie-intensive processed foods have such a relatively cheap price at the supermarket in comparison to fresh fruits and vegetables:

For the answer, you need look no farther than the farm bill. This resolutely unglamorous and head-hurtingly complicated piece of legislation, which comes around roughly every five years and is about to do so again, sets the rules for the American food system ó indeed, to a considerable extent, for the worldís food system. Among other things, it determines which crops will be subsidized and which will not, and in the case of the carrot and the Twinkie, the farm bill as currently written offers a lot more support to the cake than to the root. Like most processed foods, the Twinkie is basically a clever arrangement of carbohydrates and fats teased out of corn, soybeans and wheat ó three of the five commodity crops that the farm bill supports, to the tune of some $25 billion a year. (Rice and cotton are the others.) For the last several decades ó indeed, for about as long as the American waistline has been ballooning ó U.S. agricultural policy has been designed in such a way as to promote the overproduction of these five commodities, especially corn and soy.
Thatís because the current farm bill helps commodity farmers by cutting them a check based on how many bushels they can grow, rather than, say, by supporting prices and limiting production, as farm bills once did. The result? A food system awash in added sugars (derived from corn) and added fats (derived mainly from soy), as well as dirt-cheap meat and milk (derived from both). By comparison, the farm bill does almost nothing to support farmers growing fresh produce. A result of these policy choices is on stark display in your supermarket, where the real price of fruits and vegetables between 1985 and 2000 increased by nearly 40 percent while the real price of soft drinks (a/k/a liquid corn) declined by 23 percent. The reason the least healthful calories in the supermarket are the cheapest is that those are the ones the farm bill encourages farmers to grow.

Read the entire piece.

Richard Justice, Texans Cheerleader

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justice042907.gifAs noted in this earlier post, Chronicle sportswriter Richard Justice was a devoted supporter of the Charlie Casserly tenure as Texans general manager far beyond the time that most reasoned observers had concluded that Texans ship was leaking profusely. After the Texans bottomed out at the end of their horrid 2005 season, Justice finally turned on Casserly with the same vehemance that he previously used in supporting him. Since then, Justice has routinely mocked Casserly and former Texans coach, Dom Capers.
Now, on the heels of this weekend’s NFL Draft, Justice is drinking the Kool-Aid again with regard to the tenure of the Gary Kubiak/Rick Smith regime with the Texans:

The Texans are going to be a long time escaping their past. But these are not the Texans of 2004 or 2005. Check the facts. They haven’t done a single dumb thing since Charley Casserly left the organization. Not one. They’ll win your confidence only by winning on the field. That’s why next season will be interesting.

H’mm. Kubiak and Smith haven’t done “a single dumb thing” since taking over? That offense from last season sure could have fooled one into thinking that Kubiak and Smith had done a “dumb thing” or two since coming on the scene.
Frankly, my sense is that the Texans draft this year was rather underwhelming (an opinion shared by one local draft expert). Okoye, the number one draft choice, is a fairly raw 19 year old playing at a position (defensive tackle) in which he will be pitted against wily veterans; it’s by no mean certain that he will be any more successful next season than first round draft choice Mario Williams was last season. The Texans next draft choice — third round WR Jacoby Jones (the Texans didn’t have a second round pick) — does not even appear likely to start next season. In fact, absent injury, none of the Texans’ 2007 draft choices outside of Okoye are sure bets to be in the starting lineup for the Texans next season.
Granted, it might actually be a good thing if most of the Texans’ 2007 draft choices aren’t expected to start next season because that would indicate that the Texans are developing the type of depth that is necessary to contend for the playoffs in the NFL. Likewise, those draft choices cannot be fairly evaluated for several years. But Justice’s chronic cheerleading for the Texans is better left for the team’s website, not for a newspaper that is supposedly dedicated to providing objective analysis of news events.

Capitalism Rorschach Test

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subprime%20042907.jpgIn this clever and insightful post, Warren Meyer provides a handy Rorschach Test for how Americans view capitalism and markets by using the competing views toward the adjustment that has been taking place in subprime mortgage markets over the past several months.
Guess how Loren Steffy and Ben Stein test out? If you need a hint on Stein, see this Larry Ribstein post.