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Bleungberg was far too young to have ever watched Ed McMahon in action on ‘The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson’, and whose death was announced yesterday.

However, we have seen every episode of the peerless HBO series, ‘The Larry Sanders Show’, which mercilessly lampooned ‘The Tonight Show’ during its six-year run, and the roles of Carson and McMahon were played superbly by Garry Shandling and Jeffrey Tambor respectively.

Shandling, who had previously guest-hosted on ‘The Tonight Show’, had the benefit of having seen the action from an insider’s point of view, and would certainly have been influential in deciding how to portray the sidekick character of Hank as hapless, insecure and deeply unpleasant.

Central to the show’s theme was the long-running feud and deep jealousy between Larry and Hank - mirroring the real-life behind-the-scene struggle between Carson and McMahon.

But Bleungberg had no idea until watching McMahon’s obituary last night on the NBC Nightly News that some of the more outlandish elements in Hank’s character genuinely happened with McMahon - from being the constant butt of jokes, to hosting charity telethons and minor beauty contests, as well as numerous (tacky) commercial endorsements, and incredibly, McMahon’s bankruptcy which was also written into the storyline some ten years before it actually happened to McMahon!

The two most outstanding episodes in ‘Larry Sanders’ were ‘Hank’s night in the Sun’ and ‘Hank’s sex tape’.

We don’t know if McMahon ever hosted ‘The Tonight Show’ in Carson’s absence (Hank did - and he bombed), nor do we know whether McMahon had had ‘lots of pussies’ (Hank once spent a week with a prostitute in a hotel room to cure his depression, and had filmed a threesome with a couple of whores on his birthday).

All we’d imagine is that McMahon must have cringed at Hank’s depiction of him, and probably resented the negative portrayal.

We also doubt that McMahon had had a happy life. His final years certainly weren’t nice: ill-health, a bitter divorce and bankruptcy which bizarrely led to Donald Trump coming to his rescue in the face of being evicted from his Beverly Hills home.

However, we reckon he would have been pleased to have outlived Carson, and in all his obituaries, is no longer regarded as a ’second-fiddle’ but as a ‘national icon’ in his own right.

McMahon and his ego would have been pleased with that.

As predicted by Bleungberg a couple of years ago, the late, great Football Association now deservedly finds itself in a financial black hole in the region of £100m, thanks to its then greedy executives for favouring short-term gain over long-term stability by signing a record-breaking contract to cover the FA Cup and England matches with Setanta and ITV.

Brian Barwick, the ineffectual former chief executive who masterminded this deal in preference of those offered by established partners, Sky and the BBC, must shoulder the blame for all the ills which is currently swirling around Soho Square.
In 2007, with TV rights up for renewal, what Sky-BBC offered was only marginally less money than Setanta-ITV, but infinitely much more stability in the long-run.

Back then, the newbie sports channel wasn’t even an established name and was determined to break the dominance of Sky in the lucrative market of sports broadcasting.

Burly Barwick - a former head of sports at both ITV and the BBC - must have known then that the Setanta-ITV option would be a risky choice. Yet, he didn’t listen to those who had warned him of such a deal, and let the extra digits get the better of him.

All we’ll say is that you take on Sky at your own peril, and now that Setanta has gone bust, I doubt any upstart would dare challenge Rupert Murdoch again - even ESPN.
And all that leaves the FA with a financial blackhole to plug. No doubt, a new contract will be found with a new broadcasting partner - and for less money.

In the meantime, it once again brings into question the business acumen and disastrous leadership of Barwick.

Not only had he bungled the TV deal, but under his watch, Wembley Stadium lurched from one crisis to another, and who can ever forget his massive cock-up(s) over the severance of Sven Goren Eriksson, the subsequent failed courting of Luis Felipe Scolari, as well as the embarrassing appointment/swift sacking of the hapless Steve McClaren?!

Awful results on the pitch were also not helped by Barwick’s failure off-pitch by his inability to engage the FA by bringing it into the new century, including the continuing cronyism which still dogs the higher echelon of the organisation - men who don’t actually know much about running football - as well as never devoting enough money to tackle racism through a task force.

The FA is still trying to find its feet after a horrendous decade, and much of its current malaise originate from Barwick’s short tenure.

It is only right that it demands Barwick to hand back some of the severance pay and put them into better use.

It’s barely June, yet, 2009 is already turning out to be an above-average year for horse-racing fans.

From the top of my head, I can name at least half a dozen races which can be described as ‘memorable’.

There’s the epic Cheltenham Gold Cup (the best Gold Cup that Bleungberg has seen) between Kauto Star and Denman.

Also at Cheltenham, few will ever forget Tony McCoy’s amazing ride on Wichita Lineman in a spellbinding renewal of the Willian Hill Chase. The same pilot was also on board when driving home Hennessy to an unlikely victory in the bet365 Gold Cup.

On the level, there was Mine That Bird’s incredible run up the rails in the Kentucky Derby, followed by a near-miss in Preakness two weeks later when defeated by the gallant filly Rachel Alexandra.

Meanwhile, back on these shores, we had a thoroughly decent renewal of the 2000 Guineas in May, whose winner Sea The Stars then defied the statistics by landing a top-class Derby at Epsom on Saturday - the first horse to to the double since Nijinsky in 1970. Of course, just the day before, racegoers had been thrilled by a three-way photo-finish to the Coronation Cup.

Honestly, if foot-and-mouth were to intervene and cancels racing until January 2010, we still have a lot to look back upon.

But with the bulk of the racing year still to go, we could be in for a massive treat in the upcoming seven months. The only problem is that by the end of it, it could well be a near-impossible task to decide the race of the year.

As the men’s game scales new heights, women’s tennis continues to languish and slip under the public radar, largely due to a lack of personality and competitiveness in the WTA tour.

Despite a lucrative combination of headline sponsorship and TV rights in place for the next few years, few people seem to care about the women’s game right now.

The public’s cavalier attitude was brutally exposed by the number of empty seats at the Philippe Chartrier Court for the women’s final in Paris last Saturday.

The final itself wasn’t much of a spectacle anyway - two sets, both horribly one-sided, and over in a little less than eighty minutes - contested between two of the least charismatic players ever.

That’s not to say that there wasn’y any exicting matches before the final. In fact, it was wonderful to see many of the top players struggle against their lesser opponents: Dementieva, both Williams sisters, Sharapova, the Serbians etc etc.

And therein lies the problems at the heart of the women’s game: there’s no one outstanding or dominant player or headline act to really draw in the crowds.

The current world number 1, Dinara Safina (below) is 0-3 in slam finals. Her predecessor, Jelena Jankovic, is 0-1. Two successive world number 1s, and not a Slam title between them.

The rest of the top 20 are made up of either half-assed players (Serena, Venus), mentally-frail individuals (Dementieva, Ivanovic, Safina), or nasty grunters/screechers as well as a whole bunch of players no one’s ever heard of before!

The recent exhibition event at Wimbledon to celebrate the opening of the roof at Centre Court featuring Steffi Graf and Kim Clijsters merely served as a reminder of the glorious past, and the desperate state at which the women’s game is in right now.

Charismatic players such as Mauresmo, Hingis, Davenport are all gone, and the greatest of them all, Justine Henin, called it a day when she’d had enough (of winning, presumably).

The women’s tour badly needs Henin back.

She won’t budge, of course.

All of this makes her fellow countryman Kim Clijsters’s imminent return to the tour all the more important, and it really couldn’t come soon enough.

Before that, don’t be surprised by a shock women’s champion at SW19 this July….our tip is Jelena Dokic. Last seen limping off court 2 at Roland Garros late one evening.

Well, it never looked likely at one stage.

Bleungberg predicted this time last year that Roger Federer would clinch his record-equalling 14th Grand Slam title at Flushing Meadows in August - assuming that he’d win his sixth Wimbledon crown.

But that was derailed when Rafael Nadal triumphed at SW19, which in turn delayed his quest by at least a slam.

He duly won a fifth title at the US Open, thus taking his tally to 13, and many then assumed that he’d make history at the following slam - the Australian Open 2009.

Again, he didn’t - beaten in an epic by Nadal, as Federer threw away the fifth set.

Next up was the French title at Roland Garros, and after a hat-trick of defeats in the final meant surely nobody ever gave him a chance that he’d complete the slam in Paris.

Indeed, Bleungberg was so pessimistic of the Swiss’s chances that we practically wrote him off for Roland Garros, ad also Wimbledon 2009, and reckoned he’d equal Pete Sampras’s record at the US Open later this year.

So, what has he done? He won the French, and with Nadal on the injury list, has a real chance of securing his sixth Wimbledon title and a 15th slam at SW19!

Who could’ve thought, eh?

MANNING

BOYLE

MANNING

BOYLE

The People’s Republic of China’s intransigence to the 20th anniversary of the ‘June 4 Massacre’ came as no surprise to anybody this week.

Curiously, that very same day twenty years ago also marked a watershed moment in Iran’s modern history, for, whilst the tanks were rolling into the centre of Beijing, the uber-evil Ayatollah Khomeini took his last breath, and passed away aged 86.

Khomeini, the founding father of the Islamic Republic of Iran, was and is still widely revered by many Iranians though the choice between he and his equally repugnant predecessor, Reza Shah, is a tough call in terms of who was worse so we’ll take the wailing and tears over his death with a pinch of salt.
Both men ruled Iran with an iron fist, and ruthlessly eliminated every single opponent by any means.

So what would they have made of the unprecedented series of live presidential debates between the various candidates, in particular the incumbent Ahmadinejad and the ‘reformist’ candidate Mousavi’s TV exchange on the 20th anniversary of Khomeini’s death, and a mere 10 days before the big vote.

It was a heated affair, with both candidates accusing one another of corruption, weak and for lying to the electorate.

There were euphoric scenes across Iranian cities, with massive crowds watching the face-offs on giant screens as if they were watching a football match.

The polls are apparently much tighter now than before, and with a few more debates still to come before election day, it promises an exciting climax to this fascinating presidential race.

Khomeini would be turning in his mausoleum grave!

Twenty years on, Bleungberg can still vividly remember the night when the tanks rolled into Tiananmen Square, bullets flying in every direction as the Chinese ‘public safety officers’ and PLA ran amok in suppressing those brave young adults.

The overwhelming image which has remained with us to this day - the 20th anniversary of the massacre - is not the one with the student stood before the tanks. Rather, it was on that same boulevard, but at night, with only the dimly-lit lamppost’s visible on camera, and one could clearly hear wailing and sound of bullets going on somewhere nearby.

The Hong Kong media was simply heroic in its non-stop coverage of the massacre even though many working on the story would’ve been terrified of reprisals after the handover.

By risking all in order to beam pictures of the gaunt, hungry and defenceless students to the viewers, they helped galvanise and confirm Hong Kong residents’ already negative perception of the Communist government.

The massacre tipped them into collective revulsion and widespread panic less than a decade before the handover.

Naturally, many people fled and emigrated to the west soon afterwards, including a large number of the journalists who reported on the scene chose to work behind the camera or in newspapers rather than settle into the cushy job of news anchors on local Chinese channels.

Bleungberg occasionally comes across them on TV whilst on holiday in Canada, the thought of ‘what would have happened had ‘June 4′ not taken place’ recurs every time.

As does this: just how many people’s lives changed forever after ‘June 4′?

Below: Hong Kong university students’ vigil to mark the anniversary

Having ‘ruined’ seven women’s lives, and having packed someone off to jail for eight months, and then vowed to stay away from the ‘entertainment industry’, sex-photo celeb Edison Chen returned to Hong Kong this past week to ’sort out some business’ on his now-penniless father’s behalf.

Some people love attention so much that they just cannot stay out of the limelight.
This is the same person who cost Hong Kong’s taxpayers thousands of dollars by refusing to stand trial in former British colony for fear of reprisals, only to touch down at HKG International Airport on a scheduled flight minus his bodyguards and in full glare of the media!

This piece of shit clearly needs a slap in the face and his cocky attitude will not sit well with the triads who were calling for his head just over a year ago.

In addition to this high-profile return, he also gave an interview to CNN’s ‘Talk Asia’ (see below), as well as having a photo shoot with a Chinese magazine - semi-nude, and - despicably - with ’scars’ drawn on his back to highlight his miserable ‘plight’ over the past 18 months - all part of a campaign to rehabilitate his battered image.

Good grief. Some people really never learn, do they?!

Five summers ago, when Bleungberg was working in horse-racing, one of the few things he was tasked with by the editor was to write obituaries.

Bleungberg wrote five in all - and two were published within a few months - you just got to work out the likelihood of when someone might pop his clogs.

Three drafts, however, sat in the database - and probably lost forever - as Bleungberg moved on.

All five were written because two were getting very old, whilst the other three were rumoured to be in ‘poor health’.

Two of those in ‘poor health’ passed on rather quickly, whilst another now languishes under house arrest in Manhattan. Remarkably, however, the two elderly subjects lived on.
It was therefore with great sadness that Bleungberg learned of the passing of Vincent O’Brien - easily the greatest horse-racing figure of them all - today at the age of 92.

He was aged 87 when the obituary was first written - and was in fact, the first one that Bleungberg did.

Dr O’Brien, pictured with his 1955 Grand National winner Quare Times above and the 1970 Triple Crown winner Nijinsky below, was without equal in the sport - both on and off the racetrack - and whose achievements will never, ever be matched. Crucially, he left behind an incredible legacy in the all-important bloodstock world.

‘The greatest of them all’ just about covers it.

Major victories - a feat highly unlikely to be matched, let alone surpassed.

Champion Hurdle: Hatton’s Grace 1949, 1950, 1951.

Cheltenham Gold Cup: Cottage Rake 1948, 1949, 1950, Knock Hard 1953.

Grand National: Early Mist 1953, Royal Tan 1954, Quare Times 1955.

2,000 Guineas: Sir Ivor 1968, Nijinsky 1970, Lomond 1983, El Gran Senor 1984.

1,000 Guineas: Glad Rags 1966.

Oaks: Long Look 1965, Valoris 1966.

Derby: Larkspur 1962, Sir Ivor 1968, Nijinsky 1970, Roberto 1972, The Minstrel 1977, Golden Fleece 1982.

King George VI & Queen Elizabeth Stakes: Ballymoss 1958, Nijinsky 1970, The Minstrel 1977.

St Leger: Ballymoss 1957, Nijinsky 1970, Boucher 1972.

Irish 2,000 Guineas: El Toro 1959, Jaazeiro 1978, King’s Lake 1981, Sadler’s Wells 1984, Prince Of Birds 1988.

Irish 1,000 Guineas: Valoris 1966, Lady Capulet 1977, Godetia 1979.

Irish Derby: Chamier 1953, Ballymoss 1957, Nijinsky 1970, The Minstrel 1977, El Gran Senor 1984, Law Society 1985.

Irish Oaks: Ancasta 1964, Aurabella 1965, Gaia 1969, Godetia 1979.

Irish St Leger: Barclay 1959, White Gloves 1966, Reindeer 1969, Caucasus 1975, Meneval 1976, Transworld 1977, Gonzales 1980, Leading Counsel 1985, Dark Lomond 1988.

Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe: Ballymoss 1958, Alleged 1977, 1978.

Breeders’ Cup Mile: Royal Academy 1990.