Cleaning out the Inbox: Passings

Time continues to move on, people leave us every day and we keep trying to pay our respects to those that have recently left us.

Goodbye to Borje Salming at the age of 71.

The hockey Hall of Fame member was the first Swede to be voted into the Hall in 1996 and was named one of the 100 greatest to play the game in 2017.

Salming was the league's first Swedish star when he signed with Toronto before the 1973-74 season and would spend sixteen seasons with the Maple Leafs before finishing his career with one season with the Detroit Red Wings in 1989-90.

Known for his smooth skating, Salming never won a Norris Trophy for the league's best defenseman but finished as the runner-up twice and made the end-of-the-season All-Star first or second team on six occasions.

Salming's number 21 was retired by Toronto and he still holds the franchise record for career assists.

Goodbye to John Hadl at the age of 82.

Hadl won an AFL title in 1963 with the then-San Diego Chargers and was named an AFL All-Star four times before moving to the Rams and Packers in one of the worst trades in football history, that we wrote about recently.

Hadl appeared in three AFL title games with the Chargers and holds an NFL record that will almost certainly never be broken as Hadl is first on the list for tie games for a starting quarterback with nine.

Hadl would also coach the Los Angeles Express for two of the three seasons of the original USFL's existence, leading the Express to the Pacific Division title before losing in the Western Conference championship game to the Arizona Wranglers.

In Jeff Pearlman's recent book on the USFL, "Football for a Buck" Hadl is the subject of a story that involves the Express releasing defensive end Greg Fields and the ensuing fistfight between Hadl and Fields.

Goodbye to Gaylord Perry at the age of  84.

Perry, the long-time master of the spitter, greaser, and any other substance that he would claim would help a baseball, won over three hundred games in his career that spanned eight different teams with his best seasons with the Giants and Indians.

Perry won over twenty games on five occasions with his best season as an Indian in 1972 when Perry finished 24-16 with an ERA of 1.92 winning the first of his two Cy Young awards after being obtained in the off-season from the Giants for lefthander Sam McDowell.

Perry's second Cy Young came after a 21-6 season with San Diego in 1978 at the age of 39 with the first Padres team to finish with a winning record.

Perry wrote a book during his tenure in Cleveland entitled "Me and the Spitter" with all sorts of stories about various ways and items that he could use to move a baseball but "would no longer employ" which was equally about getting batters to think about Perry's routine as much as it was to make a few bucks off the book!

I bet I read that book a hundred times as a kid and remember buying it from another kid one day in school for my lunch money of the day.

One day without lunch was money well spent!

Goodbye to Brad William Henke at the age of 56.

Cherie brought me the news of the passing of Brad William Henke.

Henke was a fourth-round draftee of the New York Giants in 1989 from Arizona but was released in camp before being claimed by the Broncos where he would play his only season.

Henke moved into acting with many roles in film and television with his most famous regular role as a security guard on the Netflix series "Orange is the new Black".

I've never watched that series, so to me his most famous role was "Coover Bennett", one of the Bennett Clan in the FX classic "Justified" in most of the show's second and arguably best season.

Henke also appeared in one episode of "The Office" during its final season as "Frank" a warehouse worker who vandalizes Pam's artwork and she responded by vandalizing his truck, which introduces "Brian" from behind the camera in one of the show's worst ideas.