If our waking hours are a canvas, the art is how one fills it: tightly packed, loosely, a little of both. At a time when they were both 40 and the art scene in ’70s New York was in thrall to street-centered youth of all stripes, real-life writer Linda Rosenkrantz asked her close friend, photographer Peter Hujar, to make a record of his activities on one day — Dec. 18, 1974 — and then narrate those details into her tape recorder the following day at her apartment.
The goal was a book about the great mundane, the stuff of life as experienced by her talented confidants. In Hujar’s case, an uncannily observant queer artist and key gay liberation figure planning his first book, what emerged was a wry narrative of phone calls (Susan Sontag), freelancing woes (is this gig going to pay?), celebrity encounters (he does an Allen Ginsberg shoot for the New York Times) and chance meetings (some guy waiting for food at the Chinese restaurant). The Hujar transcript, recovered in 2019 sans the tape, was ultimately published as “Peter Hujar’s Day.”
Now director Ira Sachs, who came across the text while filming his previous movie “Passages,” has given this quietly mesmerizing, diaristic conversation cinematic life as a filmed performance of sorts, with “Passages” star Ben Whishaw perfectly cast as Hujar and Rebecca Hall filling out the room tone as Rosenkrantz. (They also go to the roof a couple of times, which offers enough of an exterior visual to remind us that New York is the third character getting the time-capsule treatment.)
From the whistle of a tea kettle in the daylight as Hujar amusingly feels out from Rosenkrantz what’s required of him, to twilight’s more honest self-assessments and a supine cuddle between friends who’ve spent many hours together, “Peter Hujar’s Day” captures something beautifully distilled about human experience and the comfort of others. For each of us, any given day — maybe especially a day devoid of the extraordinary — is the culmination of all we’ve been and whatever we might hope to be. That makes for a stealthy significance considering that Hujar would only live another 13 years, succumbing to AIDS-related complications in 1987. It was a loss of mentorship, aesthetic brilliance and camaraderie felt throughout the art world.
Apart from not explaining Hujar for us (nor explaining his many name drops), Sachs also doesn’t hide the meta-ness of his concept, occasionally offering glimpses of a clapperboard or the crew, or letting us hear sound blips as it appears a reel is ending. There are jump cuts too, and interludes of his actors in close-up that could be color screen tests or just a nod to Hujar’s aptitude for portraits. It’s playful but never too obtrusive, approaching an idea of how art and movies play with time and can conjure their own reality.
The simple, sparsely elegant split-level apartment creates the right authenticity for Alex Ashe’s textured 16mm cinematography. The interior play of light from day to night across Whishaw and Hall’s faces is its own dramatic arc as Hujar’s details become an intimate testimony of humor, rigor and reflection. It’s not meant to be entirely Whishaw’s show, either: As justly compelling as he is, Hall makes the act of listening (and occasionally commenting or teasing) a steady, enveloping warmth. The result is a window into the pleasures of friendship and those days when the minutiae of your loved ones seems like the stuff that true connection is built on.
Like many young men these days, Kamaldeep Dhanoa, a lanky 17-year-old, knew he wanted to do something with his life, be a part of something, but didn’t quite know what that meant.
Coming up with a career was important. But even more, it was finding the right friends — discovering what he wanted to be a part of.
He did both when he joined Improve Your Tomorrow, a mentorship organization for teenage boys and young men — that vulnerable, chronically online demographic from which Charlie Kirk drew many of his most ardent supporters, and where so much of our societal angst is focused in the wake of his death.
Now a senior at Florin High School in a suburb outside Sacramento, Dhanoa has a plan to become a paramedic, and more importantly, has those friendships that help him feel not just connected, but included and valued.
His something.
“I just know I have brothers around me,” he told me Tuesday. “We’re always with each other. It gives you, like, a sense of security. So if you’re feeling down, you could always, always rely on them.”
Dhanoa was hanging out in his school’s gym with Gov. Gavin Newsom, who dropped by to announce the California Men’s Service Challenge, an effort to recruit 10,000 Golden State males to serve as mentors to boys such as Dhanoa, so more boys can find their something.
It’s a worthy effort and before you jump to thinking it’s a reaction to Kirk, I’ll point out that 10 years ago, California’s first partner, Jennifer Siebel Newsom, made a documentary about the crisis of connection and identity facing young men, “The Mask You Live In.”
Recently, her husband caught up.
To be fair, a lot of us have been slow on the uptake when it comes to understanding why so many young men seem drawn to the obvious loneliness and disconnection of chronically online lives.
Kamaldeep Dhanoa, 17, and Michael Lynch helped Gov. Gavin Newsom announce his new statewide initiative to engage more men in volunteer and mentorship work.
(Anita Chabria/Los Angeles Times)
“Touch grass” has become a generation’s cultural shorthand to describe both the isolation and cure for people who seem so deep into a virtual world that the real one has lost meaning. It’s a dismissive way of looking at a problem that doesn’t begin and end with boys.
But, if we didn’t see it earlier, Kirk’s killing has made it clear that there are too many boys that need to be pulled back from the brink of a very bad something. One that is less about left or right and more about exactly who and what those boys stumble upon inside those ethereal spaces that most parents can’t even find, much less understand.
“We’ve got to get these kids back,” Newsom said. “They’re very susceptible young men. They’re very vulnerable online.”
Even more concerning, when the nihilism of the darkest corners of the internet catches up to their psyches, “young people weaponize those grievances,” Newsom said — whether that anger turns inward or outward.
Suicide among young men has increased. In 2023, the male suicide rate was about 23 deaths per 100,000 men, nearly four times higher than for women, a number that has been climbing for years (albeit with some slight dips). Sadly, women attempt suicide more often, but men have a higher rate of completion, often because they use more deadly means such as guns.
But lonely boys are also more prone to commit violence on others, maybe especially when they mix their anger with politics. Once recent study by social epidemiologist Julia Schleimer at the University of Washington School of Public Health found that individuals who reported having few social connections were, “more likely than others to support political violence or be personally willing to engage in it in one form or another.”
For reference, about 15% of men have no close friendships, according to a recent poll by the Survey Center on American Life. Newsom puts that figure even higher for young men, with “one in four men under 30 years old reporting that they have no close friends, a five-fold increase since 1990.”
Kirk stepped into that gap, providing meaning and belonging not just through his podcasts, where he was best known, but through the grassroots Turning Point USA organization that gave thousands of young people (of both sexes) both an ideology and, equally as important, real-world connections and events.
“Obviously Charlie Kirk was a master at not only the work he did online, but offline, and his capacity to organize and engage,” Newsom said.
Whether you agreed with Kirk’s views or not (and I did not agree on many points, including matters of race, sexual orientation, immigration or the meaning of patriotism), he created that something that is missing for so many young people. He created a vision of an America that needed to be saved, and could be saved, through a dedication to a certain kind of family and a certain kind of faith. As Newsom described it of his own effort, young people don’t just want a cause. They want to feel invested, they want to feel an “obligation to give back.”
If Newsom’s recent foray into Trump-esque social media proves anything, it’s that he’s willing to learn, even emulate, success — wherever he finds it. Newsom is trying to offer the belonging that Kirk supplied, seeped not in the exclusion and rigidity that Kirk embodied, but in California values.
“It’s about building an inclusive community of all different kinds of voices,” Michael Lynch told me of the California Challenge. He’s the co-founder and chief executive of Improve Your Tomorrow, the organization Dhanoa belongs to.
Lynch said kids get all kinds of benefits from mentors, but when he asks what those are, the sentence usually starts, “Now that I have friends…. “
The outcome of the effort to bring boys out of the virtual world is all about who those friends are, who pulls them out.
Our boys don’t just need to touch grass, they need to be around men who don’t seek to impose values, but teach them how to craft their own, how to believe in themselves before they believe in something someone is selling.
“What the world needs is your authenticity,” Newsom told a teenage journalist who covered the event for the school newspaper. “And so I just hope we take a deep breath and discover the most important, powerful thing in the world, and that’s who you are.”
If Newsom’s effort inspires just one good man to step up and help a kid figure that out — who they are, and how to believe in themselves first and forever — it will be something.
John L. Burton, the proudly liberal and pro-labor lawmaker who shaped California politics and policy over six decades on topics as varied as welfare, foster care, auto emissions, guns and foie gras, has died. He was 92.
With his brother, Rep. Phillip Burton, and college buddy, former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, Burton was integral to the organization that dominated Democratic politics in San Francisco and the state starting in the 1960s.
Burton was elected to the Assembly in 1964 and Congress a decade later. Laid low by cocaine addiction, he did not seek reelection in 1982. But he returned to Sacramento after getting clean and became the Capitol’s most powerful legislator as Senate president pro tem from 1998 until term limits forced him to retire in 2004.
“I think government’s there to help the people who can’t help themselves. And there’s a lot of people that can’t help themselves,” Burton said, describing his view of a politician’s job in an oral history interview by Open California.
Burton’s death was confirmed in a statement released by his family on Sunday.
“He cared a lot,” said Kimiko Burton, his daughter. “He always instilled in me that we fight for the underdog. There are literally millions of people whose lives he helped over the years who have no idea who he is.”
An L.A. Times writer described Brown, always dapper and cool, as a piece of living art. In contrast, Burton was performance art — rumpled, often rude, too fidgety to sit in long policy meetings. Some people sprinkle conversation with profanities. Burton doused his sentences with expletives, usually F-bombs.
John Burton with then-California Atty. Gen. Kamala Harris and Sen. Dianne Feinstein in 2011.
(Rich Pedroncelli / Associated Press)
He was quick to yell but could also be charming. He bought pies from a fruit stand off Interstate 80 between San Francisco and Sacramento and delivered them as apologies to targets of his rants. An aide once gave him a T-shirt with the phrase: “I yell because I care.”
Unlike most politicians, who dress to the nines, Burton wore ties reluctantly and showed up at meetings with governors wearing guayaberas, rarely with his hair in place. When cameras weren’t around, he drove through San Francisco delivering blankets to homeless people.
One of Burton’s many intensely loyal aides was Angie Tate, whom he hired to be his political fundraiser in 1998 knowing she was pregnant with twins. After she gave birth three months early and tried to return to work, Burton insisted that she take a year off, fully paid. She worked with him for the rest of his days.
In later years, he created John Burton Advocates for Youth, a nonprofit group to mentor foster youth and seek policy changes. One such bill extended services for foster youth until age 21, rather than the previous cutoff of 18.
“I don’t think there is a person who has done more for foster kids than John Burton,” said Miles Cooley, a Los Angeles entertainment attorney who was in foster care when he was a child and sits on the board of Burton’s foundation. “He wasn’t speaking truth to power. He was yelling it.”
From his early days in public life, Burton, a lawyer and Army veteran, advocated for greater civil rights, opposed the death penalty, and was an antiwar activist, protesting U.S. involvement in Vietnam in October 1963, when the U.S. had fewer than 17,000 troops there.
As state Senate leader four decades later, Burton joined folk singer Joan Baez at a protest of President George W. Bush’s impending invasion of Iraq. As California Democratic Party chair from 2009 to 2017, he presided as the party changed its platform to oppose capital punishment.
“John Burton was liberal when it was popular to be liberal and he was liberal when it was not popular. I always admired that,” said former state Sen. Jim Brulte, a Republican who tangled with Burton in the Legislature and later when they chaired their respective political parties.
A party chair’s job is to win elections. That requires money. In 2008, the year before Burton took over the state Democratic Party, the California Republican and Democratic parties raised and spent roughly equal sums. By 2016, his final campaign as chair, the Democrats were outspending the Republicans $36.2 million to $17.7 million.
He promoted a ballot measure in 2010 that allows the Legislature to pass the annual budget by a simple majority rather than the previous two-thirds supermajority, allowing the Democrats to pass a legislative session’s most important measure — the budget — without Republican votes, further marginalizing the GOP in Sacramento.
Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco), then-Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Oakland), Los Angeles County Supervisor Hilda Solis and state Treasurer Fiona Ma were among the politicians, most of them women, who joined Burton on the convention stage in 2017 for his farewell as party chair. Former state Sen. Martha Escutia serenaded him with a rendition of “Bésame Mucho.”
“John is the chief architect of the Democrats’ dominance in California,” Pelosi said at the time.
Burton paid tribute to the people who had helped him, saying, “You’re only as good as your staff,” and closed by exhorting party loyalists to raise their middle fingers and give a Burton-like cheer to then-President Trump.
Although Burton was a partisan, his closest friend in the Senate was Ross Johnson of Fullerton, who was Senate Republican leader. Sharing a quirky love of song, the unlikely duet interrupted a Senate floor session with a rendition of “Big Rock Candy Mountain.”
They also shared a distrust of authority and collaborated to curb law enforcement’s ability to seize individuals’ assets without a trial. Burton and Johnson shaped campaign finance law with a ballot measure permitting political parties to accept unlimited donations, enhancing parties’ power. As a sweetener for voters, the measure required rapid disclosure of contributions.
John Lowell Burton, born in Cincinnati in 1932, was the youngest of three brothers. After his father completed medical school in Chicago, the family relocated to San Francisco, where Dr. Burton cared for patients whether they could pay or not.
Burton lettered in basketball at San Francisco State College and kept a clipping of a newspaper box score showing he scored 20 points against a University of San Francisco team that included young Bill Russell, one of the greatest basketball players of all time. He met Brown at San Francisco State and they became lifelong friends. A bartender in his younger days, Burton was arrested for bookmaking in 1962, but was cleared.
The Burton brothers reflected a dichotomy in California politics, rising from the left while Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan ascended from the right, against the swirl of the Bay Area’s brand of radical politics. John Burton and Brown won their Assembly seats in 1964, the same year that voters approved a ballot measure backed by the real estate industry giving property owners the right to refuse to sell to people of color. Courts later overturned it.
The Burton-Brown organization spawned a who’s who of leaders, including two San Francisco mayors — George Moscone, who was a high school friend, and Brown, the most powerful Assembly speaker in California history. Burton was a friend of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s father, a state appellate court justice, and watched young Gavin’s high school sports games. Brown gave Newsom his start in politics with an appointment.
Barbara Boxer worked for John Burton during his time in Congress, before succeeding him in 1982 and winning a U.S. Senate seat a decade later. When Boxer retired in 2016, Brown helped promote Boxer’s successor, Kamala Harris.
Pelosi is most consequential of all. Phillip Burton’s widow, Sala Burton, succeeded him in Congress. As she was dying of cancer, Sala Burton told John that she wanted Pelosi to succeed her, and he used all his connections to help Pelosi win the congressional seat in 1987.
Outgoing California Democratic Party Chairman John Burton at the California Democratic State Convention in 2017.
(Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times)
In November 1978, Burton declined an invitation from Rep. Leo Ryan, a Democrat from San Mateo, to accompany him to Guyana to investigate the People’s Temple cult, once a force in San Francisco politics. On Nov. 18, as Ryan’s plane was about to depart with cult defectors, one of cult leader Jim Jones’ followers assassinated the congressman. Jones led a murder-suicide resulting in more than 900 deaths.
On Nov. 27, 1978, with the city convulsed by the Jonestown cataclysm, Dan White, a former San Francisco supervisor, sneaked into City Hall and assassinated Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk.
Burton fell hard in the months and years after, drinking heavily, huffing nitrous oxide and freebasing cocaine. He missed congressional votes, and aides feared he would be found dead. In 1982, he checked into a rehab facility in Arizona and did not seek reelection.
Burton’s eclectic circle of friends included national political figures, Hollywood glitterati, football coach John Madden, North Beach topless dancer Carol Doda and, from his bartending days, Alice Kleupfer, a cocktail waitress.
In this small world, Kleupfer’s son James Rogan won an Assembly seat from the Burbank area as a Republican in 1994, was elected to Congress in 1996, and helped lead the impeachment of President Clinton. Politics aside, Burton and Rogan shared a connection through Kleupfer.
That friendship mattered on May 30, 1996, when Republicans, holding a short-lived 41-39 seat advantage in the Assembly, rushed to approve tough-on-crime bills. One bill would have made it a crime for pregnant women to abuse drugs, a response to accounts of babies born addicted to cocaine. The GOP-led Assembly seemed certain to pass it when Burton stood to speak.
Though not a commanding orator, Burton spoke from the heart about how cocaine “takes total control of your life,” and how he spent days freebasing in hotel rooms, refusing maid service because he didn’t want anyone to see him.
“It took me, somebody who at least has got a fair set of brains sometimes, who comes from a background that is not deprived, who at the time I was doing it — and I’m not proud to say — was a member of the House of Representatives, and it took me two years to get off this drug, which is the most insidious drug you can imagine,” Burton said.
Floor speeches rarely change minds. But after Burton pleaded with Republicans not to “turn these young women into criminals,” Rogan, then-Speaker Curt Pringle and a few other Republicans withheld their votes. With the bill pending, Republicans conferred behind closed doors and quietly dropped the bill.
“It wasn’t planned. It wasn’t scripted. It was pure John Burton,” said Rogan, who went on to become a Superior Court judge in Orange County. Burton was the only Democrat who had the relationships and gravitas to derail the bill.
For most of his time in office, Burton served under Republican governors. He butted heads with them and on occasion won them over.
When young Assemblyman Burton sought to decriminalize marijuana, Reagan, implying that Burton was a nut, quipped that the San Franciscan was the one man in Sacramento who had the most to fear from the squirrels that populate Capitol Park. Burton answered by calling reporters to the park and trying to feed squirrels a copy of some Reagan-backed legislation.
“There’s some benefit to people thinking you’re nuts,” Burton said in an interview.
Though he was a relatively junior legislator, Burton took a lead role in Reagan’s 1971 welfare overhaul, pushing for annual cost-of-living adjustments for welfare recipients, something he fought to protect over the years.
He disparaged Gov. Pete Wilson, a Marine Corps veteran, for his efforts to limit welfare by calling him “the little Marine.” Burton had a “wicked sense of humor and a “colorful” way of expressing it” but was “a straight shooter,” Wilson said.
“With respect to legislative leaders, as Democrats, I would say that the combination of John Burton and Willie Brown negotiating budget and policy solutions during a time of crisis in the Reagan Cabinet Room was some of the finest policy and political talent California has ever seen,” Wilson said.
Voters elected Burton to the state Senate in 1996, and senators elected him Senate president pro tem in 1998, the year Gray Davis was elected governor, the first Democrat to hold that office after 16 years of Republicans. The relationship was strained.
In appearance, temperament and approach, they were opposites, and they clashed. Davis was a centrist who tried to be tightfisted. Burton, often dismissive of Davis, tried to pull him to the left. When it suited their interests, however, Davis signed legislation that Burton advocated, and Burton carried administration legislation.
“It ain’t brain surgery,” Burton said in 2021 of the art of turning a bill into a law. But few legislators could handle a lawmaking scalpel like Burton.
As Senate leader, he shepherded legislation to buy the last large stands of old-growth redwoods, increase public employee pensions, restrict guns and expand the right to sue, including for victims of sexual harassment. He was the target of such a suit in 2008. It was settled a few months later.
Burton routinely blocked legislation that increased the length of prison sentences but was a favorite of the California Correctional Peace Officers Assn., which represents prison guards. He was, after all, pro-labor.
In 2002, Burton carried legislation ratifying the prison officers’ contract negotiated by the Davis administration granting officers a raise of roughly 35% over five years, and boosting their pensions. Later that year the union, run by the fedora-wearing Don Novey, celebrated Burton’s 70th birthday by donating $70,000 to his campaign account.
Often, Burton sought no credit for what he helped others accomplish, as Fran Pavley discovered. In 2001, her first year in the Assembly, Pavley, an Agoura Hills Democrat, proposed far-reaching climate change legislation to authorize the California Air Resources Board to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from vehicle tailpipes.
Lobbyists for automakers shifted into overdrive, airing ads warning California that AB 1058 would dictate what cars people could own. The oil industry, drive-time talk radio hosts, and even Cal Worthington and his dog Spot piled on. AB 1058 looked like roadkill.
Burton’s solution: Hijack another bill and insert the contents of Pavley’s bill into it. With that bit of legerdemain, AB 1058 died, AB 1493 was born, and the auto industry’s campaign crashed.
Burton didn’t attend the ceremony when Davis signed the bill. Nor did he accompany Pavley a decade later when President Obama held a Rose Garden ceremony embracing the California concept in nationwide fuel-efficiency standards.
Pavley said she had never seen a politician work so hard for a bill for no credit, ”and I haven’t seen it since.”
Burton took special interest in certain issues. He was, for example, appalled at the force-feeding of ducks and geese to enlarge their livers to produce foie gras. In one of his final bills, he battled restaurant owners and agricultural interests to ban the practice. It passed the Senate by one vote.
In a letter urging Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to sign the bill against the wishes of some chefs, he included Burtonesque doggerel: “Save Donald Duck. F— Wolfgang Puck.”
Schwarzenegger signed the bill and sent Burton a photo of himself and Burton in the governor’s office looking at the bottom of the governor’s shoe with a note: “I got duck liver on my shoe!” In the background of the photo, there’s an image of Reagan, smiling with his head tilted back as if he’s having a good laugh.
Burton, who was divorced twice, is survived by his daughter, attorney Kimiko Burton, and two grandchildren.
Times staff writer David Zahniser contributed to this report.
The record for the amount paid for a basketball card is about to be broken by Kobe Bryant on what would have been his 47th birthday … with some help from his “big brother,” Michael Jordan.
The 2007-08 Upper Deck Exquisite Collection Dual Logoman Autographs card featuring Bryant and Jordan is up for bid online at Heritage Auctions. Bidding closes Saturday at 8 p.m. PDT, with extended bidding available at that time.
As of early Friday afternoon, bidding for the one-of-one card had reached $7.015 million, including the 22% buyer’s premium added to the successful bid. That already shatters the current record price garnered by a basketball card — the $5.9 million paid for the 2009-10 Panini National Treasures Stephen Curry Logoman Autograph card in a 2021 private estate sale.
With more than a day still remaining for bids, it’s still tough to tell what the new record might end up being.
“Most likely, it’ll end up somewhere in the $8-million range,” Heritage director of sports collectibles Chris Ivy told The Times late Friday morning, although he added that he “wouldn’t be shocked” if it went for $10 million or more.
The most anyone has paid for any sports card is $12.6 million for a 1952 Topps Mickey Mantle card in a 2022 Heritage auction. The Curry card currently sits at No. 4 among all sports cards.
The Dual Logoman Autographs series of cards features the images and signatures of two iconic players, as well as NBA logo patches from a game-worn jersey from each player. Jordan appeared on eight such cards and Bryant was on 11, but this is the only one that paired the two of them.
“It’s the only one that has Kobe and Jordan on it, and it has both their Logoman logos, and it’s signed by both,” Ivy said, “and so kind of all those factors combined together to make this the top card for modern card collectors. And we’re seeing that in the price that it’s generating right now.”
Chicago Bulls’ Michael Jordan eyes the basket as he is guarded by the Lakers’ Kobe Bryant on Feb. 1, 1998, at the Forum.
(Vince Bucci / AFP via Getty Images)
Cards featuring Jordan and Bryant individually haven’t brought in nearly as much cash, with Jordan’s top seller going for $2.93 million in 2024 and Bryant’s going for $2.3 million earlier this month.
Ivy said it is a coincidence that the auction is ending on Bryant’s birthday.
The beloved Los Angeles icon and daughter Gianna were among the nine people who died in a Jan. 26, 2020, helicopter crash in Calabasas. Jordan was one of the speakers at the father and daughter’s public memorial held on Feb. 24, 2020, at Staples Center.
“Maybe it surprised people that Kobe and I were very close friends,” Jordan said. “But we were very close friends. Kobe was my dear friend, he was like a little brother.”
He added: “What Kobe Bryant was to me was the inspiration that someone truly cared about the way that I played the game or the way that he wanted to play the game.
“He wanted to be the best basketball player that he could be. And as I got to know him, I wanted to be the best big brother that I could be. To do that you have to put up with the aggravation, the late-night calls or the dumb questions. I took great pride as I got to know Kobe Bryant that he was just trying to be a better person, a better basketball player.”
Former NFL linebacker and special teams player Bryan Braman, who rose from undrafted free agent to Super Bowl champion, died Thursday morning after a battle with cancer. He was 38.
“You look at his journey and beating the odds to make it to the NFL after going undrafted,” Braman’s agent Sean Stellato told KPRC-TV in Houston. “Not only making it, but producing and becoming a world champion, he had a real hard journey. … To die at age 38, the game of football and his family are hurting today. He was a staple for what football and underdogs are about.”
Stellato told the station that he had learned from one of Braman’s closest friends that the former Long Beach City College player “took his last breath while surrounded by friends and family.”
Braman graduated from Shadle Park High School in Spokane, Wash., and redshirted for a year at Idaho before playing at LBCC in 2007 and 2008. He transferred to West Texas A&M in 2009.
After going undrafted in 2011, Braman signed with the Houston Texans and remained for three seasons, playing in 46 games, mostly on special teams. In the final game of his rookie season, Braman earned the admiration of Texans fans when he tracked down and tackled Tennessee’s Marc Mariani after losing his helmet earlier in the play. The following season, Braman was a Pro Bowl alternate on special teams.
“We are deeply saddened to hear about the passing of Bryan Braman,” the Texans wrote on X (formerly Twitter). “Our thoughts and prayers go out to the Braman family during this difficult time.
“During his four seasons in Philadelphia, Bryan was a loyal teammate, a supporter of the community, and a valuable member of our Super Bowl LII-winning team,” the Eagles said in a statement. “More importantly, he was a devoted father who passionately loved his family and everyone around him.”
According to a GoFundMe page set up for Braman in February, he was battling “a very rare form of cancer.” Several of Braman’s former teammates contributed to the fund, including retired Texans defensive end J.J. Watt, who donated $10,000.
On Thursday, Watt also paid tribute to his late teammate on X.
“Rest in Peace brother,” Watt wrote in a post that also featured a photo of Braman in his Texans uniform. “Gone far too soon.”
John C. Harris, California horse-racing mogul, had a particular love for the thoroughbred breeding and racing sector of his company, Harris Farms.
Multiple horses that were raised and trained at Coalinga-based Harris Farms went on to become national champions, including Tiznow, the 2000 Horse of the Year, and California Chrome, a national Hall of Fame racehorse. A close friend recounted Harris’ reaction to the latter thoroughbred winning the 2014 Kentucky Derby.
The moment California Chrome sprinted over the finish line, tears streamed down Harris’ face.
“It was just knowing that his farm had such a major role,” said his good friend Doug Burge. “It was probably the most fun we ever had.”
Those who knew Harris described him as an acclaimed rancher, farmer and horse-racing enthusiast who devoted himself to his passions to the end. Harris Farms confirmed his death in a statement shared on July 3. No details, including cause of death, were provided.
Harris was born on July 14, 1943, and resided in Fresno County all of his life. He earned a degree in agricultural production at UC Davis before serving in the U.S. Army for two years.
Harris took ownership of Harris Farms following his father’s death in 1981. He oversaw all operations of the ranch, which encompasses a thriving farm that produces more than 30 types of crops including garlic, pistachios and wine grapes, as well as the horse-breeding operation, according to its website. Harris Farms was known for the beef it produced, but the cattle-raising portion of the business was sold in 2019.
Harris nurtured a steadfast passion for horse racing and the thoroughbred breeding industry in Northern California, according to friends and family. He was a former president and board member of the California Thoroughbred Breeders Assn. and served on the board of the Thoroughbred Owners of California and the National Jockey Club. According to those who worked with him, he shaped the horse-racing industry into what it is today.
“He had a love for the land, everything from farming to raising horses,” said Burge, the current president of the CTBA, who knew Harris as a mentor and friend for more than 30 years.
Harris was a longtime, dedicated advocate for the agricultural industry, according to Oscar Gonzalez, the vice chairman of the California Horse Racing Board who previously served as assistant secretary of Agriculture during the Biden administration.
“Mr. Harris was just a phone call away,” he said. “When I was in Washington, D.C. … and I needed a point of reference or background information on an issue involving agriculture, or water or immigration, he was always somebody that had context in that background.”
One of Harris’ last advocacy efforts was just a couple of weeks ago, when he fought to reinstate live horse racing at the Big Fresno Fair, a proposal that was ultimately unsuccessful.
“We will never give up continuing this storied tradition of Fresno racing. Today’s story is not the end — we will come back again next year,” Harris said, according to the Business Journal.
Justin Oldfield, a thoroughbred breeder and a chairman of the CTBA, said that Harris wanted everyone in the industry to be successful, always offering mentorship and help to those who needed it.
“For as successful as a businessman as he was, you would have never have known it from the way he treated you,” Oldfield said. “John was an extremely humble, down-to-earth individual that treated everyone with respect, treated everyone like they had value.”
He said that he once went to a horse racing industry event honoring Harris with more than 3,000 attendees.
“I can’t even imagine how many people are gonna be at his funeral,” Oldfield said.
Harris is survived by his wife, Cookie, and others “whose lives were enriched by his strength of character and enduring compassion,” the statement from Harris Farms said.
