It wasn't that shocking, unfortunately, to learn that Michael Jackson had died young, but now here's a news flash that's even less surprising: Lenny Dykstra is broke!
UPDATED: Phillie-turned-would-be stock-option guru Lenny Dykstra owes more than $10 million to JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and other creditors, and owns less than $50,000 to pay them with, his Los Angeles bankruptcy filing says. NEW: Read Dykstra's bankruptcy filing
"Sometimes the difficult decisions in life are the most necessary," Dykstra wrote me in an email. "In the end, the restructuring will definitely be a good thing."
As a baseball fanatic I'm not here to condemn the Dude -- after all, the man did excel for both the team of my misguided youth and my mature baseball choice, the Phillies -- but I am here to condemn someone. That would be those financial writers and gurus who produced glowing profiles of Dykstra and his idiot savant stock-picking abilities back in the mini-boom of the mid-1990s, when a guy with darts could have been a brilliant stock picker. Remember the Jon Stewart takedown of CNBC that resonated with so many people. This is another sterling example of badly misguided business journalism at work.
To bring the thing full-circle, no one was a bigger fan of Dykstra's alleged financial talent than the man who was completed demolished by "fake" newscaster Stewart, and that was CNBC's Jim Cramer. As Cramer told HBO back in the halcyon days:
Cramer: "If I didn't know any better I would tell you that everything you hear from Lenny is an act. Because there's no way that he would ever, that you would ever feel like he's as smart as he really is, if you listen to him. Now, there are probably four or five people in the world who, if they sent me an e-mail, told me to learn a stock, I would actually take them seriously."
Goldberg: "And he's one of them?"
Cramer: "He's one of them. He's one of them."
Will Bunch, a senior writer at the Philadelphia Daily News, blogs about his obsessions, including national and local politics and world affairs, the media, pop music, the Philadelphia Phillies, soccer and other sports, not necessarily in that order.
E-mail Will by clicking here.
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