The foundation, founded after the 1997 death of the former Washington Redskins owner, was funded from the start with money that Cooke's estate got from the sale of all his worldly goods.

The worldliest and goodest good, of course, was his football team.

It now seems apparent that before his death Cooke didn't grasp just how massive his charity would be. His original last will first stipulated that the foundation reserve its scholarship gifts just for college graduates looking for a way to pay for grad school.

But then along came that $800 million windfall from Dan Snyder, far more bucks than the Redskins were expected to fetch at auction.  Throw in the proceeds from sales of Cooke's other belongings, and for a time there was some thought that Cooke's endowment could reach the $1 billion mark.

That's a lotta grad school scratch.

I wrote the following in March 1999:

By federal law, a trust has to disburse a minimum of 5 percent of its resources each year—meaning that the Cooke Foundation, if and when it reaches the billion mark, could shell out $50 million or more in grants every year, according to a report in the Philanthropy Journal.

According to figures from U.S. News & World Report's graduate school guide, for $50 million, the foundation could subsidize the entire student bodies of the Harvard, Yale, and Johns Hopkins medical schools, and still have enough cash leftover to re-sign Leslie Shepherd to a generous five-year, $6.45 million deal.

(Leslie Shepherd was a middling Skins receiver in the late-1990s, not a budding grad schooler. )

The Cooke Foundation has not yet accrued a billion dollars in reserves—current IRS records show the group had $535,480,126 in assets as of its last filings. But that's still too much money for Cooke's initial grad-school-only idea.

So, because of the huge kitty, the foundation opened its coffers to scholarly pursuits at other levels. The group now funds, for example, private prep school tuition for deserving high schoolers (such as Brielle Tucker, who went to Madeira via Cooke's largesse).

And current executive director Lawrence Kutner told me he wants to steer the foundation toward giving out more grants to youngsters pursuing the arts.

They're already in that ballgame. I recently spoke with Cynthia Nystrom, a Montgomery County resident who told me the foundation now funds her teenage daughter's music and dance training. Such niceties weren't fathomed when the ex-owner first thought about establishing a do-gooder group as his legacy. (Full disclosure: Washington City Paper staffer Ally Schweitzer is another daughter of Nystrom's.)

"For my daughter, they pay for all her ballet lessons, her piano lessons, things that she would need for those programs, such as ballet shoes," says Nystrom. "They bought her a laptop, to make sure she had acess to the internet, and provide her with a summer [dance and music] program and an advisor. Every summer she's gotten to do these great programs, nothing I could afford on my own."

"If there's one thing that Jack Kent Cooke could have done to benefit the community and the country in general, this is it," says Nystrom of the Foundation's works. "He did a good thing."

Ladies and gentlemen, the Kent Cookes! The landed gentry of Middleburg, Va., by way of a Canadian encyclopedia salesman made a United States citizen by an act of congress! They had a town named after them, and then they didn't! Late-night rides through Georgetown with a boy-toy clinging to the hood of a Jaguar! Throwing shoes at cops! Angry wills! John Kent Cooke was supposed to run the Redskins, and then he wasn't!

You can blame Dan Snyder for a lot of things. But foremost has to be depriving us of this family through his "appalling" use of the same free market system that brought them to us.

Other stuff is happening, too. Korean exorcisms, for instance. (Joe Eaton, where are you on this?) The country's least consequential gubernatorial race (1) (2)! MoDos in Crystal City! Booty walls! Check out the Web this morning, it has a ton of great stuff!

BIKE COMMUTING CORNER. Cars try to hit bicycles. They often succeed! Commuters try to defend themselves with high-visibility clothing. But sometimes a blindingly yellow jacket is not la chose juste. Dude. Get yourself some neon stickers. A couple on your helmet, one on your fender, maybe on your bag? You can provide just enough visibility to have a case in your lawsuit.

Dang! Out of time! I'm bounceville! Follow me on Twitter!

***

You don't need to read the Washington Post;s redesigned weather page to forecast the perfect shitstorm that is heading for Raljon on Monday evening.

The rest of the paper has all the evidence. There's no section of the Post that doesn't hold horrible news for Dan Snyder.

Mike Wise fills up the front page of Style with a profile of The Man Who Would Be Snyder, John Kent Cooke.

Some of the bitterness from Cooke, whose birthright to become owner of the Redskins was never exercised:

"Dan Snyder destroyed the reputation of this franchise," Cooke said. "I sure as hell don't like the way he gutted the organization after we left. And he commercialized the Redskins like my father would have never commercialized the Redskins. People brought cushions and pennants to the games. You know how they got those? My father gave them out at fan appreciation days."

Cooke also took issue with recent controversy over tickets. "Suing season ticket holders?" he said, incredulously. "My God, it's embarrassing. We would have never done such a thing."

(AFTER THE JUMP: Mike Wise dusts off Bobby Beathard to throw some jabs at Snyder? The Post's Business section tells readers that Snyder's a lousy businessman, just for the hell of it? The bingo caller line, again? The bingo caller last called plays for the Detroit Lions? How much would you have to get paid to go to a Redskins game? Eastern gets its first and last win? )

Better still, Wise dusts off long-ago general manager Bobby Beathard to unload on Snyder. While pretending to be saying how the younger Cooke would have been good for the Redskins, Beathard's really getting back at Snyder for giving him a low-ball offer to return to the team as GM in 2002, as Marty Schottenheimer was getting shown the door:

"I think he learned so much from his father [that] John would have been a great owner," Beathard said. "His dad wasn't a hands-off guy, but he wasn't a meddler. He didn't want to come over and want to watch films or tell us who to take."

Instead of paying Beathard a decent wage, Snyder rehired Vinny Cerrato.

Then, if you jump over to the Business section, Steven Pearlstein writes a few fab and devastating paragraphs about Snyder. And everything Pearlstein says is as easy to understand as, say, "The Emperor's New Clothes."

"What do you call a business that consistently overcharges its customers for an inferior product, hires the wrong people and pays them above-market wages, and yet still manages to be one of the most profitable and valuable franchises in its industry?

Here in nation's capital, we call it the Washington Redskins.

Economists, however, have a more generic name for such an enterprise. They call it a monopoly.

It should be apparent at this point that, whatever his other virtues, Dan Snyder isn't the business whiz he's cracked up to be. From the traffic jams and drunken crowds to the soggy hot dog rolls and the endless TV time-outs, a Redskins game at FedEx Field may be one of the worst entertainment experiences you can buy at any price. And that's not even taking into account the opera buffa now playing out on the field and in the locker room.

But for the fact that Washington football fans have no other choice, the Redskins by now would be in bankruptcy court, right alongside Snyder's other big fiasco, Six Flags."

The brutalest part comes later, when you realize Pearlstein's story is about an upcoming Supreme Court case, and all the Snyder hammering, beautifully written and dead-on as it is, is totally gratuitous!

Then there's the Post's sports section, which is full of the theme that all national reporters will use when the Philadelphia Eagles visit for "Monday Night Football":  The latter-day Redskins are the most messed up franchise in the NFL, and maybe in all of professional sports.

This has been said a lot lately, and will be said a lot more over the next week, but can't be said enough: Dan Snyder just promoted a bingo caller to be an NFL play caller, a job he last held in 2004 with a horrible Detroit Lions team.

Despite all Snyder's wacko meanness, it looks like Jim Zorn ain't gonna follow the owner's plan and quit. So unlike the last two Redskins coaches, Joe Gibbs and Steve Spurrier—both of whom walked away from contracts worth millions—Zorn's going to get paid.

Take THAT, Mr. Snyder!

***

Last week, the The Great Dan Steinberg reprinted a Craigslist ad he'd found before the Kansas City Chiefs game, in which a Redskins fan said he wouldn't go to FedExField—unless somebody paid him:

Don't want to go to the game? ME NEITHER. I will, however, watch my beloved Skins for a fair price...I'll only attend if the compensation is adequate.

Earlier this week, I tracked down the fan who placed that ad. The good news for Dan Snyder: That fan, Mike Stuart, says nobody offered to pay him to go watch the Redskins/Chiefs game.

"I did not get any offers, at least for what I was asking for," Stuart tells me via e-mail. "Instead, I was offered plenty of tickets FOR cash, the most laughable being 'I have 2 tickets in 417 row 15 for the Eagles on Monday Night for $150 for the pair and 2 in 133 row 21 for $260 for the pair.' I think he may have gotten this game confused with a Caps playoff game from last season."

Stuart says he's mad at his friends who used their tickets, and that he doesn't intend to go to any more games this season, and is looking forward to watching the franchise bottom out and start over.

"I don't see single winnable game the rest of the way," he says. "Funny, even though I've bled burgundy and gold my entire life, I actually see that as a good thing."

***

Have-Nots Update: In last week's Bowl for the Bottom, host Eastern defeated Spingarn, 38-12. That means Spingarn, now 0-6 and having been outscored 285-18, will be the city's only winless football team this season, barring something crazy. As for Eastern, the Spingarn game might be the last win in the school's history. Next school year, because of a DCPS reorganization plan, Eastern Senior High School will have only 12th graders, and therefore likely won't have enough players to field a team. And after that, DCPS plans to close the school at least temporarily, and some folks think permanently.

But, if Eastern is indeed going out, they didn't go out on bottom...

***

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