Orson Welles once begged out of a party at Gore Vidal's house in Los Angeles by saying: "I have an early call tomorrow. For a commercial. Dog food, I think it is this time. No, I do not eat from the can on camera but I celebrate the contents. Yes, I have fallen so low."

But not nearly to the depths to which NBC sunk in Beijing. With Bob Costas dripping sincerity and Brian Williams gurgling hyperbole, the peacock network did not so much cover the Olympics as celebrate American medaling. Instead of the Summer Games, we got B-picture melodrama, flag-waving, gaudy nationalism, endless promos for NBC's fall lineup and tight close-ups of weepy athletes.
       
Lost amid these Crying Games has been the death of a towering, though largely unsung pioneer of sports and finance, Henry "Harry" B.R. Brown.

In the business world, the 82-year-old New York investment banker was best known for co-inventing the money-market mutual fund in 1969, and creating a $3.5 trillion industry.
   
After retiring to his hog-and-cattle farm in Leesburg, Virginia, the former chairman of the fund manager the Reserve devoted much of his time to his hobbies: fireworks and trebuchets—the latter, medieval siege weapons that went out of production around 1350.
   
Brown helped build and bankroll catapults for long-distance pumpkin launching in the World Championship Punkin Chunkin Contest, an annual two-day rite of autumn that fills the skies of southern Delaware with airborne squash. From 2000 until 2003, Brown co-captained a team that reigned over the trebuchet division.
   
His interest in catapults sprang, in part, from far-flung exploits reported in the now-defunct Heave magazine. Not a journal devoted to regurgitation, Heave was the official publication of the International Hurling Society, an organization based in Fort Worth, Texas, dedicated to the art, science, and sport of throwing things.
   
The topics in Heave ranged from the origins of the mounted crossbow to the use of armadillos for trapshooting. By the mid-1990s, Heave engineers had allegedly designed a catapult capable of pitching a Buick across two football fields.

Brown first flipped his gourd in 1999 after attending the world championships with neighbor Chris Gerow, a retired I.B.M. computer engineer. Gerow had built his own weapon of mash destruction, a wooden catapult that could throw a gallon jug of water 120 feet.  

At the '99 Punkin Chunk, Brown and Gerow watched dozens of fruit-flingers assemble in a soybean field with their homemade hurling devices to vie for supremacy. Veteran chunkers called the sport "poetry in commotion."
   

The ingenious contraptions included outsize crossbows, pneumatic cannons, three-story slingshots, and V8-engine-powered centrifuges. In the Chunk, explosives are prohibited.
   
"Harry and I were instantly hooked," Gerow recalls. "We called our wives and told them that we wouldn't make it back home that night. We stayed through the weekend."
   
With the support of friends and other fans of things-that-go-splat, Brown and Gerow set about perfecting their own catapult. Prince Valiant won the inaugural Adult Trebuchet face-off in 2000. The contraption's 487-foot fling outpaced its closest rival by 35 feet.
   
In 2001 Gerow designed King Arthur, whose 643-foot blast was some 150 feet longer than the second-place finisher.

"We tested out prototypes on Harry's 570 acres," he says. "We'd go through as many as 40 pumpkins a day." King Arthur was not, Gerow insists, inspired by the Holstein-slinging catapult in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
   
The next year, he and Brown faced a stiffer challenge in Punkin Hammer. The Maryland-based contrivance was powered by a 2,500-pound falling weight six times as heavy as King Arthur's. Still, King remained king, establishing a new divisional record of 927 feet.
   
King Arthur again finished at the top of its class in 2003, breaking the 1,000-foot barrier by 150 feet. The following fall saw the arrival of Yankee Siege, the world's heaviest (anchored by a 5 1/2-ton counterweight) and tallest (70 feet high, including throwing arm) mechanical trebuchet.
   
The gravity-fed rookie from New Hampshire propelled a pumpkin 1,394 feet, eclipsing Punkin Hammer by more than three yards. King Arthur, at 1,133 feet, had to settle for third. (That same year, Old Glory, an air-powered cannon, set the course record of 4,224 feet).
   
Ever since then, King Arthur has placed second to Yankee Siege. Pushed by a robust tailwind, Yankee Siege set the trebuchet standard (1,684 feet) in 2005. Brown had prepped King Arthur for the showdown by using it to launch watermelons at an Independence Day party on his spread.
   
This fall, Gerow plans to unveil Merlin, the grand wizard of trebuchets. "All I can say is ‘Wow!'" Gerow says.

"At the 2008 Punkin Chunk, I'm dedicating every chunk to Harry."
   
Happily, Harry Brown's body will not lie a'moldering in his grave. Some of his ashes have already been scattered by skyrocket. Merlin may well take care of the rest.