So, I may miss a time when the only team uniforms that had black or gray in them were the ones that had those as part of the team colors; when all World Series games were played in the sunshine; when a bowl game was just a bowl game not (your corporate name here) bowl game; when I did not have to get “up close and personal” with an athlete, just admire his performance on the field or court or ice, but acceptance is the only healthy response. And ceasing to care is a regrettable option.

I am sad that the culture and character of sports I grew up with and which gave me so much pleasure is long gone and not coming back. But like Phil Elliott (played by Nick Nolte) says (quoting 1st Corinthians) at the end of the movie North Dallas 40 when he quits football, apparently it is, as I near my ninth decade, “time to put away childish things,”

Bob Stiles is a pseudonym.
Send comments to garver51@protonmail.com

Acknowledgements: Many websites provided details that refreshed or corrected my memories about the events described here, and provided facts surrounding the events, and most especially allowed me to pinpoint exact dates of games I viewed or attended.

I do not wish to suggest that the world of sports of my youth and young adulthood was a prelapsarian paradise.

Pro sports were businesses then, too, but small ones, dominated by men who treated owning a sports team like owning a racehorse, a gentlemanly pastime. But they also treated their ballplayers miserably—indentured servants to the reserve clause. Colleges made money on men’s basketball and football, but not so much as to erode their integrity as educational institutions, unlike today.

Television is the prime mover in the changes in the world of sport, and the money it generates for the pro leagues and big universities is the source of today’s corruption. Television began (like radio before it) broadcasting sporting events. Then, when the money began rolling in, sporting events became television shows—a big difference. Games are now played when the networks wish them to be played, because the money being laid out for the TV rights gives them the muscle to demand it; advertising revenue, not what is best for the game or its fans is the prime mover. Thus we have the obscenities of Sunday night baseball; night World Series games going past midnight on school nights (so much for the baseball commissioner’s commitment to “the children.”); football games on almost every night of the week instead of just Saturday and Sunday afternoons; over expansion—teams, games, playoff games, bowl games. The phenomenon of a .223 hitting infielder being paid 18 million dollars a year in 2021 is just one more sign of the decadence of pro sports today. And now we have the leagues partnering with gambling operations, which can only lead to further corruption.

And then there are the sportscasters with their logorrhea, jargon, and meaningless stats—launch angle, exit velocity, high pointing the ball, etc.–that obfuscate rather than illuminate the game. Ou sont les Red Barbers and Marty Glickmans d’antan? I have found that when I do watch a game these days, I do it with the sound off. And I do not find the 24/7 sports yak shows on radio and television and the proliferation of Internet sports sites (sports yak in print, not sports writing) to have added any value—its little insight, commonplace opinions, and always at the top of its voice. Hell is Max Kellerman and Stephen A. Smith on an eternal loop. I rarely read anything written with the grace of a Red Smith, or with insight into the game that Thomas Boswell or Paul Zimmerman brought to their work.

Next, there is what Christopher Lasch called “the culture of narcissism,” born in the late 60s, which has created several generations of preening, “look at me” athletes—the children of Muhammad Ali (bragging, nasty taunting), Jimmy Connors (temper tantrums), and Mark Gastineau (one of the progenitors of what New York Post sports columnist Phil Mushnick calls the “choreographed immodesty,” which is now legion). There is more posing today on the football field and basketball court than there is in a RuPaul drag show, fueled by 24/7 TV and social media. Add in today’s social media taunting and hissy fits (where 13-year-old boys become 13-year-old girls), and the infantilization of the modern athlete is complete. That many now find it appropriate to express their political opinions (but only certain sanctioned opinions) on the field and court, with the blessings of the owners and commissioners, is the latest manifestation and a further turn off.

But then the whole idea of manliness is under attack. Men used to play sports with stoicism and the passion was assumed in the players’ obvious effort and determination and its results. Now one cannot make an important strike out pitch or basket or tackle without making a face usually reserved for the completion of a sexual act, flexing muscles, or thumping one’s chest. Kids used to look to athletes to get clues as to how to behave as an adult; now they get the message it is OK to be perpetually childish.

What was once a somewhat austere activity modeled on a Greek ideal of competition, is now a Roman orgy of spectacle coarsened further with laser lights, fog machines, Las Vegas showgirl cheerleaders, garish and vulgar Super Bowl halftime shows, endless TV promos with the players preening. Where once there were athletes, there are now gladiators.

I have not watched hockey or basketball in over twenty-five years–too many teams, too many games, too many teams qualifying for the playoffs. And basketball’s emphasis on the individual styling of the slam dunk and the excessive gunning and loitering at the three-point line (the worst rule change in the game’s history) has killed the team game I loved.

In 2019 I stopped watching baseball, something I never expected would happen.

The strikes, the look the other way response to PED usage that has befouled the record book forever, eroded much of my loyalty, and now, like basketball, it has reduced the game to two power elements: the strikeout and the homerun–the final blow for me. When I first began watching baseball, there were more than twice as many hits as strikeouts. For the past couple of years, there have been more strikeouts recorded than hits for the first time in history.

Time of games has steadily increased to the point that 4-hour plus games are no longer an anomaly. Watch a kinescope of a 50s World Series game, and notice the crispness of the pace. Players get on and off the field quickly; pitchers do not vacillate like Hamlet on the mound (“To throw the slider or the fastball. . .”), there were no batting gloves that needed to be constantly readjusted, no chronic pitching changes dictated by analytics, no endless replay confabs. Most games ended between 2-3 hours. Baseball players, too, have also succumbed to “look at me” posing. I am especially amused by batters gazing admiringly at home plate as their apparent home runs fall short, only to see doubles turn into singles and triples turn into doubles, because they did not hustle out of the batters’ box. Elaborate bat flipping has become rampant, and the commissioner tells the kids that it is “fun.”

Baseball in person, once a great pleasure for me, became a chore in the early nineties. I loved going to the games at Memorial Stadium in Baltimore. It may have been a dump, but it was a place of real, spontaneous enjoyment where the game was paramount. The current downtown stadium blasts music between innings so loud you have to shout to have a conversation with your neighbors, the cheers are orchestrated over the PA system, and the enormous video screen is in constant agitation creating isolation instead of camaraderie among fans and distracting them from the game. I stopped going after a few years.

All of this and more took most of the luster off the joy of seeing the Red Sox, Cubs and White Sox and Washington DC get off the schneid. And for the first time in 71 years I cannot tell you who won any of the season awards for the past two years. I did not watch one inning of baseball in 2020, and only a few post-season innings in 2019. I am vaguely aware the Dodgers won the World Series in 2020, but I couldn’t tell you whom they beat without looking it up.

Football is the only sport I still watch, not because it does not suffer for the ills I have mentioned, but because it is a short season where all the games still mean something. But I mosly watch Saturday and Sunday afternoons, and rarely watch at night.

It always amuses me that the team I spent the least time watching and rooting for in my youth became, in my renascence of fandom, the team who inspired my most lunatic, bordering on the psychotic, allegiance–the New York football Giants. And that my devotion to them started at the beginning of their long slough of despond from 1964 to 1981 makes it seem even funnier in retrospect.

Although being a Giants fan during those years was not funny at all. They were mediocre at best, and every Sunday was usually a time of gnashing of teeth and rending of garments, accompanied by too much alcohol. The best part was during my New Haven years having fellow sufferers with whom to watch the games, another dear friend from college and his younger brother. We had a little more to cheer about when Fran Tarkenton arrived in 1967 to lead a very potent offense with the explosive and speedy wide receiver, Homer Jones, our favorite player, and the “Baby Bulls” running backs. However, the defense was not very good at all, except for a couple of players–including safety Carl “Spider” Lockhart, who was our other favorite–thus every game was a roller coaster of emotion that would leave us drained and joyous or drained and depressed.

Once, after a spectacular play that won a game for the Giants (a long bomb from Tarkenton to Jones that led to a rare defeat of the hated Cowboys) we rose from the couch collectively, and descended with such force that we broke it in two.

In 1970, the Giants traded Homer Jones to the Browns for running back, Ron Johnson, which truly depressed me (but in fact, Johnson helped the team to its best season in years). But that was small potatoes compared to what my life was to become: after losing their first three games, the Giants went on a six game winning streak, during which I got fired, put a torch to my marriage, began drinking even more heavily than usual (and usual was a lot to begin with) and found myself in a dreary sub-let room with a hotplate, a refrigerator that groaned 23 hours a day, a mattress on the floor, and on the verge of mental collapse (that would come in April of the following year when my mother died). I remember very little of those games except the thrilling comeback from a large deficit to defeat the Washington Redskins for the sixth win, and the following loss to the Philadelphia Eagles on a Monday night, the game which Howard Cosell broadcast drunk and threw up on Dandy Don Meredith’s cowboy boots. All I can remember of that night was practically clearing out my favorite saloon with my antics—especially during the extremely long, drawn-out and inexorable Eagles late fourth quarter march to the winning touchdown. The Giants won their next three games, but needed to win their final game against the Rams to make the playoffs. The Giants got stomped 31-3, as I watched numbly from my usual barstool, and it would be eleven years before they got that close again.

The only consolation I found in those weeks was that I was not alone, for it was then that I discovered an autobiographically based novel called A Fan’s Notes by Fred Exley, in which he describes a man who is a lunatic Giants fan who clears out bars during games, drank too much, destroyed his marriage, and lost jobs. I identified, needless to say, but did not, sadly, understand then that I, too, had a drinking problem; I only had, as part of a rather long list of adversity, a Giants problem.

The seventies were a long, slow slog of bad football, the only difference being they now possessed a very good defense and terrible offense. But in 1979, in the aftermath of the famous Joe Pisarcik fumble at the end of a home game against the Eagles that snatched defeat out of the jaws of victory, the Giants hired George Young as general manager, the first competent football operations man they had had since the modern era began in the 60s. He drafted Phil Simms in 1979, and Lawrence Taylor in 1981, and the Giants made the playoffs for the first time in 18 years (an event I celebrated for several days) and won a playoff game that year.

The Giants went backwards for a couple of years, but under new coach Bill Parcells, they went to the playoffs three straight years, 1984-1986, making the Super Bowl in 1986. Again like 1970, I do not remember much from that season because once again, the Giants may have been winning, but my second marriage was collapsing, although I had at least been sober for a few years before it began to crumble, and had a decent job. My only vivid memories are the rousing catch and run by Mark Bavarro against the 49ers, knocking down and dragging would be tacklers for over 20 yards, that sparked a Giants comeback win. And listening on the radio to the Giants thrilling come-from-behind victory over the Minnesota Vikings while driving back from central New York after a visit with my son at college, highlighted by a fourth and 20+ yard completion from Sims to Bobby Johnson for a needed first down, and Raul Allegre’s last second winning field goal.

I made a sentimental journey back to New Haven to watch the Super Bowl with my friend and his brother, which was a little tense, because two of us were no longer drinking, and the one that was, was in bad shape. After a close first half, which could have been worse if not for a great Harry Carson-led goal line stand and a couple of Bronco missed field goals, the Giants went wild in the second half, and won going away. The only down moment for us was Allegre missing the extra point on the Giants last touchdown; my friend’s brother had the numbers 0-0 in the office pool, and the miss led to a final score of 39-20, and a 500 buck loss for him.

What I felt at the end was more relief than joy, the at-last-I-can-die-happy feeling (Red Sox, Cubs and White Sox fans, for instance, know well what I mean). The Giants, of course, did get to four more Super Bowls and their three victories (each highlighted by phenomenal pass receptions–Mark Ingram’s tackle-breaking winning drive-saving catch and run in 1990; the unreal David Tyree and Mario Manningham catches from Eli Manning in 2008 and 2012) were a delight, but none had the sense of necessity for me that the 1987 game did. My great obsession had been quenched, and my life as a sports fan began to fade, with the Rangers unexpected Stanley Cup in 1994 a surprise exclamation point.

One day in the early 70s when I went to pick up my son for the weekend, I noticed that one wall of his bedroom had suddenly sprouted a goodly number of photographs of Brooks Robinson: it was time for me to perform the Dad duty of taking my son to a game. The following season we went to the Sunday game in the Orioles opening series against the Tigers. I had purposely gotten box seats near third base, and the reward came soon: Brooks made a leaping grab over the bag and turned a double into a routine 5-3 putout. My son turned to me, the look on his face so astonished I thought his eyes were going to bug out of his head. And that was that. For the next 10 years, our Sundays (and an occasional night game thrown in) in the summer would frequently be spent at Memorial Stadium

And over that time, I inexorably became an Orioles fan, a process that was accelerated by the new Yankee owner, George Steinbrenner, who I immediately found to be a consummate shitheel (beware the sons of successful men who need to prove they have stones as big as Daddy’s).
I adored Thurman Munson, Ron Guidry, Roy White and Mel Stottlemyre, but I found the daily nastiness of the owner (especially in the dance of death with manager Billy Martin) made being a Yankee fan a chore, rather than a pleasure. And the Orioles, with their professionalism—the “Oriole Way”—were a very appealing group, especially my son’s idol, Brooks Robinson, one of the most decent and modest men to play the game at his level of excellence. By the mid-seventies, I was an Orioles fan.

And, so, too, in time, were many others in the Baltimore area. Even though they fielded good to spectacularly good teams from the early 60s through the 70s, the Orioles did not draw many fans—Baltimore was a football town, a Colts town. But slowly in the late 70s, attendance began to rise, and on the night of June 22nd, 1979, the Orioles at last became the toast of the town when Doug DeCinces hit a three-run homer in the bottom of the ninth to win the game—the stadium went wild, and so did Baltimore. That was all that was talked about the next day. I don’t recall the exact circumstances but a regular at my neighborhood saloon had a block of tickets for that night’s twilight doubleheader; I was invited in, and also scored a ticket for my son. That afternoon, a bunch of us left in a two-car caravan to Baltimore for the games. To put it delicately, all the adults save one were what one might politely call heavy drinkers, and the tone was set just as the National Anthem concluded, when one of our number, a bartender, ordered beers for all of us, gave the beer vendor a 20 buck tip, and suggested he return every inning henceforth, which he did. Sufficiently lubricated, we were treated to two exciting Orioles victories. Improbably the first game also ended on a winning three-run homer in the ninth inning, this time by Eddie Murray—déjà vu all over again as Yogi Berra would say. And the Orioles also won the second game in a comeback, tying the game in the seventh, getting the winning runs in the eighth. The stadium was delirious again. And my apostasy was complete.

I wisely had the one sober adult in our midst drive me and my son home. My son had never seen me fluthered before, and he seemingly found the spectacle very amusing, alas, this being one of the very last times that condition would be amusing for anyone, myself included (it wasn’t until he read this that he confessed to me that he was actually rather frightened by my condition, and the laughter was more nervous reaction). The second car didn’t get that far; deciding discretion was the greater part of valor, driver and passengers pulled into a downtown motel for what came to be known as the Night of the Projectile Vomiting, followed by a futile attempt at self-cleaning, and an apologetic note and large tip for the unfortunate soul in maid service who drew their room number.

It was a joyous summer on 33rd Street; symbolically represented by Bill Hagy, a fan in the upper deck (section 34, if I remember correctly), who would stand up and mimic the letters spelling Orioles with his body as the crowd chanted along with him during the seventh inning stretch. Soon, the Orioles invited him to do his routine on top of the dugout.

The Orioles won the eastern division, and defeated the Angels in the playoff (not before closer Dan Stanhouse drove Earl Weaver to the dugout tunnel for a cigarette for the umpteenth time as Stanhouse nibbled and struggled through the ninth, and as I, in solidarity with Earl, retreated to my saloon’s men’s room for a sympathy smoke). The Orioles went up 3-1 on the Pirates in the World Series (and I got to see my first—and last it seems— Series game in person for one of the wins), but Pittsburgh came back, fueled it is said by resolve following the death of manager Chuck Tanner’s mother, and won the last three. I can still see Willie Stargell’s towering homerun off a Scott MacGregor changeup making its parabolic path to the right field stands for what were the seventh game winning runs.

The Orioles had good runs in 1980 and 1982. In 80, after a typical slow start, they won six of eight games against the Yankees in August, including a thrilling 1-0 game I saw at Memorial, MacGregor outdueling Luis Tiant, and striking out Reggie Jackson three times, to get close. But they fell back on a west coast road trip, and finished second. In 82, they fought the Brewers down to the last game, losing to Don Sutton and finished second again.

They got their World Series victory in 1983, minus Weaver, who had been replaced by Joe Altobelli, and minus a few of their core players from 1979, but with the very important addition of Cal Ripken. I remember in the celebratory moments after the last out was recorded, turning to a friend and saying, “I’m glad they won, because they may never get that chance again,” thinking of veterans like Ken Singleton, John Lowenstein, Rick Dempsey Mike Flanagan Rich Dauer, Gary Roenicke, MacGregor, Jim Palmer. Instead, no Orioles team has gotten to a World Series since then.

Eight years later, ex-wife #2 and my daughter gave me one of the best birthday presents ever: a ticket to the last game played at Memorial Stadium, which coincided with my 50th birthday. It was just another loss in a dreary season, but at the end, when the noise died down, the PA system began playing the theme from Field of Dreams, and one by one in the autumn twilight, ex-Orioles in uniform slowly took up their defensive positions on the field, Brooks Robinson leading the way, and I began, for the first and last time in my life, to cry at a sporting event and wished my son was there with me.

It was my paternal Uncle Billy who introduced me to basketball. It was his sport growing up, and, in fact, the game is the reason he became a beloved member of my family: he and my dad were teammates on a Queens, NY, rec league team, and Dad introduced him to his sister. Although it was not the first game I watched or listened to, my earliest memory of a basketball game is a TV viewing with Uncle Billy of an NIT tournament game from 1952 with the Tom Gola-led LaSalle team, the ultimate winner of the tournament.

My first years as a Knicks fan were good ones: they went to the NBA finals three years running (but lost all three, the first to the Rochester Royals; the last two to the Minneapolis Lakers, the dominant team of the early 50s). They had a talented team led by Harry Gallatin, “Sweetwater” Clifton, Dick McGuire and Carl Braun, and coached by the New York basketball legend, Joe Lapchick. And then there was the bonus of Knicks radio broadcaster, Marty Glickman.

Glickman had the most beautiful voice this side of Red Barber; where Barber’s was Southern mellifluousness personified, Glickman was pure Brooklyn, New York, but just as smooth and soothing. A former high school and college football and track standout and member of the 1936 Olympic track team, Glickman, in essence, created the language of basketball announcing, and for the first time the game became vivid for a radio audience. You could see the court, the way Barber and others allowed us to see the baseball field over the radio. And I loved his catch phrases like “Good, like Nedicks,” when a player made a shot (Nedicks, a New York hot dog and orange drink chain, was a sponsor, and a long time favorite of mine along with the Horn and Hardart cafeteria).

Glickman was not compensation enough for the Knicks teams that were to follow in the late 50s and early 60s. From mediocre to truly awful, they suffered a dearth of talent (Kenny Sears was decent, and Ritchie Guerin, who played his college ball about a mile from where I grew up at Iona, was very good) at a time when one of the great sports dynasties was in existence, the extremely talented Bill Russell-led Boston Celtics who would win 11 titles in 13 years.

Hope for Knicks fans began slowly but surely to build in the mid 60s with a steady stream of good draft choices—Willis Reed, Dave Stallworth, Cazzie Russell, Bill Bradley and Walt Frazier, and the acquisition via trade of Dick Barnett. But disappointment continued until the 1967-68 season, when two alterations put the team over the top—Red Holzman became the coach, and midway through the season, the Knicks traded for Dave DeBusschere, who was the missing piece in the starting five.

Holzman molded the team into a pass-first team that honored the fundamentals of team play, and a tenacious defensive team (they were particularly adept at two-man traps). Basketball, at its best, is the ultimate team sport: five individuals, working together, enhancing each other’s strengths, covering for each other’s weaknesses. The Knicks raised these principles to their zenith, which filled me with an almost religious ebullience when I watched them play.

The following year in the playoffs, they defeated the East champions, Baltimore Bullets, in four straight games, but lost to the Celtics in Bill Russell’s last hurrah in the division finals. Walt Frazier had a nasty leg injury (I remember in one game, watching him pound his thigh with his non-dribbling hand as he brought the ball up court), and that probably cost the Knicks their chance to win.

The following year, they defeated the Bullets again, this time in a hard-fought seven-game series, two of which I was privileged to see in person at the Baltimore Civic Center in the company of my best friend from college. It featured titanic duels underneath between Reed and Wes Unseld and DeBusschere and Gus Johnson, and on the outside between Frazier and Earl Monroe. They defeated the Bucks in five to go to the finals against the Lakers.

The Knicks and Lakers traded wins every other game. The third game had an unreal ending: Jerry West took the inbound pass from Wilt Chamberlain (who wasn’t called for the fact that he took a step onto the court before he passed) with seconds left. West threw up a 3/4-court heave, which went in and tied the game. But the Knicks won in overtime.

Disaster struck in the fifth game, which I listened to with great difficulty at home. This was before the NBA was a big deal, and not all the games were televised nationally, so I had to listen on the radio. As I was over 200 miles from the New York station broadcasting the game, I had to pick up the radio antenna and hold it up over my head near the window to get reception. Willis Reed fell to the court with a leg injury late in the first half. Without him, it was possible for Chamberlain to just go wild inside and kill the Knicks. Instead of going to their vastly inferior backup center, Holzman went to a small, active three-forward lineup of DeBusschere, Bradley and Stallworth playing off Chamberlain hide-and-seek fashion, then double-teaming him when he got the ball. It confused and rattled the Lakers and the Knicks pulled out an improbable win; I was elated, and my arms were exhausted. Game six had Holzman revert to using his backup center, and Chamberlain destroyed the Knicks, leading to a game seven and the question on every Knicks fan mind: would Willis Reed be able to play, or would injury once more deny the Knicks their first championship?

The Knicks practiced before opening tipoff without Reed, and were congregating around their bench when Reed came out of the tunnel to thunderous applause from the Madison Square Garden crowd. You could see he was hurting, but he leaned into Chamberlain on the Lakers first possession making it as hard as he could for him, and Chamberlain missed his first shot. Reed limped down the court, trailing his teammates, took a pass, and hit a medium jumper. The crowd roared again. Again the Lakers failed to score, and Reed proceeded to hit a second jump shot. The Knicks called timeout, and that was all for Willis. But it had its effect. The Lakers, particularly Chamberlain, looked defeated just minutes into the game. Walt Frazier then proceeded to have the game of his life: 36 points, 19 assists and five steals.

My friend and I celebrated until the saloon closed down, and I had my second glorious fan triumph in eight months, a happy façade for the failure that my life was soon to become.

The following year, the Bullets finally overcame their New York jinx, and defeated the Knicks in the eastern conference finals. The next year, the Lakers got their revenge, and won the finals handily in five games. But a different Knicks team (Jerry Lucas replacing Reed, and Earl Monroe, traded to the Knicks from Baltimore because the Bullets could not meet Earl’s salary demand, in place of Barnett) beat the Lakers in 1973 for their second and as of today, last, championship.

The team then slowly devolved into the middle of the pack, then got awful, and I lost interest. I was spoiled by the basketball that they played in those wondrous years 68-73. The Knicks had one brief run at the championship in the early 90s, but those Ewing-Starks-Pat Riley coached teams played the game, to use the Italian insult for bad chefs, like shoemakers, and I could not muster interest. Since then, it has gotten worse, and I ceased to care long ago.

As I mentioned earlier, my attention to sports waned in the late high school and college years and that lasted into my mid-twenties. I watched sports with one eye mostly during those years, aware of what was happening (the Giants always coming up short in title games; the Yankees not winning all the time, and soon, not winning at all; the Rangers and Knicks treading water), but not investing much time or emotion in the events.

In 1967, I was married, had an infant son, and was living in New Haven, deeply saddened that the promise of the early 60s was beginning to devolve into the horrors of the late 60s. Sports became a relief from those horrors, and I, not unlike many others I imagine, became a sports fan again to compensate for my disappointment with the world. New Haven, happily, had a TV station in the Red Sox network, and allowed me to see many games in one of the most exciting baseball seasons ever—the three team (Sox, Tigers, Twins) pennant race that was not decided until the final day of the season. While not a Red Sox fan, I got caught up in the excitement—the heroics of Carl Yastrzemski and Jim Lonborg, the tragedy of Tony Conigliaro’s injury, and the agony of another Red Sox World Series defeat.

The other change was that, slowly over the years since they had come into existence in 1962, I had become a Mets fan. Sometime in my college years, in one of those deep navel-gazing sessions that are a hallmark of those years, I came to the psychoanalytic conclusion that I should have been a Dodgers fan in my childhood–that despite the disappointment it entailed, it was a more honest fandom, more real, and it played into my then populist political sentiments, and my long-time emotional attachment to my blue-collar, Dodger fan, paternal grandfather. The Dodgers were, in the local argot, the “People’s Cherce”. I became a baseball apostate. Ron Hunt was my first Mets favorite, and when Tom Seaver and Jerry Koosman arrived, I felt the first glimmering of respectability.

And then, the magical 1969 season happened. Nineteen sixty nine would be my last year as a resident of the New York region (with the exception of a brief 20-month return in the 70s), and I got the sendoff of my dreams with the Mets remarkable season. Considered a so-so back of the pack team, after a slow start they just started improbably winning. And I got to see most of it, including: the Mets win a doubleheader at Forbes Field against the Pirates by identical 1-0 scores, with both the runs driven in by the notoriously weak hitting pitchers, Jerry Koosman and Don Cardwell, on seeing-eye singles just past lunging infielders; Steve Carlton strike out 19 Mets for a new record, but lose the game 4-2 on two two-run homers from Ron Swoboda; Tom Seaver come within two outs of a perfect game against the Cubs. I also got to see them in person once at Shea Stadium—a Saturday afternoon game against the Dodgers, where they won late. And I listened to the famous black cat game (a stray wandered onto the field and made its way to the Cubs dugout) late in the year driving up the Jersey Turnpike (one of the late summer jaunts I was taking between New York and Maryland as part of my relocation).

The Cubs were in first for most of the year, but the Mets slowly and inexorably caught and passed them. The Cubs were a mostly veteran team, and their manager, Leo Durocher, over-worked his starting pitchers, did not rest the regulars enough, and they wilted in what was a brutally hot Chicago summer (they played only day games then—lights were several decades away). Meanwhile, the Mets were getting lights-out starting pitching, superb defense, and just enough offense, led by left fielder, Cleon Jones.

They knocked out the Braves in the playoffs to go up against the best team in baseball, the Baltimore Orioles, in the World Series. They lost the first game, but then took four straight to win the Series. Highlights: the clutch home run of Donn Clendenon and the less expected clutch home run of light-hitting Al Weiss in the clinching game, and in game three, the two absolutely amazing catches by Tommy Agee in center field, and in game four, an even more amazing, diving and sliding catch by Ron Swoboda in right, all of which preserved Mets victories.

Several ironies attended the clinching game five for me. I watched it in Maryland, a scant 35 miles from Baltimore in what would be my new home town, and instead of hearing the rapturous wrap-ups of the New York sportscasters, got to see a Baltimore TV sportscaster report on the game looking like he had just thrown up in his mouth. And, within a few years, I would become an apostate twice over, switching my American League allegiance from the Yankees to the very same Orioles, whose demise I was celebrating (see below).

I remained a Mets fan until the day in 1977 when the Mets GM, M. Donald Grant, a Puritanical grump, in a fit of pique about the salaries star players were getting since free agency had recently begun, traded Tom Seaver to the Reds because of Seaver’s ingratitude in rejecting a low-ball contract extension.

Their 1986 title meant nothing to me, and it matters not if they ever win another one. Like Rick and Ilsa will always have Paris, I will always have 1969, which remains to this day, the happiest season of baseball fandom I have ever known—more happiness in those seven months than in all the championships the Yankees won between 1949-1962.

Like many a sports fan, I had a “Say it ain’t so, Joe,” moment (legend has it that a youthful newsie said this to “Shoeless” Joe Jackson when it was revealed he had taken part in the fixing of the 1919 World Series). That’s the moment when you realize that someone whom you revere for his talent is not merely a flawed human being like the rest of us, but fatally flawed. This happened shortly after discovering basketball in the early 50s, and my teams were both local: the New York Knickerbockers in the pros, and once more, my father’s alma mater, Columbia, for a college team. And the year before I became aware of the college game, they went undefeated until losing to Illinois in the opening round of the NCAA tournament of 1951. The team’s best player was a former New York high school star, Jack Molinas, who became my first basketball hero. In 1953, Molinas was chosen in the first round of the NBA draft by the Fort Wayne (now Detroit) Pistons, and, of course, I became a Pistons fan, and badgered my dad to pick up a Fort Wayne paper when he could from a Times Square store that specialized in carrying out of town and foreign newspapers.

My devotion did not live long. Thirty-two games into his first season, Molinas was banned for life from the NBA for gambling. Although it was for gambling done during his college years, I saw him on television in one game against the Knicks, and was horrified at his unconscionable gunning—terrible shots, most of which missed badly, and in retrospect wondered if he was shaving points that night. I took a lot of teasing from my friends about my hero’s treachery, but I learned one of life’s important lessons: admire the talent, but not necessarily the possessor of the talent.

Years later, when Molinas had become a distant bad memory, his infamy became even greater: he was one of the bookies arrested and convicted in a 1961 college point shaving scandal, and spent five years in prison. In 1975 he was murdered in what is believed to be a mob execution, and it was later revealed that he had been shaving points and gambling as early as his high school days.

Redemption for Columbia basketball came in the 1967-68 season because two New York City high school stars opted to stay close to home for an Ivy League education instead of going to one of the major collegiate basketball powers that also recruited them—Heyward Dotson, point guard from Stuyvesant in Manhattan (ironically, also Molinas’s school) and Jim McMillian, a gifted small forward from Thomas Jefferson in Brooklyn who would achieve all-America status with Columbia. Also in the starting five was a very good 7-foot center, Dave Newmark; a tough, hard-working power forward, Roger Walaszek, and a first-rate outside shooter, Billy Ames, who might have set 3-point shot records if there were such a thing in 1968. Jack Rohan, the coach, was a player on Columbia’s previous NCAA team in 1951.

Following the team’s season was not easy in the pre-Internet, ESPN era, although at the time I lived in New Haven, CT, close enough to New York to get the papers from there and a few New York television stations, but, needless to say, Ivy League basketball was not a priority then or now. The team lost three in a row in December, all on the road, but got its first national attention when it beat three ranked teams, including #2 Louisville, to win the Holiday Festival Tournament at Madison Square Garden, and went on to win 16 straight games, one of which I got to see in person when they played Yale, a tough game with Newmark injured. They lost their last regular season game to Princeton, which left them tied with Princeton for the Ivy League title, and necessitated a playoff game a few nights later which I got to see on TV, and which Columbia won. McMillian had the best game of his career and that got them into the NCAA tournament.

Back then, there were only 22 teams in the tournament, and Columbia had one of the handful of play-in games to get to what would later be called the Sweet Sixteen. They defeated LaSalle to get to the eastern semi-finals where they played Davidson, then coached by Lefty Driesell.

Columbia was behind the entire game but tied it late. With one second left, a Columbia sub was fouled, and twice Driesell called time-outs to ice him. Sadly, he missed the front end of the one-and-one, Newmark missed the put back, and Davidson won in overtime by two. Columbia finished 6th in the final AP poll.

It was my belief back then that with a few breaks, Columbia could have beaten any team in the country with the exception of Houston and UCLA, the ultimate tournament winner, then in the middle of its incredible streak of consecutive championships. Columbia had two succeeding good years, but finished second to Princeton and Pennsylvania, who went undefeated in Ivy League play those years.

There have been a few more second place finishes since then, but no Ivy League title. I suspect I will not see another such season from my Dad’s alma mater in what little time I have left, but I will always be grateful for that one shining moment in my college basketball fandom. That is all a fan can ask for, and unless you are a fan of one of the perpetual powers, all you can expect.

One ironic note: not long after Columbia’s great season, I moved to Maryland, and Lefty Driesell became the University of Maryland’s basketball coach some time later. Try as I might, I could never quite become a fan of the Terps because of him. In 1984-85, I was a grad student at UM, and on a couple of occasions saw Lefty in the student union building. It took a lot of restraint on my part not to walk up to him and chew him out for breaking my sports fan heart.

[Note: this is the one game for which I cannot pinpoint a date. I had always assumed in memory that it came in the 57-58 season, but I could not find in the Rangers’ game log, one that matched, except one where Marcel Paille was the goalie. It may have been the following season then, but I could not verify a precise date. I was there, Worsley was the goalie, and what I describe is what I saw, but that is all I know].

Hockey was the last of the major sports I would become a fan of, an enthusiasm I would acquire from a childhood friend who had taken up the sport and would go on to become a first-rate goalie for our high school team. My friend built a make-shift goal out of scrap lumber and netting, and it became a routine for the two of us after school to play in the street—he would tend goal and I would shoot wrist shots at him—attenuated practice when there was no ice available. He was a Rangers fan and his favorite player was fellow-goalie, Gump Worsley. I, too, adopted both the team and Worsley as my favorites.

The Rangers were an average team at best; Worsley, Harry Howell, and Andy Bathgate were its best players, and they were no match for the Detroit Red Wings (the dominant team of the early 50s) and the new dynasty of the Montreal Canadiens. Still we were devoted fans of the Rangers, despite their mediocrity, and Bill taught me many of the subtleties of the game, often in a sarcastic manner at various Ranger players’ inability to execute said subtleties.

In the fall of my sophomore year in high school, m friend said that the Rangers were selling cheap tickets to a Saturday matinee at Madison Square Garden (the previous edition on Eighth Avenue between 49th and 50th Streets) against the Boston Bruins, and did I want to go? Of course, I replied. And for the second time, I was disappointed because my favorite player did not play. Gump was a scratch because of an injury, and instead we got to see the NHL debut of Marcel Paille, who shutout the Bruins. Luckily, this was merely a prologue.

Our next time at the Garden was when my friend’s dad got a block of tickets for a night game against the hated and almost invincible Canadiens of Beliveau, Plante, Moore, Harvey, Geoffrion and the Richard brothers. Bill’s dad drove us to the Garden, which was packed and hazy with cigarette smoke, and we ascended to the nosebleed seats on the upper level behind the 50th Street goal.

Early in the first period, things looked predictably grim for the Rangers. A penalty led to a power play opportunity for the Canadiens, and then, less than a minute later, the Rangers were penalized again, making the Rangers two men short. It was then that Gump Worsley provided me with the most excitement I have ever experienced at a sporting event. The Rangers were not able to clear the puck out of their end the entire time, and Worsley made easily a dozen and a half saves in the next two minutes, some of them seemingly impossible—blinding slap shots in which he was screened—and the crowd just roared at every one, and when the penalties were finally killed, the Garden erupted in applause. Emboldened by Worsley’s phenomenal feat, the Rangers went on to win the game–one of the bright moments in another so-so season.

After that, I revered Gump. First, he seemed approachable because he looked so ordinary and not at all “athletic” especially by today’s bulked-up standards—a fireplug with a crew cut. Then I discovered he was inordinately fond of beer (an enthusiasm I would soon discover myself) making him even more like an average guy. And he was funny: in an interview with a New York sports reporter, he was asked which team gave him the most trouble. “The Rangers,” Gump deadpanned.

Luckily for Gump’s health and fortune, he was traded a few years later to a good team, the archenemy Canadiens, where he finally got to play on a Stanley Cup winning team. In 1980, he was inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame.

But being a Rangers fan was not such a lucky fate. For almost a decade, they fielded a very fine team (the Ratelle-Gilbert-Hadfield line, Brad Park, Eddie Giacomin, etc.) that always came up short in the playoffs. Only the 71-72 and 78-79 teams made it to the finals, and the efforts of Worsley’s fine successors—Giacomin, John Davidson, John Vanbiesbrouck, all came to naught.

I was only a part-time hockey fan by the 93-94 season. I ignored the regular season, and only watched the Stanley Cup playoffs when there were just four teams left. I was very surprised that the Rangers were one of the four—they hadn’t won the Cup since the year before I was born, and I had years earlier concluded it was something I would never see.

Hockey is a low-scoring, very intense game, and at times it was excruciating to watch the games—three double overtime games against the Devils in the Eastern Conference finals alone practically sent me to the ER, including game seven. After a loss to the Devils in game five, it looked like the end of another disappointing Ranger season, but Ranger captain Mark Messier, perhaps channeling Joe Namath, guaranteed they would win on the road in Jersey and play a game seven in the Garden, and he, with three goals in the third period, made good on his promise. In game seven, I had to turn the TV off —I couldn’t take it, and was sure I would jinx the Rangers by watching. I turned it back on just in time to see Stephan Matteau’s winning goal in the second overtime. I had even worse jitters in the finals against the Canucks, again a seven game series. During game seven, I frequently had to walk away from the TV, paced the floor in my hallway, cursing myself for having given up smoking six years earlier. My heart sank when twice the Rangers had their two-goal lead reduced to one. When a bouncing puck just clanged off the goal post near the end of the game, I thought I was going to pass out. But the Rangers held on to win to become the last pro team I rooted for in my years of sports fandom to win a championship. Later, sipping a cup of coffee (I had quit drinking years earlier), tamping down my desire for a cigarette to go with the coffee, I thought of my childhood friend, whom I had not seen in 30 years, and wondered if he was still a fan, if he was as overjoyed as I was. The Rangers victory was the unexpected icing on the cake of my life as a sports fan.

The following day, in one of the New York papers, there was a typical roundup story about the joy of “long suffering” Rangers fans. One anecdote caught my eye: before he went to the Garden for the game, a Rangers fan went to his father’s grave, and placed a transistor radio tuned to the station that broadcast the game on the tombstone. I understood completely.

I saw my first baseball card late in the 1950 baseball season (memory being what it is, I cannot remember the name of the movie I saw two weeks ago, but can remember that the card was the 1950 Bowman card of journeyman Cubs pitcher, Doyle Lade). The following year I discovered I had the recessive male collectors’ gene, and obsessively managed to get the entire Bowman 51 set from Whitey Ford to Johnny Pramesa. When I saw the Bowman football cards in the glass candy display case of my local delicatessen/candy store soon after, I bought a couple of packs and was hooked.

I fell in love with the traditional poses: running backs in the Heisman trophy stance; quarterbacks with football cocked behind their ears, other arm straight out; receivers stretched out with the ball on their fingertips; lineman either menacing (defense) or in blocking stances. And I loved the uniforms and the team logos (the Eagles Kelly green with eagle with a football in its talons was particularly evocative). But my first team was the Green Bay Packers, again for childish artistic reasons: I liked their garish Fauvist gold with green accents uniforms they adopted about this time. Their quarterback Tobin Rote became my first football hero.

I am sure I saw the Thanksgiving Day game between Green Bay and Detroit in 1951 (the Packers would be the traditional Detroit opponent in this game to 1963), although the details are obscured by time. While the game was not yet nationally televised, it was available on a New York channel, probably the one that televised the Giants games locally. The following year, the Packers were scheduled to play the Giants at the Polo Grounds, and after some wheedling and cajoling, my dad got tickets to the game. The Packers obliged by wearing the all gold with green numbers uniforms, but for reasons I never did hear, Rote did not play (nor did I see rookie star receiver, Billy Howton); instead, Babe Parilli, the Packers number one draft choice for that year, did. It was a dull, ball-control game dominated by defense and Giants turnovers, and while the Packers won, I was very disappointed to not see my two football heroes, Rote and Howton, play.

Eleven days later I did see them on television in the Thanksgiving Day game, and was rewarded by a long TD pass and run from Rote to Howton down the far sideline near the end of the first half to get Green Bay close (the Lions had run up a big lead early in the game). However, Thanksgiving Day routine, established the previous year, was to leave at halftime for the drive from New Rochelle to my grandfather’s house in Sunnyside Gardens where the family had dinner, arriving in time only to see the last minutes of the fourth quarter. And it was also standard practice for Bobby Layne and the Lions to rouse from their slumbers in the second half, and pull away to win the game handily, which they had done by the time I got to Grandpa’s that day.

Ironically, Rote was traded to arch rival Detroit following the 1956 season, and after an injury to Layne, got to lead them to their last NFL championship against the Browns. Tobin Rote is also the answer to one of the great sports trivia questions: the only quarterback to win an NFL and AFL (with the San Diego Chargers in 1963) championship. And he retired with a record: most career yards rushing for a quarterback. As of 2019 he is ninth on the list.

In time, my uncles and my dad would have me rooting for the Giants, especially my maternal Uncle Bill, my Irish Catholic Godfather, because for a New York Irish Catholic, rooting for the Mara Men was like an extra sacrament, and Emlen Tunnel, the great defensive back and kick returner, would become my first Giant hero. But because of the then imposed local TV blackout of home games, I saw neither of the two great defining games of the Giants in their glory years—the 56 championship victory over the Bears, and “the Greatest Game Ever Played” overtime defeat to the Colts in 1958.

My first memory of baseball is reading the NY Daily News account of Gene Bearden’s heroics in the Cleveland Indians’ defeat of the Boston Red Sox in a one game playoff to get to the 1948 World Series. The following year I was a Yankee fan, listening to games on the radio, reading game accounts for all the teams, the box scores, and the stats, again in the Daily News, with all the devotion of a religious acolyte. Sometime that summer, Dad suggested we go to a game. My father was also a devoted Yankee fan (I believe because of his great admiration and identification with Lou Gehrig—both Gehrig and my father were of German descent, raised in New York City, and attended Columbia University), so there was a total united family front on who to root for.

Our routine that day was as it would always be over the following five-six years. Dad drove into the Bronx and parked the car north of the stadium on the Grand Concourse; we then got on a D Train to the stadium. This, I came to understand, was to avoid the clusterfarg that was parking by the stadium (and its attendant exorbitant fees).

A long time ago, I was going to write a brief essay about my first impressions of my first baseball game, but, then, in no time, I read about a half dozen magazine pieces all of which said what I would have (it was the time of the great, florid, fathers-passing-onto-the-sons the love of baseball nostalgia moment in sports writing), and so abandoned the idea. But I am still taken by the rhapsody of the senses on that first day: the urban hurly-burly of the elevated train, crowd, and the street vendors hawking food and souvenirs (I remember the rush of desire for the 8X10 glossies of my favorite Yankees: Rizzuto, Berra, Henrich, and, most of all, Joe Di Maggio, my first sports hero); the gray cavern inside with the pungent smell of beer and hot dogs, and then heading up the tunnel to the seats and seeing the greenest piece of earth I had ever seen In my life (an illusion no doubt created by its contrast to the urban drabness of its surroundings).

I do not remember anything about the game; I saw Joe DiMaggio, and that was all that mattered. And I remember A’s owner and manager Connie Mack, because unlike the other baseball managers, he did not wear a uniform; instead he was dressed in a dark navy blue suit, white shirt and blue tie—more like a football coach than a baseball manager.

It was a grand baseball summer, an exciting pennant race between the Yankees and the Red Sox, which was not resolved until the last two games of the year—the Yankees beat Boston both games to win the pennant by one game. I remember sitting by the radio at the kitchen table that last Sunday cheering them on with Mom and Dad, now myself a member of that tribe called sports fans.

And it was a grand decade too. I had three teams to watch and listen to, brought to me by some of the finest sports broadcasters of all time: Mel Allen (the Yankees); Red Barber and the fledgling Vin Scully (the Dodgers), and Russ Hodges and Ernie Harwell (the Giants). I saw the Bobby Thompson “shot heard ‘round the world” homerun on TV, and I saw my team win five consecutive World Series, which I came to understand was far from the usual estate of fandom (I learned this painfully as a New York football Giant fan during the years in the wilderness from the mid 60s to the 80s).

I also learned that my team was hated by many. I lived in a middle class neighborhood most of whose residents were Dodger fans, and all the kids I played with were Dodger fans. I suspect many of them thought my parents and I were putting on airs and had pretensions of being better somehow by being Yankee fans. In time, bragging rights became a burden and a source of guilt. Good Catholic boy that I was, I did penance by becoming a secret fan of the St. Louis Browns, a perpetual cellar-dwelling franchise with few talented ballplayers. I had little to cheer except for Ned Garver’s 20 wins in 1951 while the team lost 102—a feat described by one wag as just behind Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead. At a Sunday double-header versus the Browns the following year, I persuaded my dad to buy me a Browns cap. An almost stereotypical loud and brash New York fan sitting in front of me, when he saw what I was wearing, incredulously asked, “You rootin’ faw da Browns?” I meekly nodded, and received the look of pity and condescension usually reserved for the village idiot.

My interest in baseball and all sports began to wane toward the end of the decade as I wandered through the minefield of adolescence. Other interests began to impinge on my devotion—the usual (girls and books and idealistic zeal) and the more arcane (jazz). My waning interest in baseball was intensified by the Giants and Dodgers moving to California following the 1957 season, an event, which more than anything else symbolized the end of the idyll of my childhood and made the game smaller in my estimation. My paternal grandfather and uncle Matty were devoted Dodger fans; my paternal uncle Bill a Giants fan. I spent many a summer afternoon watching both teams with them. Now when I went to my grandfather’s home in Sunnyside, Queens in the summer the radio and TV were silent—no Dodgers meant no baseball. Uncle Matty would die five months before the move was announced; my grandfather, almost two years after the last game was played at Ebbets Field and two months before the Dodgers would win their first championship in Los Angeles. Their deaths and the move west of the Dodgers and Giants were my first lessons in the transience and impermanence of life.

It would be a decade before baseball in particular and sports in general would re-enter my life, and only then would I resolve the Yankees-Browns dualism.

I came home from playing outside on a sunny fall Saturday to find my mother in the kitchen screaming at the radio that sat atop the refrigerator, and I looked upon this spectacle with a mixture of fear and incomprehension. Excitedly, my mother explained that Columbia, my father’s alma mater, was holding its own in a football game against the heavily favored Army team.

Army had not lost a game since the 1943 season, had gone 32 games without a loss—only two 0-0 ties with Notre Dame the previous year, and one against Illinois two weeks earlier, marring its record. Columbia was down 20-7, but rallied in the second half to score two touchdowns, and hold on for a 21-20 victory. I thought my mom was going insane during the winning touchdown drive, which, I would read years later, culminated with a remarkable 26-yard pass completion from Gene Rossides to Bill Swiacki at the Army three-yard line (Swiacki horizontal to the ground, arms fully extended, catching the ball just inches off the turf).

Lou Kusserow ran the ball in for the winning touchdown two plays later. Mom let out several whoops, began jumping up and down, and made herself a celebratory Manhattan on the rocks, my parents’ drink of choice, at game’s end. I was mystified, not really knowing about sports yet (that was a year away), but seeing my mother so happy made me think there was something going on I should know about.

In due course, I would learn about the legacy of coach Lou Little, the 1934 Rose Bowl victory, and Sid Luckman. But the ’47 team was the last memorable season for Little and Columbia football. Only nine winning seasons for the Light Blue since then, the best years 1961, 1996 and 2017. Rooting for Columbia’s football team, I came to understand, was a futile undertaking, a mostly perpetual disappointment, and sadly, I was too young to truly revel in its last moment of greatness. But on fall Saturday afternoons when I am watching a game on television, I still watch the scores scroll to see how Columbia did.

The Giants were honoring their star tailback, Tuffy Leemans, on this fateful day and my father and both my uncles, both named Bill, were there, and understood something big was happening when the public address announcer told all servicemen in attendance that they were to report back immediately to their duty stations. This was long before the existence of portable radios, let alone cell phones, but in time, word filtered through the crowd that Pearl Harbor had been attacked by the Japanese. At home, my mother and my dad’s two sisters began to cry as they heard the news of the attack on the radio, and, I, two months and one day old, soon joined in, I am told.

Both uncles would in time be drafted into the service—one with the Navy onboard a minesweeper in the Pacific Theater, the other in the Army infantry in Europe. Dad at his draft physical was found to have had TB, and was declared 4F. My family was one of the lucky ones; both my uncles returned unhurt, and they and my dad became my first guides into the world of sports.

“It is foolish and childish, on the face of it, to affiliate ourselves with anything so insignificant and patently contrived and commercially exploitative as a professional sports team, and the amused superiority and icy scorn that the non-fan directs at the sports nut (I know this look—I know it by heart) is understandable and almost unanswerable. Almost. What is left out of this calculation, it seems to me, is the business of caring—caring deeply and passionately, really caring—which is a capacity or an emotion that has almost gone out of our lives. And so it seems possible that we have come to a time when it no longer matters so much what the caring is about, how frail or foolish is the object of that concern, as long as the feeling itself can be saved. Naïveté—the infantile and ignoble joy that sends a grown man or woman to dancing and shouting with joy in the middle of the night over the haphazardous flight of a distant ball—seems a small price to pay for such a gift.”

“I can go back to rooting for the Browns now, like I did growing up.”

A mild rebuke to myself, but it did not bother me—sadly, being a sports fan was one of the lesser sins I committed against the sacred contract of matrimony while married to her–and one my present wife must also endure (which she does mostly with tolerance, although there are occasional grumblings about being a football widow on fall weekends).

On the drive back home, I thought about fandom and came to the realization that being a fan was one of my defining characteristics, perhaps the most prominent after the standard ones: family, occupation, life events and associations.

I possess no great skills, cannot boast of any major achievement. I am, instead, a fan—of other people’s great skill and achievement; of acts of physical and moral courage; artistic endeavors; the written word; noble gestures, physical grace, and manual skills. Joe DiMaggio was my first idol; jazz musicians have been a major source of inspiration throughout my life since my teens. In recent years, I have taken pleasure in watching Mike Holmes fix a house and Lidia Bastianich create a meal.

But first, I was a sports fan, like many an American boy before and since, and, with the events surrounding my arrival, how could it have been otherwise?

In the top of the ninth inning, the Dodgers held a 4-3 lead, there were two outs, and two strikes on the Yankees’ last hope, Tommy Henrich (“Old Reliable,” as Yankee announcer Mel Allen called him). Henrich swung and missed a Hugh Casey screwball for strike three, and seemingly the game was over, and the Dodgers had tied the series at two games apiece. But disaster struck. The pitch eluded catcher, Mickey Owen, and rolled to the screen, allowing Henrich to reach first base. Then, in succession, DiMaggio singled; Charlie Keller doubled; Bill Dickey walked, and Joe Gordon doubled, and the Yankees won, 7-4.

According to my mother, she, a rabid Yankee fan, upon listening to these events on the radio at home in New Rochelle NY, became so excited she went into labor. After an 18-mile drive to the hospital in my mother’s hometown, and where three generations of her family had been born, and several dents pounded into the passenger side door of the family Studebaker coupe by mom when the labor pains hit, I made my arrival in the early morning hours of October 6th.

The next afternoon, on the hottest October 6th on record for New York, in my first hours of life, the Yankees beat the Dodgers to win the Series, the first of the seven memorable encounters between these cross-town rivals that would define my first years of baseball fandom, and my fate was sealed: I would be a Yankee fan.