Earliest Sports Memories

Now that spring has finally arrived here in the east, I see Little Leaguers scurrying home from school, eager to finish their homework (that’s what they claim, anyway) and get to the park for their practice or game. That has stirred memories from playing days of yore and coaching days and nights of not so long ago.

      Over the years, in the course of interviewing athletes and sports business figures and personalities, I occasionally asked them about their earliest sports memory. Here are some of their responses:

      Mark Attanasio, the owner of the Milwaukee Brewers: “Being a Yankee fan in 1964 when I was 7 years old and the Yankees losing the World Series in Game 7 to the Cardinals and walking around the block in the Bronx where I lived and crying because the Yankees had lost.”

      Print and broadcast journalist Peter Gammons said, “Listening to the seventh game of the 1952 World Series when I was seven years old in the barber’s chair. Billy Sambito was my barber, and eventually the sponsor of my Little League team. His nephew, Joe Sambito, went on to be great pitcher and we became very good friends. He’s now an agent. Our families were forever intertwined.

      “I have a tape of that game. It’s so different, because the pitchers all had full windups and pumped over their heads. There wasn’t a lot of base-running. You can watch that and see how Jackie Robinson changed the game. The Yankees used four starting pitchers in relief in that game. It was tremendous.”

      Wyc Grousbeck, the managing partner, governor, and CEO of the Boston Celtics, said that his earliest sports memory was of baseball. “When I was six years old in ’67,” he said, “my dad got to go to a Red Sox/Cardinals World Series game and I didn’t get to go.”

      Likewise Sports Illustrated writer Alexander Wolff’s earliest memory was born out of a missed opportunity. He said that he recalled “being put to bed by my parents in December 1964 and being told I could not stay up late to watch Michigan, with Cazzie Russell, play Princeton, with Bill Bradley, in the Holiday Festival. I was seven years old.”

      Writer and editor Daniel Okrent was the first public editor of the New York Times and the inventor of Rotisserie League Baseball. He said, “My father took me to my first game at what was then called Briggs Stadium in Detroit when I was six years old in 1954. It was the Indians against the Tigers — my team. The Tigers lost, but I do remember specifically Walt Dropo, who was playing first [base] for the Tigers, hit this, what seemed to me, gigantic home run into left field. It was probably an ordinary home run, but I’d never seen one before.

      "My continuing ongoing memory is going to sleep at night listening to Ernie Harwell broadcast games.”

      Debbie Yow, the director of athletics at North Carolina State, said that her earliest sports memory was of “attending my older sister Kay’s high school basketball games. Kay [who passed away in 2009] was eight years older, and when she was a freshman in high school, I can remember going to her basketball games and sitting on a very large barrel while my father talked to men during half-time. This was North Carolina. There was [cigarette] smoke everywhere. Smoke, smoke, smoke. People smoking out in the hallways while I was sitting on this large barrel and waiting to go back in and watch Kay play again.”

      Brian Bedol, who founded Classic Sports Network and College Sports Television and is now managing director at Bedrock Venture Partners LLC, offered his earliest sports memory: “Jimmy Brown in his last season with the Browns,” he said. “I remember sitting in a snowstorm with 83,000 other fans.”

      Terry McDonell, editor of the Sports Illustrated Group, said, “I remember being a little boy in my grandfather’s house and being shown an old-fashioned diagram of a Minnesota/Notre Dame football game that my father, as a child, had diagrammed. You know, showing the ball moved from the 10 [yard line] to the 20, to the 23…and I remember trying to do that while listening to a football game on the radio, trying to have the same experience that my father had had many years before. My father was killed. He was a pilot. So, this was a big thing, being given this [diagram] as a little boy and being told that maybe I could do this too. I think I was about 4.”

Point of View

I don’t know about you, but when I attend a sporting event, I like to watch the game in front of me, not the spectators behind me. But directors of televised sporting events are of a different mind. They seem to think that viewers are more interested in anything but the game itself. How else to explain why they repeatedly cut away from live action to show us the fans, the coaches, the bench, the cheerleaders—in short, everything but the game itself?  

    
It doesn’t matter what the sport is. During last season’s American League Playoffs, Fox cut away from virtually every pitch to show us a fur hat in the stands. Those of us in New York at the time already knew it was cold on that October night. And anyone outside the east would have recognized it quickly without the continual shots of the spectators huddled against the chill.

    
Anyone interested in following the New York Jets on TV has his attention repeatedly redirected to Fireman Ed and the large sidekick whose shoulders he sits on for over three hours. We get it.    

    
Last week, with 19 seconds to go in the NCAA women’s basketball championship and Notre Dame down five and pushing the ball upcourt, the ESPN director cut to a shot of the coach. Is there any fan in such a climactic moment who turns away from the climax and thinks, “I wonder what the coach looks like right now?”

    
The same director, at a televised staging of a Shakespearean production, would cut away from Hamlet’s soliloquy to a close-up of an usher in the back row.

    
Circuses have sideshows that provide a variety of amusements for the curious onlookers before the main event takes place. But when the action is in the center ring, everyone is watching the lion tamer and nobody at that moment cares what the bearded lady looks like. If the circus were televised today, the director would undoubtedly cut away from the tightrope walker high above the crowd to a shot of the groundlings looking up.  

    
Maybe it’s an attention-deficit thing. But here’s an obvious clue to those hyperactive directors who cannot keep their eyes on the ball and their cameras still: The stadium and arena seats face the field and court because that’s what fans pay to see. We don’t contort ourselves into positions with our backs to the action in order to give our full attention to fellow spectators. That’s a sideshow nobody wants to see.

Sports Without Advertising

In the 1967 film “Bedazzled,” Peter Cook, as the devil, laments that he hasn’t done anything really evil since he introduced advertising into the world. That got me wondering about where sports would be without advertising. I once posed that question to a number of notable sports figures. Here is a compilation of their responses.

“Never in my life have I thought about that question,” said Roy Spence, the founder and president of GSD&M, the advertising agency responsible for the memorable “Don’t mess with Texas” public service ad and Southwest Airlines’ “You’re now free to move about the country” tag. “But I would say that sports would always be sports. You’re going to have people competing against each other, whether it’s here or around the world, at any level at any time, whether it’s marbles or hopscotch. Advertising has made sports a lifestyle. It’s allowed sports to reach the masses, for good or bad. In the end, I think advertising is a good thing for sports.”

Donald Dell, the founder and chairman of ProServ, said in 2004, “That’s the important question. To me, all pro sports are really a product of two things: television and sponsorships. What does a tennis tour take to be successful?

     “Well, first, it takes good players. Good players get you television. Television gets you sponsorships. At the end of the day, if you’re going to be playing for these big purses, it’s never done at the gate receipts. So sponsorships and television are what make the world of pro sports go ’round. Certainly in tennis….

     “[Tennis and golf are] individual sports. And they are a direct product of sponsorships. If you’re going to sponsor something, you want to make darn sure it’s televised. If there’s no television, you’re not going to increase your sponsorship. If the sponsorship doesn’t increase, the purses don’t increase.”

“That’s a chicken-or-egg question,” said Pam Gardner, president of the Houston Astros. “It’s necessary. We have to have [advertising]. It’s part of our livelihood. As I said before, baseball used to just be a sport, but it’s a sport that’s become big business, and so baseball probably wouldn’t be without advertising.”

“That’s a good question,” said Jerry Colangelo, president of USA Basketball. “I guess we create many things, and some things are created for us. And the fact is, once sponsors identify a market that sports brought to them, that was a market to buy their product, they had to reach that audience. And therefore a whole new business evolved in terms of sponsorships and advertising partners, and it continued to grow into naming rights and major all-encompassing types of packages. It became very unique.”

“[Sports] would be a little less well off [without advertising],” said John Walsh, executive vice president and executive editor of ESPN Inc. “People would make a little less money. I don’t know. Advertising at its best inspires creativity. Advertising at its worst gets in the way of doing your job.”

A "Super" Day

In “A Clergyman’s Daughter,” George Orwell wrote about a teacher’s excitement over seeing a student’s enthusiasm for learning suddenly flare up to match her own. This week in school, I shared a similar, albeit small, spark of wonderment over a newfound discovery with a young scholar.

“Mr. K, what is this?” asked Valerie during the fifth grade’s quiet reading time the other day. She pointed to a word in her paperback.

“Banister,” I said.

“What’s that?”

“It’s the railing alongside the staircase in your house.
“Oh. I never knew it was called that,” she said. “Thank you.”

Valerie retreated to her desk. Moments later, she was back at mine.

“Look.” She was pointing excitedly to another word in her book and smiling. The word was “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.”

“Isn’t that funny,” she said. “I never saw it spelled out before. My dad tried to spell it once, but he said he thought he made a couple of mistakes.”

“Did he try to spell it after you watched ‘Mary Poppins?’” I asked.

“Yes. Wasn’t that so good!”

Nothing better, I thought, not thinking of the movie.

The Best Thing About Sports (Part II)

          Billy Martin said, “There is nothing greater in the world than when someone on the team does something good, and everybody gathers around to pat him on the back."

          I once asked a number of successful sports figures what they considered the best thing about sports. Within this group was a common refrain.

          Gene Upshaw, who passed away in August 2008, was a Pro Football Hall of Fame offensive lineman and the long-time executive director of the NFL Players Association. He had this to say about the best thing in sports:

          “The camaraderie you build with your teammates and the people that are involved in the sport. You take that with you wherever you go. You can never ever let it go. And anyone who has participated has that feeling.

          “You’re in this unique fraternity, and it’s there for a lifetime: good, bad, indifferent; winning, losing, traveling, crying—all of it. It’s the camaraderie. It’s the greatest thing that you get out of this. The relationships you build through that.”

          Gail Goodrich, a basketball Hall of Famer, echoed Upshaw: “The camaraderie of being with your teammates, having a common goal, and working together toward it,” said Goodrich. “That first year after you retire, there is an adjustment. The biggest thing you miss is that association with the team.”

          Jerry West was in the same backcourt on the Lakers with Goodrich for two different terms. One of the NBA’s 50 greatest players, West, who later built championship teams as an executive with the Lakers, said, “The harshest lessons learned in life are probably through sports. There is no gray area. You either win or you lose. And I think it tests the character of all players. It tests the character of the people working internally. And it can lead to hastily made decisions that sometimes damage a franchise more than they would ever help because people don’t want to lose.

          “I think management has a great responsibility to the ownership, almost to the point where I believe that you should lose your job if there’s something that the owner wants to do and it’s just not the right thing to do because it is an emotional thing. I do think that were all at risk sometimes because we’re opinionated and we think we know what’s best for the team, and we don’t own the team.

          “I like to think I’d never work for money in my life. I do it because I love it. Obviously it’s important to get paid if you’re in a business like this. But I think the most important thing is, if somebody hires you, they should trust your instincts enough to let you run the team and for them to not interfere with some things that maybe they’re not very familiar with.”

          Randy Vataha enjoyed success in college (Stanford) and in the NFL (New England Patriots) as an undersized receiver. Looking back on his playing career, Vataha, the president of Game Plan LLC, said, “One of the reasons I enjoyed playing football is you have so many teammates to share the experience with. Every year, like a lot of people, I’ll get near a television when that ball comes down on New Years’ Eve in Times Square. And you say, ‘Why would all those people get there 10-15 hours in the cold before that ball drops down? Why do they do that?’ And it’s really to share an experience with everybody else.

          “Well, when I played at Stanford, the team had not been to the Rose Bowl in almost 20 years. So, to be able to win the Pac-8 and share that with your teammates, and to be able to go on to win the Rose Bowl, was a phenomenal experience. A lot of those guys have been dear friends for life, and they were all sort of forged within that teamwork. You can’t ever replace those kinds of experiences with your teammates.”

          Al Leiter, who pitched for the Yankees, Mets, Marlins, and Blue Jays before moving into the broadcast booth at YES and the MLB Network, said, “I have yet to meet a teammate, or even an athlete from another sport, who is not highly competitive. And I know after 20 years professionally—15 or 16 years in the major leagues—what continues to drive my love for the game is to compete at the pinnacle of my industry. To face the greatest players in the world and make quality pitches to get them out. It’s a rush. It’s a tremendous degree of satisfaction, even in the smallest battles.

          “As a player, my perspective is about competition and winning. And it has to be [the same] as a fan. And I would say sports are encompassed by the desire to watch competition at its best with the feeling of euphoria or sorrow with a win or a loss next to your team.”

          Offering perspective on the best thing about sports from the front office, Atlanta Falcons president Rich McKay said, “It’s the opportunity to compete in a game as a grownup. What I enjoy is that on Sundays you get to have your team compete against their team and see who wins. I like the fact that as adults we still get to play or be involved in a game that’s usually reserved for younger people.”

          Pat Williams, senior vice president of the Orlando Magic, has spent a full life in sports as a player and executive. He cited the relationships you make as among the best things sports offer.

          “The people you are involved with—the coaches, the athletes, the media,” said Williams. “You just do not meet those kind of people in any other walk of life. I ran into a man who grew up in the Philadelphia area. He was almost in tears talking about what the 1983 76ers meant to him and to his father and to his neighborhood. This man…was very emotional. And that just brought back to me the power of sports. And the impact it has on people’s lives.”

          Sports journalist and broadcast pioneer John Walsh once said, “The best thing about working in sports at ESPN is that there is a range of different possibilities every day. There are different mediums. There are different types of stories. You can come to work and be talking about Kobe Bryant on the court and his spectacular play, or the Kobe Bryant fall from grace off the court, which is an interesting, dramatic story as well. There is laughter and tears, all kinds of emotional stories that come about on a daily basis.

          “What’s happened in sports in the last quarter-century has been so overwhelmingly breathtaking and widespread that sports have come to represent life in America and the range of experiences, and the range of stories to cover is pretty astonishing.”