Guest Posts on County 10 are provided by contributors and the opinions, thoughts, and comments within are their own and may not necessarily reflect those of County 10.
I occasionally catch game six of the 1975 World Series on ESPN. For those of you who don’t remember it, I consider it the greatest World Series of all time, a sentiment shared by many.
It remains invigorating, and frustrating at the same time, to watch Boston Red Sox Hall-of-Fame catcher Carlton Fisk drive it out of the park over the left field wall for a 12th inning walk-off home run. Yes, I was a fan of Bench, Rose, Geronimo, Perez, Foster, Concepcion and mostly second baseman Joe Morgan. A half-century later ,I still am.
My friends, including a couple of knuckleheads from Boston, didn’t have the same fondness for the National League Champion Cincinnati Reds. That made it exceptionally fun when we crowded three dozen of us into a tiny dorm room in Crane Hall to watch the game.
I was a freshman, away from home for the first time, and my friend Jon had a 25” Curtis Mathes color TV. Almost all of us had TVs in our Spartan dorm rooms, but like my 9” black-and-white set, nothing compared to Jon’s.
Guys were packed into every corner of the 16×14 room. Five sat on the sagging upper bunk, and I had a corner of the lower bunk with four other friends packed in. When the action got hot, the upper bunk swayed and sagged so much we sometimes bailed out of the lower one in anticipation of a collapse.
Bets on every pitch, insults flying back and forth, with group groans mixed with cheers on every play. It was a fantastic way to watch the World Series.
It’s interesting that the interest in a World Series from 50 years ago remains a favorite of older sports fans.
I’m sure the viewership for this classic encounter with two legendary teams will fade a bit over the next few decades, but even in the future, baseball fans will find it. Earlier in the week, I watched a few rounds of Mohammed Ali and Joe Frazier mixing it up in their second fight at Madison Square Garden back in 1974. I watched it the first time in a broadcast delayed by several days on ABC at my grandmother’s house, since we only had one TV channel out on the farm at the time. I remember the controversy when Ali won by unanimous decision after tying up Frazier an incredible 133 times in the fight.
When modern athletes don’t hold our interest, we reach back to the legends of yesterday. My recent story on my friend Nick Bebout had an amazing response. Nick’s a great guy, that was most of it, but he played in an era before social media hype dominated sports. That was part of it as well.
YouTube is a tremendous resource. I didn’t realize it until I interviewed Riverton’s phenomenal diver Addison Peart, that is used by athletes to learn new drills, techniques and styles. Plus, it fills the athletic void in the offseason in many sports. I discovered the Superstars from the 1970s and 80s recently. For those who don’t remember, or have never heard of it, it was an event that combined the best from diverse sports and pitted them against each other in swimming, running, biking, obstacle course, and powerlifting competitions.
Smokin’ Joe Frazier remains my favorite professional competitor. The iron man from a tiny town in South Carolina could uppercut like no other and take punishment that would have floored a lesser fighter. He was the perfect foil to the smooth, articulate Ali.
But Joe couldn’t swim, and Joe didn’t have the slightest idea of pacing himself in competition. In one biking segment, Joe takes off on a 10-speed on a 400-meter track and builds a huge lead right out of the start. The problem was, it wasn’t a one-lap race, and by the time he reached the finish line, Joe was dead last and barely able to pedal his bike.
That performance was much better than the 100-meter swim competition for Joe. All the competitors dived into the water at the start. Joe flailed for a few strokes, then sank to the bottom of the pool. Lifeguards quickly jumped in and saved the former heavyweight champion from drowning.
It’s not the same as waiting for the 110-meter finals at the Roy Peck, the Wind River Invite, or the Shane Brock; those are all Fremont County gems that await the arrival of spring in a few months.
My wife Sue, who isn’t a huge sports fan, was amazed at shot put legend Brian Oldfield as he competed against former Pittsburgh Steeler Lynn Swan in the 100-yard dash finals. Swann beat the big guy by two-tenths of a second, but Oldfield’s time of 10.43 was incredible for a man that huge.
Sue has even watched a couple of NFL films and ESPN 30-for-30 broadcasts on Chris Collingsworth, Earl Campbell, Mike Singletary, Bo Jackson, and Walter Payton. These in-depth documentaries bring out the human side of these larger-than-life characters and provide a nice backdrop to the present-day hype surrounding the multi-million-dollar salaries.
You wouldn’t see the MLB, NHL, NFL, and NBA stars of today competing for cash in something like the Superstars. With their overblown salaries, they don’t need it.
The past is the past, it’s yesterday, but memories are one of the few things that separate us from the other mammals. Times, finances, and memories change with the times.
The $3000 Swann won after beating Oldfield in the 100 was good money for a professional athlete back in the 1970s.
Change and how we approach it is a lesson in patience, a lesson we can all use in today’s deadline-driven rush to nowhere.