Sports Fan

It sure was tough rolling out of bed at 4:45 Tuesday morning. Especially after a long Columbus Day weekend. Staying up late for Monday Night Football didn’t help either. But it was well worth the lack of sleep seeing my beloved Miami Dolphins win. Not that I’m such a “Big” sports fan, but I do love my teams. Monday night was a good night for me sports-wise. The New York Rangers won 7-2 over the Toronto Maple Leafs, and of course, my Dolphins beat the New York Jets 31-27 in the upset of the year. The Yankees are having a great season, but I have to say that baseball has had its day with me. I do watch it, but only when the Yanks are on, and there is nothing better to do. Rangers Hockey and Dolphins Football have priority. I have been known in the past to plan life’s events around the games. But now I don’t think my wife would understand that for one minute and rightly so! Many have asked me why I am a Miami Dolphins fan. I was born at Memorial Hospital in Miami, Florida so it was natural when the Dolphins came to the AFL in 1966 that I would root for them. Plus the fact, that my Dad was glued to the television on Sunday afternoons watching the Dolphins play. I loved those times watching with him, and I even learned my present-day style of yelling at the referees through the TV from him. I always think of him when I watch and wonder if he is staying up late to watch, or if the game is on in Virginia. Sometimes I call him to see if he is watching too. Sometimes I forget. I became a New York Rangers fan in 1972, the year I moved from Katonah to Chappaqua, New York. I met a girl named Laurel at my bus stop. She always talked about the Rangers and made hockey sound so exciting. I always thought Hockey was some “Communist Sport”, and never paid it much attention. Back in those days, we didn’t have Cable TV on Hog Hill Road. We lived too far off the main road, where the cable was just making its way to the area. Laurel’s family had Cable, and she would occasionally invite me over to watch games. I think at first I was more amazed at how clear the picture was, as opposed to the fuzzy picture we got at home from the antenna received broadcasts. After a while I started really getting into the games, listening to the radio and dancing around my room when the Rangers would score a goal. I still do a bit of dancing when they score, but I would say it is much more subdued. So now I have DIRECTV, I can watch every game. They even rebroadcast the games again if I miss the live game. What a great thing…or is it? Maybe too much time and money are spent on sports. That was the thing that got me about baseball. It’s a kid’s game for crying out loud! We grew up playing ball in an empty lot where we had to run around the tall grass to flatten it down enough so we could see each other. Hopefully, we would catch every fly ball so we would not lose the ball in that sea of green. It would take forever to find it, if at all. If our radar was not working that day, we would have to head home. More than likely it was the only ball we had. I always felt bad leaving the ball behind. I thought it would get lonely out there on its own. Of course, we would always find another ball in the high grass that we lost a few days ago, it would weigh 50 pounds from all the water it retained while it was hiding from us. After a few days in the hot summer sun and it was dry enough, and not as slippery for our small hands to use in one of our big games. Today you watch a Major League game and every pitch that the ball touches the ground the Umpire throws it out of play. We would have killed to have a dry ball and only a speck of dirt on it. We would play in the light of the nearby street lights along Anderson Road. Katonah, New York is where I learned to play baseball. I can remember like it was yesterday, my dad throwing “high pops” at my best friend Brucie and me. Neither one of us could catch to save our lives. Brucie caught more than one on the top of the head, while it seemed I favored to let the ball hit my forearm or wrist ‘til my hand went numb. We eventually got the hang of using our gloves to catch and went on to be pretty good ballplayers. A few years later, Brucie and I were asked to play on an All-Star Team with the “Older Boys”. I was so proud of Brucie and me, as we played together on that diamond. In our minds, it was our moment playing a World Series Game at Yankee Stadium. Today grown men are paid millions of dollars to play a kid's game. We played for the love of the game. Some in the majors still do. Derek Jeter is a great ambassador for the game with his enthusiasm and skill. He remembers Joe DiMaggio’s advice that there are kids out there seeing him play for the first time, so play with the enthusiasm of your first game, every game. And he does. It's guys like him that give the game that old-time appeal. Hopefully, there is more of his brand of ballplayer coming down the pike, or sadly America will lose its favorite pastime to corporate greed, and other distractions. So am I a sports fan...probably not. Maybe it’s just the nostalgia of it all. I guess for me watching my team brings back a bit of the innocence of my childhood. Simpler days of sitting in the living room with my dad, or the pure adrenalin rush as Rangers radio man Marv Albert’s voice raised an octave just before he uttered the sweetest words “He shoots…he scores!.” I guess I love the seamless tradition of sports, at least with my teams. The Dolphins, Rangers, and Yankees have changed their uniforms very little if any over the years, and I like that. A constant, lineal reminder of a time long ago that eases us ever so gently into the future. So maybe I am a sports fan, it’s not such a bad thing after all.