What sports event dates you?
It’s a date that will live in the minds of baseball nerds forever.
Oct. 8, 1956.
The day the Yankees’ Don Larsen pitched the only perfect game in World Series history. Fifty years ago this Sunday.
But it was also a day ineradicably linked to me.
It was the day I was born.
In some ways, I truly believe my birth date determined my course in life. After being born on one of the most famous days in baseball history, to a baseball-loving father – who still blames me for missing the game – baseball had to be a key component of my life.
How was I ever going to become a golfer or pianist or nuclear physicist with that birth date (not to mention that I’m tone - and math - deaf)?
No, baseball was the impetus for the path I would have to follow and it led me, 50 years later, to be writing sports in Spokane.
And it’s led me to a question I want you to answer.
What major sporting event in the past 50 years has been tied to your life? Were you married on the day Secretariat won the Belmont by 31 lengths (June 9, 1973)? Was your first daughter born on the day Drew Bledsoe led the Cougars to an Apple Cup win in the Pullman snow (Nov. 21, 1992)? Did you meet your wife-to-be the same day Kirk Gibson hit his pinch-hit home run to beat the A’s (Oct. 15, 1988)?
These are the kind of things I’m looking for you to share. If you have such a date indelibly linked to you or someone close to you, just go to spokesmanreview.com/sports and click on the SportsLink blog or the “Question of the Day” to add your comment.
By the way, I have the Gibson date etched permanently on my head, in the form of a scar I received that day.
I was in Louisville, Ky., at a convention and had snuck away from the awards dinner to my Galt Hotel room. I clicked on the TV to watch the last few innings of the game alone and, when Gibson fouled off ball after ball, I stood on the bed, taking it all in. When he connected on Dennis Eckersley’s slider and drove it into the night, I jumped for joy, only to hit the light above the bed with the top of my head.
The postgame show always will have a blood-red tinge in my memory.
“ The discussion we had last week over the Bellevue football coach’s booster-club stipend was, for the most part, an intelligent, thought-provoking, informed one.
Many of you saw nothing wrong with paying a high school coach $55,000 annually above his school stipend of $5,600. Others had a problem with the priorities and had other ways to spend the money.
And almost everybody was able to discuss it in the way it was meant: As an intellectual exercise that may not sway your opinion or effect those involved but would shed some light on our society’s priorities.
Thanks for your time.