It’s the New (Sports) Meme
Via Drum and Steven Taylor, the Top 10 Sports Moments you saw as it happened, either in person or on TV. In my case, every one was via the tube. Not in order after the first item.
1. The Immaculate Reception. All of us in southwestern PA agreed at the time, by the way, that this was a good call.
2. Really, what else matters?
3. Okay. The Miracle on Ice in 1980.
4. Mark Spitz winning all the medals at the 1972 Olympics.
5. Denver breaking two different curses with their Super Bowl victory over Green Bay.
6. The next year’s AFC playoffs, Keyshawn Johnson getting: a receiving touchdown, a rushing touchdown, a fumble recovery and (on the hail mary that concluded the game) an interception.
7. Doug Williams’ 5-TD second quarter in the 1987 Super Bowl, breaking another curse of sorts.
8. Sugar Ray Leonard’s gold medal performance in 1976.
9. The 1982 AFC Divisional playoff game between Miami and San Diego. I still believe this was the best football game ever played, if you consider football as an art form.
10. Kirk Gibson’s game-winning homer to win game one of the 1988 series, the one he hit because his leg was too messed up to run the bases in earnest.
2. Okay, we should have a full ten. I’ll say Deena Kastor’s amazing bronze medal marathon run at the 2004 Olympics, where she methodically picked off 13 runners over the second half of the race, about eight of them before the announcers realized what was happening.
Comment by Thomas Nephew —
July 5, 2005 @ 9:59 am
What fun! I’d put Aaron’s 714th homer in my list; I was a big Braves fan back then (still am, but not as obsessively). You bet I was watching.
Others of personal significance: Dwight Clark’s SF49er catch against the Cowboys; “the drive” SF49ers vs. Bengals; US vs Russia 1980 (watched this in Germany in the wee hours with the other American in the dormitory.) A soft spot for Notre Dame and Adrian Dantley ending UCLA’s basketball winning streak. Not a moment but a whole series: Braves-Twins, 1991. Best ever, IMO. And an electrifying play in the Sugar Bowl maybe 15 years back, where some Alabama cornerback chased down a Miami receiver (Michael Irvin?) pulling away for a touchdown, stripped the ball right out of his hands, and went the other way for a touchdown or close to it. (And I don’t even like Alabama.)
Comment by Thomas Nephew —
July 5, 2005 @ 10:00 am
Meant 715th homer, actually. The edit didn’t stick.
Comment by Nell —
July 5, 2005 @ 10:39 am
These are the kinds of things that date a person.
1: Yankees-Red Sox 1977 ‘playoff’ (tiebreaker at end of season) game, the one where fvcking Bucky Dent got the big hit. It was a day game, I’d called in sick to see it. Absenteeism was rampant on the east coast that day.
2: Steve Yzerman hoisting the Stanley Cup in 1997. But the Big Moment of that season, essential to their win and just as engraved in Red Wings’ fans’ memories — the choreographed multi-player fights in the payback game against the Avalanche, the sweetest moment of which was Osgood v. Roy.
3: The Catch in the 49ers Super Bowl victory (1989? I think.)
4: Carlton Fisk’s body-English home run against Cincinnati in the 1975 Series. That Series was stuffed with great plays, the most absorbing Series in my watching life.
5: George Brett turning around a hundred-mile-an-hour Goose Gossage pitch in the playoffs sometime in the early 1980s for extra bases (or maybe a homer); as Bill James wrote, you knew as you saw it that would be the last pitch in the strike zone to him for years.
6: The Kirk Gibson homer. I didn’t just see it, I called it as he came to bat. Grimly, as I was rooting for the A’s; but I could just see it about to happen.
7: The (playoff? Series?) game where the Philly crowd took a rattled reliever (Worrell? must have been a playoff) completely apart and the Phils took the lead and won the game.
8: Bill Buckner booting the ball in the Red Sox-Mets Series. Hey, they don’t have to be good moments, do they?
9: The insurance goal for the Sharks in Game 5 of their first-round playoff against the Wings in 1994. They were such underdogs, they’d gone on a huge tear in the stretch drive during March, and in this game they played with more confidence every shift. This was the moment when you knew they would pull off the unbelievable upset. This series made Scotty Bowman determined to bring Igor Larionov to the Wings, one of the keys to their greatness in the 1990s.
10: Scotty Bowman lacing up to take a turn with the Cup in 1998.
Comment by Nell —
July 5, 2005 @ 10:43 am
AAAiiee! What the hell happened? It’s in 36-point type!! I was going to add #11: The schmaltz and overdone-ness of the celebration at the end of Cal Ripken’s streak was lightened by a brilliant sign held up in the third-base stands: ‘We consider ourselves the luckiest fans on the earth.’
Comment by Matt —
July 5, 2005 @ 10:51 am
Thomas: The Alabama player was George Teague, the Miami player Lamar Thomas, the year 1993, and the play — despite being nullified for an Alabama offsides — was awesome.
Comment by Jim Henley —
July 5, 2005 @ 10:55 am
Nell, sorry. It appears to have been the numeral signs. Who knows why.
.
Thomas: sorry. When you edit you need to click the PREVIEW button again to update your changes, not the post button or whatever.
.
Ah, the SUBMIT button, he edited to add, and clicked PREVIEW again to complete.
Comment by Thomas Nephew —
July 5, 2005 @ 11:37 am
No big deal, of course. Nell’s comments look OK on my screen, maybe you’ve fixed something in the meantime.
Yeah, the Fisk homer was great. And I shared that bad pre-Kirk Gibson homer feeling. And I guess this does all date me, doesn’t it. Whatever.
Another kind of sports moment was the Bay Area quake in 89, which is where I was at the time. Between about 1000 car alarms going off and seeing that the Series was off the air in the bar I peered into, I confirmed my quick impression that “dang, that was big.” Didn’t see it, but Al Michaels said “Its an earth-” before getting cut off.
Comment by Thomas Nephew —
July 5, 2005 @ 11:46 am
Thanks for all the details on that Alabama play, Matt. I’d clearly forgotten a lot. I mainly remember being just slackjawed when it happened, and laughing at the replays.
Just read that Teague was a first round pick the next year, coached linebackers for the Cleveland Browns in 2002, and is running a charitable foundation as of now. So I guess he prospered, good for him.
Trackback by Off Wing Opinion —
July 5, 2005 @ 11:59 am
Top 20 (Plus Two) Sports Memories
Thanks to Jim Henley for picking up on this latest meme: list your top 10 sports memories with one condition…
Comment by Nell —
July 5, 2005 @ 1:11 pm
Thanks for fixing it, Jim. Unnerved by the big black type, I blew the quotation from the sign at the end of Ripken’s streak:
We consider ourselves the luckiest fans on the face of the earth.
Comment by steve duncan —
July 5, 2005 @ 4:23 pm
“By now, word-of-mouth had spread and everyone knew what was happening. A massive horde of fans converged around Nicklaus’ holes, and the cheers could be heard by every golfer on the course. As Nicklaus slowly walked from the 15th green to the 16th tee, the roar from the gallery was like a rolling wave of thunder.
Seve Ballasteros was now walking up the fairway on the 15th. Just as he was about to hit his second shot, a huge roar went up on the par-3 16th, where Nicklaus’ first shot had landed 3 feet from the pin. Ballesteros cracked, and plunked the shot into the water trap. “He had an awkward lie up on a knob,” Ballesteros’s partner Kite remembered, “It was a tough situation: The lie, the circumstance, what Nicklaus was doing, the noise. It was so noisy we couldn’t even hear each other.”
If the 1986 Masters isn’t just about the best damned bit of sports drama ever played out on television I don’t know what is.
Comment by Marc Hoff —
July 6, 2005 @ 9:09 am
You sure Miracle on Ice qualifies, Jim?
Unless you were in the crowd, you saw it on tape delay …
http://www.answers.com/topic/miracle-on-ice