I enjoyed playing all the traditional sports in my early years. Traditional, in those days, meant football, basketball, and baseball. Soccer was still something that they mainly did in Europe and, as my dad liked to say, was intended by the Communists to “divert attention from important things like football.” Hockey was for people who had longer winters than we did and indoor rinks. It looked cool, but didn’t develop a following in southwest Virginia until the late 60’s when professional hockey came to the Roanoke Valley. So, we had football in the fall, basketball in the winter, and baseball in the spring and summer.
Kids didn’t specialize in just one sport like they seem to do in many parts of the country now. Parents were either smarter and realized that the chance of a college scholarship for their young superstar was about as great as getting hit by a meteor and a professional career as likely as winning “the lottery” (only there wasn’t one in those days), or they didn’t live their lives through their kids vicariously. And most of the schools where I grew up couldn’t have fielded teams if the best athletes didn’t play multiple sports. The result was that youth sports, even through high school, were played for all the right reasons – for fun and exercise and competition, to keep kids out of trouble, to teach good sportsmanship, for school spirit, to develop friendships. Over the last 40 years it seems these virtues have been forgotten or at least declined significantly in priority.
But enough rhapsodizing about how great it was in the good old days.
Personally, my lifelong love affair with sports has been a bit inconsistent. My “best” sport in little league days was basketball – I was quicker than most of the kids I played against and could steal the ball, dribble the length of the court, and make layups. I was at or near the top of our league in scoring in sixth and seventh grades. But put me 10 feet from the basket and, between horrible eyesight (I refused to play with my glasses on) and a God-given lack of skill, I was lucky to hit the backboard. And I was at best average height as I moved on into high school.
My favorite sport to play was football. This was probably inevitable and certainly influenced if not dictated by genetics. Not that I was big or strong or “built for the game,” but my dad and two of his brothers had played the autumn game for dear old Christiansburg High and my hero, cousin Joe, had been one of the greatest Blue Demons ever and had been hit by the meteor and gone to college on a full ride scholarship. This was the era of “Friday night lights,” when towns shut down and folks filled the bleachers. In southwest Virginia of that time, it wasn’t “Herbert Hoover High v. Florence Nightingale Prep,” it was Christiansburg v. Radford. It was a community thing, town versus town. So, I grew up dreaming of Friday nights, putting on the blue and gold and walking along the little ledge from our locker room, around the gym to the gates, and running onto the field in front of the entire town, or so it seemed. As a kid you never felt more special.
So in my life, football was the sport I loved to play the most, and basketball was probably the one where I excelled the most, but baseball was what consumed me. It had a longer season, and when school was out for the summer, kids in every neighborhood had games going from dawn to dusk, interrupted only by organized Minor League, Little League, and Pony League games at Kiwanis Field and the occasional meal. We weren’t carted off to camps or music lessons or tutoring sessions. We played ball outside and stayed out of our mothers’ hair.
But baseball had another special place in my heart. My dad grew up in an era when baseball was still the “National Pastime.” A few books I have read about those days say that baseball, boxing, and rowing (rowing?) were the three most followed sports of his youth. The biggest heroes were boxers and professional baseball players. The NFL was in its infancy and the NBA didn’t exist and college sports were for the upper classes. But boy, did they love baseball in those days.
The love of baseball that I shared with my dad went beyond throwing the ball in the backyard and checking box scores and league standings every morning and listening to games on the radio on hot summer nights. It was sort of my view on the world beyond Christiansburg. It gave me an insight to the major cities of America.
Baseball at the Major League level was the inner-city game, played in ballparks (not stadiums!) smack in the middle of neighborhoods and business districts, with views of cityscapes and home runs “leaving the park” and kids chasing the balls down in the streets. It gave me the nuns in the right field bleachers in full habits in 90 degree heat in Pittsburgh, the San Francisco Bay just behind a cyclone fence in right field where Willie McCovey deposited a million home-runs, the laundry over the left field wall in Cincinnati where Frank Robinson broke many a window. I still have my mental image of Wrigley Field in Chicago, before the entrepreneurs started selling rooftop seats for $500 a game to watch the Cubs lose another one – there was always the guy in an old white tee shirt who would raise his apartment window about the fourth inning and step out on the rooftop beyond the right field wall and peer in at the game for free, scratching his ample stomach and opening an Old Style (I’m guessing on this one), unaware that he was on national television and that Joe Garagiola was talking about him.
I have shared my nostalgic love for the game with many of my contemporaries over the years. One of my favorite stories comes from a retired architect in my neighborhood who grew up in Clarksburg in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s. He lived in the section of the city known as Stealey, in an era before houses were air conditioned and there were not so many diversions in our lives. He likes to talk about how you could walk through the streets of his neighborhood on hot summer nights, windows open for hope of a faint breeze, and as you went by house by house you would never miss a pitch of the Pirates game on the radio. KDKA radio, Bob Prince announcing, Roberto Clemente starring, for historians.
Oh, for the love of baseball and where it took us in those days.
