ESPN

by Steve Wulf

  Field of Dreams (1989, baseball).

  “It was like coming this close to your dreams and then watching them brush past you like a stranger in the crowd.”

  —Burt Lancaster as Moonlight Graham

  The Natural (1984, baseball).

  “Pick me out a winner, Bobby.”

  — Robert Redford as Roy Hobbs, to the batboy

  Bull Durham (1988, baseball).

  “Don’t think. It can only hurt the ball club.”

  — Kevin Costner as Crash Davis, to Nuke LaLoosh

  North Dallas Forty (1979, football).

  “I’ve been ignoring the fact that I’m falling apart.”

  —Nick Nolte as receiver Phil Elliott

  Hoosiers (1986, basketball). “If you put your effort and concentration into playing to your potential, to be the best that you can be, I don’t care what the scoreboard says at the end of the game, in my book we’re gonna be winners.”

  —Gene Hackman as Coach Norman Dale

  A MIGHTY LONG GAME

  CAL RIPKEN AND WADE BOGGS PLAY 33 INNINGS

  It wasn’t a good sign when a power failure delayed the start of the April 18, 1981, Rochester-Pawtucket game at McCoy Stadium by half an hour. The last thing anybody wanted on that cold Rhode Island night was a long night.

  The first nine innings went fairly quickly, with the Red Wings taking a 1–0 lead into the bottom of the 9th. But the PawSox tied it up in the bottom of the inning, and the pitchers’ duel continued … and continued … and continued. Finally, in the top of the 21st, Rochester pushed a run across, only to have Pawtucket third baseman Wade Boggs drive in the tying run in the bottom of the inning. And that’s the way it stayed, knotted at 2–2, until International League president Harold Cooper suspended the game at 4:09 A.M. in the bottom of the 33rd.

  It was agreed that the game would continue on June 23. When the two teams reconvened, Pawtucket scored the winning run in its first at bat when Dave Koza hit a bases-loaded single to knock in Marty Barrett. After the marathon slog in April, the final rally in June took all of 23 minutes. But the whole thing took 8 hours, 30 minutes, the longest professional game in history. Said Pawtucket manager Joe Morgan, “I wanted to play another few innings, or seven to get to 40, so no one could ever break it.”

  Wade Boggs high-fives Marty Barrett as he scores the winning run two months later.

  Among the participants were two third basemen who ended up in the Hall of Fame, Boggs (4-for-12) and Cal Ripken Jr. (2-for-13); Jim Umbarger, who pitched 10 shutout innings for Rochester; and Bruce Hurst, who went five scoreless for the Sox. Recalled Hurst, “I remember striking out Ripken on a 3-and-2 breaking ball at 4 o’clock in the morning, and I don’t think he ever forgave me.”

  The game—which attracted extra attention because it was played amid a strike by major league baseball players—produced a dozen other records, including those for the most putouts by a team (99, by Pawtucket), the most strikeouts by a team (34, by Rochester), and the most at bats by one team (114, by Pawtucket).

  Unfortunately for Morgan, he wasn’t on the bench when the winning run crossed the plate. He’d been ejected two months earlier, in the 21st or 22nd inning, for arguing about an interference call at first base.

  The first notable author to write about baseball is none other than Jane Austen, who wrote this passage in the first chapter of Northanger Abbey in 1798:

  “… it was not very wonderful that Catherine, who had by nature nothing heroic about her, should prefer cricket, baseball, riding on horseback, and running about the country at the age of fourteen, to books …”

  FAMOUS AMOS

  THE AMAZING MR. STAGG

  His name is evoked every year for the Division III football championship, in Salem, Virginia, which is called the Stagg Bowl. But given the significance of his contributions to the game, they should name the Super Bowl after Amos Alonzo Stagg. As legendary Notre Dame coach Knute Rockne once said, “All football comes from Stagg.”

  The list of innovations Stagg introduced to the game is, well, staggering. It runs from the fundamental (the huddle, the tackling dummy, numbering plays and players, padding goalposts, awarding varsity letters) to the freewheeling (the end around, the lateral, the Statue of Liberty play, the man in motion). He is also credited with inventing the batting cage in baseball and the five-man formation for basketball. The mere mention of his name seemed to inspire people: The first atomic bomb was created underneath Stagg Stadium at the University of Chicago.

  Stagg was born in West Orange, New Jersey, and attended Phillips Exeter Academy. From there, he went to Yale, where he was a divinity student, a member of Skull and Bones, the infamous secret society, and an end on the first-ever All-America football team. After deciding that his quiet manner would make him a poor preacher, Stagg devoted himself to sports—specifically, to football. He launched his coaching career in Massachusetts in 1890 at the School of Christian Workers, now Springfield College. In 1892, he became the head football coach at the University of Chicago and transformed the Maroons into one of the best teams in the nation. Once asked if a particular team was the best he had ever coached, Stagg replied, “I won’t know that for another 20 years.”

  In 1932, he was forced out at Chicago because, at 70, he had reached retirement age. So he went on to the College of the Pacific, where he coached from 1933 to 1946, retiring as a fulltime head coach at the age of 84. He later served as an assistant coach at California’s Stockton Junior College and, with his son, at Pennsylvania’s Susquehanna College. Throughout Stagg’s career, his devoted wife was by his side, charting plays and feeding him statistics.

  When he was 102 and living in a nursing home, a photographer who was taking his picture for a newspaper feature told him, “I hope I’m back here next year to take your photo.” To which Stagg replied, “You look pretty healthy to me. I think you’ll make it.” Alas, Stagg died on March 17, 1965, five months shy of his 103rd birthday.

  Amos Alonzo Stagg, 1928.

  THE PUCK STOPS HERE

  WAYNE GRETZKY ON HOW TO TAPE A STICK

  When Wayne Gretzky was a kid, taping his stick—or doing anything with his equipment, for that matter—was an almost-holy experience. “I remember spending so much time just looking at my skates and gloves, comparing them to what the pros were wearing,” Gretzky says now.

  Of course, the Great One didn’t have your typical childhood. At 10, he became a household name in his native Canada after netting 378 goals in a single season, still an age-group record. Gretzky went on to become the NHL’s all-time leading scorer. But his relationship with his stick never changed.

  “The way I taped it was largely influenced by my dad, Walter. He showed me how to do it: black sticky tape wrapped around the blade from the heel to the toe, about a half inch apart. Then you moved up the stick and put a knob at the end. My dad wasn’t into a big knob at the end of the stick, so I didn’t waste much tape up there.”

  Walter taught his son to wrap his blade with tacky “friction” tape, which is thicker than the standard cloth version. The color was important, too: Black tape helps disguise the black puck, making it harder for goalies to pick up lightning-quick snap shots.

  Gretzky added one refinement all his own. “The last thing I did was put some baby powder on the blade to relieve some of the tape’s stickiness,” he says. “I always felt the baby powder gave me a smoother surface so I could feel the puck better.”

  Now head coach of the Phoenix Coyotes and the father of three hockey players, Gretzky says that he sees guys spending lots of time bending, taping, even blowtorching their sticks—time that might be better spent on the ice.

  “I don’t think I spent an inordinate amount of time on my sticks,” Gretzky says. “I believed that as long as I put the time into practicing hard, what I did preparing my stick would become secondary.”

  GLASS CEILING

  THE FIRST FEMALE DUNK

  Candace Parker does it all the time now. But who exac
tly was the first woman to dunk a basketball?

  If you answered Lisa Leslie, sorry. She was the first player to do it in a WNBA game, in 2002. The correct answer is Georgeann Wells, who dunked while playing for West Virginia University against the University of Charleston on December 21, 1984—nine days before LeBron James was born.

  It happened before a small crowd in a tiny gym in Elkins, West Virginia, and unfortunately there were no television cameras to capture the feat. The 6-foot-7 sophomore had been dunking in practice, and as Wells (now Wells-Blackwell) recalls, she was warming up before the second half when point guard Lisa Ribble said, “I feel it tonight. Do you?” Wells replied, “I feel sick to my stomach.”

  But with 11:18 left to play and the Lady Mountaineers ahead by a comfortable margin, Ribble lofted a long pass to Wells, who took a couple of steps and then dunked it with one hand. Keep in mind that back then, women played with a men’s regulation-size ball, not the smaller ball used in the women’s game today. A later dunk against Xavier University was captured on film, and the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, in Springfield, Massachusetts, chronicled Wells’s feat in a special display.

  Wells-Blackwell, however, doesn’t think a woman dunking is a big deal. “My thing is just Why not slam? Do it because you can.”

  Georgeann Wells dunks for the Mountaineers.

  You know him as Dikembe Mutombo, but at birth, in Zaire, he was named Dikembe Mutombo Mpolondo Mukamba Jean Jacque Wamutombo.

  BREAKFAST OF CHAMPION

  A BREAKDOWN OF MICHAEL PHELPS’S MORNING MEAL

  For the record, this is what Michael Phelps eats in the morning when he’s competing:

  three fried-egg sandwiches with cheese, lettuce, tomatoes, fried onions, and mayonnaise

  a five-egg omelet

  a bowl of grits

  three slices of french toast with powdered sugar

  three chocolate-chip pancakes

  two cups of coffee

  That’s approximately 4,000 calories, not counting the other swimmers he seems to eat for breakfast.

  But you’re not Michael Phelps. What should a normal athletic person have for breakfast? Let’s ask Michelle Daum, M.S., R.D., a pediatric and adult nutritionist in Westchester County, New York.

  First of all, I’m in awe of what Michael Phelps eats. Talk about power breakfasts. Good for him—but not for the rest of us. Unless you’re going to swim in eight Olympic events in a week, it’s not the way to start your day.

  What you really want for breakfast is whole grains, fruits or vegetables, and a source of protein, i.e., eggs, nuts, cheese, or milk. I didn’t notice any fruits in Michael’s breakfast, and he could do without the mayonnaise, chocolate chips, and butter they must have used to cook all that. Would you like to hear about some of the breakfasts I give my kids?”

  Sure.

  Monday. Calcium-fortified orange juice, yogurt with sliced bananas, granola

  Tuesday. Sliced melon, whole-grain cereal, glass of low-fat milk

  Wednesday. Bagel with a slice of Muenster, apple with peanut butter, glass of low-fat milk

  Thursday. Orange juice, oatmeal with almonds and raisins

  Friday. Two scrambled egg whites, grapes, glass of low-fat milk, whole-wheat English muffins.

  How about Wheaties? Says Daum, “Add some raisins, don’t add sugar, pour on low-fat milk, and it actually could be the Breakfast of Champions.”

  CHAMPION OF BREAKFAST

  HOW WHEATIES GOT THAT SLOGAN

  Phelps is just one of about 1,500 athletes who have appeared on a box of Wheaties since 1933, when Babe Ruth became the first. That was also the year the famous slogan was invented. It seems that General Mills had decided to spoon out $10,000 for the broadcast rights to the baseball games of the hometown Minneapolis Millers, and included in those rights was a billboard in center field of Nicollet Park. A representative of the Millers asked Knox Reeves, the advertising man for Wheaties, what should be put on the sign. Reeves, seated behind his desk, doodled a cereal box on a piece of paper and wrote down the fateful words: “Wheaties—Breakfast of Champions.”

  As it happened, Wheaties also offered a case of the cereal to any Miller who hit a home run in the home park that year. Well, Joe Hauser chose that season to hit 69 homers, 33 of them in Nicollet Park. That meant 33 cases, or 792 boxes, for Hauser. Some 50 years later, Hauser recalled, “I gave most of them to my teammates. Not that I didn’t like them—I still eat Wheaties.”

  Ruth was once asked on a radio show to push a Wheaties cookie that mothers could bake for their kids. His line was supposed to be “And so, boys and girls, don’t forget to tell your mother to buy Wheaties so she can make these cookies.” But in rehearsal, he kept pronouncing cookies “koo-kies.” He promised he would get the word right when the time came, but sure enough, he got it wrong while he was on the air. After a moment of silence, Ruth told the audience, “I’m a son of a bitch if I didn’t say koo-kies again.”

  GLOVE AFFAIR

  OMAR VIZQUEL ON HOW TO BREAK IN A MITT

  You can spend almost as much money on products for breaking in a baseball glove as you can for the mitt itself: oils, foams, molds, straps, even oven-activated potions. You can, as some major leaguers have done, throw a new glove in a whirlpool or run over it with your car.

  The number of baseball gloves produced from the hide of one cow is four or five.

  But take it from 11-time Gold Glove-winner Omar Vizquel. All you really have to do with a new glove is play with it. “I don’t do too much to a new glove,” says Vizquel, who has played more games at shortstop than anyone else in major league history. “I take it out to the field in batting practice, take ground balls with it, play catch with it. Gloves take their own shape, and the shape you want is the shape of your hand.”

  To break in a glove, Vizquel will bend the fingers down toward the palm, but that’s the way of infielders. Outfielders prefer a more vertical pocket, so they bend the fingers thumb to pinkie. Either way, it takes a little time and a lot of play.

  Most major leaguers have several mitts in rotation: a game glove, a replacement, some that they like that aren’t quite ready for graduation. Vizquel has had the same gamer for three years, so he has a number of gloves figuratively chomping at the bit. “Sometimes I’ll give one to a friend,” he says. “But he’s got to be a real friend. And he’d better take very good care of it.”

  Too much oil makes a glove heavy. Those oven potions will turn your laces into french fries. If you still insist on slathering something on your glove, any shaving cream with lanolin will do. (Little Leaguers can have fun with that.) And when baseball season is over, you might want to spread a light coat of petroleum jelly on the glove and put it in an unsealed plastic bag. But basically, the key to breaking in a glove is provided by the umpire before every game: Play ball!

  NET RESULT

  ON THE ORIGINS OF CUTTING DOWN THE NET

  The popular tradition of cutting down the nets after a big basketball victory can be traced to one man, legendary North Carolina State coach Everett Case. According to the historian Matt Zeysing at the Basketball Hall of Fame, the Old Grey Fox was the first person to cut down a net, snipping it off as his Wolfpack held him aloft after the team won the Southern Conference championship in 1947. He simply wanted the net as a souvenir of the victory.

  Should you be so lucky as to earn a similar distinction, please keep these recommendations in mind:

  Use a ladder. Riding on someone’s shoulders while holding scissors is dangerous.

  Borrow the trainer’s tape cutters to do the honors.

  Don’t get hung up on the order of doing the cutting, but make sure the team captains and the coach go last.

  The team may choose to let individual players cut off little pieces of cord for themselves, but if the players instead clip each of the hooked cords and thus preserve the net, they’ll have a much better photo op when the net is twirled around or worn around the neck.

  Everett
Case cutting down the net in 1959.

  JIMMY V

  AN EXCERPT FROM JIM VALVANO’S FAMOUS SPEECH

  Another North Carolina State basketball coach who cut down the nets, Jim Valvano, gave a beautiful and moving speech at the 1993 ESPY awards. Dying of cancer, Valvano famously said, “Don’t give up; don’t ever give up.” But Valvano was as much about laughter as he was about tears, and he brought down the house that night with this story:

  I have to remember the first speech I ever gave. I was coaching at Rutgers University, that was my first job … and I was the freshman coach.… My idol as a coach was Vince Lombardi, and I read this book called Commitment to Excellence by Vince Lombardi. And in the book, Lombardi talked about the first time he spoke before his Green Bay Packer team in the locker room—they were perennial losers.… Three minutes before they could take the field, Lombardi comes in, bangs the door open,… walked back and forth, like this, just walked, staring at the players.… “Gentlemen, we will be successful this year if you can focus on three things and three things only: your family, your religion, and the Green Bay Packers.”… They knocked the walls down and the rest was history.

  I said, that’s beautiful. I’m going to do that. Your family, your religion, and Rutgers basketball. That’s it. I had it. Listen, I’m 21 years old. The kids I’m coaching are 19,… and I’m going to be the greatest coach in the world, the next Lombardi.…

  I’m practicing outside of the locker room and the managers tell me you got to go in. Not yet, not yet. Family, religion, Rutgers basketball. All eyes on me. I got it, I got it. Then finally they said, “three minutes.” I said, “Fine.” True story. I go to knock the doors open just like Lombardi. Boom! They don’t open. I almost broke my arm.… Now I was down, the players were looking. Help the coach out, help him out. Now I did like Lombardi. I walked back and forth, and I was going like that with my arm, getting the feeling back in it. Finally I said, “Gentlemen, all eyes on me.” These kids wanted to play, they’re 19.… “Gentlemen, we’ll be successful this year if you can focus on three things and three things only: your family, your religion, and the Green Bay Packers,” I told them. I did that. I remember that.