My intense and borderline unhealthy obsession with snowmen and their numerical equivalents (the number eight) stems from a childhood fascination with Pittsburgh Pirates slugger Willie Stargell. I remember liking Stargell because he was the de facto leader of the Pirates, and my best friends Scott and Glenn cheered for the Bucs so I followed gold-and-black suit. That’s how young allegiances are formed; it’s no stranger than loving the Yankees because your father did so before you were born. Finding sports heroes, and the converse, spurning them when they let us down, is the ultimate referral economy. We were retweeting in our own way, although it mostly involved who got to be Willie Stargell, and who was relegated to the roles of Manny Sanguillen, Dave Parker, and Al Oliver in our games of backyard baseball.
Until this week, I had no idea why Glenn and Scott – twins, with one of them in every one of my classes from first through sixth grades – were devoted Bucs fans. They weren’t from Pittsburgh, they hadn’t had any life-changing experiences in the Three Rivers area, and in the waning years of the 60s the Pirates were the equivalent of the modern-day Yankees: good but not regular champions. Pre-dating networked recommendations, the only way you knew what was going on was through newspaper box scores, the occasional game of the week on TV, and your friends and family. Earlier in the week, one of the twins found me on Facebook. I haven’t heard from him in years, and I was thrilled by the outreach, but almost immediately (thinking about wrapping up the hockey book in the next few months) I had to ask about the Pirates.
Turns out, in his words, that his father followed the Pirates because he had a friend who played for them. Minor league, journeyman, or senior circuit, we’ll never know, because my boyhood friends lost their dad several years ago. For me, the incomplete explanation more than suffices: it’s another case of love inherited from our parents and our parents’ generation. Thanks, Scott, for sharing the story with me.
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