Sports fans most definitely mark time by sports seasons, and clearly associate events staggeringly good or bad with particular slices of our life. The 1969 Mets are what I remember from 1st grade; the 1972 Pirates-Reds National League Championship Series marked the beginning of understanding sadness in sports; the Devils won their last Stanley Cup the first year my son played travel hockey. But like financial prognosticators who picked stock market direction based on the conference affiliation of the Super Bowl winner, I have specific memories of World Series events and their perceived impact on my life.
1969 World Series: Miracle Mets, watching from Miss D’Amico’s first grade class on a black and white set perched on her desk, lights turned off, 25 of us clustered around the 12-inch screen to mark the first time I ditched school (or work) for a sporting event. My fascination with baseball cards started that following spring, collecting pasteboard memories of what transpired at the beginning of the school year.
1977 World Series: Yankees win, Reggie Jackson is Mr. October. I had put away my baseball cards the previous spring, upon graduation from middle school. I remember watching it with my cousins, amazed that they had such passion for the Yankees, not quite appreciating the magnitude of Jackson’s performance. It was likely the first sports event I can claim to have watched as a young adult.
1979 World Series: Pirates “We Are Family” series, Willie Stargell leading the black and gold to another championship, preaching unity before “diversity” was in the vernacular. In the fall of my senior year in high school, baseball was less interesting than college applications, dating, and doing statistics for the football team. My fascination with Stargell had faded a bit, into the mental left-center field gap, but came back front and center in the last Fall Classic I’d watch while living in my parents’ house.
2000 World Series: I watched the Yankees win from the comforts of a higher-end hotel, where I was addressing a dot-com high-flier the next morning. I remember seeing Sun Microsystems (my employer) stock jump the next morning, along with a basket of other technology stocks I owned. I sold only to be reprimanded by my manager for not believing the stock would continue its rocket ride. Just a few days, later, SUNW hit an all-time high, and since that day it’s been a remarkably difficult period to be a Sun employee or shareholder.
My personal definition of “lost decade” is that stretch from the Yankees last adding a ring until tonight. The World Series can’t make the market go up, or improve corporate earnings, or find jobs for all of my friends who have been displaced in the past year. Furthermore, there’s nothing I (or any other fan) personally did to propel the Yankees through the season and postseason. But for everyone who is a fan, who has been marking time since the first year of the double zero decade, the years marked with naught in every conceivable sense, there’s a bit of a halo effect that we’ll enjoy for a few weeks. It’s a nice way to wrap up the last season of this decade, bookending the way it started.
[ad#Google Adsense]
Comments are closed, but trackbacks and pingbacks are open.