Watching all-time classic sports highlights, truly great moments of surprise and miracle, is a tremendous thing to behold. I've come to love watching not only the moment itself, but the seconds just beforehand. On film you can see the athlete standing there, nonplussed, his name so far not a household name. Even if he's a great player already he may not have had a single, defining moment that will be replayed on televisions until the end of time. I love these moments; in particular the truly desperate ones. While in hindsight we see the player as a hero who simply would not give up etc etc, you know that as the play begins he has no more of an idea that his own life is about to change as you may your own. Doug Flutie's a great example. Here's a play that will be replayed as long as there are humans on Earth; it certainly won him the Heisman. Yet most people forget that earlier in that very game, he had become the first qb to ever go over 10,000 career passing yards. He had already accomplished so much, but as he walks up to the line it is the play to come that will forever define him as a football player - hell, prolly as a person. I love watching the replay and the second before the snap, wondering what's it like, to have your life changed so suddenly? When you watch the highlights, I think you tend to think the athlete knew exactly what was going to happen; of COURSE he does, you've watched it 1000 times!! Of course he knows what's about to happen, he's seen it too!! But he doesn't; up through the actual moment, he himself has no idea what is about to happen. Those plain, normal seconds leading up to immortality are fascinating to me.
For some reason, these examples jump out at me.
- Doug Flutie
- Ralph Branca/Bobby Thompson
- Bobby Plump
- Carlton Fisk
- Christian Laettner
Yes, there's many more.
3 comments:
Cool thoughts... can I buy some weed from you? (JK everybody!)
Do Bucky Dent and Aaron Boone qualify for this type of thing? I guess their stories are a bit different... but oh so wonderful!
Another long winded Xmastime and me comment:
When I was a wee lad I was always the smallest kid in my grade, scrappy but little, and unlike the mighty Xmas my love of sport was not matched by any real prowess in it, unless you count surfing and growing up on the beach in FL many of us did count surfing. So picture a tiny 12 year old Jim, hard to do not having an image in your head of the current old man Jim, sitting in the dugout inning after inning, teaching the other goobers how to juggle baseballs while the coaches’ 8 year old son is taking my rightful spot out by 2nd base, ”nepotism” I screamed to myself (I may have been little but that didn’t keep me from being surprisingly erudite). Fast forward 10 years and I am fresh out of college and living in a faraway Scandinavian country, hanging out in a bookstore that sold week old versions of Time and Newsweek and Sports Illustrated and on the cover of a slightly out od date SI was a no longer 8 year old version of the same kid playing football for BC. “No way, how is little Dougie Flutie playing major college football, seriously he's like 13 and he wasn't THAT good.” I thought, but there he was in a picture of his whole family, Mom and Dad, 2 brothers and his not-so-pleasant older sister who was my age and had a girth that would have rivaled the pre-all-organic-diet Xmastime (which means she too could have worn the Barber for a belt (which is the funniest line I have ever read). How did he go from the little kid who was actually pretty good, to being the plucky freshman QB of the future? I didn’t have time to ponder it right then, as I had to go and find much taller than me blonde girls who might be interested in my particular brand of international diplomacy. Fast forward another few years and I am back in the good ol US of A, at a family reunion with thousands of my southern football lovin' cousins all hootin' and hollerin'while we’re watching that great game, with a slightly vested interest, and he goes and throws that great pass and the stars are aligned and you are right, his life was never going to be the same. If the other kid drops it, does Dougie win the Heisman? Maybe not. Does Trump give him a billion dollars to hand off to Herschel Walker? No. Does he even get to get to play in the NFL, it seems unlikely, the world is full of HS football coaches who are full of grit and pluck but somehow they just don’t have the approved body type. Now as you pose your question I wondered, not only what is the guy like before the moment that changes everything, but what was he like the day before, or the week before, or even just growing up . . . did he have to take out the trash or mow the lawn before he became somebody that everybody knows.
Its equally interesting to consider the life after the event, maybe, like Doug, you can parlay it into a good gig, or maybe you spend your twilight years signing boobs at some tractor pull.
Okay after this I am definitely going back to the lurking.
i'm a second cousin to Captain Lou Albano, if you ever want to hear my dad's stories...who is he? never mind.
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