Associated Press sportswriter Hal Bock is calling it quits after covering events for over 40 years.
It ends so quickly, before you know it really. It ends here at the close of one year and the start of another, a rather appropriate place to finish up.
It is done 40 years or so after it began, an adventure of remarkable proportions, a journey that snaked its way through exotic venues, places I never imagined visiting, watching and writing about events I never imagined seeing.
It ends with sights and sounds you don’t forget, signposts in your mind, pit stops on the journey:
• Reggie Jackson hitting three home runs in a World Series game, each on the first pitch, each farther than the one before.
• Jim Craig, Mike Eruzione and a team of college hockey players beating the mighty Soviet Red Army hockey team and going on to win the Olympic gold medal at Lake Placid.
• Outmanned Villanova outsmarting Georgetown to win the NCAA tournament and sending disheveled coach Rollie Massimino running around the court, two years after North Carolina State and Jim Valvano did the same thing to Houston.
• The splash of color and sound that is the Indianapolis 500, and watching Rick Mears and Gordon Johncock drive the brickyard at breakneck speeds and finish the race almost side by side.
• Terry Bradshaw shepherding the Pittsburgh Steelers to four Super Bowl titles and then Joe Montana doing the same thing for the San Francisco 49ers.
• Roberto Duran walking away from Sugar Ray Leonard, disgusted with either himself or his opponent – he never said which – and announcing, “No mas.”
• Muhammad Ali, fighting for the last time in a makeshift ring on a soccer field in the Bahamas, dressing in a trailer, a sad ending for the man who called himself “The Greatest.”
• Debbie Armstrong claiming a surprising skiing gold medal for the United States on the side of a mountain in Yugoslavia while I wondered how I was going to get back down to write the story.
• Locked in the Montreal Forum after a Stanley Cup game and using some high school French to have a night guard open a freight entrance so I could get back to Ste. Catherine Street.
• Calling in an urgent story on the first baseball free agent draft from the ladies powder room at Manhattan’s posh Plaza Hotel because that was the only phone available and in this business, you do what you have to do.
• Watching the roller-coaster career of Pete Rose deteriorate from Charlie Hustle to just plain hustle. Rose lied to me and a lot of others in an assortment of venues over 14 years about betting on baseball. He looked me in the eye and never blinked. Now I’m the guy who is blinking.
This odyssey began with 20 major league baseball teams, 14 NFL teams, eight more in the AFL, six NHL teams and nine NBA teams. Then, along came the USFL and the WFL, the ABA and the WHA, creating franchise multiplication, not always such a good thing.
One night, a television talking head was reporting the scores and dutifully announced, “… and in the NHL, Carolina 4, Tampa Bay 2.”
My wife, the psychologist, who has put up with plenty during this odyssey, looked up rather startled and said, “Carolina has a hockey team?”
“Phoenix, too,” I replied.
I didn’t even mention Nashville or San Jose.
So much of the time was spent outside closed doors, waiting for the proprietors to decide the direction of their sports and their leagues.
They shut down baseball for two months in 1981 with what I thought was the strike to end all strikes. It turned out to be nothing more than a warmup for the conflagration of 1994 when the intramural bluster of players and owners canceled the World Series.
There have been football strikes, hockey and basketball lockouts and there will be more before they’re done. The fact of the matter, though, is that when the adventure began, the top salary in sports was $100,000 a year. Now, that’s tip money for the capitalists who play the games.
If that sounds like a revolution, it’s nothing compared to the way news gets transmitted. In the beginning, there were portable typewriters and Western Union operators. Now the typewriters have turned into computers and the teletype operators have been replaced by the mysteries of Microsoft and Netscape.
This has become a business for young people and I no longer fit that description. So I am moving on, planning to teach a little, write a little, watch some games, and hang out with my grandson, deciding whether to go for some ice cream or to visit the merry-go-round.
Thanks for the memories.
AP-ES-01-10-04 1133EST
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