OT: What Is Your Earliest Sports Memory?
This concept has sorta gone viral this week (there's another series of issues that obviously takes much more precedence, but they are outside the scope of this blog). People are recounting the earliest news they can remember.
Today, I've seen a few people on twitter discussing the earliest sports moment they can remember. For reference, there was a thread in 2010 on the blog asking for earliest Michigan FB memories. It was a while ago, and only Michigan Football related. This is a bit wider.
It's Friday, it's July, it's time for this thread. What is your earliest sports memory?
The first datable sports memory I have was Kirk Gibson's bottom-of-the-8th home run in Game 5 of the '84 series. My family was watching it at another family's house on an old, small color tv. I gather people were going rather bananas, but my memory is vague. Still, I remember it.
A close second was the '85 Michigan-Iowa game.
Brett Hull goal in 2002 playoffs forget which game
One of my first memories is seeing Dick Nixon's face on the TV when he resigned the presidency. As far as sports, I keep thinking that it's got to be one of either the '74 or '75 Super Bowls, because I remember the Vikings playing.
Silly and hilarious
It looks like you win the prize for oldest poster / earliest memory.
Tigers '68 -- walking home from school in GR and everyone that had a radio listening to it. About the same time -- the Fearsome Foursome D-Line of the Los Angeles Rams! I loved baseball and football even before I was old enough to play. Remember I lost a tooth running with a piece of concert like it was a football!
I can vivdly remember the images and voices of the newscasters as the networks covered the terrorist attacks at the '72 Olympics. I put my face up to the TV Screen trying to see the "Guerillas" that were being described by the reporters. In my four-year-old mind, I thought: "They must be talking about men in gorilla suits, and not actual gorillas."
I remember watching the 1970 Lions vs Cowboys playoff game when I was 7. I was watching with my Dad, Grandfather and a couple uncles at my grandparents house. The grandparents purchased one of those big colored picture tube sets with the built in radio and phonograph in the late 60s. At the time my parents only had a B&W television set. This got me hooked on watching football and the next fall I started following Michigan football!
I cannot remember a time since that age where I wasn't chasing down a ball of some type, usually softball in our mixed gender games that were always going on. My grandmother had 12 children, and I had 5 siblings, two of them who were older than my youngest aunt. I believe there was an age gap of 19 years between my oldest Aunt and youngest. As a result, we were always tossing shoes, playing catch, volley ball, softball, etc., everytime we visited Grandma's.
However, the game that caused my fixation(as to my inolvement) was probably around 19 and 60, maye 61. My uncle was either a jr. or sr. and he was the first athlete at that particular school to be first team All State in football. He was also all conference in everything else, including basketball. He was 6'4, 235 lbs, very big for that day but about right in the middle of the pack for his family. Seeing that they didn't have strength training, his size and athleticism normally made him the best player in whichever sport he was playing.
This happened to be a football game, and I can recall how crazy the fans went when he stuck his big paw up in the air, pulled down an int, one handed, and ran it back about 60 yards for a TD, running over the qb who tossed it in the process. He held all the school records you liked to see from a DE, TE, shot put, 220, 440 - which I broke later, and I imagine if they had lifted then, the rest of the team would have taken about a year just to catch up to his natural strength. But it was that interception, basically mauling every RB who got near him and catching a number of passes when he was on offense that gave me a mixed emotion of both pride and desire - knowing I wanted to hear that when I got older. Of course, I just assumed I'd grow to be the same height and weight. Not even close, about 6 inches short and 55 light. But in additioin to the 440 speed, I also wass extremely fast in the sprints and for whatever reason, and I think it really has something to do both with hand size and shoulder joint, I could throw a tight spiral and hit what I was aiming at from the time I first picked up a fb. At least I thought this was the case but then looking back, I was the ballboy from the time I was about 11 until it was my time to play, so I imagine my cousin and I, the other bb, threw that ball around a lot.
Looking back, I am extremely happy the extended family was so into sports. We always had something to strive for - my older brother was an all-conference guard in bb and a lot of it had to do with his high kiss shots off the backboard and the arc he put on his outside shots. That, too, can be traced back to an even taller uncle who would open the gym doors for him and make him shoot over his outstrechted arm at about 6'8". He was the school janitor who the varsity coach was salivating over when he was about 6'3" in jr. high. He had undetecteted epilepsy that caused him to roll out of bed and the ending was a metal insertion of some type in the head and partial payalysis on the left side.
He was a hell of a man, regardless but I must say - he was about 3 years older than the one who I watched - he did look a bit out of place in the jr. high bb photo where the nearest teamate didn't quite hit his shoulder.s Hell, at 6'3" then, he was about 2" taller than the team mate that played center for us in high school. We always had some big - as in wide, linemen - on the football field, but height on the basketball team was a rarity.
I have a great memory from Tiger Stadium in 1971. Our annual trip down for a game, saw the A's about a week after the All-Star game, stars were still painted on the field. Went down to get Reggie Jackson's autograph and I pointed to where he hit the home run. Reggie could be an ass, but on that night, he let me point and listened to me like it was the first time someone showed him, couldn't have been nicer to a 7 year old.