Ten Weeks Before Bucky 'Bleeping' Dent...

"THE TWO OF THEM DESERVE EACH OTHER. One's a born liar, the other's convicted." --  New York Yankees Manager Billy Martin, July 24, 1978.

Combative Billy Martin,
from the '78 Yanks yearbook

Manager, yes, but not for long. At least not in that instance. The subjects of Martin's airport bar alcohol-fueled ire were his star outfielder, Reggie Jackson, and team owner George Steinbrenner. An unholy trinity, a year earlier they'd collaborated to bring the Bronx Bombers their first championship since 1962. The star burnished his Mr. October legend by closing out the series with three consecutive first-pitch homers in its last game.

But now, just past the halfway mark of a flagging title defense effort, egos clashed, nerves frayed and tempers boiled over. Jackson, mad at Martin for batting him low in the Yankees lineup, ignored his manager's instructions to swing away and bunted into a costly out during an extra-inning game.

The Yanks lost that July 17 game to the Kansas City Royals, 9-7, dropping them a season-worst 14 games behind the arch-rival first-place Boston Red Sox.

But appearances were not as they seemed. Changes significant and petty were afoot in both organizations, harbingers of a dramatic reversal of fortune that made this season the stuff of legend.*

The talkative Eck went 20-8 in 1978...
(from the Sox' 2nd edition yearbook)

Mr. October was suspended five games for insubordination. Upon his return, the star professed his innocence to the press. That touched off a Martin tirade during which he threatened to bench Jackson indefinitely even if it meant his own dismissal.

Hours later, after the Yanks thumped the White Sox, 7-2 in Chicago, the manager offered his fateful unfiltered remarks at an O'Hare International Airport bar before a flight to KC.

Four years earlier, Steinbrenner had pleaded guilty to making illegal contributions to President Richard Nixon's '72 reelection campaign and to obstructing justice. Martin, having just stepped on the boss's third rail, was as good as dead. Forty years ago this Tuesday, he tearfully resigned.

On the day of Martin's demise, the Sox were 63-33, 30 games over .500, enjoying a 5.5 game lead over the second place Milwaukee Brewers, but a slimmer 10.5 game bulge over the Yankees. Portentously, Boston had lost five straight during Jackson's forced sabbatical. (Cue the third-person omniscient: little did they know...)

... while the low key Guidry went 25-3.
(from the Yankees' yearbook)

Three years earlier, led by gold dust rookies Fred Lynn and Jim Rice, the Olde Towne Team had won the American League pennant then lost an agonizing 7-game World Series to the Cincinnati Reds. While the Big Red Machine rolled over the Yankees in four straight the next year, the Bombers rebounded to win it all in '77. Now the pendulum appeared Boston-bound thanks in large part to Rice.

The Boston left fielder was on fire. After 96 games, he was batting .322 with 24 homers and 81 runs batted in. He had a .606 slugging percentage and an OPS of .982. Bolstering his presence in the lineup, Lynn, perennial all star catcher Carlton Fisk and aging icon Carl Yastrzemski.

Dennis Eckersley led a starting rotation that included Luis Tiant, Bill "Spaceman" Lee and free agent signee Mike Torrez.

Playing .696 ball -- on pace to win 112 games -- on June 23, the Red Sox fatefully issued a revised 1978 yearbook, swapping out its original cover boy, Fisk, for one celebrating Rice. The second-edition Sox won just 51 more games, a .543 clip. The Yankees from that point played at a .627 clip. The race was on.

A revised yearbook, a reversal of fortune

They had replaced Martin with soft spoken Bob Lemon, who'd led the White Sox to a 90-win season in '77, only to be cashiered in early '78 when the South Side Hitmen got off to a bad start. Bill Veeck's loss was the Boss's gain.

Steinbrenner had his man. Freed from the Jackson-Martin power struggle, the Bombers reverted to championship form, with one notable exception who far exceeded those expectations.

Starter Ron Guidry, who'd gone 16-7 with a 2.82 earned run average and 176 strikeouts in 1977, was now almost unhittable. Amid all the tumult, he'd gone 14-1, with a 2.11 ERA before Martin's departure. He'd finish at 25-3, with a 1.74 ERA and 248 Ks, winning the American League Cy Young Award in a walk and nearly copping league Most Valuable Player honors too.

That MVP award went to Mr. Rice of Boston, who'd hit .315 with 46 homers and 139 RBIs. It was no consolation for what ensued after the yearbook was revised, the star suspended, the manager resigned.

Signed away from the Yankees
only to play a big role in their comeback
(from the Sox' 1st edition yearbook)

Sox fans had long been accustomed to seeing their team swoon. Seventy years removed from their last championship, they'd already endured Enos Slaughter's mad dash in '46, Bob Gibson's dominance in '67 and Ed Armbrister's interference in '75. None of that was adequate preparation for what was to come.

Swoon not withstanding, Boston enjoyed a nine-game lead over New York as late as Aug. 13. But, by Sept. 10, it was gone. Days later the Red Sox were 3 1/2 back with 15 games to play. Then, led by a pair of future hall-of-famers, Yastrzemski and Eckersley, they rallied while the Yanks faltered.

On Oct. 1, the season ended with both teams holding identical 99-63 records, setting up a one-game playoff to determine the AL East division champion. If you're a Sox fan, this is probably your stop. For the rest of you, it went like this:

That game was held on Oct. 2 at Fenway Park in Boston. Guidry, with 24 wins on the year, started for New York, while Torrez -- a 16-game winner who'd been a Yankee 12 months earlier -- went for Boston. After six innings, the Red Sox clung to a 2-0 lead on built on a Yastrzemski homer and an run-scoring single by Rice.

The mild-mannered nightmare of Red Sox nation
(from the Yankees' yearbook)

With one gone in the seventh, Torrez yielded back to back singles, as many as he'd allowed all game. He got pinch-hitter Jim Spencer on a fly to left for the second out, bringing up Yanks' light-hitting, ninth-hitting shortstop Bucky Dent.

Dent hammered a 1-0 pitch off his instep, tumbling to the ground in pain, pausing the game and any momentum Torrez might have carried into that moment for a full minute while New York's trainer applied a numbing agent.

The shortstop stepped back in the box, choked up on his bat and swatted the next pitch he saw into the screen above Fenway's 37-foot high left field wall for just his fifth homer of the year. It gave the Yankees a lead they'd never relinquish and made him persona non grata in New England forever.

* Supplanted as the Yankees' top reliever when the Yankees signed Goose Gossage, reigning Cy Young Award winner Sparky Lyle poured his ire into a best-selling tell-all about the '78, titled The Bronx Zoo.

-- Follow me on Twitter @paperboyarchive

Once the Patriots Were Likeable Underdogs

THEY HAD NO SUPERFANS. They had no song. They had no players named after appliances. Yet there they were, expected to compete on the same field, on the same terms, as the 15-1 Chicago Bears. They were the lovable underdog New England Patriots and they were in the Super Bowl for the very first time.

The twentieth title game of the NFL's modern era

It was 1986 and this was Super Bowl Double X.

Thirty-two seasons later, those Patriots are a barely acknowledged afterthought, eclipsed by the legend of that singular, stupendously successful Bears squad, little more than the answer to a trivia question: Who did the Bears beat?

Who knows? Who cares?

The Patriots have since become such a force, such a fixture on the big stage, that their first championship game forebears are all but forgotten, the franchise equivalent of the lost Roanoke Colony. Who wants to overlook a sickening amount of success to recall the big fail?

Rhetorical question. Don't answer.

Da Bears had da coach, Mike Ditka, who may still be the most popular man in Chicago. Running back Walter Payton, Sweetness, a secular saint struck down by cancer at age 45, keyed the offense. They also had colorful quarterback Jim McMahon, Olympic sprinter Willie Gault, linebacker Mike Singletary and the massive defense linemen Richard Dent and William "The Refrigerator" Perry.

The Fridge: a 23-year-old, 6'-2", 335-pound phenomenon.

The revered logo.

The Patriots' Super Bowl XX roster is somewhat less revered today than Pat the Patriot, the snarling minute man in a three-point stance who adorned their still-white helmets.

Irving Fryar, the first man taken in the 1984 National Football League draft, was their biggest star. His seven touchdowns, scored as a receiver and kick returner, tied for the team lead with running back Craig James. Tony Eason, one of six signal callers taken in the first round of the '83 draft, was their primary quarterback, backed by veteran QB Steve Grogan. Karate blackbelt and future football hall of famer Andre Tippett anchored the defense.

Their coach was Pro Football Hall of Fame member Raymond Berry, once a standout receiver for the Baltimore Colts. He directed them to an 11-3 regular season record and a wild card game match-up with the New York Jets -- and Eason's '83 draft classmate QB Ken O'Brien -- at the Meadowlands.

New England beat New York, 26-14, after a Tippett hit forced O'Brien -- the league's top-rated passer -- from the game. A week later, the Patriots beat the Raiders 27-20 in Los Angeles, setting up a conference championship game with Dolphins in Miami.

Helmed by another class of 1983 draftee, Dan Marino, those same Dolphins had handed the Bears their only regular season loss. Still, it was full speed ahead. The battle cry in Boston: Squish the fish!

New England linebacker Andre Tippett,
from the Super Bowl XX program

And squish 'em they did, 31-14, punching the Patriots' Super Bowl ticket and giving rise to the somewhat faulty fan logic: If the Dolphins could beat the Bears and we could beat the Dolphins, then we must be able to beat the Bears too.

Defrost the Refrigerator! Berry the Bears!

Not so fast. Chicago had rampaged through the NFC post season, beating the New York Giants, 21-0, and then the Los Angeles Rams, 24-0. Eight quarters of football. No points allowed.

Barefoot Patriots kicker Tony Franklin would break that string with a field goal less than two minutes into Super Bowl XX at the Louisiana Superdome, giving New England a 3-0 lead. Kicker Kevin Butler tied it for Chicago about four minutes later, then gave the Bears their first lead near the end of the first quarter, 6-3.

QB Tony Eason and lineman John Hannah,
from the Super Bowl XX program

The game was, for all intents and purposes over. Da Bears dominated on both sides of the ball, piling on the points while keeping New England off the board. Even the massive Refrigerator was allowed to run one in, running up the score to 44-3 (a one-yard plunge denied the beloved Payton, who went scoreless).

Grogan, who replaced Eason in the second quarter with Chicago already ahead 20-3, connected with Fryar in the fourth for a Patriots touchdown, 44-10. A Bears safety made the final tally 46-10.

Bad as that day was for New England, it was the Patriots who were bound for glory, again and again and again ad nauseum, while the fearsome Bears were one-and-done, still searching for that next championship season.

-- Follow me on Twitter @paperboyarchive

Tales from the College Football Orphanage

IT WAS A LITTLE NOTICE about a team whose problem was they attracted little notice. It stung all the same.

College football is like a religion for people in many parts of the United States. From Michigan's Wolverines, to Alabama's Crimson Tide, from the UCLA Bruins to the Georgia Bulldogs. There are Huskies and Cougars, Wildcats and Nittany Lions, Badgers, Golden Gophers, Tigers, Bears, Blue Hens, Volunteers and Cavaliers. Each has their revenant retinue of students, alumni and boosters.

I'm not one of them. Despite attending two Division I-AA schools, I'm among that sad set of graduates who've been disenfranchised.

I am a college football orphan.

Twenty years ago this week, Boston University pulled the plug on its 91-year-old football program after finshing its Atlantic 10 season with a 1-10 record. The end was reported in a New York Times news brief not much bigger than an obituary which, in a sense, it was. The paper said there were tears for the Terriers, shed by players, not fans.

Though I'd been out of college for a decade, I'd actually seen them just two months earlier when they played Hofstra University's Flying Dutchmen on Long Island. B.U. touted the game as an alumni event. Having gone to both schools, attendance seemed compulsory. I took my dad. We honored my undergrad and graduate institutions by switching sides at halftime.

The Dutchmen defeated the Terriers, 24-14. I don't recall the game being that close. Like getting together with an old friend, the reunion was somewhat bittersweet and I'd no idea it would be the last time I'd see them alive.

To be sure, it's not like Boston U. football had been much of a calling card for the school (unlike Boston College, which is not in Boston). B.U.'s golden era overlapped my time there when the Terriers were Yankee Conference co-champions three years running and, in the second year, actually advanced to the I-AA quarterfinals before being vanquished by Furman University's Paladins.

The Flying Dutchmen host the Terriers

Starring for the Terriers then: wide receiver Bill Brooks, who was drafted by the Indianapolis Colts and enjoyed a 11-year National Football League career during which he also played for the Buffalo Bills and Washington Redskins.

Earlier stars had included Miami Dolphins' quarterback-receiver-special teamer Jim "Crash" Jensen and Harry Agganis -- the Golden Greek -- who starred for B.U. in football and briefly for baseball's Boston Red Sox before dying at 26 from a pulmonary embolism.

Boston University just wasn't "a football school" and so 1997's season was its last. Hofstra, however, had other plans. The two programs seemed headed in opposite directions.

H.U. hired ex-New York Jets defensive coordinator Joe Gardi as head coach, expanded their stadium and started producing National Football League-caliber players: Jets receiver Wayne Chrebet who became a bona fide NFL star, then Super Bowl-winning New Orleans Saints receiver Marques Colston. On the 1997 squad, future San Francisco 49ers defensive back Lance Schulters. Still to come, Super Bowl-winning Pittsburgh Steelers offensive lineman Willie Colon.

The Flying Dutchmen, soon renamed the Pride, made the I-AA playoffs in 1995, 1997, 1999, 2000 and 2001, that last appearance coming as co-champion of B.U.'s old Atlantic 10 conference.

In the end, that brief glimmer of bigger time football promise wasn't enough to inspire the dedication needed to keep Hofstra's program afloat. In 2009, a dozen years after the Terriers left the NCAA gridiron, the former Flying Dutchmen too sailed into oblivion.

-- Follow me on Twitter @paperboyarchive

Confessions of a Cubs Bandwagon Jumper

``YOU ARE A WAGON-JUMPING FRAUD," my wife told me on Sunday.

She's right. I am. Guilty as charged. Wearing a blue Chicago Cubs t-shirt on the day after they'd won their first National League pennant since 1945, what right have I -- a life-long Mets fan -- to cheer for a team I avoided supporting for almost a decade while living just blocks from Wrigley Field?

Last place Mets beat
the 5th place Cubs, 2-0.

None really.

Bandwagon jumper. Hypocrite. Front-runner. Fraud. "You're honor, the defendant would like to enter a plea of `Nolo contendre.'" Still, I can't help but cheer for the team I expressly rejected in favor of their less-popular intra-city rivals, the White Sox, while there.

My meager, pathetic justification is this:

I was born in an NL New York household, a son of Brooklynites abandoned by the Dodgers and morally unwilling and unable to embrace the Yankees, an act my father said was tantamount to cheering for the First National City Bank.

So, it was root for the Mets and whoever was against the Yankees, a pretty easy edict, even after I left home in 1983 for college in Boston, where the enemy of my enemy was the Red Sox. That all changed of course in 1986, when the formerly-down-trodden Mets -- who were a last place team in '83, 82, 79, 78 and 77 -- collided with the still-hexed Sox in the 1986 World Series.

There comes a time in every fan's life where his loyalty is tested, where the ties that bind one, heart and soul, to the old home team are strained by circumstance, by peer pressure, by the urge to try a new relationship. And so it was that I had blended with Red Sox nation. I wore the clothes, I bought $3 bleacher seats. I munched Sports Bars, drank beer and imbibed the lore... about the heartaches wrought by Series losses in '46 and '67 and '75, Pesky's hesitation, Gibson's dominance, Armbrister's interference. I already knew about the karmic wound inflicted by Bucky "Bleeping" Dent.

Dykstra led off with a homer.
The Mets never trailed.

Still, I was in Boston and the Mets I'd left behind had inflicted their own karmic wounds. I'd seen Neil Allen hang too many curveballs swatted into oblivion by the likes of the Cubs' Dave Kingman and the Philadelphia Phillies' Bo Diaz.

How much worse could it be to root for the Red Sox? Dumb question, right? For feckless me, it wasn't really one I had to answer. Red Sox history was something I learned in college. The Mets were my religion. When forced to choose, my faith won out.

And so it would be, 20 years later, when I found myself moving to Chicago while the White Sox were the champs and the Mets seemed to be a rising NL East power.

Why adopt the Cubs? Why absorb their lore: the Billy Goat curse, Leon Durham's error, the Steve Bartman incident? Why should I -- by then a long-suffering Mets, Jets and Islanders fan -- take on their burden when I had better options? Besides, rooting for another NL team was a conflict of interest (a rule I still observe to this day).

Cynical, middle-aged me.

For a time, it worked, especially for one golden inning on an ungodly hot Summer Sunday at Wrigley Field when the Mets pummeled a succession of Cubs pitchers for 11 runs, including three homers, two of which were grand slams.

The rising power Mets were soon humiliated by an Adam Wainwright curveball in the Autumn of '06, then bedeviled by late-season collapses in '07 and '08, failures that coincided with back-to-back NL Central titles for the Cubs and another playoff appearance for the White Sox.

Struggling Mets 7,
Struggling Cubs 4

Still, having left New York, more or less for good, I clung more tenaciously to my roots, my Mets, for better or for worse, in sickness and in health. But the Cubs, their fans and their city made a deep impression, one that remains to this day.

Truth is I had a sneaking admiration for the Cubs' aesthetic, the classic uniforms, the bullseye logo largely unchanged since I was a kid, the ballpark, the neighborhood, the absurdly optimistic fight song sung there with conviction. "Go Cubs! Go!"

Chicagoans care passionately about their city. It may seem to those who don't live there that it's one big free-fire zone, but it's not, and everyone wants it to be a better place. The people who live there have a civic pride the likes of which I've never known. The Cubs evoke an even deeper passion. Despite 108 years of failure, their fans endure. Their enthusiasm never wanes. Even with ample justification. Their hope never dies. They've suffered and suffered and suffered some more.

They've paid their dues in spades.

Meanwhile the Mets are done until next Spring. Unlike last season, there are no operable conflicts of interest. With all due respect to fans of the Cleveland Indians -- waiting since 1948 for a World Series winner to call their own -- the Cubs and their fans have waited 40 years more. I want this for them.

Go Cubs, Go!

-- Follow me on Twitter @paperboyarchive