Epilogue

      

         

    

     It is fitting that the list begins with Bobby Orr and ends with Cam Neely. I was 5 years old when I first became aware of Orr, and 31 when Neely retired in 1996. By that time my magazine and card-collecting days were well behind me, but I’d had a good 26-year run with plenty of thrills, a few crushing disappointments, several comings and goings, and too many hard goodbyes. And while my passion for professional sports has never waned, it was around the time that Neely was bidding farewell that my rooting interests took a sharp turn away from the individual athlete to focus solely on the aspect of team. In other words, I now root for The Laundry.

     Free agency created much uncertainty for the sports-hero-worshiper. Then ESPN came along, followed by so many others, providing 24-hour sports coverage. Suddenly we knew everything about our icons, and we knew it instantly. We knew when they scored a goal, caught a touchdown pass or robbed someone of a homerun. But we also knew when they missed an empty net, threw an interception or struck out. We knew when they got pulled over for suspicion of drunk driving and how many children they had and with how many women they’d had them. There have been too many fake retirements, too many ill-advised comebacks, too many false pledges of allegiance, and too many steroids. With this constant flood of information, it became increasingly more difficult to identify which players to root for, and ever easier to find someone to root against.

     There was also the matter of getting older. No one will ever accuse me of being overly concerned with maturity, and I’ve never been one to consult an age-appropriate behavioral chart to inform me of how to act at a certain age. But when I reached my early-30s, it seemed a bit odd to be choosing favorite players from a crop of athletes who were, for the most part, younger than I was (Okay, maybe I should’ve realized this earlier. Where’s that chart?...). All of my favorite players were older than me with the exception of Neely, who I’ve got by 5 weeks. Today, at age 49, for the first time in my life, I’m older than every active athlete in the four major sports (although Jamie Moyer, 51, has yet to officially retire). It just makes more sense at this stage to stick with the stability that rooting for the Red Sox (113 years old), Bruins (90), Celtics (67) and Patriots (54) brings, rather than follow some 22-year old whose every move will be overly scrutinized both on, and off, the field, and serve as an audition for a second career on some reality TV show.

     My friends and brothers and I often say, “Imagine if we had all this technology when we were kids?” The Internet, ESPN, ESPN2, 3, 4, 5, 6...Sunday and Thursday Night Football, the NHL, NBA, MLB and NFL Networks, the ability to search for, and store, virtually any image of any athlete on a desktop computer, then to be able to call it up and share it with anyone with just a click and a keystroke? Well, I’ll admit, there’s a lot I like about the efficiency and immediacy of modern technology and all of its timesaving potential (It certainly made researching these essays a lot easier). But I wonder, How would we, the street-hockey-playing, pick-up-game-seeking, rake-the-yard-to-earn-enough-money-to-buy-a-couple-of-packs-of-baseball-cards kids of the 70s have spent that extra time? I look around these days and see an awful lot of empty playgrounds. My guess is we would’ve spent the time on the Internet or in front of the TV. So, I’m glad I grew up in the era that I did.

     Does this sound like preaching? Like some crusty middle-aged guy whose lost his fastball pining for the past? I think every generation looks back with fondness for the way they grew up. We have only our own frame of reference. I loved making trips to Woolworth’s and Wayside Bazaar with my friends with a pocket full of change to buy trading cards, and days rushing home from school to see if the mailman had delivered the latest Sports Illustrated or a back-issue of Street & Smith’s, and I loved unfolding the Globe sports section on a fall Friday to discover which three NFL games would be televised on Sunday. The hope, in all of these activities, was that my favorite player would turn up in one of those packs of cards, or on the cover of one of those magazines, or play in one of those games. And I loved afternoons spent at Robin Hood Park or Central School, playing sports with my friends, pretending that I was Bobby Orr or Fred Lynn or Larry Bird.  Nope, I wouldn’t change a thing, except for maybe a later bedtime back in the fall of ‘75.

So, thank you,

Bobby Orr

Guy Lafleur

George Brett

Larry Bird

Fred Lynn

Mark Bavaro

Julius Erving

Roger Staubach

and Cam Neely

     You were all a huge part of my growing up. Now, just do me one favor and never let me see any of you on Celebrity Rehab, or Dancing With The Stars.