The precise when and where remain vague and stuck in some cranial crevice alongside forgotten algebra equations, the periodic table of the elements and civics lessons.
The how and the why, on the other hand, aren't hard to pry loose from the cobwebs and memory bank. Actually, since this is personal, it's more of a who.
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Steve Garvey is the bobblehead embodiment of why millions like me fell in love with baseball and sports in the 1970s, and why many learned the hard way that perception and reality in sports can be as distinct as adulation and shame.
Before Sosa, McGwire and Clemens, there was Garvey, whose personality and work ethic endeared him to fans all over Southern California for two decades. He never missed a game, played on four World Series teams and was the biggest deity in stirrups since John Wayne, and they named an airport after the Duke.
Garvey had a junior high school named in his honor. Of course, that was before he began populating schools with his own illegitimate kids, which is sort of the point of today's roundabout premise.
For anybody under age 40, most of this won't make much sense. Back when Garvey was a star, we listened to games on a quaint device called an AM radio. It required imagination and batteries for fuel. Cable television didn't exist. Most of us had rabbit ears on top of a black-and-white TV, which received four or five stations. Tony Kubek and Joe Garagiola did the Game of the Week on NBC, the only consistent television exposure baseball received nationally.
I insisted that my parents subscribe to an afternoon paper, the Stockton Record because the local morning paper didn't always have West Coast box scores in the sports section. Thirty years ago, it could take 24 hours to learn the results of the game on the previous day. We were starved for information and, as we learned with Garvey, weren't always receiving the unvarnished facts.
 Brad Marcus Producer I became a fan of the New York Yankees in arguably the darkest days of the franchise, the late 1980s. I guess the lure of Mel Hall’s Jheri curl, Rickey Henderson’s snatch catches and Alvaro Espinoza’s sheer athletic ability was too much for this Staten Island kid to pass up on. Read more! |
It was the Stone Age, not the information age, really. As it turned out, the less we knew, the better. Broadcasters like Vin Scully, still working at Chavez Ravine all these years later, embroidered the L.A. games with as much magic as anything being produced down the road on the Hollywood sound stages.
Facts, however, were another issue altogether. The journalism of the day was spotty. We innocents had no real idea what was going on in the locker rooms back then. Garvey actually got into a locker room fight with future Hall of Famer Don Sutton, who could see through Garvey's contrived persona. At the time, Sutton was evil incarnate.
But for fans, like the late Jim Murray wrote, Garvey was Jack Armstrong, right out of central casting. Garvey signed autographs until every kid was satisfied, posed for pictures and kissed babies. I vividly recall somehow sneaking into the players' parking lot area at Candlestick Park as a kid, waiting by the Dodgers team bus after the game, and watching Garvey sit down his pricey Louis Vuitton luggage -- this was back when a star player made $300,000 annually, which is less than the rookie minimum today -- and sign autographs for 20 uninterrupted minutes.
"Everybody all set?" he asked before climbing back on the bus.
He wore a suit to the ballpark, had a square jaw, Popeye forearms and an iron will. After every postgame radio interview, he always said hello to his wife and kids listening at home. Like it was yesterday, his simple explanation for playing in a National League-record 1,207 consecutive games is seared in my ears.
