I was just looking over some old posts and I was re-reading a post by Gator 28037. He was talking about a bunch of stadiums he had visited in the SEC conference to watch the Gators and others play college football. I added a comment about a game I had watched in Eugene, Oregon at Autzen Stadium. Anyway it got me thinking back to a moment I will always remember. It was baseball though, not football. I had enlisted in the army in March of 1975 and after basic training at Fort Ord in California, I was sent to Fort Devens in Massachusetts for my advanced training at the ASA school there. I was a baseball fan, but really didn't follow any one team at the time. There were no teams really close to home in Oregon. My training company commander got tickets to a Red Sox game at Fenway against Baltimore and any of us that wanted to go got a bus trip into Boston for the game.
When I walked into that stadium and saw for the first time a major league ball park, it was almost unreal. The place was almost too perfect. The grass was so green and all. The players were people that I had only seen on TV or baseball cards, but there they were. Fred Lynn, Jim Rice, Carl Yaztremski, Carlton Fisk, Dwight Evans and on and on. Brooks Robinson was still playing for Baltimore. Anyway from that moment on I became a BIG Red Sox fan. By the way, I was fortunate enough to get tickets to the World Series that year too. I got to go to the first game, which Boston won, and I had tickets for game six, but wouldn't you know it. A guy in my company talked me into selling those to him (he was just married) so he could take his new wife to the game. I guess that's the way it goes, but a great memory just the same.