Sometimes change is good; sometimes not: part one

Like most inner-city kids in Philadelphia, I grew up playing all the traditional sports—baseball, football, basketball, boxing—we even ran track and field events against one another.
The only hockey team in Philadelphia at the time was the Ramblers, a minor league franchise. We did occasionally attempt to play hockey when the creek froze over, and then only with tree branches as sticks and flattened cans as pucks, which we mistakenly referred to as, “plucks.”
Patrick Roy holds the National Hockey League record for all-time regular season goaltender wins (551).
I think one guy in our crowd played tennis, and no one—no one—golfed. We didn’t see golf as competitive. Why, we wondered, would anybody hit a ball, and then walk after it? That’s what the fielders were for in baseball.
But something strange happened in the late 50s. Arnold Palmer won the Masters, and for some (still to this day) unexplainable reason, we watched this guy when he golfed.
Can you imagine! We actually turned on the television and watched a man walk, and considered it a sporting event.
Arnold Palmer never won the PGA. He won the Masters four times, the British Open twice, and the US Open once.
Not unlike today, championships were fairly scarce in Philly during the 1950s. The NBA Philadelphia Warriors (today the Golden State Warriors) won the pro championship in 1956, and LaSalle won the college basketball title in 1954.
Sportscasters today get excited when some NBA player achieves a “double-double,” meaning 10 or more of any statistic, done twice, such as 15 points and 12 rebounds, or 15 points and 12 assists, in a single game. A triple-double (ten or more in three categories, e.g. points, rebounds, steals…) is even more rare. But Wilt Chamberlain, in his book, “The View from Above,” claimed that, back before many of those statistics were tabulated, he was the only player to score a quintuple-double, having 10 or more points, rebounds, blocks, steals, and assists in a single game.
The Phillies had been to the World Series in 1950 (losing to the Yankees in four straight), and we’ve all heard the lament regarding the drought between Eagles’ titles, their last triumph dating to 1960. I remember that game well, listening to it with my father the day after Christmas.
Christmas fell on a Sunday that year, so most workers were off the Monday following. Dad and I listened to that game on the small radio in our kitchen, since it was played at Philadelphia’s Franklin Field, hence making it a home game, and home games were not televised locally.
But it was televised in New York, so anyone who got the New York TV stations got the game. The local bars that had huge antennas (you almost have to be over 30 to remember that just about every house had an antenna protruding from it’s roof), with a “Tenna Rotor” attached to turn it toward New York, did a bristling business that day.
Once those establishments were full to the doors, the doors were locked, and no one else was admitted until someone left. A quart of beer sold for about 45¢ in those days, but on that day, and that day only, the “New York” bars were charging $1.50 a quart.
So even though Franklin Field was standing-room-only, the TV blackout was not lifted, and some merchants made a killing.
Those rules were changed several years ago, and now it’s much easier to watch your local team on TV, even when they play at home.
The Eagles defeated the Packers, 17-13 and won the championship that day, and although some great players took the field for both teams that day, it’s a different game, populated by a different breed of players that will take to the field for this year’s championship game, now titled, “the Super Bowl.”
The Green Bay Packers won the first two “Super Bowls,” defeating the Kansas City Chiefs 35-10 in 1967, and the Oakland Raiders 33-14 in 1968. It was not officially called Super Bowl, but at the time known simply as the AFL-NFL World Championship.
Next week: Part two