Today marks the 30th birthday of yours truly. In honor of said day, it seemed appropriate to run down a pair of special Detroit sports memories that helped shape my love for this town and its teams.
Scared Straight
I would like to think I’ve been a Pistons fan for the full duration of my life. I was born and raised in the state of Michigan and remain a devout follower of the ‘Stones to this day. Simple math would suggest that I’ve been on the Piston Train from start to finish. But I know this to be untrue. For whatever reason, from approximately age four though six, I played the part of the contrarian; I watched virtually all of the Bad Boys’ reign, rooting vociferously for the opposition almost the entire time.
I wish it were different, that I was pro-Piston through and through, that I didn’t feel some ill-advised childhood impulse to separate myself from the crowd. But I lived those years as a full-fledged hoops traitor and I can’t take it back. Thankfully, it didn’t last forever.
I was set straight for good during an emotionally-charged playoff watch party at our family home. It was a critical game with Boston, one that could heavily swing the balance of the series. There were probably at least 20 people packed in on a warm May evening, forcing the crowd to split, the less fortunate setting up shop in the kitchen to squint at the moving pictures on the blurry 12-inch screen. As a first or second grader, I was naturally bopping around full of energy, showing off my new Celtics top, chirping about the artistry of Kevin McHale’s footwork to anyone that would listen. Only, I took it one step too far.
I made my way to the cramped, stressed group in the kitchen, and let out a shrill cheer for the villains in green after a particularly big play. My aunt, a serious sports fan with a short temper, was having absolutely none of it. She whirled on me without missing a beat, shouting, “We can’t have that right now! You’re gonna have to get out of here!” No softening the blow. No soothing touch to make the words seem less threatening. Just a no-nonsense order to find somewhere else to be. Keep in mind, I was all of five years old and already in my own house -- I didn’t have many options.
But looking back on it, I’m grateful for the verbal slap to the face that I received that night. It taught me a valuable lesson about hometown loyalty, about respecting the city’s teams that my parents and grandparents had supported passionately for years -- and also that sometimes aunts or uncles can get real scary when they have a year’s worth of mortgage payments riding on an NBA playoff game.
A Legend of the Highest Order
Ernie Harwell/Facebook photo
There was nobody quite like Ernie Harwell. The man was class personified, both on and off the air. As an intern for the Tigers, I had the good fortune of meeting Ernie on Opening Day in 2007, albeit for just a brief moment as he was being shuttled around to various TV/radio interviews leading up to the game.
Fast forward a couple of months later and he is back for a special appearance to call a Tigers/Angels game from behind the microphone. Now bear in mind that I hadn’t seen Ernie since the beginning of April, the interaction we did have was short and generic, and the guy had probably been introduced to five million people in his then 89 years of life. I had no expectation that he would remember me, and would never think in my wildest baseball dreams that he would recall my actual name.
Forget all that; Ernie Harwell was some kind of Detroit Superhero.
As we crossed paths in the hall, he flashed a big smile while bellowing in that classic Harwellian voice, “Hello, Joey! Good to see you again!”
I was simply blown away. We chatted for another 30 seconds or so, the specifics of which are lost to memory. But the conversation that followed the greeting never mattered. A Hall of Fame broadcaster, a baseball legend of the highest order, digging into the far recesses of his overcrowded memory bank to come up with the first name of an anonymous broadcasting intern from an on-the-move meet-and-greet several weeks prior.
Ernie Harwell literally had me at hello.
