Our lives can often be marked by some of the sports heroes we have had in our lives. Here's a chronological look at some childhood sports heroes of mine.
n Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris: My first heroes were the M&M boys of the New York Yankees. I was living in McDowell County and the summer of 1961 was a big summer. It was my first summer to play Little League baseball. It was also my first season of following Major League Baseball and the home run chase of Mantle and Maris was the talk of the nation. Youth baseball players all over the country wanted to wear No. 7 (Mantle) or No. 9 (Maris). The baseball movie "61*," based on the pursuit of Babe Ruth's single-season home run record, is the most historically accurate sports movie ever made.
n Jerry West: If you were from West Virginia or living in the state in the 1960s, West was everyone's sports hero. I was too young to remember him playing at East Bank or WVU, but I followed him daily in the NBA with the Lakers. Even though we were 3,000 miles away, our state became a Lakers state. I would cry myself to sleep as they seemed to lose every year in the NBA Finals to the Boston Celtics.
n Jimmy Smithberger: There were nine high schools in McDowell County when I lived there; now there is one. Smithberger was the football star at Welch High, where he won the Kennedy Award in 1963 and went on to play at Notre Dame for Ara Parseghian. He was a starting defensive back on the 1966 Fighting Irish national championship team.
n Jim Brown: In southern West Virginia in the early 1960s, most NFL followers were Cleveland Browns fans. The Browns were on local television every Sunday, the Bengals were not yet in existence and the Steelers were hapless and irrelevant. Fans in this state loved the Browns and Jim Brown. When you played sandlot football as a kid in the early '60s, everyone wanted to be Jim Brown.
n Pete Rose: In this region in the 1960s and early '70s, Rose was bigger than life in baseball. Even today, he can do no wrong with his fans in this region. This used to be hard-core Reds country and Reds games were on the radio in virtually every house and at every swimming pool, store and restaurant in the region. Kids on every sandlot in the coalfields wore number 14 and tried to emulate Rose.
n Curtis Price: High school basketball was big in Kanawha County in the 1960s, and no team was bigger than Lou Romano's Charleston High Mountain Lions. The leader of the band was Price. I first saw him at the old Jefferson Junior High School. He combined athleticism with elegance and grace. It also seemed his teams never lost, and his 1968 team went undefeated and won a state championship.
n Jim Fout: I grew up going to high school games. In McDowell County, I went to the Gary games. When I moved to Kanawha County, wherever the DuPont Panthers played, my family and friends were there. The athletes were heroes to us all and coached us in the youth leagues on Saturday mornings. Fout was the quarterback in football and the leading scorer in basketball. I was so sheltered and naïve, I thought he invented the behind-the-back dribble and reverse layup.
n Joe Namath: For young kids, sports in the 1960s started with short hair and buzz cuts and ended with long hair. In the late '60s, no athlete epitomized cool more than Namath. I was in junior high when he shocked the football world, changed pro football forever and won Super Bowl III. Back then it was "cool" to be irreverent, and athletes like Namath, Muhammad Ali and Reggie Jackson were considered "cool." Namath also supposedly dated Ann-Margaret, who was my favorite childhood crush.
n Fritz Williams and Dave Reaser: In the late 1960s, the WVU basketball team was led by two in-state players, Ron "Fritz" Williams of Weirton and Dave Reaser of St. Albans. The interstate highways weren't built yet and fans from the Kanawha Valley did not travel to Morgantown for games like they do now. That did not stop names such as Williams, Reaser, Carl Head, Carey Bailey and others from being popular with local fans.
n The D'Antoni family: I feel like I grew up with the D'Antonis. In the coalfields, McDowell County and Wyoming County felt like the same county. My father used to watch Lewis D'Antoni's Mullens teams play in the 1950s. I saw Danny D'Antoni as a high school player at Mullens in 1964. When he, George Stone and Logan's Jim Davidson lit up the old Madison Square Garden in the 1967 NIT, all of the southern coalfields were excited. I saw Mike D'Antoni play in the 1968 state high school tournament and a 1969 all-star game. When he went to Marshall his 1971-72 team lit up the city of Huntington, selling out every game and playing on statewide public television. He was a hero to every kid in Huntington and the tri-state region.
By the early 1970s, the children of the '60s had grown up and it was time to go off to college. For me, it was the end of innocence.
I immediately started working in college athletics and minor league Class AAA baseball and my sports heroes eventually became colleagues. Thus, you lose the hero worship element of your life.
Several years ago while attending a Cleveland Browns training camp, I had lunch in the team's dining hall. Jim Brown sat beside me and introduced himself to me as if I was someone he needed to know. Not long after that, at a Final Four in New Orleans, I sat on a VIP shuttle bus and rode to the SuperDome with Sandy Koufax. We talked basketball and about the games and I never realized who he was.
One time when country music superstar Garth Brooks performed in State College, Pennsylvania, his staff put the word out that he wanted to meet Joe Paterno. I was at Penn State at the time and we took the entertainer to a football practice. He was like an excited kid in a candy store to meet the longtime football coach.
That's the thing about celebrities and heroes: They are hero when we're children, but as you get older you realize they are people, just like the rest of us.
Reach Frank Giardina at flg16@hotmail.com.