Oh, the Technology

As the college football season endures the year of the upset, my job with other collegiate sports including basketball also begins to heat up. Take yesterday for example, I had 2 basketball practices and a soccer game to attend. When days like this come along you have to do the best you can to follow what is happening elsewhere in the sports world.


Just two weeks ago, when the Yankees were still alive, I was at a high school football game on the night of Game 2. During downtime in the game I would text message Josh to get score updates, and sometimes call my father on my cell phone as well. Yesterday while at the soccer match one of the guys in the press box has that ESPN bottom line on his phone, so we were getting constant updates on the LSU/Kentucky game and the Vanderbilt/UGA game. As this was happening I started think back about the good ole days. I told the young men, who are college students, about how we sometimes had to follow particular games, just back 10-12 years ago when I was in college and not everything was on TV, heck I think there may have only been 2 ESPN’s then.


It was fall of 1995 when I was freshman roaming the halls of York College and my beloved Yankees made the playoffs for the first time in my life, or at least the life I could remember. It was Game 2 of the Yankees versus Mariners series. In our room we had a TV, but it didn’t work so well, plus our campus cable package was weak. As I get older my memory fades, but I remember somehow watching the beginning of the game. I think we watched it in the Sparts Den (which was the little café in the student union). When that closed we had to head back to the dorm. Well in the dorm we didn’t get the channel that the game was on, so what were we to do? Again the era before the cell phone, you folks remember that right? Most of the people were heading to bed trying to pretend they were going to class in the morning so me and one other dorm mate (Chris Bonhert if I remember correctly) sat in the lobby of Manor North and watched CNN for almost two hours and had to wait until the score scrolled back around on the news-ticker. As the evening got late we celebrated a two run Yankee victory, but we weren’t even sure how they won. We had to wait until the morning to read the paper, watch SportsCenter or heck even wait 5 minutes for the story to download on the original ESPN website, which was something like www.espn.sportszone.com.


Now of course just like every story you have, somebody can top it with their own. Unfortunately for me, the person who can top my story is my own father. On May 8th 1970 in Madison Square Garden the New York Knicks won their first NBA Championship. As most people know that game was made famous by an injured Willis Reed limping on to the court and helping the Knicks to victory. Well my parents were on their way from Fort Sam Houston returning to the Garden State after my father was discharged from military service, or so the story goes. They decided to spend the night in Waco Texas and the hotel didn't have a TV or something like that, remember folks this was 1970. My father had a friend in Texarkana who had a TV and was watching the Knicks game. My father called him and listened to the game through his friends play by play description as his favorite team won the championship.


So folks if you can't see your favorite teams game, just rememeber the age of technology that we live in where you can quickly access scores and updates rather than watching a news ticker for two hours or periodically calling a friend in Texarkana for updates.