The Thrill of Sports鈥�
How do you bring entire communities together?
Two things.
It starts with a fast break. It ends with an easy layup.
In recent winters, you could watch Uniontown’s wildly cheering fans erupt simultaneously at high school gymnasiums all over western Pennsylvania.
That’s what sports can do.
That’s the sense of community I experienced while watching all of those Uniontown Red Raider basketball games on those outstanding WMBS radio/Facebook feeds.
Thanks to the masterwork of the WMBS station manager/play-by-play announcer Brian Mroziak and his able crew these past few years, local sports fans have yet another outlet available to them to see their young gladiators, er, gladiate (is that a word?).
These days, with the latest out-of-the-box technologies, I cast the WMBS/Facebook feeds onto our 65-inch screen – and the Uniontown Red Raider basketball team ran fastbreaks through our living room.
Back when I became a sports fan (in the mid-1950s of the last century), we had legendary play-by-play announcers Amy Canton and Jack McMullen.
You could hear the games on the radio. But unless you went to them, you might not know what many of the players looked like.
The Pittsburgh Pirates only broadcast their away games on TV. Local games were blacked out.
It wasn’t until the Bucs played in the 1960 World Series that many local Pirate fans got to see what the inside of Forbes Field looked like.
The black-out was lifted for that series.
Luckily, when Bill Mazeroski hit his earth-shattering home run, those of us who stayed after school at Lafayette Jr. High School saw it on a TV they placed in the middle of the gymnasium floor.
Speaking of blackouts, I’m proud to say I saw the Immaculate Reception live. Not many people within the Pittsburgh TV market can make that boast.
Even though that game between the Steelers and the Oakland Raiders was a playoff game, Three Rivers Stadium wasn’t sold out.
Thus the blackout.
I saw it because I lived outside of the Pittsburgh TV market – up in Wellsboro, Pa., while working for WNBT-radio.
Most major sports have moved beyond all of those pesky blackout rules.
I did a cursory count, and I found there are 21 sports-related channels on my Verizon cable system.
Tailor-made for sports enthusiasts – especially at this time of year.
College basketball’s March Madness is underway for both the men and the women.
The men’s games are on CBS, TBS, TNT, and truTV. The women’s games are on ESPN, ESPN2, ESPNU, ESPNews and ABC.
The Masters Golf Tournament begins on April 10.
The NBA playoffs start with a Play-in Tournament two days after the Masters ends.
The National Hockey League’s regular season games end while the NBA’s postseason begins in mid-April. That means the NHL’s playoffs and the NBA playoffs will be taking place at the same time.
But before that, and later this week, the Pittsburgh Pirates will be playing their first game of the 2024 Major League season.
That means my wife and I will plan our Opening Day festivities with stuff like hot dogs, peanuts, and Cracker Jacks – and that 65-inch behemoth of a TV.
As we have every year since we met, we’ll eventually watch more than 140 games on cable and streaming services.
With the Major League Baseball season in full swing, there’s a peculiar event I’ll probably be checking out on Netflix on July 20.
It’s a “boxing match” between 27-year-old YouTuber Jake Paul and the heavyweight boxer formally known as “Iron Mike” Tyson.
By now, at the age of 57, he probably should be called “Aluminum Mike” – but not to his face.
I don’t think these gentlemen will give us a good exhibition.
I remember covering a Mike Tyson fight at the Las Vegas Hilton Hotel in March of 1987.
His challenger, James “Bonecrusher” Smith held the 20-year-old Tyson for 12 rounds.
Tyson won, but after the fight ended, the legendary comic Milton Berle spotted me, and he said, “Worst (expletive) fight I ever saw in my life!”
I expect the Mike Tyson vs. Paul fight to be even worse.
I’ll still watch it.
Sports does that to me.
Al Owens is a multi-Emmy Award winner, former reporter, and anchor for Entertainment Tonight, and 50-year TV news and newspaper veteran. E-mail him at freedoms@bellatlantic.net.