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Where did you get your love for sports from?

Discussion in 'Anything goes' started by John B. Foster, Dec 31, 2018.

  1. John B. Foster

    John B. Foster Well-Known Member

    Not sure if this thread will ever take off, however, I figured I would give it a try.

    Did you get it from your parents? A family relative? Just turning the TV on one day and started watching a game? There are so many possibilities, let's hear your stories.

    For me, it was just channel surfing with my brother one day. Both my parents hated sports. We were just changing channels and we started watching an MLB game and we just fell in love with it. After that, we just started watching everything we could find on TV related to sports.
     
    Last edited: Dec 31, 2018
  2. Songbird

    Songbird Well-Known Member

    I've watched, played, and loved sports since I can remember.

    I think my first memory of sports was going to a Dodgers game at age 5 or 6.
     
    John B. Foster likes this.
  3. Scout

    Scout Well-Known Member

    Dad and uncles then continued with friends in school growing up.
     
    John B. Foster likes this.
  4. PaperDoll

    PaperDoll Well-Known Member

    We didn't have cable growing up, so there wasn't a lot of TV sports available. But I cultivated a love of the Olympics through this huge, turquoise library book I took out almost constantly. I think I still have an audio tape of my dad snoring while I do play-by-play of Olympic bobsled off the TV.

    I am still more knowledgeable about and more interested in Olympic sports than the traditional ones, so bring on the high school swimming and soccer and track (and field too!)

    My career goal is to cover an Olympics, and I haven't fulfilled it yet. I guess that means I have to stay in this crazy business a little longer.
     
  5. micropolitan guy

    micropolitan guy Well-Known Member

    My parents, but especially my dad. He loved baseball so we three brothers grew up huge baseball fans, all played, and still follow the game.

    Spent tons of time with my dad at:

    Hockey games at the old Memorial Auditorium, watching the Buffalo Bisons of the pre-expansion American Hockey League.

    International League baseball games at War Memorial Stadium, watching the Bisons. We'd go 4-5 times a year.

    Doubleheader college basketball games at the Aud, back in the days of future NBA stars Bob Lanier, Calvin Murphy and future Buffalo major Tony Masiello, when when Villanova, Providence, St. John's, etc., made regular appearances playing their Catholic-school brothers at Canisius, Niagara and St. Bonaventure. My dad was so excited to see Ernie D when PC came to town, when he was a sophomore.

    We went to one Bills game a year, and listened to all the others on our living-room radio back in an era when home games were not televised and even road games were hit-or-miss.

    My dad was a teacher/administrator at my high school. So we went to almost every home football/basketball game together until I got old enough to go with my friends.

    WBEN-TV/radio talent Van Miller was the play-by-play voice of the Bills, Niagara, Buffalo Braves and sometimes the Bisons. I never met him but he was like a member of the family.

    Most of the teams we watched were minor league or lower, but the experience was definitely major league. Unforgettable.
     
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  6. Vombatus

    Vombatus Well-Known Member

    1980 USA Olympic hockey followed shortly by Ralph Sampson.

    That’s where I really amped up, but prior to that, ABC’s Wild World Of Sports, including that poor ski jumper, was a huge influence to enjoying a broad variety of sports.

    Jim McKay. Still remember Munich. RIP.
     
    Last edited: Jan 1, 2019
  7. Baron Scicluna

    Baron Scicluna Well-Known Member

    My Dad, who has always been a sports fan. There's pictures of us, with me as a baby, reading the sports section and watching baseball on TV.

    Then, when I was around 6 or 7, I'd get the Sunday paper, bring it up to my parents' bed, and I'd read the sports section and comics while they'd read everything else.
     
  8. Starman

    Starman Well-Known Member

    My parents were big college football fans, and I got to go to games when I was literally a baby. Sometimes my mom would stay home and I'd go with Dad as a toddler and grade schooler.

    Dad also played softball -- fastpitch (very big stuff at the time) until his late 30s and slowpitch until he was almost 50 -- and we watched plenty of baseball on the tube over the years.

    My grandfather played college baseball and had known some Tigers players in the teens and twenties, so he had some old-time stories.

    My opposite grandmother used to go to games as a girl in the 1900s with her father, so she had some stories, too.

    Family legend had it that my GG-grandfather, a lumber baron millionaire in the 1880s, owned a small percentage of the NL Detroit Wolverines, who won the early Worlds Series in 1887.

    True or not, the family lived in a mansion about 300 yards from the team's ballpark.

    My mom had played basketball in junior college, so she got me going on basketball.

    Dad had tried out for college hockey in the 1940s before it was even an established sport, so we watched that too sometimes.
     
    Last edited: Jan 1, 2019
  9. Batman

    Batman Well-Known Member

    My Dad, definitely. He was a huge Phillies fan and I was the only boy out of three kids (as well as the last) so I guess it just transferred on to me. It was family lore that I was born the day the Phillies clinched their first division title, and that I was able to read box scores in the newspaper when I was 4. Went to my first baseball game at 5 or 6 (Phillies-Giants at the Vet; Gary Matthews hit a home run and Bob Dernier stole second, slid headfirst and left a skidmark in the dirt).

    After that, it was just what I and my friends did growing up. We played wiffle ball in the summer and street football in the fall and spring, and basketball whenever we could find somebody with a hoop on their garage.
    I was never much of an athlete. I was in shape from playing and running so much, but was way too small to do any of the big sports in high school. Wish I'd known now what I know then and had either gotten into sports writing a little bit earlier or taken an alternate route to be an equipment manager.
     
  10. KJIM

    KJIM Well-Known Member

    My mom. There's a valid reason I sent her to Yankee fantasy camp for her 50th wedding anniversary. And an equally valid reason why I got my father a $50 Whataburger gift card for the same occasion.
     
  11. WriteThinking

    WriteThinking Well-Known Member

    I had brothers who liked and played sports while we were growing up, and I was always being taken along to watch one of their games, but really, it was an interest I developed pretty much on my own. One of my first big sports memories was of attending a game at Yankee Stadium with one of my brothers, a couple of cousins and my uncle, and I think I enjoyed it more than they did. Still, growing up, I loved basketball the best. I was pretty good at it, was always welcome to play in games that involved mostly boys, and I was a rabid Lakers fan during the mid-70s and throughout the 80s and 90s (as in, I even followed, regularly, the radio broadcasts, and would sit in my room with the door closed, listening to them. In fact, I never missed them, and often listened to radio broadcasts even while watching games on TV, the better to have Chick for the sound bites instead of whomever was on the TV station).

    During those same years in the '70s and '80s, I also discovered the newspaper, being the first in the family to get up every morning (as in 4 or 5 a.m.), to read it, for the sports section, specifically. I'm sure my journalism/sports writing career had its genesis there. And when my first paid, full-time newspaper job was a half-news/half-sports position, and I found that I generally liked the sports part better (even though I had a good appreciation for news and developed good news instincts), my direction was set.
     
  12. CD Boogie

    CD Boogie Well-Known Member

    I did not get it from my father, who did not root for any team other than his alma mater, Georgetown. And I didn't get it from my brothers, because I didn't have any. I think my love of sports came initially from being really good at sports (for a pre-teen). Also my dad took me to Cooperstown when I was 9 years old in 1982 and I was awestruck. I read the Hall of Fame yearbook from 1982 -- Hank Aaron, Frank Robinson and Travis Jackson were on the cover -- and I wore the cover off that thing. Matter of fact, I might just buy that thing on Amazon right now. Thanks for the reminder. Oh, and Happy Chandler. Forgot about him. Sorry, Happy.

    [​IMG]
     
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