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    Great moments that got you 'into' a sport

    ...Be it a game, a race, a solo performance or whatever

    This is mine when it comes to American football.

    Most other sports that I like, I was pretty much brought up with - i.e., they were always 'watched' in our house: skiing, Tour de France, Olympics, etc. But that one was a sport I was only watching to see what all the fuss was about, as my friends were going on about it at the time. I saw that game and I thought: "That's my team!"

    Now... how about a 'throwback' to that uniform, please, Jets? That's the classic hemet design and kit, I think: all clean and minimal. Retro looks are all very well, but I don't think of that when I think of the Jets. A team with a name like that should be all about modernity. Just IMHO, like.

    #2
    Great moments that got you 'into' a sport

    That video is over 8 minutes long, can you tell us which moment we are looking at?

    Comment


      #3
      Great moments that got you 'into' a sport

      Well, the whole thing is a great 'moment' in terms of the overall context. But if you want to see the climax of it all, then go to 4:15 and watch it for about a minute or so, and you'll see the climax.

      I think you're taking me a little too literally with the 'moment' thing, Ad Hoc. It could be a heroic performance on the Tour de France that inspired you - which would be 3 weeks worth of excellence - but that still counts as one event or 'moment'.

      As it is, I'm glad that clip is so long, as it gives the achievement some context. Watched in isolation, the pass is 'just' an ordinary long bomb into the endzone. However, coming at the end of a see-saw slugfest, which went into overtime at 45-45, makes it an extraordinary thing. The routine thing to do is play safe and kick a field goal. But the Jets didn't - they went for the jugular in spectacular style, and I instantly appreciated them for doing that.

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        #4
        Great moments that got you 'into' a sport

        I realise I'm picking this apart a little bit, and these things are not necessarily explainable, but if you weren't into it, how did you know what was routine and what was a slugfest and all those things?

        I mean don't get me wrong I enjoy this sport too, but overtime doesn't really do it for me at all - it's those last minute drives with the clock ticking that are where it's at for me. I think NFL would be better if there was no overtime and you could draw.

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          #5
          Great moments that got you 'into' a sport

          Well... my friends had been fans for a year or two (the first wave of NFL on Channel 4) and I'd watched a few games - the '85 Super Bowl included. However, I was only slowly getting to grips with the rules and hadn't yet seen a game that had inspired me. However, I saw this game in it's entirety and it blew me away. I started watching the games more regularly and by a year later I was hooked.

          I use the terms such as 'slugfest' with retrospective knowledge. I doubt that I'd heard the term before I started watching American sports!

          I fundamentally disagree about draws/ties, but that's just a matter of taste.

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            #6
            Great moments that got you 'into' a sport

            As far as NFL is concerned, Channel 4 did it for me, too. The Redskins v Miami in (I think) '83 got me fascinated (Killer Bees, Thiesmann etc) and it stuck for a long time, but apart from the odd World of Sport thing on baseball (and my parents bringing back some memorabilia from the US), Joe Carter hitting that home run in '92 or '93, thrilled the bejeezus out of me, and I was utterly lovestruck from then... and if anything, I like baseball more than I like football now. Which is really weird.

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              #7
              Great moments that got you 'into' a sport

              Incidentally, for the sake of clarity, I had wanted to call the thread "Matches/races/performances that got you into a sport" but the 'new' board doesn't allow thread titles of that length. Thus, after scratching my head for a few moments, I decided on the term "moments".

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                #8
                Great moments that got you 'into' a sport

                Football I got into by going to SJP with my Dad. I think the first match we saw was against Forest, but I can't remember for sure.

                Cricket, it was definitely the telly. It started with being fascinated by the sheer calmness of the commentary by Richie Benaud and Jim Laker, and all the arcana of it all.

                But baseball started fascinating me before I ever saw a game. I used to got out with an American girl, whose father was fantastic raconteur. It was his stories about the bottom of the ninth, two out with the bases loaded etc etc that made me determined to find out about this sport. C4 started showing postseason highlights shortly after that, luckily.

                Rugby Union's unusual, in that I wasn't really into watching it, tried playing it at uni, found I liked that, but still never really got all that into watching it (though more so than I had been).

                The only one I can pinpoint a particular match for is Aussie Rules, which I'd kind of tried to like, but which didn't click until Freo vs Richmond, Subiaco Oval 2005, which was the first game I saw live (and so far the only one). You don't get a sense of the majestic sweep of an attack without seeing the vast panorama of it.

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                  #9
                  Great moments that got you 'into' a sport

                  Joe Theisman, now we're talking, Gero. Art Monk catching some incredible number of passes was great too. "Downtown" Charlie Brown, John Riggins, Darryl Green, Mark Moseley.

                  It was the Redskins as a team that got me into it.

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                    #10
                    Great moments that got you 'into' a sport

                    Was that the fabled 'counter-trey' offence era 'Skins or did that come later?

                    (edit: It's not, is it? The Doug Williams era was the counter-trey, wasn't it?)

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                      #11
                      Great moments that got you 'into' a sport

                      Hockey: 1980 Olympics. USA-Finland. And then all the hoopla after that. Then I started playing. I also remember reading an article in Boys Life on Wayne Gretzky and wanting to be like him.

                      With American football, I was born into it, but the moment that I really switched on was when Penn State beat then #1 ranked Pitt 48-14 in 1981. At the time, Pitt was the big rival. We went down 14 early and I was watching it at my friend's house and I distinctly remember the kid's dad, a man of great scholarship and charity, screaming "we didn't get off the bus!" But then we came back to tie at half and blow them out in the second half. I went home at half-time and watched the rest with my family. We were all very excited, especially my mom.

                      I was also born into baseball, since my family were all Reds fans. I recall them talking about the Big Red Machine and all of that, but my first game was in 1977 or 78. The Reds lost 5-2 to the Expos who had just picked up Tony Perez from the Reds. I was destraught at the loss. I don't remember the score, but my older brother kept score and he's told me.

                      I lost interest in baseball between 1992-2004. I think what sucked me back in was reading Moneyball.

                      I got into football/soccer in college when I went with some friends to some W&M games because there wasn't anything else for freshman guys to do on a Friday night. Something about the frustration and the futility of such a low scoring game attracted me at that time in my life whereas it hadn't when I was younger and more optomistic. I was into the world cup, I got FIFA 94 for the Sega Genesis, and then followed the early days of MLS on TV, but the first proper game I attended was a USA-Ireland (2:1) friendly at old Foxboro Stadium. It wasn't great atmosphere, but it was the first time I'd seen the game at a high level played live and could see what was happening on the whole field. That was a turning point.

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                        #12
                        Great moments that got you 'into' a sport

                        I love almost all sports, with the possible exception of some of those that are decided by judges on "artistic impression", like some of the gymnastics, ice dancing and the "X games" ones like surfing and snowboarding.

                        I'm a big believer in the "higher, faster, stronger" ethos, or whatever it is. Not "more flamboyant", or "artistic". I think those things are admirable, btw, but keep them aside for their own contests, not have them in Olympics.

                        Anyway, my "this sport is really worth watching, isn't it?" moments (you'll recognise a theme here, most of these are from when I was about 9 to 12, and apologies if some of the details are therefore hazy or downright incorrect):

                        1. Horse Racing - Bob Champion and Aldaniti winning the first Grand National I really took notice of (was that 81, or 82?).

                        2. Snooker - Tony Knowles beating reigning champion Steve Davis 10-1 in the first round of the 1982 World Championship (and then Alex Higgins winning the thing later on).

                        3. Cricket - the 1981 Ashes series, especially that Headingley test. Also, around that time, that incredible series of one-day finals that always seemed to end up with Somerset and Northants scrambling a win off the very last ball.

                        4. Rugby League - I think it was the 1984 Challenge Cup Final? The one where Joe Lydon ran the length of the pitch twice to score tries for Widnes.

                        5. Rugby Union - the 1984 (?) Grand Slam decider between Scotland and France where Scotland won with a last-minute try from a lineout.

                        6. Golf - The 1982 British Open, where over the course of the last two days, first young American tyro Bobby Clampett threw away a 5-shot halfway lead, then young Zimbabwean "Nicky" Price blew a two-shot lead on the final five holes, to allow world number one Tom Watson to sneak back in and win. I think this set me up for a lifetime of expecting the "best" player to always win at golf's majors, when in fact that only happens about 10% of the time.

                        7. Cycling - Tour road race cycling, anyway - the Hinault/LeMond tour of 1985, where it was obvious LeMond could have had him but they went over the top of the last major climb together as team-mates, in an almost open understanding that the following year, it would be LeMond's.

                        8. Darts - the Bristow/Lowe/Wilson battles of the early 80s. Even though almost all the players are better now than anyone was then, I don't think darts has ever got back to that era in terms of drama, a bit like

                        9. Tennis - McEnroe, Borg, Connors and the young Lendl all taking titles off each other from 1981 to 1984, and ...

                        10. Boxing - Leonard, Hagler, Hearns swapping that middleweight division in the mid-80s.

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                          #13
                          Great moments that got you 'into' a sport

                          I grew up watching American football and baseball with my dad, but my earliest memories of watching are vague, and consist mainly of my father getting very angry or very happy for reasons not entirely clear to me at the time. The first season I really strongly kept up with the Raiders, paying attention to every game I could and knowing, at least to some extent, what was going on, was the 1980 season, when they won the wildcard spot and eventually the Superbowl. Very bittersweet, because they moved to L.A. the next year.

                          I always kept up casually with baseball, but the formative "I'm hooked" moments came later, when I was in high school. Fittingly for baseball, the moments are painful rather than triumphant: the Giants losing the pennant to the Cardinals in seven games in 1987, and the Dodgers beating the A's in the 1988 World Series. I do remember being absorbed by the 1979 World Series, when the Pirates came back from 3 games to 1 to beat the Orioles, but I didn't become as engaged again until I was fifteen or so. In retrospect, the '87 and '88 seasons meant something because I started going to lots of Giants and A's games with friends around that time. Going to the ballpark is really the best way to get hooked on baseball, I believe.

                          For (association) football, it came on more gradually when I was in high school and early college. My friends and I played, but I only really started watching it when a friend's dad got satellite TV and we started watching European games, mainly English First Division and Bundesliga. (We watched some Mexican league games on the Spanish stations, too.) I took a liking to Tottenham for pretty superficial reasons, which will no doubt confirm the prejudices of anti-Spurs folks: their attacking style was flashier and more comprehensible to me than more defensive teams, some of the musicians I liked had mentioned Paul Gascoigne in interviews I read, and their name sounded weird and very English to me. (And when I was in high school, I felt that anything English or British was cooler than almost anything American.) My loyalty and interest were really cemented during the 1991 FA Cup run, especially the defeats of Arsenal (that free kick!) and Forest. By that time, I was in college, and could watch the matches in bars, though a lot of my fandom at that time, such as it was, was reading match reports in the Times and Guardian in the college reading room. It's much easier now with the Internet and FSC, etc.

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                            #14
                            Great moments that got you 'into' a sport

                            Renart wrote:
                            And when I was in high school, I felt that anything English or British was cooler than almost anything American.
                            See that's weird, because for almost anyone growing up in Britain in the 80s, anything American was cooler than anything British. Loads of us got into American Football in 1984 and 1985 simply because it was different, and on our groundbreaking new 4th channel "Channel 4", and even basketball was briefly popular in the UK. Hell, for a while in the mid-80s, anything Australian (Neighbours, INXS, Kylie and Jason, surfing) was cooler than anything British.

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                              #15
                              Great moments that got you 'into' a sport

                              Association Football: the 1967 FA Cup Final, extended highlights on Wide World of Sports close to a month after the game. Also the reason I follow Tottenham.

                              Cricket: The Windies tour of England in 1976, seen on television while we were on holiday.

                              I was born into everything else, though I will say that the first time I ever saw the field at the original Yankee Stadium (age 4) was absolutely magical. The original was very old school, with dark and somewhat cramped concourses and lots of pillars supporting the upper decks (which extended over a good portion of the box seats). As a result, you generally walked up (or down) a tunnel-like ramp to get to your seats, and at the end of the tunnel suddenly came into view of the field for the first time, which completely dominated your vista and featured grass that was greener than anything one had ever seen. Given that I was in the prime of my grandparents' (failed) attempts to make a good Catholic out of me, I genuinely associated that vista with heaven.

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                                #16
                                Great moments that got you 'into' a sport

                                More complicated than that, I reckon, Rogin. I mean, I always thought British pop and fashion were cooler than American for much of the 80s, mainly because, well, they were. And there was the beginnings of a "conscious" fan culture in football, of which of course WSC was a huge element. That was really exciting, in a way that watching Frank Gifford and his NFL highlights once a week never could be, for me.

                                I turned to the new football culture in some relief, actually. Bradford and Heysel and Hillsborough had made me kind of sick and desperate, and I'd given American football a real go to see if I could like that instead. But it never took with me, and still hasn't.

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                                  #17
                                  Great moments that got you 'into' a sport

                                  I have to ask Ursus, is the original Yankee stadium one prior to the one they recently knocked down? That team refreshes itself so often it seems very likely it was an entirely different form on the same site.

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                                    #18
                                    Great moments that got you 'into' a sport

                                    Yes, the original was on the same site as the one recently demolished, but was quite different in terms of experience. Although part of the shell of the old ballpark was kept when they built the new one, the Yankees still had to play in Shea Stadium for two seasons (and yes, it was bizarre to see them there).

                                    The original:



                                    The second:



                                    Two and three during construction of the latter:



                                    The current version (three):

                                    Comment


                                      #19
                                      Great moments that got you 'into' a sport

                                      Rogin the Armchair Fan wrote:
                                      Renart wrote:
                                      And when I was in high school, I felt that anything English or British was cooler than almost anything American.
                                      See that's weird, because for almost anyone growing up in Britain in the 80s, anything American was cooler than anything British. Loads of us got into American Football in 1984 and 1985 simply because it was different, and on our groundbreaking new 4th channel "Channel 4", and even basketball was briefly popular in the UK. Hell, for a while in the mid-80s, anything Australian (Neighbours, INXS, Kylie and Jason, surfing) was cooler than anything British.
                                      Yeah, I think it's just down to the way many of us romanticize the foreign and what we don't have. Being a soccer fan when I was in high school made you different, more "sophisticated." This quite appealed to my gang of friends, who tried (with only intermittent success) to dress like mods and pretend we were above the whole acid-washed-jeans-letterman-jacket-and-mullet culture that prevailed in the hallways. (I actually kept my baseball and gridiron football fandom somewhat under wraps at school because I didn't want to seem like the jocks. Which is weird, now that I think about it, as I went out for sports, too, and could kick myself now for not buying a letterman jacket when I was able to do so. I wouldn't have worn it then, but would love to have it now!)

                                      Also, when I was in high school (1985-1989), most American music on the radio was pretty bad (David Lee Roth solo albums, Huey Lewis, etc.), while the "alternative" stations played the Smiths, the Cure, Depeche Mode, the Jesus and Mary Chain, etc., which to my ears sounded so much better and seemed like part of such a cooler "scene". Looking back, I realize that probably a lot of people my age growing up in Manchester or Glasgow or wherever would have envied my life in California, but the thought never crossed my mind at the time!

                                      Comment


                                        #20
                                        Great moments that got you 'into' a sport

                                        There is an incredibly high probability that Renart and I were at at least one of the same games at Candlestick or the Colosseum, given that I must have gone to about 60 games during those two seasons.

                                        Another for the list of OTFathon prequels, of which the most notable for me is still the 1984 UEFA Cup Final (me, TG and a number of the other OTF Spurs contingent).

                                        Comment


                                          #21
                                          Great moments that got you 'into' a sport

                                          Cricket - England v West Indies in 1995, one day I saw Brian Lara, one of the world's greatest batsmen, hit a rapid 145. Then they next day I saw Dominic Cork take a hat-trick as England sealed the game.

                                          Pity all test cricket isn't that exciting!!!

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                                            #22
                                            Great moments that got you 'into' a sport

                                            "That's it, he's dead."

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                                              #23
                                              Great moments that got you 'into' a sport

                                              More context here.

                                              Comment


                                                #24
                                                Great moments that got you 'into' a sport

                                                More conventionally, this.

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                                                  #25
                                                  Great moments that got you 'into' a sport

                                                  Like many the Tour de France and American Football I got into thanks to Channel 4. In the early days it always seemed to Hinault/Lemond on one and the Redskins on the other.

                                                  Football and cricket it's a bit harder to remember. Possibly my first professional matches (Wednesday vs Preston in the 3rd division, England vs Australia Trent Bridge 77, the famous Boycott test)

                                                  Recently I've got into Biathlon and Ice Hockey, which goes to show I live somewhere cold I guess. Biathlon through the fact that a local woman is Romania's top biathlete and actually won an event a couple of years ago (despite basically having to do all her own training and cover her expenses from whatever she can scrape together in winnings). Turned on Eurosport a few times to see how she was doing and fairly quickly became hooked by the sport (especially the mass starts, the whole race element with the extra loop when you miss a target is, I reckon, a brilliant and very exciting way of doing things)

                                                  And Ice Hockey I watched when I lived in the US and sort of enjoyed, mostly because it was the North American sport that most closely resembled football. However as a televisual spectacle it leaves something to be desired because the puck is too small and moves too fast, and half the time you can't see it. Since I moved to a big ice hockey hotbed though, and have attended matches, I've really got into it - and can now much more appreciate the subtleties of the sport as well as being able to enjoy the fast paced action (because you can actually see it live)

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