Party like it's 1979

When people ask me about how I got to be a sports fan, or how I decided to go into sports media, I tell them about growing up in Pittsburgh. Really, I'm too young to remember the city's best of times. The Pirates were one of the best teams in baseball during the 1970s, though they only managed to get to the World Series twice in six trips to the playoffs during those 10 years. The Steelers ... were the Steelers, plain and simple. But in 1979, when the Steelers won their third Super Bowl and when the Pirates won the World Series, I was only 7. So I barely remember. What I recall is the hype, the way the buzz from all that winning seemed to be on everyone's mind. And I suppose I ended up wanting to be a broadcaster or a writer because those were the people who told me about what was going on. I spent more time hearing about the games from them than I did actually watching the games being played.

The Pirates teams of that time period will always hold a special place for me. I don't want to wax too dramatic about it, lest I start to sound too much like Bob Costas or Thomas Boswell. OK, nobody is ever going to confuse me for either one of them. But I do think I got caught up in the romanticism of baseball's every-day presence in the lives of its fans. As Boswell has said, it's not that you have to watch or listen to the game every day. You can miss a few and when you go to come back to it, you know it's there and available every day. Baseball players seemed larger than life because of that daily presence. To me, none were larger than Willie Stargell, who had moved from left field to first base in the late stages of his career by the time I grew to know who he was. Willie Stargell was my boyhood idol. At the time, it was because he was the Pirates' leader on the field. But then I came to understand his meaning to the team off the field. His quiet dignity, his leadership. I actually got to interview him once, when I was working in Morgantown. I sat in the Pirates' dugout in Three Rivers Stadium, talking to my boyhood idol. Man, I was scared shitless. I'm fairly certain he had no recollection of me at all after that conversation, but it meant the world to me.

All of these memories have come flooding back the last few days because I just got my hands on a boxed DVD set of the 1979 World Series. Major League Baseball has done something I've long wished for all the leagues to do by releasing DVDs of the TV broadcasts of historic games and series. Actually, baseball and the NBA have been doing it for a couple years now. The stodgy, crusty old NFL will never do it. They don't call it the No Fun League for nothing. But baseball is releasing a few World Series a year over the next few years. The '79 Series is just out, all seven games in their entirety from the ABC network feed.

It's wonderful nostalgia for me, since I didn't actually watch the games when they were played. I knew the players and their statistics by heart from their baseball cards. But now to see them come alive in living color -- a lot of color -- is really something. In the late 1970s, the Pirates sported a gaudy color scheme -- nine possible combinations of black and gold and pinstripe tops and pants, which they would mix and match indiscriminately in a practice Sports Illustrated referred to as "multi-hued anarchy." Some of the combinations were just flat out hideous, like the getup Dave Parker was sporting on the cover of a 1977 issue of Sports Ilustrated. In the 1979 World Series, the team wore four different uniform combinations in seven games.

Despite all of those difficult uniform decisions, the Pirates managed to come from 3 games to 1 down to win the series, 4 games to 3. Stargell redeemed himself for a horrendous performance eight years earlier in the 1971 World Series by hitting three homers in 1979 and winning the Series MVP. I know all of the facts. I've known them for years. But watching it happen, seeing the old stadium and the shots from the camera they had in a helicopter above the city, it all made me think back to that time and that place. I tried to picture myself at 7 years old and what I was doing that October while those games were being played. Even now, even though I don't live in Pittsburgh anymore and probably never will again, whenever I tell someone I'm going home there's part of me that's thinking about that place -- thinking about a cool, bleak autumn day and the rivers and the bridges and the rolling gray hillsides, a place where everything was black and gold and sports were still larger than life. That will always be where home is to me.