If you are a sports fan, and if you are lucky, Fate will find a way for you to attend one memorable Hall of Fame-caliber game in your lifetime.  It might be a Super Bowl come-from-behind drive with two minutes left in the game.  It could be a three-point buzzer-beater to win the NCAA basketball final.  Perhaps it’s a short-handed goal in sudden death of Game Seven of the Stanley Cup hockey championship.  Maybe it’s your favorite player heading the ball into the net in stoppage time to win the World Cup.

Allow me to share mine with you…

I never thought I’d get to see a game of the 1977 World Series in person.  My assistant at work, a large, bombastic New York icon of a man named “Willie John”, knew, as only a Big Apple maven could, one of the camera crew for WPIX-TV, the station that held broadcast rights to regular-season Yankee games.  This camera guy, “Dulio,” had an extra two strips of World Series tickets that he sold to Willie John.  Willie kept one for his own use, and took the remaining strip of four tickets and distributed one each to four of his friends.  I wound up getting a ticket for Game Six at Yankee Stadium.

He might as well have given me a ticket for Game Fifteen.  I didn’t figure the Yankees had much chance of winning even one game of the seven-game set.  New York was an old team:  four of the nine regulars (Thurman Munson, Graig Nettles, Roy White, and Reggie Jackson,) were 30 or older, and most of their bench players were on the back side of their careers as well.  Their pitching staff was comprised of so-so retreads Ed Figueroa, Mike Torrez, Catfish Hunter, and Ken Holtzman, all on the wrong side of 30, and a couple of unproven young phenoms, Ron Guidry and Don Gullett.  The year before, the Yankees were swept in four by the Cincinnati Reds, and after narrowly winning their division and scraping past the Kansas City Royals to win the American League crown, the odds didn’t look too good for Gotham.

Their opponents, the Los Angeles Dodgers, looked to be unstoppable.  They were the first team in major league history to have four players-- Steve Garvey, Reggie Smith, Ron Cey, and Dusty Baker—hit 30 or more homers each in a season.  They had, arguably, the best pitching staff in baseball, and had demolished the defending champion Reds in the regular season before eliminating the Philadelphia Phillies in four games to win the right to represent the National League in the World Series.

But, as they say, that’s why they play the games on the field…

The first two games took place in Yankee Stadium; the Yanks won Game One, 4-3, but it took twelve innings and a number of blown chances before Paul Blair’s single knocked in 22 year old second baseman Willie Randolph with the winning run.  The Dodgers beat sore-armed Yankee starter Catfish Hunter like a red-headed stepchild, 6-1, behind a five-hit complete game by Burt Hooton.

The Series then shifted to balmy Los Angeles.  Here we go, I reckoned.  The Angelenos would sweep all three games in pitcher-friendly Dodger Stadium, and that, my friends, would be that.

Not so fast…

In Game Three, the Yanks jumped out to a three-run lead in the first inning, only to see their edge evaporate when Dusty Baker slammed a three-run homer in the third.  But the Yanks picked up a run in each of the fourth and fifth innings, held the Dodgers scoreless the rest of the way, and won 5-3.  There would be a Game Six in New York after all; the Dodgers couldn’t win the Series in L.A.  As it turned out, the teams split the remaining two games in the West Coast swing, New York winning Game Four, 4-2, before being shellacked 10-4 by the Dodgers in Game Five.

So, the teams returned to New York with the Yankees holding a razor-thin 3-2 margin in the Series, but with the Dodgers having the momentum after their lambasting of the Yankees in the previous game.  If the Dodgers won Game Six, it would force a seventh and deciding game.  If the Yankees won, it was all over.  They would be World Series champions.

Suddenly, that Game Six ticket in my wallet was looking a lot more golden…

(to be continued on Sunday, here.)