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Published Saturday, October 11, 2008

Mazeroski's famous blast in 1960 was music to my fingers

I heard Bill Mazeroski's name mentioned the other day.

You know exactly what I thought of, don't you.

The 1960 World Series. Game seven. Bottom of the ninth, score tied. Mazeroski, leading off the inning, hits Bill Terry's pitch over the left field wall at Forbes Field and the Pirates beat the Yankees, 10-9, to win the Series four games to three.

I remember it like it was yesterday.

I was sitting in Mrs. Parrott's typing class where she was making a Herculean effort to convert my one-finger-on-each-hand-hunt-and-peck style into something more efficient when Mr. O.P. Evans' unmistakable voice came over the PA system.

He announced the outcome of the game without elaboration, just who won and the final score.

It was, however, a milestone of major proportions since he had never done anything like that before.

Mr. Evans, you must understand, never let anything interfere with classroom instruction. I mean anything.

So there was only one explanation for his actions.

I decided that Mr. Evans, an outstanding principal who ran Newnan High School with what modern-day critics would characterize as an iron hand, must have been a Yankee-hater like myself who was so happy that the underdog Pirates had miraculously won that he couldn't resist announcing it publicly.

I later decided that the only way he could have known was if he had been watching the game on TV ensconced in the NHS Holy of Holies which was his office. I knew Mrs. Evans hadn't called him from home with the news because she was in the library thumbing through every returned book looking for evidence of desecration.

So I pictured Mr. Evans in his office, with all the school-world busily going on around him, glued to his TV set just like I wished I could have been.

I don't know whether it happened that way or not. But I hope so.

Anyway, his announcing the outcome of the World Series marked a break-through moment.

If he deemed the World Series important enough to interrupt classes with an announcement of its victorious party, then it must have been something really important.

Of course, I already encompassed that belief myself, but to discover that a man of Mr. Evans' stature, a man I held in such high esteem, now shared my view lifted my self-estimation to inestimable heights.

As I remember it there was no great outpouring of emotion over the outcome of that Series among my cohorts in that classroom.

I was happy the Pirates won, not because I was a great Pirate booster, but because it meant the Yankees, against whom I always pulled, lost.

The young lady who sat beside me in that typing class who was already a whiz at typing and who gloried in whipping me in every speed-typing trial we had up to that point, was a Yankee fan and the fact that Mr. Evans' announcement conjured up from the depths of her being an anguished but muffled curse, did, I admit, give me a certain amount of pleasure.

It also did something else.

My fingers, which had labored over my typing machine as though bound by some invisible force rendering them incapable of speed and accuracy, were miraculously set fee to dance, as it were, with reckless abandon, free of restraint.

And I became almost in the twinkling of an eye, if not an expert, then most certainly a 10-fingered practitioner of the art now capable of knocking out 60 words a minute free of major catastrophe.

It was one of those turning point moments.

Even now when I think of the World Series my first thoughts dart back to afternoon games in the fall, to bunting-draped Yankee Stadium and its infamous left field sunfield, to Don Larsen's perfect game, to Lew Burdette, to the Dodgers winning it all in 1955.

And, oh yeah, to the day when Mr. Evans made his announcement and my typing fingers took on a life of their own.

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