Soundin' Off

To the end, my grandfather would tell the story about being in the living room, listening to the radio, hearing the ball leave the yard a borough away, jumping up and hitting the ceiling.

Remember the early days of WFAN, when Stan Martin had those “WFAN flashback” clips? John MacLean’s playoff-clinching goal, Sadaharu Oh’s record-breaking home run, Mike Tyson’s “Moiderous decision, moiderous.” And then there was the one, Polo Grounds, Oct. 3, 1951 — “need we say more?”

In college, for one class, we did a bus tour of the city. One of the first stops was the Morris-Jumel Mansion. George Washington slept there, and all. We walked around the building and suddenly stood at the top of a bluff, overlooking the Harlem River. Across it, back home, stood one grand stadium, where it had been for over 70 years and where it’d remain for another decade. Some people probably thought that was why I stopped where I stopped, being sports boy and all. It wasn’t. Close, but it wasn’t. I was looking down at the housing project, or rather at what the housing project had replaced almost 35 years earlier. Atop Coogan’s Bluff, I could hear Russ Hodges in my mind, I could see Bobby Thomson hit that line drive, I could watch it sail toward P.S. 46 and I could magically be somewhere I could never be.

The man who hit that ball is dead at 86. One more tie to the glory days of New York baseball fades into memory, but he and his most-memorable home run were already legend.