Aaron reminisces about sports in the summer of 1984

People who know me know that I'm a big sports fan. I wanted to tell a couple of stories from my childhood from the time when I first remember becoming a sports fan. These stories both happened in the spring and summer of 1984. At the time, my family lived in a small town named Lowell in western Michigan. That year was the first year I remember specifically becoming aware of professional sports and trying to follow them over the course of a season.

Living in Michigan in 1984 was pretty exciting because, as folks who know something about the history of professional baseball know, the Detroit Tigers won the World Series that year. Imagine what that is like for a kid - the first year following baseball, the local team ends up winning the World Series. And they didn't just make it to and win the World Series, but they had one of the most famous seasons in baseball history. I remember Jack Morris throwing a no-hitter early in the season, and the 35-5 start (which is still a record for best 40 game start to a season I think), and them coasting through the rest of the season into the playoffs, then the ALCS sweep over the Kansas City Royals and the World Series win over the San Diego Padres.

I also remember how much the whole state loved the Tigers that year. They created and sold commemorative cups for the team during the season (before they'd even played in or won a playoff game - can you imagine something like that happening today?). In fact, I still have a Bless You Boys cup we got at McDonalds that summer somewhere in my sports memorabilia collection. I even got to see the Tigers in person for my first ever professional baseball game - we were visiting my mom's college roommate in Wisconsin when we drove from Michigan to Oregon when we moved out West that fall, and they had extra tickets to a Milwaukee Brewers game that happened to be against the Tigers. I think the Tigers had already clinched the division title by that point, and so they weren't planning on going and instead they offered them to us. It felt like fate that it all worked out that way, and I still have those ticket stubs saved somewhere. I don't remember much about that game except it was in the old County Stadium in Milwaukee (since torn down - one of 3 no longer existing stadiums I've been to games at along with the old Arlington Stadium in Texas and the Kingdome), and most importantly to me, the Tigers won that game like they did so many others that season.

The other big thing about that baseball season for me was the Chicago Cubs. My Grandpa grew up in western Michigan as a big baseball fan like me, but the radio station that came in best at his house broadcast the Cubs games every day, so he grew up a Cubs fan even though he grew up in Michigan. The Cubs had a strong team in 1984 and were in a pennant race all summer that year with the New York Mets. They finally pulled ahead in the end to win the NL East. So, not only did my local team end up winning the AL East, but my new 2nd favorite team (thanks to Grandpa) ended up doing really well and making the playoffs too. The playoffs were a different story for the Cubs than for the Tigers unfortuantely. They started out in the NLCS by winning the first 2 games from the San Diego Padres, and since the LCS was a best-of-5 series back then, that meant they only had to win 1 of the next 3 games to make it to the World Series and get to face off against the Tigers. Of course, being the Cubs, they ended up losing the next 3 games and so the Tigers ended up playing the Padres in the World Series instead of the Cubs and won 4 games to 1. Since then, I've learned more about the history of the Cubs and their heartbreaks (no World Series appearances since 1945, no championship since 1908, etc), but in 1984, I didn't yet know about any of that and just went along for the ride, and it broke my heart a little when they lost game 5. I also remember being a little relieved because I didn't know if I could root against my Grandpa's favorite team if they ended up playing the Tigers in the World Series.

It is a little strange to look back at the teams now - neither of them have been very good since then. The Tigers made the playoffs in 1987 but lost, and then were really terrible until the magical run to the World Series in 2006. The Cubs had a division title in 1989, a wild card in 1998, and a wild card in 2003 where they again ran into heartbreak and fell just short of the World Series. Back then though, I didn't know any better and expected them both to be good every year and keep making the playoffs every year. I mean, they each had the MVP and the Cy Young winners that year - Willie Hernandez won both for the Tigers, and the Cubs had Ryne Sandberg as MVP and Rick Sutcliffe as the Cy Young.

Aside from baseball, another big sporting event happened that year that helped me grow up into the sports fan I am today. That year, the summer Olympics were held in Los Angeles, and it is the first Olympics that I remember watching at all. Not only that, but that summer my family was in the process of moving from Michigan across the country to Oregon. As a child, Oregon might as well have been the other side of the world, and my dad had already started his new job, so my mom, sister and I were alone in Michigan getting the house ready to sell. That same year, they opened a McDonalds in Lowell, and so my mom took us there for lunch fairly often because we liked having Happy Meals and playing, and it made us all a little less lonely with dad gone. Plus we had never really gotten the chance to go there much before then because there wasn't one close. McDonalds had an Olympics promotion that summer where they gave out scratch cards that had names of different events on them, and if an American won a gold, you got a free Big Mac, if they got a silver, you got free fries, and if they got a bronze, you got a free drink. They must have setup this promotion before finding out that the Soviet bloc was going to boycott the Olympics in response to the USA boycotting the 1980 summer Olympics in Moscow. Because of that, American athletes ended up winning a ton of medals that summer, and we ended up with a lot of free meals as a result of all of those scratch cards that we collected prior to the Olympics. I remember having fun watching all of the events on TV and keeping track of all of the events that we had scratch cards for, and then planning when we could go have lunch at McDonalds again. They were nice enough to let us redeem multiple cards per visit too, so we ended up with several free meals that summer.

Most vividly, I remember Carl Lewis in the sprints and Mary Lou Retton in gymnastics, but I also remember watching some of the sports I'd never heard of before. I ran track as a kid and I think part of my enjoyment of that sport came from that Olympics.

I'm sure this post won't really be interesting to most folks, but I found myself sitting here with a big grin on my face as I remembered some of the details from that summer (or maybe by this point, I am remembering only what I choose to remember, but oh well.....).