You’re standing awful close Gus, can’t tell if it’s your toes I’m feeling or mine. (Roy Hobbs)
You know I believe we have two lives, the life we learn with and the life we live with after that. (Iris Gaines)
From the movie The Natural (1984)
Wings of the Wind
Est. September, 2009 – ReEst. April, 2010
Recent Comments
Wings of the Wind 
Thanks, Chris, for the good quotes from “The Natural.” I enjoyed that movie. The on-field stadium shots were filmed at the old War Memorial Stadium (aka the Rockpile) in Buffalo. When I was 14 ys/o back in 1970, a local furniture store had a contest every week to guess the score of the upcoming Buffalo Bills game with tickets for the following home game as the prize. The upcoming game was Bills vs. Rams. The Bills were atrocious while the Rams were pretty good. I submitted a score of Rams 21, Bills 0, and the actual score was 19-0. I won the tickets and my Dad and I attended the Bills vs. Jets game at War Memorial Stadium the following Sunday. The stadium was decrepit then, and that was 14 years before The Natural was filmed.
You’re welcome, Tom, and thank you for your very interesting reply. I had no idea where they filmed it but it definitely looked like it had seen better days. What a great memory about you and your Dad getting to go see a game after your good guess. My Dad wasn’t much of a football fan and I only remember going to one Ram game at the L.A. Memorial Coliseum. We did get to quite a few Angel games in Anaheim at Angel stadium (the big A). Getting out of Dodger stadium was always a trial so we didn’t go there as often.
My Dad hated professional sports. His pet peeve was athletes making big salaries. He must have ranted 30 different times at the dinner table about Joe Namath making $75K per year back in the late 60s. That’s “chump change” for today’s athletes. Anyway, I think my Mom talked my Dad into taking me to the game. It’s not something he would have relished.
Yay for Mom. I’m glad she talked your Dad into going with you. Speaking of Salaries, with the advent of NIL two freshman on the Arkansas college basketball team are making quite a lot. One makes about 230,000 and the other one makes over twice that. Coach Calipari makes 8 million a year, only eclipsed by the Kansas coach who makes several thousand more.. It seems out of control to me but at a time when people put so much importance on sports and winning it’s probably a matter of supply and demand. Our priorities are certainly messed up. Your Dad would probably be against pro and college sports today. It certainly has made the games on all levels less exciting to me but who can blame the athletes for taking what the gaming worshippers are willing to pay.
Lol. Mom had my back on many occasions.
I agree with you that sports salaries are absolutely out of control. Tickets to games are out of reach for most families. And sports’ dalliance with legal gambling is now coming back to bite them as we see with recent headlines.
I think the gambling will continue to be more of a problem even though it makes no sense to me. And it really is a shame that ticket prices are out of range of people who would like to go. I have no interest in going at this point anyway. Arkansas University has a good baseball team and I could afford one of those games but they play way up in the north part of the state. There is a minor league baseball team called the Travelers in Little Rock but I don’t know any of the players and have little time for that. That would be my best bet as far as reasonable ticket prices.
I’m a fan of Rochester Institute of Technology Men’s Hockey. They’re the only NCAA Division I level team in the Greater Rochester region and they have a newly built arena. Tickets are $15. I’ll be going to a few games later in the season.
That’s right! You’ve mentioned the hockey team. The tickets are very reasonably priced. Sounds like a good time!