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Show Pane B12 Thursday, September 11, 1986 Park Record Malice Toward! RJme by Jim S mod ley The (Erato Steak.. a (Great Steals! And delicious prime rib, succulent seafood and our famous 35-item salad bar. For BREAKFAST Monday-Saturday 7:30-9:30 a.m. DINNER Monday-Thursday 5:30 to 10 p.m. Friday - Saturday 5:30 to 11 p.m. Sunday 5-10 p.m. SUNDAY BRUNCH 10:00 a.m.-2:00 p.m. every Sunday year-round. LUNCH Monday-Friday 11:30-2:30 p.m.. Saturday 12 noon Enjoy live entertainment Friday and Saturday evenings in the Grub Steak's relaxing Western Atmosphere For more information please call 649-8060 or 649-7100 Park City's Favorite Restaurant TO K r! S I A I K A I at Prospector Square Hotel Off & YOUR FALL TRAINING AT THE PROSPECTOR ATHLETIC CLUB Starting September 20th with the Park City Autumn Classic 5 mile run Benefitting Utah's Special Olympics Information and Entry Forms Available at PAC Front Desk 649-6670 Also starting Monday, September 22nd mm 7. Lk.il TJ-jtA ,u i K A year of memories Covering sports for the past year has enabled me to watch some fine athletic preformances and has created : memories that will stay with me. While I still have one more column to go before saying au revoir, I had decided not to do anything nostalgic. No self indulgent pieces. However, I really appreciated meeting the people who participate in this town. And to me that is what Park City is about those who participate. This is a sports town and many of the friendships friend-ships here have been created on the field of competition. I started the job in August of '85 when Jans had won the men's softball league title and began the league championship playoffs with Doc's. Jans received more than their share of boos and it made me wonder what the team did to make it such that their opponent always got the fan support. I learned that all they did was win. They were like the New York Yankees of Park City softball in this New Englanders eyes. Back East, you either loved or hated the Yankees. I've seen Jans play many times this year and they have some good ballplayers. However, the thing they have that other teams do not have is the knowledge and confidence that they can win every game they play. You can never count Jans out of a game. The more adversity they face the tougher they become. They don't choke up in a tight game. They are not cocky, they are confident. Admittedly, I thought they were going to blow a couple of games, but they came through. You gotta admire 'em. On the running scene, which is more difficult for me to write about since the farthest I run is to the refrigerator for another beer during commericials of football games, the performances of Barry Herbster and Jeff DeMond in the 1985, 10K Speed Run and that of Ed Masters and Bill Rammel in the Wasatch Front 100 Mile Endurance Run were incredible. I had the pleasure of riding in Gary Cole's Porsche Targa with a sun roof, as it was the pace car, and it presented an excellent opportunity for photos in the 10k run. Herbster and DeMond pulled out in the first mile and were never challenged by anyone but themselves. They exchanged first place a couple times during the race, but were never more than six feet apart. With about 50 yards to go, Herbster put on a kick and won by one-hundredth of a second. Masters and Rammel had never run 100 miles before August of 1985. Masters finished 12th and Rammel was seventh. I was impressed how two guys that had never run that far before could gut it out for 20-plus hours and place so highly. Covering the race was also special because you pick up on the camaraderie of the runners. Many of the athletes have comepted in past years, so going to the Endurance En-durance run was a homecoming of sort for them. And speaking of homecomings, who can forget Madonna Madon-na Harris' performance in the Wheat Thins Mayor's Cup races in Park City only a couple of months ago? She was hot. And the crowd lining Main Street appreciated ap-preciated her efforts as she threatened to lap the field. She won every lap and, of course the overall race a feat which has not been accomplished in tfie Wheat Thins " history. In looking back at sports I can't forget many of the memories that athletes at Park City High School have provided. The football team that came so close in many of its games only to end up losing, may be on the right track this year. They may have learned that they can be winners, which often is the only thing separating teams that chalk up the victories from those that don't. Of the entire season last year, the event that sticks out the most was a run by Bruce Buckner. Park City won that game 3-0 thanks great, team defensive effort and a cool, Greg King field goal. But Buckner's run was the highlight. It was a third down and five yards to go when Buckner got the call. He ran around left end to the line of scrimage when he was first hit . The tackler( although slowing Buckner a bit, found himself on his backside as Buckner continued upfield. Buckner was then met by two more defenders, who hit him high and low. But that did not stop Buckner. They were both holding onto Buck's legs which kept pumping for that first-down marker. Finally, two more defenders came up and got a piece of Buckner. He dragged the four of them for one more yard and a first down in a great individual in-dividual effort. He was an animal. Also at the high school, I had to admire the competitiveness com-petitiveness of Pam Finnegan, Heidi Hannay and Abby Peterson. The three girls participated in cross country all season although they did not have enough runners to field a team. And at the state finals, at Sugarhouse Park, two of the girls were sick before the race and still ran, almost collapsing at the finish line. Two of the most inspirational athletes at the high school were departed seniors Greg King and Scott Tatum. When these two stepped on the basketball floor they gave a couple hundred percent, nonstop, every minute they played. I always wondered how Tatum could outjump guys that were several inches taller than him. And King was relentless on defense, hounding his opponent into distraction. In mentioning gutty performances it has to be said that the women's soccer team, the Kicks, provided one almost every week of their season. The team lost their coach early last fall and were always short of players. Often there would be eight or nine players facing 11 on the opposing side. Many of the teams they played were also younger; sometimes much younger. It seems that the thread that holds the Kicks together is Nettie Franzen. Her energy and desire to win have no boundaries. Often it is those who score the goals that get their names in the paper, but ithout the defense of Franzen the Kicks would have lost more than they did. They also played to few fans so the inspiration drawn from the home fans cheering you on was not there for the Kicks. But the Kicks played and few of the scores were lopsided. So it was a fun year covering sports in Park City, a year I won't forget, a year I will miss and a year I thank the athletes for providing. ' Nobody got the solution to last week's sports quiz: What is a Christmas fly? so the year's subscription to the Park .Record is still, tucked, away in the subscription manager s desk. The Christmas fly is simply a fly used in fishing for trout. Since next week's column is the final "Malice Toward None" there will not be another sports quiz. Muninr'siy (Dim SjpaDirtts by Jim Murray Is Winfield a great Yankee? Yankee Stadium is the Vatican of baseball. This is where the game went big time. This is where it all began, really. This is where Babe Ruth took the game away from the gamblers and the small-time hustlers and the corner saloon, and put it on Broadway. New York without Yankee Stadium is as unthinkable as New York without the Great White Way, the Statue of Liberty, the skyscrapers, the Brooklyn Bridge or the Broadway stage. This is the town that gave the nation its music, its humor, its drive. But it needs Yankee Stadium the way Vienna needs its waltz, or Paris its spring. Baseball needs Yankee Stadium. Also, its Yankees. Once, the Yankees were baseball. It wasn't a game, it was a parade. The Yankees had the calliope; everyone else had the nose that lights up. If the Yankees weren't in a World Series, it wasn't a World Series. If you didn't do it in New York, you might as well not do it. Other teams hustled, scrambled, worked to put together teams that could compete. The Yankees sat back and took the position that God will provide. And so he did. The Ruth era passed and the Gehrig era took over. Lou went and Joe DiMaggio came along. As Joe was hanging them up, Mickey Mantle arrived. The Yankees had a supply line. God was a Yankee. A canny old German named Jacob Ruppert once ran this institution with an iron hand. To be a Yankee wasn't a sport, it was a religion. CBS got hold of this theological conglomerate and completely misunderstood the whole thing. They turned the Yankees into just another sit-com in very few years ana were glad to cancel the show after a few rough seasons. When George Steinbrenner bought into this royal family, it seemed at first as if the gamekeeper had taken over the manor. George was a brawler. George was no Ruppert. No organ music and incense for George. George liked noise, combat, controversy. George wanted to have fun. He also wanted to have winners. He correctly perceived perceiv-ed that what the modern Yankees lacked was "the big guy." The Yankees needed a Moses. George came up with a beauty. David Mark Winfield is one of the most inposing hunks you will ever see in a baseball uniform or out of it. Six-six, 220, not an ounce of fat on him, he looked in the batter's box like a thunderstorm on the horizon. Pitchers got rattled, outfielders out-fielders moved back and infielders prayed he didn't get ' a fastball to pull. He didn't come cheap. Twenty-three million for 10 years shocked the baseball Establishment of its time. Outraged historians pointed out that Babe Ruth never made more than $80,000 a year. Cynics wondered why George hadn't bought Rhode Island instead. Winfield never had a chance. The cards weren't stacked stack-ed against him but Yankee Stadium was. Yankee Stadium is "The House That Ruth Built" in popular lore. The house built for Ruth is more like it. You have to be caieful not to bump into right field rounding first. Left field is just a rumor. You have to change planes to get there, so to speak. It's no accident that almost every single Yankee they write songs about was left-handed. Only Joe DiMaggio was not and it is no secret that Joe's home runs would have been in the 500 range, instead of 361, if he'd had the demensions Ruth, Gehrig, Maris, Berra and Mantle had to shoot at. Winfield didn't have a career, he had a sentance. He left the airport confines of San Diego's stadium for the great outdoors of Death Valley in Yankee Stadium, where fly balls go to die. The numbers he put up were heroic 37 home runs one year in that cavern, a .340 average another. But the Yankees made it to only one World Series in his tenure. The man who was not Babe Ruth sat in a corner of the Yankee dugout the other night. Even sitting down, Winfield Win-field looks like 50 homers looking for a fence to fly over. They make statues out of bodies like these. , But the tabloids were full of stories laying to rest the myth of the next great Yankee superstar. George Steinbrenner Stein-brenner was issuing statements containing words like mistake to describe his signing of Winfield all those years ago and letting Reggie Jackson go. Winfield is quietly bitter. "My performance has been super consistent, occasionally stellar," he points out. "It's the Yankee team that's different, not Dave Winfield. Win-field. "You add all the dimensions I bring to the team defense as well as hitting and I'm a positive addition ad-dition to the Yankee tradition and I've always been. "Look at what this team has done for me. I got my 2,000th hit this year. You think they stopped the game and bronzed the ball? I got my 300th home run. Pretty important milestones, eh? Not to the Yankees. "I got honored by the city today. The mayor gave me a certificate of appreciation for my work with children. You think ony guy from the Yankee office was there? Guess again." Mayor Koch called Winfield "one of the finest athletes in the history of New York sports." Adds Winfield: "You look at those numbers I put up here: 37, 32, 26 home runs, 19 this year. And 106, 1 16, 100, 114 runs batted in. What's that, chopped liver? You can add 8 to 10 home runs a year to my totals if I'm playing anywhere but San Diego and Yankee Stadium. "I've stood the heat here very well. I stayed in the kitchen. kit-chen. The writers here some writers are like agents provocateurs. They work both sides of the street to bring out headlines. I produced. You think any pitcher in this league is happy to see Dave Winfield come up? " So, Dave Winfield was is the last great Yankee? They should keep a pedestal warm for him next to the statues of Babe and Lou in center field? Very likely, thinks the last great Yankee himself. "When I'm gone, they'll get someone and they'll say, . 'Well, he's no Dave Winfield. He can't go get 'em like ol' Dave."' he predicts. So, he didn't make a mistake becoming a Yankee all those years ago when he had a choice of becoming a superstar or the guy who wasn't Babe Ruth? "I didn't make any mistake," said Dave Winfield , quietly. "But they may be getting ready to make one, letting me go." |