Shuttle spans lots of change

Home

Entertainment

Sports

Other Sun Publications

FREE DELIVERY!
Get Free Delivery! Request your Osceola News Gazette Today.

Login Form

2013 Osceola Health

2013 Sexual Predator Sexual Offender List sexualpredatorcover13

Windows on the Classroom March 2013

School Calendar
2012-2013

View our other Special Sections

Shuttle spans lots of change

Sports

Wednesday, 13 July 2011 12:19

Rick Pedone
Sports Editor

Ever heard of the Sunbird Cup?
Unless you are the most fanatical of tennis historians, and at least middle aged, probably not.
It was a women’s pro tennis event held in the early 1980s at Haines City’s Grenelefe Resort. United Airlines sponsored it. Cool gift bags.

It rarely attracted large crowds, even though Martina Navratilova and Billie Jean King made appearances, probably because Andrea Jaegar was ruining the sport with her moonballs. After a few years, the tournament disappeared. Not that anyone noticed.
The only reason I bring it up is because the Sunbird Cup was going on in 1981 when the first space shuttle was launched.
Now, 30 years later, the last shuttle is making its curtain call. When it lands next week, it’s all over.
Think of what has transpired in U.S. sports since 1981: Michael Jordan went from the Final Four with North Carolina to the Chicago Bulls and launched the NBA into unprecedented popularity.
The NFL, already popular in 1981, grew to the most dominant professional league in the U.S., and one of the most powerful in the world.
Major League baseball lost part of its season due to a strike in 1981, went through the cocaine scandals, free agency, more strikes, a complete shutdown in 1994 and then steroids but it survives and mostly thrives.
Wayne Gretzky was beginning his amazing NHL run with Edmonton, and the N.Y. Islanders were winning four straight Stanley Cups.
Earl Woods was teaching his toddler Tiger how to play golf.
The Olympics was a cold-war showdown between the U.S. and the USSR.
Few things have changed as much over the past 30 years as televised sports, thanks to ESPN, still in its infancy in ’81, and TBS, which popularized sports on cable TV.
Sports news still came in five-minute chunks at 6 and 11 o’clock in 1981. There was no scroll at the bottom of the screen illuminating the score of every big game in progress.
College football was primarily the domain of Keith Jackson and ABC sports. You saw one national game on Saturday, maybe a couple of others via a syndicate. Same with basketball and baseball. Remember NBC’s Game of the Week on Saturday afternoons with Curt Gowdy, Tony Kubek or Joe Garagiola?
TBS turned the Braves, woeful as they then were, into America’s baseball team because just about every Braves game was televised.
Over the past 30 years, women advanced from bit players to major participants in sports.
There was no national women’s soccer team in 1981. It formed in 1985.
High school athletic programs in 1981 just were beginning to field girls teams in softball, soccer, basketball and swimming. Weightlifting? Wrestling? Forget it!
Today, girls make up close to 50 percent of the student athletes at Florida High School Athletic Association member schools.
ooo
I have a grand total of two shuttle-related sports memories, both epically insignificant.
The first coming at the Sunbird Cup in 1981, when Navratilova was playing an unseeded journeywoman in the early rounds. Can’t remember her name, but she was European.
It was an early afternoon match in late April; it was scorching hot. The match was hopelessly lopsided. Navratilova, then at the peak of her skills, was on cruise control. I couldn’t fathom what sort of relevant question I would ask when it was over.
Then, the European slipped and went down on the court. After sitting on her sacroiliac for a sec, she suddenly cut loose a yell that echoed through the nearly-empty stands: “Ahhhh! Eeezz hoot!”
Yep, it was hootin’ hot. So, at last there was some drama.
Oh, and the first shuttle went up that day. I missed it.
The second shuttle memory came in 1992, when Osceola High hosted the state softball tournament at the now-defunct Thacker Avenue field adjacent to the Osceola YMCA.
At mid-game, early even-ing, a shuttle went up. Perfect launch, virtually cloudless. You could see the thing for four or five minutes if you were interested.
Hardly anyone noticed. It was like watching a jet cruise through the sky.
That’s not surprising. I remember sitting in a high school classroom in 1971. On the TV, astronauts were walking on the moon.
We watched for five minutes, then we went back to flicking paper footballs through finger goal posts on our desks.
ooo
There won’t be a better game this year than the U.S. women’s soccer come-from-behind shootout win against favored Brazil Sunday at the World Cup.
Down a woman, in extra time, the U.S. tied the score at 2 on Amy Wombach’s header after a couple of horrendous officiating decisions that crippled the U.S.
Why is it so hard to find competent officials at this level? Last year a ref took away a goal from the U.S. men for a phantom offside. They also missed an English goal against Germany.
On Sunday, the referee made a questionable call in the box and red-carded a U.S. defender early in the second half. Then, after goalie Hope Solo made a great save on the ensuing penalty kick, a linesman declared that Solo moved too early and awarded another penalty kick to Brazil.
The U.S. win was an impressive display of resilience on an international stage.
It was terrific, but I’d have to say the best part of the women’s World Cup is the total and refreshing absence of vuvuzelas.