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Have You Ever Witnessed In-person a Historical Event?
Here’s mine. It’s June 1998 and my beloved Utah Jazz are one game from elimination in the NBA finals. We have a one-point lead and the ball with 30 seconds to go. The ball is passed to Karl Malone; but with less than 20 seconds to go, Michael Jordan sneaks in and strips the ball from Malone.
I lean over to my wife and say, “We are toast.” Jordan takes the ball down, jukes Bryon Russell left and nails “the shot” from the left arc. My seat position was down the court, directly behind Jordan. The shot was dead on line and nothing but net.
The Bulls win the title. And Jordan retired. I was going to be able to tell my grandchildren that I saw the great Jordan’s last NBA shot, a shot that won the Bulls another title. Then he came out of retirement for an entirely forgettable period with the Wizards.
Even so, I saw that shot in person. [Start the video below at about 2:45 and go to 4:25. Near the end you’ll see the shot exactly as I saw it.]
It still makes me sick to my stomach. Stockton and Malone are two of the greatest players never to win a title. And there’s only one reason they failed: it’s name is Michael Jordan.
Have you witnessed a great event? Tell us about it.
Published in General
Tell me about it – sitting in the stands with seven or eight hundred of my closest friends. Good way to get foul balls though.
And, thread cross-over with the marriage thread, I met the couple that ultimately introduced me to my wife at a game in mid-spring when the wind shifted off the lake and dropped the temperature during a game they’d under-dressed for. I had an extra blanket in my bag, and we got to talking.
How about the pushing of the button to file the petition that put General Motors in chapter 11?
This is way bigger than Jordan’s shot. Hank Aaron is and will remain the all-time HR champ. If A-Rod makes it, and he likely will, an asterisk will immediately appear by his home run total.
Question: Are the guy who jumped out the stands and shook Hank’s hand at third base?
No, I was in the left field mezzanine , with a pretty good view of the arc of the ball. Thanks for supporting Hank as the true HR king. With Bonds now off on a technicality, there will be more pressure to ignore the obvious evidence and lobby for his HOF candidacy and claim to the record.
I was in Berlin on the day that Germany reunified. My wife and I walked down Unter den Linden Boulevard. They had set up loudspeakers, and Wagner was blaring up and down the street, and there were tens of thousands of other people just walking up and down that street – the main drag of East Berlin.
It was an historical moment, but also really creepy – partly because of the Wagner and its Nazi associations, but also because what had been (up until that day) East Germany was just such a creepy place. Just ominous yet drab stone buildings, one after another. Not a single sign on any building, announcing the business within. Virtually no restaurants. No storefronts. And, amidst the obvious poverty, people with wheelbarrows hauling stereos and other electronic equipment back from West Berlin.
I’m glad I saw it. I’m glad I left.
On September 11, 2012, I happened to be walking past the Oval Office door when I heard Barack Obama say to Hillary Clinton, “Look, I’ve got to watch “Breaking Bad” and then go to bed. Just tell everyone that the damn attack was provoked by a video. We’ll figure out which one later.”
fascinating. were you stationed there?
I was at the PGA Championship at Crooked Stick before John Daly arrived, one of my bosses got me in. I had a decent chance to his caddy. Then you may never have know his name.
I attended Martin Luther King’s ‘Poor People’s March on Washington’ in June 1968. I took a photograph of the takeoff of the doomed space shuttle Columbia in 2003. Of less significance, I saw a demonstration of a videophone at the 1964 World’s Fair in New York.
And as Franco said above- “All my friends went to Woodstock and I didn’t.” (Even though I was invited)
Nope, just a tourist. We didn’t plan our trip around the event either. We just happened to be there that week.
I was present when the first ballistically-deployed parachute was tested from an actual aircraft in flight. I was on the ground, watching, with the inventor, Boris Popov. The parachute deployed but then there was a serious malfunction when the wing fabric of the test aircraft failed, rendering it unflyable. So the test pilot had to ride the thing all the way down to the ground. (The original plan was for him to cut away and fly off.) The aircraft, under the canopy, came down into powerlines, setting off a spectacular light show. The pilot, Rob Kells, coolly cut himself free of the wreckage and dropped to the ground unharmed. We all went out for quite a lot of beer afterwards.
Well, there were the LA Riots. I got much closer to them than I had intended.
Then there was the time Fernando Tatis of the Cardinals hit two grand slams in one inning, both against Chan Ho Park of the Dodgers.
But the one that trumps them all: The live recording of the 200th Ricochet Podcast.
Just got back from the VE Day 70th anniversary WWII aircraft flyover on the National Mall. Truly amazing, and probably never to be seen again. Once the WWII generation passes on, the war will fade from consciousness. My 5 year old loved it too, having been brainwashed by me about planes.
Have you ever been to one of the Warbirds airshows at the EAA fly-in in Oshkosh? How did it compare?
Miffed, no I haven’t, although I’ve heard about it. Worth a trip?
The question wasn’t directed at me, but, yes, worth the trip. Absolutely. Oshkosh is one of the greatest events on Earth. (Full disclosure: I write and illustrate for the EAA magazine. But still, it’s true what I say.)
Oh yeah.
I’m guessing that today they weren’t setting off pyrotechnics on the ground as the bombers flew over.
I happened to be in Juneau Alaska when Sarah Palin resigned the Governorship on July 3, 2009, so I witnessed her absence from the July 4th Parade the next day.
First baseball game at Yankee Stadium after 9/11 when President Bush threw out the first pitch.
I’ve never seen that many official looking helicopters in my life. They just kept landing and landing and landing one after another. We kept watching saying, “I bet he is in this one. I bet it’s this one.”
We never saw him get out of any of them.
Pretty clever, that Secret Service.
I was there in Bosnia when Hillary Clinton came under sniper fire at an airfield.
Really. In fact, every time that Hillary Clinton was under sniper fire at an airfield in Bosnia, I was there too.
Arizona, were you the sniper?
I attended George W. Bush’s 2nd inaugural. Man, it was cold. He gave a really good speech, mostly about spreading democracy around the world, if memory serves.
Not sure it qualifies as actually historic, but I met Denise McAllister pre-Ricochet.
(Of course, it was mostly her husband and my brother, both photographers, talking shop. When I saw her at the Charlotte meet-up, she didn’t remember it. So it was more of a hem-of-the-garment sort of thing.)
I was at the Varsity Grill drinking beer when I should have been in class at the University of MD. About a hundred county, state, and fed police cars and an ambulance went racing by on Route 1 toward D.C. George Wallace had been shot.
The only “historic” event I ever witnessed was being present for the game where Pete Rose hit the umpire and was suspended for a month.
I was there in the crowd when Pope John Paul II met Yasser Arafat. Maybe shaking Arafat’s hand wasn’t the best decision he ever made, but anyhow, I was there.
I saw the first space shuttle launch.
I was present for the greatest comeback in NBA playoff history…http://scores.espn.go.com/nba/recap/_/id/220525002/gameId/220525002/new-jersey-nets-vs-boston-celtics
It was so loud in that building that my ears rang like I’d been to a rock concert.
More memorable than historic: Looking at the dates, it was probably the Shuttle that delivered the Hubble to orbit. On its return trip across the country, there was a refueling stop at Davis-Monthan AFB. As it approached, perched atop it massive host, it did a very low-and-slow 270º right turn over downtown Tucson. Cooo-uuul…
Dumb famous-person moment: When he was still a student, I walked off a bus, turned right, and almost face-planted into Michael Jordan. First time seeing him up close so surprisingly, I would have estimated he was about 7’6″, 280, with 0% body-fat. No contact, no foul, just *HoMy!*
Was at the Tucson Gem and Mineral Show where people were selling entire 3′ sections of the Berlin Wall, along with buckets and buckets of Wall rubble.
Saw the Kennedy motorcade pass by in DC, Oct. 1963.
I landed my A-10 at Aviano just after the EA-6B that clipped the cable and caused the death of 20 Italians. I could see the damage and assumed it had hit a wire, but never imagined a cable car accident. We found the locals in a much different mood that night on our dinner push, but didn’t realize the realize the reason until the next day.