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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
Paul Pierce was especially fun to watch when he was playing with Rajon Rondo and Ray Allen.
My soon to be wife and I saw what is still the biggest 4th quarter comeback in NBA history.
It was Thanksgiving weekend in 1977 and we went to Atlanta to visit a friend. While we were there we took in a fairly meaningless game between the Hawks and the Bucks. At the end of the 3rd quarter the Hawks were ahead by 28 points. They extended the lead to 29 with 9 minutes to go and then the Hawks started playing like the game was over. The Bucks kept chipping away at the lead. Of course most of the crowd had left. But by the end the Bucks eked out a last second comeback win by 2 points.
I never leave a game before it’s over, and this is one reason why.
First sub 4 min. mile ran indoors.
First successful Atlas launch from the west coast.
Lots of other launches and some very spectacular fails.
Was in LA for the Watts riots, didn’t see them first hand but flew into LA during the R King riots and did see them from the air..
I was in St. Peter’s square when John Paul II was elected.
I watched the last-ever Space Shuttle landing.
Despite being an astronomer and having gone down to watch the launch of a Hubble servicing mission years earlier, I’d never seen a spacecraft either launch or land before; that earlier mission got delayed too long for me to stick around and watch. This time wasn’t planned much in advance. We were on vacation in Daytona Beach when I saw that the last landing would occur during our trip, so we bundled into the car at 4:00 AM and drove down to Cape Canaveral. My daughter was four at the time, so she’s gotten to witness a special, if wistful, moment in our manned space program.
Was that Jim Beatty? I saw him run a couple of times back East.
I was at the old Yankee Stadium with my Dad the day Mickey Mantle came as close as anyone to hitting a fair ball out of the park. It hit the facade on the roof over the right field part of the stadium, thirty yards or so to the left and it would have been gone. As I remember it seemed like it bounced almost all the way back to the infield.
In NHK footage of the motorcade of the Japanese Crown Prince after his historic marriage to someone vaguely non royal in June 1993, look for a pan shot of a crowd where there is one lone foreigner about a head taller than the average. That was me – I heard all about it from some very excited co-workers that next Monday and got the chance to see it in the NHK year in review montage that December.
I just asked my wife about her own historical experience. She was a non-Communist Romanian college student in 1989 when Ceaucescu was overthrown, so you can imagine what THAT was like.
But it turns out that she was on vacation at the time and saw the whole thing on TV. ;)
Just out of curiosity, where does a college student in communist Romania go on vacation?
I was in Tent City at PSAB (Saudi Arabia) during the aborted Desert Fox in late 1998. We had mission planned the operation during the day and then sat on our makeshift front porch (the tents had been there quite some time) waiting for the fireworks to start on CNN. Instead, Saddam faxed Kofi Annan a letter mere minutes before it would have been too late. It was pretty obvious he knew what was about to happen. I left PSAB about a week later. In about a month, Desert Fox (II) started and opened up a whole new game in Northern and Southern Watch areas.
Wondering how many Ricochetti remember the interim Gulf War that happened between 1991 and 2003.
I was food shopping in the Jerusalem shuk when Ariel Sharon came for a visit after having gone up on the Temple Mount. The Temple Mount trip was what Arafat blamed the Second Intifada on.
I also took care of a lot of pediatric patients in the period of time after that, but it wasn’t really a single historical event.
There was also a mentally handicapped 15-year-old Palestinian who had a failed career as a suicide bomber, and a Gazan boy who had been burned over 90% of his body when his uncle had a “work accident”. The kid survived.
Late August 1963 I was performing folk music in the Village in NYC. Caught the 2:30 a.m. bus to DC after my gig and arrived at the March after 5 a.m. along with an army of law enforcement. My memory of the day is primarily spiritual; the crowd felt humble, prayerful to me. I went for the music. I heard Joanie and Bobby would be there. They were there and did not disappoint.
To this day it jars me to hear the word “speech” with regard to MLK’s words that day. Upon every phrase, there was a whisper through the crowd of “Amen,” and “Yes, Jeeezus.” That was a sermon.
I took daily air samples on the fantail of USS California (CGN-36) while in port at Alameda NAS in 1986 to prove the radioactivity settling on the Bay Area wasn’t coming from the nuclear wessels stationed there. No, the miniscule but detectable “fallout” was from Chernobyl.
I was present in Michigan Stadium for U of M’s 24-12 upset victory over #1 ranked (and defending national champion) Ohio State. The victory ended OSU’s 22-game winning streak and sent U of M to the Rose Bowl and a share of the Big Ten title. It was the big win of Bo Shembechler’s first season as U of M head coach and set the stage for the huge rivalry between U of M and OSU and their legendary coaches, Schembechler and Woody Hayes. To make this even sweeter, U of M’s sole conference loss that year was to in-state rival Michigan State – which is where I was a student. I was only at the U of M game because two high school buddies who went to U of M had invited me to the game!
To: Brighton
Fr: Birmingham
Sweeet!
I was planning on going to Woodstock and even had a ticket (did you know they had tickets to that event). I had to go to a University orientation instead. This is not an event but I had patrol meetings on the farm of Henry Wallace (VP under FDR) and would watch him run by (he was 80 or 90). HW was doing what he liked best raising regular and exotic chickens. My other claim to fame is George C. Scott and Colleen Dewhurst were on my paper route. If you want to count near misses Ben Roethlisberger was almost my son in law but that story would take more than 250 words.
Cato Rand—”Just out of curiosity, where does a college student in communist Romania go on vacation?”
I’ll ask her for more details, but she said, “Santa Land.” Apparently a Christmas-themed amusement park outside Iași, where her university was. Communist Romania was a weird place. Officially atheist, with a state church (Romanian Orthodox).
Thinking of her vacations, she had a big family vacation another time to Poland and East Germany in 1988. Saw the Berlin Wall from the wrong side. That whole trip had hilarious stories, which I’ll have to post sometime.
Please do. They’ve got to have a “through the looking glass quality.” I’m sure there’s a part of it that’s just our perception, but I envision communist Europe as such a joyless place that the whole idea of a vacation seems like an oxymoron. I was on a beach on the Adriatic coast in Montenegro about 10 years ago — long after the wall fell — and even then it had weird “not in Kansas anymore” feel to it.
Wow! Impressive – you’ve got me nailed. [If only that trip had taken place in England rather than Michigan!]
I was at that game as well but as a youngster, I was at every Michigan home game.
You might have noticed my family in the midst of the 105,000 fans in the Big House that day because we thought we might need the paramedics to attend to my father. :)
One of 9000 to actually have been in the arena for the “Miracle on Ice.”
A follow-up that you might appreciate. Every Thanksgiving my wife and I used to drive to Baltimore to spend Thanksgiving weekend with friends. During the late ’70s or early ’80s we stopped at a rest stop on the Ohio Turnpike to grab a bite to eat. As we were eating, I glanced at a nearby table and sitting there was Bo Schembechler, his wife, his young son, and a young black man – I assumed maybe the Schembechlers were giving him a ride home to somewhere in Ohio (many of Bo’s football recruits were from Ohio). Much to my wife’s chagrin, as we were leaving I stopped at his table and gave him a compliment about the job he’d done turning U of M into a football powerhouse. Without disclosing my Spartan loyalties, I told him the job his success had made everyone in Michigan proud. He was, as expected, very gracious. So I not only got to be present at one of his great moments, but I actually later got to meet the man himself!
Ronald Reagan’s first inaugural.
Game 2 of the 200o World Series (Roger Clemens throws broken bat at Mike Piazza).
Game 6 of the 2004 ALCS (Curt Schilling’s “bloody sock” game).
Wallace died in his 70s (1888-1965); John Nance Garner, also vp to FDR, died at almost 99 in 1967.