The coveted demo is 18-34. Male, even better. The one all media crave. The cynosure for anybody selling anything. Surely they’ve been hit hard by COVID-19’s body slam of sports. For them, there was no March Madness and no Opening Day. College football and the NFL are in jeopardy, no matter what the suits in headquarters say or do.
But the 18-34s will eventually get their sports back. Years from now, they will embrace their Super Bowl and their Super Fight and who would drop dead from shock if the combatants they root for and gamble on are also named Manning and Mayweather? Chances are they will hardly remember the dagger of this pandemic.
But what about us weaned on Octobers filled with Koufax and Gibson and strikeouts by the truckload, of The Miracle Mets and Swoboda levitating in right field? Of summers filled with Mantle dragging his body into heroics, of Mays in center, where triples went to die? And has there ever been a bigger baseball hero than Yaz in 1967? For us, no.
What about us, we of Wilt vs. Russell and Willis in the tunnel? Of Arnie’s Army and Bob Beamon defying gravity? And Jim Brown and Joe Namath and Gale Sayers sloshing in the mud? And Cassius Clay and Cosell and the greatest sporting event in history, Ali versus Frazier, 15 rounds at The Garden?
We started our love affair with sports during a time when they exploded across our TV sets into our living rooms with dynasties, superstars and personalities, and we took them to school with us and college and, some of us to the rice paddies of Vietnam. Lombardi’s gap-toothed grin, Lew Alcindor’s graceful style and O.J. running from the Rose Bowl to LaGuardia and all the way to the 405.
We would go to Stan’s before and after Whitey dazzled and Reggie stood up. And the Jerome Cafeteria with older men dressed in suits and ties and fedoras to watch a football game. Orange drinks at Nedick’s tasted better after Clyde dropped 30.
Later on, George Martin became our Mike Manuche or Toots Shor and if we were lucky, leprechaun lucky, we’d catch Pete Axthelm at The Palm working the phone booth by the tiny bar. For the 18-34s I am sure Instagram or Snapchat or Tik Tok or whatever other social media platform they use serves as their virtual watering hole.
I preferred the sociability of the first table at Elaine’s, tucked under the TV by the door, after a Yankee or Knick win. Today, they are all gone. Just like all the games and all the sports as we remember them.
Do those of us who are beginning to keep score on more than games — on years and age — get back the years we could lose in this age of lost sports? And if we do, who has more pages in that book than us, the children of Mantle and Maris, of Oscar and West? Us, of Ameche going in from the one and The Impossible Dream and The Ice Bowl?
It is small and selfish and even more than ridiculous to agonize about sports when death surrounds us. It absolutely is. Will some of us even care about games going forward? Will it help us re-define “hero,” applying it to nurses and doctors and the kid who works through the night to stock the shelves of ShopRite, just like 9/11 did? How did that work out? How soon after did we short the cops and firemen and first responders who ran toward the buildings, substituting right fielders and relief pitchers for those whom so justifiably merit the word?
The 18-34s will shake this off, of that I have no doubt. The uniforms will get more stylish, the apps more alluring. Guys my age, the children of Unitas, subscribers to the canon of Jim McKay, John Facenda and Jack Whitaker, I am not so sure. We are one step closer to the final whistle.
Marotta is a filmmaker.
