(05-07-2021 12:11 AM)IWokeUpLikeThis Wrote: (05-06-2021 08:33 PM)bill dazzle Wrote: (05-06-2021 05:56 PM)esayem Wrote: (05-06-2021 07:06 AM)ken d Wrote: Pro - Brooklyn Dodgers - NY Giants at Polo Grounds 1952
College - Penn State @Army - Michie Stadium 1956
Both of those are incredible.
Yep. Very cool for ken d.
Yes. I would be eager to read a ken d thread outlining his experiences at Polo Grounds, Michie Stadium in the 1950s, and other history he attended.
The biggest reason I got to have those experiences is because I'm older than dirt compared to most posters here. And you all are probably looking at some of them through the prism of what has happened in college athletics since then.
For example, a Penn State-Army game looked very different then. In 1956, Penn State had been to two bowl games in its entire history - the Rose Bowl in 1922 and the Cotton Bowl in 1947. The latter was the only year that PSU had achieved a Top Ten ranking (#4 in AP). Growing up in the New York suburbs, going to a game at Penn State would have been unthinkable, because at the time you pretty much "couldn't get there from here". They weren't the reason my dad took me to that game.
Army, on the other hand, had thrived during WWII, as one would expect. They were still pretty good in 1956 and even better in 1957 and 58. The stain of the Vietnam War eventually made them much less attractive for recruits and they've never fully recovered from that.
But the attraction of that game was its location, and all the non-football pomp that went along with game day at West Point. It was a short drive from where I lived, and there really wasn't any attractive alternative in the area when it came to college football.
MLB on the other hand was great for a New Yorker. Three perennial contenders in a league that played in only 10 cities in the US, all in the eastern half of the country. Competition from pro basketball and hockey wasn't much, as both the Knicks and the Rangers sucked big time. The football Giants were decent, and they shared the Polo Grounds with the baseball team. But the NFL wasn't yet the behemoth it would become.
I grew up thinking that the World Series was always played in New York because it almost always was. And there was almost always a game on television after school for me, because each of the three teams basically had its own TV station - the Dodgers on channel 9, the Yankees on 11, and the Giants on 13. But starting in the third grade, my grandma wouldn't let me watch any of them until I had taken the box scores from the previous day in the newspaper and re-calculated the batting averages of all three teams.
So college sports for me back then was just an occasional outing, and something I followed largely through the media, which I did avidly as a kid. I couldn't wait for Sports Illustrated to arrive every week. That meant that the teams I was familiar with were national, not local, and I really had no rooting interest in any local school. I still don't.