Longest. Title. Ever.
Sorry about that. But seriously, you remember the moment don’t you. Hank Aaron is rounding second as Atlanta is going crazy, and two (white) guys run up to him. Well, the first time I saw the video when I was younger I thought something was going to happen to Hammerin’ Hank.
Imagine for a second that you were him…wouldn’t you have freaked out with those guys running up behind you? I would have been terrified. Hank is a bigger man than I.
Well, as Aaron rounds third another man runs up to him in a giant white overcoat, and jumps into the middle of the fracas at homplate. Here’s the video….can you figure out who it is? (Answer after the jump)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RxfLgu7hA9g
From reader KD, “Craig Sager is meeting Aaron a little past halfway down the third base line. He sticks out, quite recognizable, even then. Wearing a huge, white overcoat.”
And you might recognize the guy who is running alongside Aaron after he’d rounded third. That’s Craig Sager, on hand as a $95 per-week news director for a radio station in Sarasota, Fla. He was literally interviewing Aaron before Aaron touched home plate.
Sager, now popping up as a reporter all over TNT’s NBA playoff coverage, has a knack for finding himself in the midst of sports history. He slept with Seattle Slew in his barn the night before the horse won the Belmont — and thus racing’s Triple Crown — in 1977. “I had no place to stay and not enough money for a hotel,” he says. “But I’d become friends with the guy who cleaned his stall.”
And Sager walked away with a souvenir, now shellacked and on display in his basement trophy room: Some Slew poo.
Yeah, that’s what I’d do….I’d take some crusted poop from a horse. There wasn’t an old horseshoe laying around?
Sager Forever Linked (USA Today)
(Picture from LTMA and article tip from OMDQ)
