The area where I used to live is a little bit north of Baltimore and an easy one-hour drive into Philadelphia. There’s a nearby hiking trail called Ma & Pa, for Maryland and Pennsylvania. In the year of 1983 it would’ve been a dream spot to be for a sports fan, as your year saw an NBA title happen with the 76ers early on and close out with a World Series title from the 1983 Orioles. The Notebook looks back on those two championship runs…
The place to be if you were a sports fan in 1982 was New Orleans. Not because the Saints had a big year, or that LSU was dominant. But two head coaches, already on their way legendary status, won their first national championships in 1982. In the springtime, North Carolina’s Dean Smith brought his seventh Final Four team to New Orleans and finally won a national championship. And later in the year, Penn State’s Joe Paterno took home his first crown in the Sugar Bowl, a title that was the first in Penn State football history.
The Notebook’s year-by-year study of the modern era (1976-Present) has focused on the best place to live as a sports fan in any calendar year. 1981 challenges that that paradigm. While California teams won the World Series (Dodgers) and Super Bowl (49ers), SoCal and NoCal are worlds apart. Indiana won the NCAA Tournament while Clemson’s Orange Bowl win gave them the national championship in football. The New York Islanders and Boston Celtics won titles in their sports. With titles all splintered out, was there any common theme? Yes, there was. The championships by both San Francisco and Clemson marked landmark wins in the football landscape, for two different reasons. Both were the first step in significant shifts in the power structure of the NFL and college football. The Notebook looks back at their autumn and winter rides to glory…
No city has ever won the Grand Slam of Professional Sports—that is to win the Stanley Cup, NBA Finals, and World Series & Super Bowl in the same year. But the city of Philadelphia made a spirited run at it in 1980, putting a team into the championship round in all four sports, and for none was the success longer in coming than for the 1980 Phillies.
The city of Pittsburgh was already riding high in the early part of 1979. In January of that year the Steelers became the first NFL team to win three Super Bowls, defeating the Dallas Cowboys 35-31. The baseball Pirates had contended to the season’s penultimate day the previous fall and were one of the National League’s model franchises in the 1970s. Little did the good people of Pittsburgh know that even better times were still ahead and it would be the Pirates and Steelers leading the way.
1978 wasn’t a year that was about where you wanted to be, as much as where you didn’t want to be. While championships were spread out across the America, one city had it rough—at least if you’re a fan who believes the worst fate is that of hopes raised and dashed. The city of Boston had three teams look like championship material, but in the end, the Bruins, Red Sox & Patriots all came up short.
The place to be in 1977 wasn’t necessarily geographic. While the Yankees winning the World Series and the Cowboys winning the Super Bowl undoubtedly pleased those who bandwagon-hopped the country’s two most popular franchises, the ultimate place to be was a Jesuit priest in the Catholic Church. The Jesuit schools swept the national championships in both college football and college basketball as Notre Dame and Marquette brought home trophies. So while it helped to live in the Midwest, your ultimate place to be was a 400-plus year old religious order that spanned the globe
… it’s not unusual for a sports fan in the southern part of the Hoosier state to cheer for IU hoops and Cincinnati Reds’ baseball. And for fans as these, 1976 must have been nirvana.