I can’t tell you exactly when the first one was, because it was sometime between the summer of 1946 and the summer of 1950, when I was 4.
But I do know where it was, because my father was working for the Trenton (N.J.) Giants, an affiliate of the New York Giants in the Class B Interstate League. I was told I was a regular at those games, and that would include a game in the summer of 1950 when a young center fielder named Willie Howard Mays Jr. made his minor league baseball debut. At Trenton’s Dunn Field. So New Jersey was my State No. 1 attending a domestic sporting event.
It took a while, but I have now completed the quest for 50. On the night of Feb. 1, I was in attendance at Frost Arena at South Dakota State University to see the Jackrabbits take the floor in the 236th renewal of their rivalry with the North Dakota State Bison. I have now seen sporting events in all 50 states, and let’s not forget the District of Columbia and the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico.
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Understand that I am the only child of Bill and Mary Ryan, a sports-minded couple if ever there was one. My dad was involved in sports in a variety of ways. He was a local organizer and promoter in Trenton. He was an administrator in minor league baseball. We spent the summer of 1951 living in Columbus, Ga., where he was the business manager of the Single A South Atlantic League Columbus Cardinals. He spent the next two years as assistant athletic director at Villanova. Mary Ryan knew what she was in for when she married him. The whole sports thing was OK with her because she loved sports herself.
Sports were what we did. I can honestly say I do not remember a time in my young life when we weren’t at a game, going to a game, or getting ready to go to a game.
Having made my living writing sports since graduating from Boston College in 1968, I have an extensive résumé covering all the requisite exhibition games, regular-season games, and playoff games for MLB, the NFL, the NBA, and the NHL, in addition to numerous men’s NCAA Tournament games and Final Fours. Throw in a few Frozen Fours and a Women’s Final Four.
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File all that under “Business,” not to imply that it’s been anything other than pleasurable. I’ve been privileged to have written either a game story or a column to commemorate clinching a championship for each of our four primary major league teams. Not everyone gets the opportunity to do that.
What doesn’t surprise me in the least is that the two sports I have attended in the most states are men’s college basketball (38) and minor league baseball (33). File these under “Avocations.” Whatever else I was doing, I was always on the lookout to find a new college basketball venue — I’m up to 205 — or minor league ballpark.
College basketball memories
Ah, college basketball. On the night of Jan. 8, 1954 (Elvis’s 19th birthday), I was seated in the first row behind the home bench when Villanova’s Bob Schafer scored 46 points against my exalted colleague Bud Collins’s alma mater, Baldwin-Wallace, to shatter the Pennsylvania Palestra scoring record of 45 set by teammate Larry Hennessy only a year earlier.
Eight years later, I was present in Princeton’s Dillon Gymnasium when Bill Bradley began his storied collegiate career with 27 points against Lafayette’s box-and-one defense. I found myself in a frightening 15-minute whiteout making a foolhardy drive over a mountain to see East Tennessee play Furman in Johnson City, Tenn. I did get rewarded with a triple-OT game. I saw young LSU 7-footers Shaquille O’Neal and Stanley Roberts combine for one non-dunk in an OT home loss to Georgia. I saw a game at Texas-Arlington, whose home floor was actually on a stage. It was like going to the theatre.
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And how about this one? The night before covering a Saturday afternoon NCAA first-round Providence-Michigan State game in Indianapolis, I drove Providence Journal buddies Mike Madden (a future colleague) and Jayson Stark to Terre Haute for an NIT game featuring Indiana State and Illinois State. Yup, our first looks at Larry Bird and Magic Johnson were within 18 hours or so.
When on active duty with the Army reserves at Fort Knox, I took advantage of a pass to take in a game at historic Memorial Coliseum in Lexington, got a UK-Mississippi State matchup, and, yes, I have the ticket stub (don’t get me started on digital tickets).
When my wife and I made our first trip to California, we headed to our hotel, dropped off the bags, and made it to Pauley Pavilion for tipoff of a UCLA-Washington game.
Two memorable college basketball experiences were beyond the D-1 experience. I talked the boss into letting me cover the entire 1984 JUCO tourney in Hutchinson, Kan., and the full first round (16 games over two days) of the 1989 NAIA tourney in Kansas City. Fascinating, each.
Three days in Fort Kent, Maine, studying a nice little D-3 team located where Route 1 begins, and where the morning chatter in the local restaurant consisted of a lot of Franglais, was great fun. I will surely never forget my time in Castle Dale, Utah, learning about 16-year-old 7-4 sensation Shawn Bradley, who told me the only drawback to being that tall was, “It’s getting harder and harder to ride a horse.”
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We must not forget the women. Very high on my list of impactful college basketball events was a game that took place on Jan. 16, 1995, when Geno Auriemma’s UConn Huskies, led by Rebecca Lobo, knocked off Pat Summitt’s Tennessee Volunteers. The transfer of power from Knoxville to Storrs had begun.
Five events I would not mind reliving ...
Minor leagues, major thrills
I was introduced to college football when my dad was at Villanova and came up with a promotion called the “Grocery Bowl,” in which anyone buying $10 worth of groceries at the Acme Market received a ticket to a Villanova football game at the cavernous Municipal Stadium. Hence there were sellouts to see the likes of Georgia, Kentucky, and Ole Miss.
Of special note was the 1957 Army-Notre Dame game at that same Municipal Stadium. It was the resumption of a once-great rivalry that had been suspended after the 1947 game for some silly political reason. My dad had passed away the previous May, but savvy Mary Ryan, widow of one sports nut and mother of another, had gotten tickets to the game. Thus 11-year-old Bobby Ryan was there for a famous game in which Army’s Bob Anderson went 85 yards from scrimmage on the first play of a game that would be decided in ND’s favor by a Monty Stickles field goal. You bet I have the ticket stub.
My mom was always coming up with things like this. For several years she obtained Palestra tickets for the Villanova-St. Joe’s game (I was a big Nova fan). She outdid herself in 1962 when I returned home from working as a camp counselor to learn we were heading to Bridgeton, N.J., to see if hometown Trenton could defeat Portland, Ore., in the Babe Ruth League championship game. Yup, they could.
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Trenton lost its minor league team when the Interstate League disbanded after the 1950 season, and it really wasn’t until the Pawtucket Red Sox came a
long that I was able to rekindle my interest in minor league baseball, which has now taken me to more than 50 minor league parks.
The big renewal came in 1971 when a two-installment Sunday Globe account of a road trip with the then-Double A PawSox led to a book offer from Little, Brown. And so in 1972, in between my Globe duties, I embarked on a fabulous summer odyssey throughout minor league baseball that took me from Trois Rivieres, Quebec, to Honolulu, with stops such as Kinston, N.C. (home of Cedric Maxwell), Appleton, Wis., Visalia, Calif., Ogden, Utah, and Albuquerque.
The Albuquerque Dukes skipper was Tom Lasorda, not yet a Dodger legend. His team included the likes of Joe Ferguson, Ron Cey, Tom Paciorek, Davey Lopes, Von Joshua, and Larry Hisle. The pitching staff featured Charlie Hough, Geoff Zahn, and Doug Rau. The Dukes may have been the best minor league team of the past 50 years. The book was called “Wait Till I Make The Show,” and it was my equivalent of a baseball doctoral thesis.
Check this out. Veteran southpaw George Brunet is pitching for the Hawaii Islanders. He goes eight strong innings vs. the Eugene Emeralds, but his bullpen blows the game in the ninth. The next night, a female fan calls him over. She places a lei consisting of Marlboro packs around his neck. And you wonder why I love minor league baseball?
The last piece
You know you’ve married the right person when she thinks it’s a perfectly acceptable vacation trip to see both major and minor league games. I mean, not every wife wants to spend a night in Batavia, N.Y. (don’t miss the Miss Batavia Diner) or Peoria, Ill. Elaine Ryan was OK with it.
Of course, I’ve had countless memorable experiences at major league events. It’s difficult to pick the Best This and Best That when it comes to specific games. I will say this. I’m eternally grateful when I did it and where I did it. I often say that if I could turn the clock back professionally from Jan. 1, 1980, through Dec. 31, 1989, I’d do it all over again. I might even backdate it to Jan. 1, 1970. And how could I have a better vehicle than the Boston Globe? If I wanted to do something, they would let me do it, as long as it was remotely within reason.
An Ole Miss football game gave me a 49th state, and I started thinking about making a clean sweep. Which brings me to No. 50.
South Dakota!
You have five basic choices. South Dakota football or basketball, South Dakota State football or basketball, or the American Association Sioux City Canaries. South Dakota State football would have been a good choice. After all, the Jackrabbits are the two-time defending FCS national champs. But I’m a basketball guy at heart, and I just had to see the perennial Summit League power Jackrabbits take the floor, preferably against a primary rival. This brought me to Brookings, S.D., the night of Feb. 1, when the Jackrabbits would be taking on a big rival, the Bison of North Dakota State.
South Dakota State is the largest school in the state, and it has a very impressive campus, with magnificent facilities. Brookings (2021 pop. 23,577) is very much a college town, with “Jackrabbits This” and “Jackrabbits That” signs everywhere.
“We’ve put up $190 million worth of facilities in the last 10 years,” reports director of athletics Justin Sell, “and it’s all private funding.”
It’s not all about athletics, either. There are two nice museums on campus, plus a botanical garden known as McCrory Gardens.
Coach Eric Henderson is in his fifth year at the school. His teams have won or tied for the Summit League title in three of his first four years and were 30-5 back in 2021-22. The Jackrabbits have stumbled by their standards this year, entering this game against North Dakota State at 12-10. The best player is junior Zeke Mayo, a 6-4 guard who entered averaging 18.3 points per game.
Frost Arena was sold out (3,418) and the joint was definitely jumpin’. And what a game! The Jackrabbits had first-half runs of 11-0 and 10-0. The Bison ran off a scintillating 24-4 run of their own, and took a 33-30 halftime lead. The second half began spurty once more, but things settled down around the 12-minute mark and from then on it was basket-swapping time.
North Dakota State took a 65-62 lead with 10.9 seconds left on two free throws by Damari Wheeler-Thomas, but Mayo tied it with a transition 3-pointer from what I would call Curryland to send it into OT. Back and forth they went until Mayo put the Jackrabbits ahead at 73-72 on two foul shots with 1:03 left.
With barely four seconds left, North Dakota State’s Boden Skunberg missed a 17-footer, but before the Jackrabbit fans could celebrate, 6-10 freshman Noah Fedderssen soared over a cluster of bodies to tip it in with 1.3 seconds left to give the visitors a 74-73 victory.
“Tough to swallow,” Coach Henderson sighed. “We knew coming in it would be a heck of a battle and be like a tournament game, and that’s what it was. Losing on a tip-in? Things like that are going to happen. But I’m a glass-half-full guy. The sun will come upon tomorrow.”
No. 50 brought me to a terrific place, a great game, and a high-class coach. I couldn’t have asked for more.
Bob Ryan can be reached at robert.ryan@globe.com.