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Great story in today's Times about the Mets Clipboard Giveaway of 1977.
A Drab and Cherished Relic of Shea
By MICHAEL MALONE
My Mets clipboard is quite possibly the least cool piece of sports memorabilia in history, and perhaps the ugliest.
Picked up in a Shea Stadium promotional giveaway during the otherwise lamentable 1977 season, the clipboard remains with me to this day, pressed into service, like the Mets left-hander Pedro Feliciano in 2010, just about every day.
This rust-brown portfolio with a gold Mets logo, gold clip and nary a dash of blue or orange has, over the decades, smoothed out mushed junior high homework, held my résumé during job interviews and housed book chapters that awaited editing. Several days a week, it holds the important material I plan to read on the train ride home while my work papers float around in my backpack.
I often wonder how this modest folder has survived my many moves while seemingly more worthy possessions like furniture and books were tossed like so many big-salary Marlins. My clipboard is not a cute bobblehead. I can’t wear it, it’s not autographed, and it’s clearly not game-used. So what keeps me clipped to it?
I had a chance to trace the origin of our relationship recently when I caught an episode of “Mets Yearbook,” the cheesy filler show that SNY broadcasts during rain delays. This one focused on 1977. Ralph Kiner and Lindsey Nelson shared the narration. The real estate beyond Shea’s left-field fence — as long as I could remember, it was the picnic area bleachers — looked like farmland. Ed Kranepool, wearing a “Starsky & Hutch” leather coat, strolled the field at his alma mater, James Monroe High in the Bronx, taking note of its poor condition as boys wearing shorts over sweat pants played catch.
“If you can catch balls on these fields,” Kranepool said in his Noo Yawk accent, “you can catch them at Shea Stadium.”
In 1977, the Mets went 64-98, finishing 37 games off the pace, and traded Tom Seaver. How I loved that team: Lee Mazzilli’s cheeky basket catches, Lenny Randle’s blockbuster speed, Pat Zachry’s stunning beard, so thick you could lose a comebacker in there. Barely a million fans came out to Shea, the Mets’ lowest attendance since their awful inaugural season. So bereft of highlights were the program’s producers that Kiner resorted to a rundown of the promotional days.
Back to School Day, Kiner said, featured a “handsome and useful gift.” The camera zoomed in on a boy about 8, scribbling in his Mets clipboard. I wondered for a moment if the boy, shot from over his shoulder, was actually me. He had straight brown hair, was painfully skinny and wore tube socks up to his calves. Then I noticed a gold chain around his neck — not my style.
But I was at Shea that September day. Was it the time Steve Garvey hit a foul ball directly to my mother, who contemplated what to do with her beer, only to drop it, and the ball, at the last second? Regardless, we left Shea with a lasting souvenir.
On “Mets Yearbook,” Kiner segued from the clipboard to a featured player: “Speaking of handsome and useful, the Mets can attach that label to catcher John Stearns.”
But I was still thinking about the clipboard. Other Mets souvenirs gradually disappeared from view, like yearbooks in the basement and cracked batting helmets in a far corner of the garage. My first Mets hat, the brim bent and button missing, exited in more dramatic fashion. The button rivet caught on the bearlike coat of a woman who brushed past me in a shop. I was speechless as my beloved cap marched away.
Nothing survived but my handsome and useful Mets clipboard. A sign of its times, it bears no sponsor’s logo, unlike the Pepsi T-shirt I snagged from the Pepsi T-shirt launcher near Citi Field’s Pepsi Porch two years ago.
My clipboard is 36, older than every player on the Mets roster but relievers LaTroy Hawkins, Scott Atchison, Tim Byrdak and Feliciano. Yet not much has changed.
The Mets posted their lowest attendance in a decade last year, and they are firmly below .500 this year. Kiner is still around; I recently saw him in the SNY booth, regaling Gary Cohen and Ron Darling with tales of hitting against Warren Spahn.
I’m still rooting for my Mets, and carrying the clipboard in my backpack each day. Its plastic cover is torn at the binding, revealing cardboard. But the clip’s metal teeth remain sharp, and I hope it lasts another 36 years.
You can find a Mets cheese board on eBay (“Unused, unopened, undamaged,” $34.95). But not a Mets clipboard, which elicits memories of birthday ballgames with my father, sitting in an endearingly charmless colossus and rooting for mediocre players like Bruce Boisclair and Joel Youngblood.
Memories are a bit like Mets clipboards or Mets caps missing the button on top. Hold tight to them, or you might lose them forever.
Michael Malone is the author of the novel “No Never No More,” published in April. |
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