Forecasts for dicey weather made me decide to skip going to Philadelphia to see the MLK Day game between the Sixers and the Bobcats so I watched it on TV. The Sixers' slack jump-shooting game in the first half drove me batty and I kept switching to an ESPN interview between Dick Schaap and Buck O'Neill, about the Negro Leagues.
O'Neill told a great story about how he heard that Jackie Robinson had been signed to play organized baseball. At the time O'Neill was boatswain stationed in Subic Bay, in the Philippines. Around 10:30 at night, when most of the sailors were asleep in their bunks, he was paged by the captain to report to him ASAP. When he did so, the captain told him that the news had just come across that Branch Rickey had signed Jackie Robinson to a contract to play organized baseball. O'Neill, a Negro Leagues player who went on to have a career in the majors, started whooping, then commandeered the P.A. system and announced the signing to all. Then everyone started whooping and hollering.
The Sixers did better in the third quarter but in the fourth went back to playing a slack game, coughing up a 12-point lead, then just managing to tie the game and send it to overtime. I by then was switching back and forth between the game and an MLBN Studio 42 interview filmed last May between Bob Costas and Jimmy Rollins and Ryan Howard. Somewhere near the end of the interview, Costas referenced an a cappella rendition Rollins and Howard had done of "Take Me Out to the Ball Game". Awesome. Hilarious. Totally original. It should be shown at ballparks everywhere.
The Sixers went ahead in overtime on an Andre Iguodala shot, rookie Evan Turner made four key free-throw shots, and the spark plug all game long was of course Lou Williams. It shouldn't have been so hard but in the end the Sixers won 96-92.
