Bill Lyon: Sports helped Philly celebrate Bicentennial Posted on March 29th
The country was 200 years old, and a peanut farmer from Georgia was elected president.
It was 1976, and among the movies of the time: Rocky (the first one), The Bad News Bears (the original), A Star Is Born (the remake), and The Omen (the first one).
This being the Bicentennial, just about everything sporting was held in Philadelphia in 1976: the National League won the All-Star Game, 7-1, at a stadium called the Vet, with five Reds voted starters by the fans in a successful ballot-box stuffing.
The East beat the West, 123-109, in the NBA All-Star Game, with Washington’s Dave Bing and his silk-on-satin jumper named MVP, while the winning coach was Boston’s gravelly voiced Tom Heinsohn, who in his playing days was known as “Tommy Gun” for his penchant for
squeezing off long bursts.
The National Hockey League All-Star Game was . . . well, there was about as much defense as there was in the NBA’s game. Checks were by invitation only.
The Final Four was held here, in an arena called the Spectrum, and Indiana, coached by a tempestuous tyrant named Bobby Knight, capped an undefeated year with the title. We would host one other Final Four, in 1981, and just our luck, Knight won again.
So what else transpired in 1976?
Well, on the eighth day of the second month, Eagles owner Leonard Tose, having fired three coaches in the preceding five years, hired a 39-year-old Californian named Dick Vermeil, whom he had stumbled upon while watching Vermeil’s UCLA team win the Rose Bowl.
Vermeil was inheriting a franchise that hadn’t had a winning season in the previous nine years and that had mortgaged its future, trading away its top three picks in the next two drafts and its top two the year after that.
On one rain-lashed afternoon, Vermeil had the team bused to Widener College, which had an indoor facility. The Birds were barely 10 minutes into practice when the Widener women’s field hockey team arrived and booted them out. Back out in the driving rain, Philadelphia’s football players, by now surly and sodden, discovered their buses had left. Vermeil began to butt his head against a brick wall. It all seemed omen-like.
One midsummer night in ‘76, while Vermeil was conducting a film study, there arose a great clatter from outside. Vermeil threw open a window and demanded to know the source of the clamor.
“The birthday, Coach,” he was told.
“Whose birthday?”
“Uh, well, the country’s. It’s the Bicentennial. You know, the Fourth of July.”
“Well tell them to hold it down, will ya?”
Eventually, still oblivious to the rest of the world, he coached the E-A-G . . . to the Super Bowl.
In the world of baseball in ‘76, the Big Red Machine was inhaling everyone else. The Reds were under the tender loving care of an engaging, unaffected, uncomplicated, malaprop-spouting, silver-maned (remind you of anyone around here?) manager named George Anderson, alias Sparky, and also alias Captain Hook for his impatient tendency to yank pitchers.
In 1959, in his one and only season playing in the bigs, Sparky Anderson was employed as an infielder by the Phillies. In 477 at-bats, he hit .218 and was advised - not too gently - to pursue the game from a different angle.