[RADIOLAB INTRO]

[phone ringing]

JAD ABUMRAD: Okay.

ROBERT KRULWICH: Three, two, one.

[beep]

ERIC SIMONS: Hello?

ROBERT: This show we're about to do, it began ...

ERIC SIMONS: Hey guys, how's it going?

ROBERT:  ... with a conversation that we had with a friend of ours, Eric Simons, and he told us about this moment that was kind of strange.

ERIC SIMONS: This is—this is the San Jose Sharks actually, who ...

JAD: Is this a—this is a hockey team? Or ...

ERIC SIMONS: Yeah, hockey team.

JAD: Okay.

ERIC SIMONS: And, like, I—I'm pretty strongly identified with hockey to begin with. Like, I play hockey, my dad has played hockey his entire life, and the Sharks started in the Bay Area, like, when I was 10 years old. Sharks are my favorite, favorite creature by a long way, and so I've rooted for them forever. And for, like, the last, like, six years they've been really good. Every year they're picked at the beginning of the year to go to the Stanley Cup, maybe to win the Stanley Cup, and every year they fall short. And so in 2007, they were in the playoffs. The Sharks are the top seed. They're playing the eight seed which also is Anaheim, which is probably their biggest rival and they lose.

JAD: [raspberries] Oh!

ERIC SIMONS: And I remember driving home from the ice rink, it's probably about midnight. And it was a really pretty night out. Like, the city lights and they're, like, shimmering on the water. And there's always these tankers out, like, parked in the bay. There's like the silhouettes of the boats, and the Oakland coastline and the San Francisco shoreline. And, like, this is everything that makes me happy in the world.

ROBERT: Eric says that usually when he sees that view, no matter how he's feeling he's like, okay everything's gonna be good, it's gonna be fine 'cause that is one beautiful city. But that night ...

ERIC SIMONS: I was so angry that I—I remember noticing this, like—this, like, beautiful scene and thinking burn! I hate this. I hate everything about it. Burn down in flames. Like, that—that's embarrassing, the fact that these guys I don't know lost a hockey game in Dallas, that has the power to override everything I think I like about myself, and just turn me into this, like, drooling, savage, angry beast, and I don't like that.

JAD: You know what I love about that story?

ROBERT: By the way, you know, Eric is so taken with the subject that he's writing a book about it at the moment.

JAD: Yeah.

ROBERT: But anyway, go ahead.

JAD: But what I love about that story is it's so typical, you know? Almost every sports fan has had a moment where you're like, "I cannot believe my own emotions right now." Are you a burner? I mean, do you watch sports?

ROBERT: I'm not, no. I mean, I watch sports but I don't get into that—I don't get into a darkness.

JAD: Oh. I do. There have definitely been times I've wanted to burn down New York.

ROBERT: [laughs] And have you ever asked yourself, like, why?

JAD: Well, that's the question, right?

ROBERT: Yeah. 

JAD: For this hour, anyway. Like, why is it that something as trivial as a hockey game can feel like life or death? Which probably doesn't happen to a lot of public radio people but, hey. 

ROBERT: Well, it could. It could. You shouldn't think that. 

JAD: Yeah, all right. All right. Not to generalize.

ROBERT: If you widen—if you widen the category a little bit and just said "Games?" Well, then you'd include everybody.

JAD: All right, games.

ROBERT: Everybody.

JAD: So then, what is it about a game that makes it ...

ROBERT:  ...more than a game?

JAD: Yeah.

ROBERT: Well, let's find out.

JAD: This is Radiolab.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: Stay with us.

STEPHEN DUBNER: Sports to me as a kid were vital. Sports were the—like, if everything else on the planet had disappeared except for sports I would have been fine. If—if—if the church had gone away, if school had gone away, even if all my brothers and sisters had gone away, I like them fine, but sports was the only thing that I really loved as a kid.

JAD: Can you introduce yourself?

STEPHEN DUBNER: My name is Stephen Dubner. 

JAD: And Stephen is the author of Freakonomics.

ROBERT: Freakonomics.

JAD: The books, the blog.   

STEPHEN DUBNER: And I've got my own ISDN line. 

JAD & ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: Kind of an inside joke. It's a fancy piece of studio equipment because now Freakonomics is also a radio show. 

ROBERT: Are we talking to you, like, in your living room?

JAD: And the reason we called Stephen up—and this is the honest truth—is that Soren Wheeler, one of our producers, overheard Stephen telling this story in the men's room.

SOREN WHEELER: That's where I do most of my research for the show, actually. 

JAD: That's Soren.

SOREN: This is where I look for friends.

JAD: In any case, Soren overheard Stephen in the stall, got him to come into the studio and tell it to us. 

ROBERT: Because this is the story about a boy, a hero, and a dad. 

JAD: And how those three things can get a little intertwined.

STEPHEN DUBNER: I don't really know what happened. What I know is that when I came into being in 1963 I was the last of eight kids.

JAD: And Stephen says already at that point sports was family law. In fact, when it came to baseball ...

STEPHEN DUBNER: No two people in the family, including my mother and father, there were 10 of us, no two people rooted for the same team. And—and as it turned out ...

JAD: There was even a rule.

STEPHEN DUBNER: ... no two people were allowed to root for the same team. Now ...

JAD: He says his dad actually assigned each of the family members their own baseball team and told them, "This is your team. Only you get to root for this team."

STEPHEN DUBNER: So, my dad was a Mets fan, my mom I don't remember. But I had a sister who was a Red Sox fan, there was a Cardinals fan, a San Francisco Giants fan. There was an LA Dodgers fan, that was my brother Peter. And I have no recollection of a time before I was a Baltimore Orioles fan. So I think what happened is Stevie was born, here's another kid. We need another team. Who does he get? How about the Orioles? And ...

ROBERT: Was this like a tooth fairy sticking a dollar under your pillow?

JAD: Yeah, how did he assign the Orioles to you?

STEPHEN DUBNER: Okay, so first of all I should just say, like a lot of things in life as a very young, very obedient Catholic boy, I accepted this mystery without question.

JAD: [laughs]

STEPHEN DUBNER: But here's my hunch. My father, I think, felt that it was a shame that he couldn't give more to his children, materially more and even more of himself, and so in my mind the greatest gift he could give to each of us was our own baseball team.

JAD: But this is ultimately a story about more than just baseball.

STEPHEN DUBNER: My parents were both Brooklyn-born Jews, kind of typical second-generation American who, before they met each other, while they were in their 20s, they both converted to Roman Catholicism.

ROBERT: Huh.

JAD: What was the reaction from their parents?

STEPHEN DUBNER: Oh that was bad. That was bad. The way that my grandfather discovered that my father had converted was when some rosary beads slipped out of his pocket and fell onto the floor. So it was like my grandfather basically threw my father out of the house, literally declared him dead.

JAD: Wow.

STEPHEN DUBNER: Sat Shiva for him.

JAD: And so he says when his dad met his mom ...

STEPHEN DUBNER:  ... who was another Jewish convert to Catholicism ...

JAD: ... they were like two refugees who'd found each other.

STEPHEN DUBNER: Exactly.

JAD: Together they left Brooklyn, went upstate. Spent all their money on an old farmhouse in the country.

STEPHEN DUBNER: Leaving behind a past that was toxic.

JAD: But then when they got upstate, they found themselves a little out of place.

STEPHEN DUBNER: We were kind of these farmers, Jewish—Brooklyn Jewish city people who were now upstate Catholic farmer survivor types.

ROBERT: [laughs]

STEPHEN DUBNER: We had no money, a lot of kids. And my dad ...

ROBERT: He said his dad would often be upstairs.

STEPHEN DUBNER: "Lying down."

ROBERT: For hours and hours, which didn't make a whole lot of sense to him at the time. He thought, "Come on, why isn't he down here with us?" But now as an adult he understands that his dad was not well. In fact, he was depressed.

STEPHEN DUBNER: Yeah.

ROBERT: Really depressed.

JAD: And how much did you know about your parent's backstory when you were growing up and on the farm?

STEPHEN DUBNER: Can my knowledge be measured in negative terms? But it was plain to me that my father was a kind of diminished man. That he wasn't capable of doing all the things that other men were capable of doing.

ROBERT: So Stephen says he would go outside to the backyard and spend time by himself ...

JAD:  ... pretending to be the Orioles.

STEPHEN DUBNER: Recreating the games that had been played the day before in real life.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, sportscaster: And here comes Frank Robinson. He's still spearheading the Orioles ...]

STEPHEN DUBNER: You know, one game could last me six, eight hours. And I would literally—I would literally play 162-game seasons.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, sportscaster: And again makes it too good.]

STEPHEN DUBNER: I would be every batter on both teams and the announcers. 

[ARCHIVE CLIP, sportscaster: Brooks Robinson completes his home run trot.]

STEPHEN DUBNER: And, you know, this thing about ownership and whether my dad did that on purpose or not, he did make me feel like if they failed then they needed me to—to boost them up.

ROBERT: And that kept him busy for a while.

STEPHEN DUBNER: But then the play happens.

JAD: And everything changes. To explain, somewhere along the way when he was 10, Stephen discovers football.

STEPHEN DUBNER: Football was considered barbaric. Worst of all, it was played on the Sabbath. 

[ARCHIVE CLIP, football player: Yeah, baby!]

JAD: But regardless, he fell in love with it.

STEPHEN DUBNER: I loved the brute force of it.

JAD: The fact that all these guys wore helmets that made them look kind of like ...

STEPHEN DUBNER: Kind of like knights.

JAD: And almost immediately he latched onto a particular running back from the Pittsburgh Steelers.

STEPHEN DUBNER: And that—and that was Franco Harris.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, crowd: C'mon Franco! Let's go! C'mon Franco!]

STEPHEN DUBNER: I discovered Franco Harris in his rookie season. 

JAD: Read about him in Sports Illustrated, and from the beginning, everything about him just made sense.

STEPHEN DUBNER: I came from a big Catholic family, he came from a big Catholic family.

JAD: His family was kind of mixed, so was Franco's.

STEPHEN DUBNER: His dad was Black, his mom was Italian. He was a very unusual guy, very kind of thoughtful and quiet. And I became a big Steelers fan because of him.

JAD: Which brings us back to the play. 

[ARCHIVE CLIP, sportscaster: And this crowd is standing!]

JAD: Saturday, December 23 ...

ROBERT: Almost Christmas.

JAD: ... 1972.

STEPHEN DUBNER: The Steelers were about to lose to the Raiders.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, sportscaster: The Oakland Raiders have taken a 7-6 lead.]

STEPHEN DUBNER: 40 seconds left on the clock. We had the ball on something like our own 35.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, sportscaster: Fourth down and ten yards to go.]

STEPHEN DUBNER: Last gasp.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, sportscaster: Hang on to your hats, here come the Steelers out of the huddle. Terry Bradshaw at the controls.]

STEPHEN DUBNER: Bradshaw drops back to pass.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, sportscaster: Bradshaw running out of the pocket, looking for somebody to throw to, fires it downfield ...]

JAD: Bradshaw throws, and just as the receiver is about to catch it, he gets crushed. The ball pops up ...

STEPHEN DUBNER:  ... goes falling through the air ...

JAD:  ... and right before the ball hits the ground, Franco Harris, his guy, zooms into the frame out of nowhere ...

STEPHEN DUBNER: ... and catches it in full stride at his shoe tops.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, sportscaster: That's caught out of the air, the ball is pulled in by Franco Harris! Harris is going for a touchdown for Pittsburgh!]

JAD: Franco runs 60 yards into the end zone. Time runs out. The Steelers win.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, sportscaster:  ... the football. I don't even know where it came from. There are people in the end zone!]

STEPHEN DUBNER: Shortly thereafter, this play was dubbed "The Immaculate Reception."

[ARCHIVE CLIP, sportscaster: When you talk about Christmas miracles, here's the miracle of all miracles.]

STEPHEN DUBNER: For me, as a kid watching it, where my team won and my guy—it was like, I was sealed for life.

ROBERT: In fact, this guy was so much his guy that when Steve would write his homework papers, he began signing the papers ...

STEPHEN DUBNER: Franco Dubner.

JAD: Wow.

STEPHEN DUBNER: And I thought of myself as Franco Dubner. Which I mean I know it sounds funny now, but it was very natural. Like, we were all named for saints to start with. I mean, my oldest brother is named Joseph, my oldest sister was named Mary. So, we're—you're named for saints, plainly. Franco was my saint. 

ROBERT: The following Thanksgiving Stephen's parents drove off to a prayer meeting.

STEPHEN DUBNER: Was part of this religious offshoot that they participated in called the Charismatic Christian Renewal.

JAD: Very fervent group, lots of speaking in tongues.

STEPHEN DUBNER: It was strange, and a little scary to me to see my parents speaking in tongues.

JAD: Stephen would sometimes go, but this time he didn't.

ROBERT: So his parents drove off to the meeting.

JAD: In Albany.

STEPHEN DUBNER: Kind of far from our house.

ROBERT: And a few hours later only his mother returned.

STEPHEN DUBNER: My mother comes home and tells us, "Dad had an attack."

JAD: She told him in the middle of the meeting he just fell over. 

ROBERT: He was in the hospital now, but ...

STEPHEN DUBNER: He would be out of the hospital in time for Christmas. So, that's all I heard. I was a 10-year-old kid, it's like, "Oh, my dad's coming home for Christmas."
JAD: Cool.

STEPHEN DUBNER: Great. And the football playoffs are coming up. 

JAD: Month later ...

STEPHEN DUBNER: It was the 21st of December.

JAD: Almost exactly a year after the immaculate reception.

STEPHEN DUBNER: It was the last day of school before Christmas break, it was a half-day. We had grab bag Christmas gift exchange at school ...

ROBERT: Stephen races home from school pretty excited.

STEPHEN DUBNER: Playoffs are coming up and my dad's coming home. And then my mother comes in and says, "Dad died. I'm gonna go upstairs to lie down."

JAD: And that, that is when the dream began. Now he's not exactly sure if it was that night or maybe the next, but when he went to bed and closed his eyes, this is what would happen.

STEPHEN DUBNER: I would go to the VFW hall in Albany ...

JAD: This is a place his dad had taken him.

STEPHEN DUBNER: ... where Franco Harris was giving a talk, and I would invite him to come back to my house way out in the boondocks for spaghetti and meatballs, and in my dream he would come back, he would eat the spaghetti, it wasn't terrible. Then I would say, "Hey, you want to go out in—in the yard and play some football?" And we would go out. And it's dark, and it's just me and him. We're the Steelers against some mythical team in the darkness, and we're playing on our field in our backyard. And I'm kind of embarrassed because our backyard is all lumpy with frozen cow hoofprints, because sometimes we'd stake the cow back there. And on the second to the last play of the game it's like we're behind by three points, Franco would turn his ankle in one of these cow hoofprints, and then he'd hand the ball to me and he'd say, "Kid, you have to take it from here yourself."
ROBERT: What was the look on his face when he'd hand you the ball and give you The Kid speech?

STEPHEN DUBNER: Oh. You know Jesus on the cross face? Jesus on the cross. 

'Cause he's in pain, he's got a beard, he's kind of sweating and dripping and crying a little bit. And then I'd have to run it in for the winning touchdown. And the dream—but the dream would always fade there, I never knew if I made it or not.

JAD: And he says the next night he had the same dream.

STEPHEN DUBNER: Exactly the same.

JAD: And the next night.

STEPHEN DUBNER: The same.

JAD: And the next night.

STEPHEN DUBNER: The same.

JAD: And the next night.

STEPHEN DUBNER: The same.

STEPHEN DUBNER: Almost every night for about three or four years.

ROBERT: Wow.

JAD: And the next night.

STEPHEN DUBNER: The same.

STEPHEN DUBNER: So I, you know, had that dream several hundred or maybe a thousand times, yep.

JAD: And every time you woke up from that dream, just curious, how did you feel?

STEPHEN DUBNER: What I remember feeling is that Franco Harris came to see me, and that he couldn't win the game for me, but that he was on my side and he wanted me to win kind of, period.

ROBERT: So if we were to stop this story right now, this would be a story like many others you've heard: boy falls in love with athlete, dreams of athlete, grows up, leaves athlete behind. But this is a different one.

JAD: Eventually after a few years, Stephen stopped having the dream, he moved out of the house, went off to school, got married, became an adult, pretty much forgot about Franco. But then something happened purely by accident.

STEPHEN DUBNER: Living in New York, maybe—I don’t know—15, 18 years ago, I caught sight of him on the cover of Black Enterprise magazine. Franco had become a—a very successful small businessman, and my heart just started to thump like it had when I was a kid and I thought I gotta—I gotta get to know Franco. 

JAD: So he tracked down Franco's address. 

STEPHEN DUBNER: Wrote him letters.

JAD: Then more letters.

STEPHEN DUBNER: And to make a long story short ...

JAD: One day the phone rang and it was him.

STEPHEN DUBNER: ... he did agree to meet with me.

ROBERT: Wow.

STEPHEN DUBNER: I told him I'd like to write a book about a boy getting to know his childhood hero and trying to figure out what that person is like in reality, and I was also interested in ...

STEPHEN DUBNER: I—I was very careful in my mind that first day that I met him in Pittsburgh, saying "Don't tell him the dream, don't tell him the dream, because he will think that you're a freaking lunatic, right?" That first day I told him the dream, of course.

JAD: [laughs]

STEPHEN DUBNER: I couldn't. It's like—I don't know.

JAD: What was his reaction? Was he horrified?

STEPHEN DUBNER: He doesn't show horror. He's a very interesting fellow. He's got a really—he's got a really interesting manner. Very low key.

JAD: They did end up meeting a few times as Stephen wrote his book, but he says Franco was always really careful to keep him ...

STEPHEN DUBNER: At—at arm's length, I would say. 

JAD: And anytime they kind of got close, Franco would sort of disappear a little bit. In fact, toward the end of the book project, they make an appointment to meet ... 

STEPHEN DUBNER: I get to Pittsburgh a couple days early. Typical.

JAD: And Franco's not there. Actually, Stephen ends up standing in a parking lot waiting for him, and waiting, and waiting, and waiting. And then eventually he heads back to New York.

STEPHEN DUBNER: And I guess I thought that somehow he had a lot to teach me, you know, about being a man, being a real—a real grown up, being a father. And he was polite, and—and just not really that interested.

JAD: And it was around this point that Steven decided, "You know maybe that's what he was trying to tell me in the dream, and in real life too."

STEPHEN DUBNER: That no one can save you but yourself. Part of his messiah job was to persuade me that, you know, everybody's got to be their own messiah. That was the message.

JAD: But isn't that disappointing to you?

ROBERT: This guy was your—your hero, you want him to be all these things and he didn't want to be those things back. I mean, that must have hurt a little.

STEPHEN DUBNER: You know, look, Franco Harris didn't fall in love with, you know, me. He didn't want to be my best friend, but that—that aside, he is an exemplary human being, he—he's a really—he's a good human being. I think it can easily go too far, I think you can put too much of your emotional life in the hands of people who have—you know, who don't know you and have no responsibility for you, but I—I think sports fandom is a fantastic gift with almost immeasurable value, and my ...

JAD: Wait, but why? I mean, really? I mean, I love sports, but I mean, he's just a running back, he's not a saint.

ROBERT: I don't—what exactly about sports makes it—gives it an immeasurable value?

JAD: Yeah.

STEPHEN DUBNER: It's a proxy for real life but better. You know, it renews itself, it's constantly happening in real time. There are conflicts that seem to carry real consequences but at the end of the day don't. It's war where nobody dies, it's a proxy for all our emotions and desires and hopes. I mean, heck, what's not to like about sports?

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: There you go. You just sort of—you just wrapped it all up in a—in a little bow right there. That was awesome. 

JAD: Stephen Dubner is the author of Confessions of a Hero Worshiper, and he is the host of the public radio show Freakonomics. Check them out at Freakonomicsradio.com.

ROBERT: We'll move on to other heroes, other sports and other puzzles in just a moment.

[ERIC SIMONS: Hey guys, this is Eric Simons.]

[STEPHEN DUBNER: This is Stephen Dubner.]

[ERIC SIMONS: Radiolab is funded in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org.]

[STEPHEN DUBNER: Radiolab is produced by WNYC ...]

[ERIC SIMONS: ... and distributed by NPR.]

 

 

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