Tampa, Florida					Thursday, September 09, 2010

Wade Boggs—From Marmora to Cooperstown
Wednesday, January 5, 2005
Tampa—I never had a neighbor of mine voted into the Baseball Hall of Fame at Cooperstown. Or, a former neighbor, when he was growing up and a kid star. Now I have. By now, all who care, know Wade Boggs, peerless perhaps as a pure hitter, was voted into the Hall this week by eligible voting newspeople, and by the third largest voting total ever—474. Little Wade Boggs grew up down the street and over another from wife Linda and me on Davis Islands in Tampa. His street was/is Marmora, on a canal that was manmade by Mr. Davis who made these Islands. Boggs grew up there and played Little League not far from our houses in a league called Bayshore where my grandson, Tommy, plays now, and well, I might add. Wade Boggs would walk from his house to ours in his early years in the pros and I would interview him on my dock that cuts into a part of Tampa Bay. Lots of sports stars have visited and been interviewed there, including another baseball neighbor, Tino Martinez, and as was another Tampa-produced baseball Hall of Famer, 96-year-old Al Lopez. But, Boggs the kid neighbor was so outrageously good at his sport he made the Hall with less votes than only Nolan Ryan and Boggs’ buddy and hitting idol, George Brett. Boggs was often in our home and has been with wife Debbie often since, but I made it to his only once during his Marmora Drive days, when he had a little party for Brett. Now, all these years later, Wade Boggs, still loves his sport with an almost childlike frenzy, talks about it as enthusiastically as ever, as he did at a press conference for his Tampa Bay news people followed him so long, only hours after he was voted into the Hall. None there at the conference, which Boggs, wife Debbie, his dad, Win (Winfield), and son Brett, held at Tampa Palms Golf Club, near their present fancy-dancy home, had reported on the Boggs Baseball Story so long and faithfully as had I as sports editor of the Tampa Times, then Tampa Tribune. No one. And, he always made room for me despite his big time stages, and there were lots of them. He has never forgotten his Davis Islands roots. Boggs was a five times batting champ in the American League, four of them in a row. He spent most of his career with the Boston Red Sox, then championship time with the New York Yankees and the last two at home with the Tampa Bay Devil Rays. He won a world championship with the Yankees (1996) and is well known for jumping on a horse at Yankee Stadium after the final game win and rode about in celebration with the mounted policemen. He is best known as a Red Sox, where he spent most of his 18 big league years and topped a career off with the hometown Tampa Bay Devil Rays, where he got that 3,000th hit, beating the Pete Rose, which topped that of Ty Cobb, and putting fans in the Devil Rays seats of Tropicana Field for owner Vince Namoli. Vince was there at the press conference, arranged by his public relations man, the able Rick Vaughn, who later spoke of the best thing he thought Boggs said. Few disagreed. Boggs, who will talk for hours at the drop of one question, said he would let the Hall decide what cap he wore at the Cooperstown induction, noting that he’d not have been elected without what he accomplished at each team—the long steady times at Boston, the great championship Yankee times, and that 3000th hit he’d not have achieved had the Rays not signed him for two final years. “He was right,’’ said Vaughn. “It was terrific of him to say that. He had it all in prospective. He would not have made it had he not had those three uniforms to wear.’’ And, Boggs was humble at this press conference so few can hold. He was humble and he was grateful and he was reminiscent and he was the crafty interviewee he always was. Boggs is a lot like Hall of Famer John Bench, to whom Tampa was a second home (to Cincinnati). He talks like a college educated men. Neither were. Baseball was their university where they achieved so and were graduated with summa cum laude. Both were erudite. Both had enough sass about them to become the terrifically successful aggressive players they were, Bench the catcher-leader-hitter, Boggs the infielder, hitter (of anything and anyone), base runner, and clutchman they had to be to be so good they made it into the Hall. Both had neat little told-you-so smile/smirks about them. Both were loyal to their friends and their towns. Both were friends/subjects of mine as the writer. Heck, I stayed (as did Tampa restaurateur Malio Iavarone) in the Bench home while he played for the Reds in a World Series, and Boggs (and Debbie) always, always made themselves available to this hometown reporter. There is a lot of Carl Yastrzemski in Boggs, a reminder he cherishes, and a fact as well. Yaz, Boggs said in interview was an idol, saying he sat by him and pumped the Hall of Famer for information whenever he could. Boggs said at his conference in Tampa, it was impossible for him to think he could be associated with Ted Williams,	Stan Musial, George Brett, the truly great stars of the game, his idols. And, he said he figured he would get 74 per cent of the vote and not the 75 percent required. As it was he got 94 per cent plus. And when he got the call Tuesday morning, he insisted on being told on the phone by people he knew. He thought it was a joke, at first. Indeed, and old friend had already called and said he didn’t make it. But, when it was known by him to be a fact—well, it was a moment like none other in his fascinating life. I had talked with him at 10 p.m. the night before the Tuesday announcement in New York City that he and Ryne Sandberg had been voted into the Hall, Sandburg. For Sandberg, it was his second nomination, missing a year ago. This was Boggs first eligible year, his first vote and as most who knew Boggs had told him he was a shoo-in. He said he’d heard that. Heard it was a slam-dunk, a sure thing, “but I won’t believe it until it happens,’’ he said the night before. He had his doubts. All would. But, my his credentials made him that slam-dunk. But, that was not always so, like all the years, good as they were, at Boston, and the timeless interviews I’d had with him over his deeds, misdeeds, and absolute belief he could only eat chicken to be what he wanted to be. Well, he and his family did eat lifetimes of chicken, causing him at his press conference to apologize to his son for that diet of the boy’s youth. Yes, the kid plays baseball, as a senior in high school, and yes, his dad coaches him, as Wade’s dad there beside him on the dais at the press conference coached his son in Bayshore Little League and forever more. “He was always my coach. He taught me everything,’’ said Wade. And Wade explained how he called his dad nightly when he was in the minors, and early on in the majors, to go over every game, concentrating not only his hits, but the hits he did not get. “He taught me lessons no one else could,’’ said Boggs. “The first time I threw a bat,’’ after a strikeout in kids’ baseball, his dad-coach, “benched me. He said my bat did not cause the strikeout,’’ nor the helm et he threw, too, “you did.’’ Boggs said he never threw another bat, helmet, or anything else, “in view, oh, maybe in the tunnel,’’ he joked. He taught “me was wait to weight. . . wait on the ball…and shift the weight,’’ said Boggs. His dad (his mom died in a terrible traffic accident in Tampa) in 1986, Dad Win, now 80 and in uncertain health, was a trooper at the press conference, as was wife Debbie (as well as throughout much of their 28 year marriage. She is a patient and understanding wife, who cooked the chicken all of that time for this man of one main-course fanaticism, and sustained the life of the big league ballplayer, which is not always a blue sky time. Boggs himself was not an automatic. He spend six years in the minors before Red Sox, who had drafted him out of Plant High in Tampa in 1976, was called to Boston. He never left. He became the sensational player, the consistent player (a must), a repeating batting champ, a repeating Golden Gloves infielder at shortstop, a World Series stickout at third base and at the plate. Then came the acme, that 3,000th-hit that put him over the top with the all time total hits record. So, now that is where Wade and Debbie and are now—at the top, after the long hard climb from Marmora Drive on Davis Islands in Tampa, from hitting balls into the Bay at Peter O. Knight Airport in Tampa, from being a seventh round draft pick about which he learned with us at The Tribune sports department that afternoon in 1976 when all eyes were on the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, about to draft for their first team ever…one that lost them all in the beginning but soon made it to the big time. It was always a team effort wife Debbie a booster-troopere throughout the long campaign. Win and Debbie and Wade have come a long way, always dragging their friends with them to glory, surely a matter of pride and pleasure for us all who have been along for the ride to the pinnacle. Including his mom, Sue, watching from above, said Wade. “We got her done,’’ said dad Win after the press conference to Martin Fennelly of the Tampa Tribune. The Boggs Hall of Fame Caravan went to New York City day after the Tampa press session and the announcement of his election to the Hall, for more celebration and press deals. One was at the Waldorf. Did I say Wade and Debbie and Win had gone a long way? How about from Bayshore Little League on the Seddon Island Channel in Tampa to the Waldorf-Astoria on Park Avenue in New York City, a stopover for the August, 2005 to baseball’s Hall of Fame shrine in Upstate New York at Cooperstown? Is that a long way? And how about from throwing his bat and helmet at the Bayshore Little League and being benched for it by his dad-coach to the hallowed place now reserved for the Kid from Marmora in Baseball’s Hall of Fame? Gosh, neighbor. ##
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