Field of Dreams is consider a classic baseball movie. It is also a ghost story.
Just think about it. There are dead former professional baseball players walking out of an Iowa corn field to play a few innings of the sport. It’s “I see dead people’ meets children of the corn.
Having a catch with your dead father. That’s wicked.
We just saw a wicked World Series. My Kansas City Royals couldn’t over come the wicked pitching of San Francisco’s Madison Bumgardner. I love what the Royals did to get to the postseason and right down to the final out of Game 7 of the World Series.
On Halloween, I got to thinking if I could, who were deceased athletes, coaches and others involved in sports I would want to have sitting around in my living room and talking sports and life in general.
The first one to come to mind was Babe Didrikson Zaharias, who achieved success in golf, basketball and track and field. She won two gold medals and one silver medal in track competition in the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics. Didrikson Zaharias was the first woman to competed in a men’s PGA tournament in 1938. She became a top golf on the Women’s Professional Golf Association tour.
Knute Rockne — the father of the forward pass in football — is another choice for me. He played and coached at Notre Dame. Under him The Fighting Irish became a major factor in collegiate football. One reason, Rockne is on my list is he died in an airplane crash in 1931 in Kansas. The plane crashed in a wheat field near Bazaar, Kan.
Wouldn’t it be great to visit with Wilma Rudolph and Jesse Owens, U.S. Olympic champions? Both were tremendous athletes battling the forces on the track and off with discrimination. The two sprinters intrigue me as a slow-footed, short, wide body individual.
Lou Gehrig, the great New York Yankee first baseman, who was nicknamed “The Iron Horse” as he played in a then-Major League Baseball record 2,130 consecutive games. That record held up until Baltimore Orioles’ great Cal Ripken, Jr. broke it in 1995. Gehrig’s career was cut short amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), he died less than two years later at the age of 37. Gehrig remains an inspiration, representing fortitude, humility and courage to the tens of thousands of Americans living with Lou Gehrig’s Disease.
Contact Jocelyn Sheets at 641-792-3121 ext. 6535 or jsheets@newtondailynews.com.