Welcome to HalPhillips.net, where the lede headline remains the March 2026 publication of my new book. My publishers at Bloomsbury issued Sibling Rivalry: How Mexico and the US Built the Most Contentious, Co-Dependent Feud in World Soccer on March 5, 2026. Get your very own copy here, or click that handsome book cover. We recommend two or three copies per person… Now, look up: Observe the Sibling Rivalry tab right there in the nav bar. That’s where you’ll find the book’s new companion site, always freshly stocked with timely World Cup news, book-related features and excerpts, my recently posted Soccer America essays, reviews and more. In the blog there, one can also read the official press release from Bloomsbury.
Do feel free to root around the more general offerings here at halphillips.net. Or visit my Instagram feed: a pretty cool, rivalry-centric digital museum & gallery dedicated to relevant, North America soccer ephemera. There’s another tab up there in the nav bar that links to my Threads page. That’s where I tend to micro-blog a lot these days on issues of the day, soccer-related and otherwise.
Dedicated futbol folk might also wish to check out my first book, Generation Zero: Founding Fathers, Hidden Histories & The Making of Soccer in America. This best-selling 2022 release is available via print, eBook or audio editions (the latter is read by a charming, disembodied A.I. simulacrum of Rebecca Lowe). Click the graphic below to find GZ’s companion site, replete with published, GenZero-centric soccer features, commentary and podcasts.
Suffice to say, all these channels represent a must-visit for soccer news and views ahead of the 2026 World Cup. That’s an event our two Siblings will co-host, along with Kid Brother Canada, which is coached by an American now. So it’s all very much on brand.
Turns out Moms & PBS were right: Reading is fundamental — to democratic stability. Neo-fascist leaders and their movements are ever more prevalent and powerful in 2026 because so-called low-education voters are ever more prevalent and easily led. These are the constituents famously preferred by Donald Trump. Yet these voters are proliferating worldwide, because the technological conditions that have created our 21st century literacy deficit — social media platforms newly super-charged by machine learning — are global.
We Americans often shovel these folks into a “non-college educated” bucket. During the last decade, however, smartphones — our 24/7 gateways to AI-enhanced social media algorithms — have hacked our behaviors in broader, more dangerous ways that have greatly expanded this suggestible-voter category.
In the U.S. specifically, a 2025 study in iScience found that pleasure reading fell 40 percent from 2003 to 2023. Non-audio/visual news consumption are both declining — according to Americans news consumers themselves. Effective literacy is shrinking globally but only in so-called first-world nations, where internet and smartphone usage are highest. Even the recently college-educated cannot complete nor comprehend entire books today, or so their professors report. Attention spans and critical thinking skills have attenuated in concert.
We readers and would-be readers are instead ever more reliant on watching or listening. Myself included.
Old school authoritarians hate readers. They love listeners and watchers.
As humans around the world read less — less often, less well — we are, all of us, more susceptible to the power dynamics that political leaders once deployed in pre-literate times, for millennia ahead of the Enlightenment. Trump is medieval so many ways: the naked patronage, his championing of a Christian faith he does not follow. But Trump is cunning, as primitive leaders proved cunning. High walls don’t control immigrant populations. But they impress illiterate peasants as signs of strength and safety.
As literacy wanes, as cognitive and social behaviors related to reading wane, we are witnessing leadership styles respond and devolve. We refer to these newly empowered leaders as authoritarians or fascists; their communication capabilities feel new. In fact, they’re drawing upon age-old, foundational elements of power acquisition and maintenance, tools devised to dominate pre-literate cultures: fear cia the assertion of raw power and violence, personal charisma, symbolism, and xenophobic rhetoric.
Reading Resists Medieval Politics
It’s possible that humans will adapt, or democracies will eventually gird themselves to better resist these demagogues who have leveraged new technological realities. Early returns don’t look so promising.
The more reasonable assumption: Modern democracies simply cannot function without a preponderance of informed, literate citizens who can effectively process and parse written information. On the eve of an American Bisesquicentennial, it seems relevant to point out that the U.S. democratic project, in particular, would not have been established 250 years ago without broad-based literacy among its 18th century citizens.
Colonial thought-leaders like Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson, “founders” like Alexander Hamilton and James Madison (dedicated pamphleteers in their own right), argued as much. In print. They were agreed on this point because the Enlightenment thinkers they revered, figures like David Hume and John Locke, believed self-government was not possible without literate populations. They, too, established that stipulation, in print.
On July 3, 1776, Great Britain’s North American colonies were among of the most literate communities in the history of mankind. According to the World Economic Forum (WEF), average literacy for white men in the late-colonial period was roughly 70% to 90%, while white women averaged 45% to 50%.
BOSTON, Mass. (June 3, 2026) — This column concerns Joe Mazzulla and the Celtics, but bear with me while I use George Horton as a framing device: My very first-ever sports-writing job allowed me to cover Horton’s Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School boys basketball team. That winter of 1986-87, the genial, middle-aged coach had trained up a talented collection of 7-8 kids, none of whom were taller than 6 feet — but all of whom could run, gun and handle the ball.
The mighty L-S Warriors didn’t bother with many plays. Their non-stop press resulted in absolute chaos, great masses of layups off turnovers, a league title, and more tournament glory than anyone could have expected.
The next season, just two kids remained from that squad — the slowest two. I went and saw them play early in December and was stunned to watch them meticulously run a half-dozen offensive sets I’d not seen the year before. This new scheme created great shots in the half court for a team short on athleticism. The Warriors never pressed; Horton arrayed them in an air-tight match-up zone. The team went 14-4 and went to another state tournament.
Having watched his team the year before, I had assumed that Horton was one of those coaches who just rolled the balls out and let things happened. But he recognized what he had and leveraged squad skills. Same same the following winter, only Horton devised a completely different scheme for an entirely different roster.
That’s great coaching. Still convinced I could be the next Bob Ryan, I traded up to a daily newspaper job the following spring/ George Horton died of a heart attack six years later. His wife found him slumped over in his recliner, a Celtics playoff game still playing on the TV.
Joe Mazzulla: Worthy COY winner, but…
I thought of George again when Joe Mazzulla was named NBA Coach of the Year early in May. The Celtics had a great regular season before crashing out in the first playoff round to Philly. Honestly, no one had expected the Sixers to challenge Boston, which had rounded into something approaching championship form after Jason Tatum’s return from a 10-month Achilles tendon rehab. The Celts led the series 3-1 but still managed to lose it. Shit happens.
Before he won it, Joe had deemed the Coach of the Year award “stupid.” I love Mazzulla. He’s candid in a way only someone on the spectrum can be. Earlier in the season, Coach Joe had been interviewed about the team’s new, gold-on-white uniforms. He said he liked them. The reporter asked why. “Because they say Boston on the front,” he deadpanned.
PROVIDENCE, R.I. (Jan. 5, 2024) — It’s never too late to mark and quantify the impact of Ernie DiGregorio. Not in New England. Not when the subject is college basketball. Yet here’s the immediate news peg, the reason to contemplate Ernie D and his attendant rabbit hole early in 2024: It was 50 years ago this week that DiGregorio set the NBA rookie record for assists in a game: 25, for the old Buffalo Braves, during a 120-119 win over the hapless Trailblazers, in Portland on New Year’s Day 1974.
This particular moment in NBA history, in and of itself, packs enough meaningful hoops serendipity to justify an entire 30 for 30 documentary: • Ernie D led the Association in assists that 1973-74 season, his first. He led the league in free throw percentage, too. • The Trailblazers were indeed terrible enough to earn the no. 1 pick in the June 1974 draft. They took a guy named Bill Walton. • The Braves coach that record-setting January night? Dr. Jack Ramsey, who left for Portland the summer of 1976, whereupon he and Walton immediately led the Blazers to their only NBA championship. • After acquiring Nate Archibald in September 1977, Buffalo let DiGregorio go — to the Lakers, who waived him halfway through the season. Boston signed him but didn’t offer a new deal. Just like that, Ernie D’s NBA run was over. • That same summer of ’78, Buffalo owner John Y. Brown Jr. swapped franchises with Celtics owner Irv Levin, who promptly moved the Braves to San Diego. • A year later, the newly christened Clippers signed Walton, meaning Ernie D missed playing with The Big Redhead by only a couple Degrees of NBA Separation.
To sum up on Ernie D: Consensus NCAA Player of the Year in 1973, at Providence College. NBA Rookie of the Year in 1974. Out of the league by the summer of 1978.
Today, that sounds like an epic tale of crash and burn. Yet the mid-1970s did represent the most turbulent period in NBA history. The league had battled the ABA for talent and eyeballs the previous 10 years, before absorbing its competitor prior to the 1976-77 season. Free agency was instituted at roughly the same time. Upshot: Many on-court careers were cut short or otherwise doomed by the ensuing roster consolidations, by franchise-swapping owners, by drugs, by a decidedly incoherent league promotional strategy.
In the pre-cable age, television networks never convinced the NBA would ever prove marketable as a major sporting enterprise. Aside from not being football or baseball, the newly merged NBA was uncomfortably Black. (The pre-merger NBA was so lily white, there was meaningful playing time for not one but two Van Arsdales!) Would Middle America ever watch something so “urban”?
Ultimately, yes it would. But as late as June 1980, two full seasons after Magic and Larry showed up, CBS was still showing NBA Finals games at 11:30 p.m. EST, on tape delay.
It’s no coincidence that college basketball first planted its own flag during the Seventies, this period of such marked NBA chaos and weakness. In this sliver of broadcasting daylight, especially, college hoops created a viable toehold in the culture. And it was the college game where Ernie D would prove a far more influential figure.
Heartiest New Year’s greetings from the band to everyone out there in Mumbles Nation. We wanted to share some content here and encourage you to monitor this space, as 2026 is shaping up as a busy year on the gig calendar. We should soon have news about a cool April date at a new, prestige venue. Well, new to us… Also, our first Fryeburg Fair is lined up (first week in October), and several more new-venue dates are in the works.
Meantime, however, we ran across this podcast and couldn’t help but share it. “Flightless Bird” ranges all over the map in terms of subject matter but this one, on tribute bands, hit home. Because, as some of you well know, Pocket Full of Mumbles started out as a Simon & Garfunkel tribute duo. Yes, we have evolved way from that enterprise, adding new sounds and personnel, while widening our content to include originals and covers of many different artists. Just this winter we’ve added new ones from Little Feat, REM and The Pixies.
Yet facts are facts: The band was born in the tribute milieu and this podcast discussion really got us thinking about what that meant at the time. And what it means now.
Of course, our name is enduring. Pocket Full of Mumbles refers to a specific lyric from “The Boxer,” and we don’t see that changing or evolving.
Pocket Full of Mumbles: No Cosplay
But unlike many of the tribute bands operating today — and there are hundreds working today and making good money from coast to coast — we Mumbles never much indulged in cosplay. Early on we had some fun re-creating famous S&G covers. See here some examples. But we never took that whimsy to the stage., whereas many tribute bands purposely perform, dress and promote themselves on- and off-stage in ways that pay homage to the original bands. As one pod guest put it (he performs in an AC/DC tribute ensemble), it’s often the goal to create a sort of Broadway-show version of the original lineup from night to night.
There was quite a bit of discussion regarding what distinguishes cover bands from tribute bands. This doesn’t seem a very fine line to us. Cover bands do not indulge in much cosplay; how could they? You can’t dress up and act like a dozen different bands during a single performance. I mean, think of how many wigs that might require!
Cover or “bar’ bands also seem to place more emphasis on interpreting recognizable songs in a different but effective way altogether. We often say, “You may know the Simon & Garfunkel version of America but you can’t truly appreciate the song until you’ve heard it with pedal steel.”
The Mumbles have moved well past the tribute thing but we still perform half a dozen S&G songs and we don’t judge. Tribute bands go that route today because they ‘re popular and can be lucrative, which is just another way of saying, “Many folks who patronize live music venues want to hear what they know.”
Foreign Journey? Genius
There can be great creativity in the exercise, not just dressing up but crafting the brand: Apparently, there is a tribute ensemble out there that opens with a set of Foreigner, followed by another in the “role” of Journey. The are, naturally, called Foreign Journey. Some original acts actually mine established, skilled tribute bands to replace aging, deceased, disaffected members. Journey famously plucked a tribute lead singer (based in the Philippines!) back in 2007, when the original Steve Perry stopped believing.
In the end, a good set, ably performed, is its own reward regardless of genre. I saw an outfit called The Outsiders deliver a truly excellent Tom Petty show at Bell’s Brewery in Kalamazoo two years ago. First rate, and they didn’t do any “characters” or costumes. [If you think drunk middle-aged women go crazy when they hear a spot-on version of “Last Chance for Mary Jane,” you should experience that phenomenon in the Midwest.]
By the same token, if you play in a Grateful Dead tribute band — as Mumbles drummer Jeff Glidden has (along with an Allman Brothers outfit called Wake Up Momma) and you don’t get stoned with fans between sets, you’re not really trying.
For us, this pod reminded us of these bands, how all types of bands, are conceived. Mike Conant and Hal Phillips had played together in a couple different bands starting circa 2008. At some practice five years later, Mike started noodling the melody of “Leaves That Are Green,” off Sounds of Silence. I joined him and sang the whole thing, start to finish. We looked at each other and said, without speaking, “Well then. Here’s someone who likes S&G as much as I do.” And the rest is history…
I tend to spend a lot of time at the computer. In 2025, I started collecting fun golf course images to use as wallpaper on my oversized monitor. The better ones stay in place for several weeks, allowing for detailed scrutiny and study. I decided to share some of the most thought-provoking examples here.
1) This one image from Royal Lytham & St. Anne’s shows the better part of four golf holes (7-10). It shows a substantial dune ridge, greats swaths of multi-hued vegetation and a public walking path — all of it tightly surrounded by a densely populated suburban neighborhood. Total course acreage: 90. Perspective: Merion GC is considered a small parcel for golf. It sits on 124 acres.
2) Still, there is room here for a massive and completely ornamental blowout bunker (top left) that does nothing but looks great.
3) How do you get 7,118 yards into such a small space? Observe the tournament teeing ground below the blowout bunker. That box serves the mainly off-camera 11th hole. There’s a similar walk back to 8 tee, off-camera bottom right. Of course, most members wouldn’t dream of playing these back tees, so day-to-day safety issues are greatly reduced.
Golf Wallpaper: Backward & Forward
4) The Old Course at St Andrews famously plays its course backwards once a year, but many GBI clubs do the same. Observe how beautifully these four would play in the opposite direction. To boot: Check out the awesome par-3 from that back tee at 11 to the 8th green. GBI clubs often play so-called “cross-country” tournaments with similarly gerrymandered holes & routings. One can see how easily that could be done at Lytham.
5) This aerial was snapped, by photography guru Gary Lisbon, at exactly the right height. Too many are taken from 30 feet or higher, which tends to flatten out fairway contours especially. Look at the lovely humps and hollows here, even those in the distance. Perfectly captured.
6) Lytham had sought the 2026 Open to celebrate the centenary of Bobby Jones’ famous victory here. Birkdale will host instead. Championship golf can be accommodated at Royal LSA (as recently as 2012), but it’s getting harder to imagine 30,000 spectators here, too. Or merch tents. This image shows why.
Driving home from a dreamy golf excursion, author Hal Phillips noticed wispy grasses glistening alongside a newly widened stretch of a busy interstate. Their presence raised questions about the agronomics of incorporating a linksy feature into inland settings.
[Ed. This essay was first published in the November 2026 print edition of Golf Course Industry magazine. It’s posted in its entirety here. And yes: Fescue Program would make a great band name.]
Prior to the smartphone era, when folks read mainly in analog fashion, a great many of us kept a Maine Atlas and Gazetteer in the glove compartment of our cars, or the privy. Published by Yarmouth-based mapmaker DeLorme, this oversized, soft-cover booklet neatly divided this Great State of ours into 96 pages, or rectangular quadrants, each of which depicted a specific 16-by-11-inch map in remarkable detail and scale.
Most of you know this, of course. We studied The Gazetteer so as to orienteer around the state, to better familiarize ourselves with topographies and place names, in addition to those potential routes that might traverse and connect them. The conditional nature of these journeys is critical to Maine’s mythos. Our unofficial state motto, offered to folks from away seeking directions, spells this out pretty clearly: You can’t get there from hee-yah.
GPS titan Garmin purchased DeLorme back in 2016, along with Eartha, the massive, slowly rotating globe that still occupies three full stories inside the former company headquarters. GPS-enabled mapping applications have reduced the need for physical maps of all kinds. However, the need to better know and understand this place we call Maine remains undiminished.
Case in point: The many odd-ball municipal naming conventions to be found here. Until 1820, Maine was part of Massachusetts, where British place names remain commonplace. This makes sense: Winchester and Boston and Middlesex were the very towns, cities, counties and regions from whence a great many 17th and 18th century settlers hailed. I’m a Masshole born, bred and proud — the Oxford English Dictionary added the word “Masshole” in 2015 (How do you like them apples!?). And so, I endorse this naming convention as quite sensible.
Maine Place Names defy Convention
Maine has its share of similarly UK-derived place designations among its 23 cities, 430 towns, and 30 plantations. Yet the naming conventions here are more varied and, well, idiosyncratic. Way more. It’s possible, for example, that the founders of Lebanon, Norway, Poland, Mexico, Sweden, Smyrna, Stockholm, Moscow, Carthage, Monticello, Bremen, Rome, Athens, Troy, Denmark, Peru, Palermo, Dresden, Paris, West Paris and South Paris all hailed from these original locations. But I doubt it.
There would appear to be little rhyme or reason to this geographic exotica. Rather, each place was so named for its own particular reason, on account of its own eccentric Creation story. The western Oxford County town of Peru (pop. 1,509), for example, was incorporated in 1821, in solidarity with the South Americans who had just declared their independence from Imperial Spain. It had first been organized in 1812 as Plantation Number 1 — a plantation being a rudimentary form of municipal self-government that, by Maine statute, cannot pass or enforce its own local ordinances. Thirty such townships still operate this way, mainly deep in the state’s interior, though the islands of Matinicus and Monhegan also function today as plantations.
Prior to its incorporation, Peru was also known as Thompsontown, in honor of General Samuel Thompson, the former Brunswick tavern keeper and one of Maine’s most prominent Revolutionary War figures. In May of 1775, shortly after the battles of Lexington and Concord, he led 600 militia in capturing and expelling the HMS Canceaux from Portland Harbor, then known as Falmouth Harbor. The Canceaux would, ahem, return in October 1775 and burn most of Falmouth to the ground.
While I’m a “Masshole” born, bred and proud (the word’s now ensconced in the Oxford English Dictionary), I’ve made my home in Maine since 1992, and never has there been a bigger soccer story to hit the Pine Tree State than Hearts of Pine, our first-year entry in USL One.
The club’s fairytale run finally ran out of pixie dust in Spokane, Washington. I was there, along with 50 hardcore supporters who watched their Sons of Maine surrender a tying goal in OT stoppage time, then miss a deciding penalty that, if converted, would have sent them to the final. Oof.
A brutal way to lose. But the club brain trust, the fans and coach Bobby Murphy are to be commended, along with the players naturally, for putting together such a remarkably competitive campaign. Assembling a pro roster on the fly, with limited funds and zero relationships with other clubs, at any level of the American soccer pyramid, is difficult. But Hearts quickly identified a dependable, flinty rotation of 14-15 players by mid-summer and, with just enough flair to entertain in the nation’s professional third division, caught bloody fire.
The club went 10-4-4 from July 6 to the close of the season in late October. That sublime stretch included a 6-1 drubbing of eventual league finalist, Spokane Velocity (last year’s rookie darlings), and the ouster of 2025 USL Championship winner Pittsburgh Riverhounds from the Jägermeister Cup, a sort of leagues-cup competition for both USL divisions.
Heart-Stopping and Brand Savvy
\That’s merely the competitive side of the ledger. Across Maine itself, Hearts have proved a cultural phenomenon, selling out every home date at 6,000-seat Fitzpatrick Stadium in Portland, and pimping more merchandize than Danish outfitter Hummel and local boy L.L. Bean, a fitting shirt-sleeve sponsor, could have imagined.
What’s more, the fan section at Fitzy Park has proved a sensation unto itself, replete with non-stop singing, chanting and flair-lighting. These are not European-style ultras or Argentinian bravas, but rather a more harmless bunch of bearded hipsters who helped transform their interstate-adjacent home ground into a fortress through non-stop, quite genial-but-insistent stomping and craft-beer swilling. Think of The Guy from HBO’s “High Maintenance”. Only crunchier. With female counterparts in knitted Carhartt hats. That is the Hearts fan section demographic.
I’ve followed Hearts of Pine closely all this inaugural season, but I’m not a season-ticket holder. I attended four matches, two at Fitzpatrick and two U.S. Open Cup dates at Lewiston High School. I point this out because, while I’ve been to more away matches in the U.K. than Hearts fans have had hot dinners, I tend not to gravitate toward these fan-section spectacles. Home or away, I cheer and sing on occasion, always in support. Mainly I’m there to watch the match.
To be honest, my big day out in Spokane owed absolutely nothing to my relatively casual Hearts support. I arrived in western Montana earlier in the week to visit my two kids, both legitimate Mainers (they were born there) who nevertheless make their homes in Missoula.
Two days after touching down, however, I did realize that Hearts were scheduled to play their USL One semifinal in Spokane, just three hours to the west. In Big Sky Country, a 3-hour drive is like running out to Cumberland Farms for a gallon of milk. So off I went to Eastern Washington, on a Sunday afternoon, to support my new local club.
It’s often argued that the 1975 World Series — contested 50 years ago this month — ranks among the finest in baseball history. In terms of legendary personalities and the competitive iconography that framed them, Game 6 featured enough fairy-tale moments all on its own: a not-yet-befouled Pete Rose bellyflopping into third then popping up to jawbone with his opposite number, Rico Petrocelli; rookie golden boy Fred Lynn propped limp and lifeless against the center-field wall after failing to flag down Ken Griffey’s RBI triple in the 3rd; Sparky Anderson on the top step of the dugout, ready to give Rawley Eastwick his trademark hook, only to let him face Bernie Carbo in the 8th; Johnny Bench short-hopping George Foster’s throw from left-field foul territory to cut down Denny Doyle at the plate, sending the game to extra innings where, of course, Carlton Fisk waved his game-winning homer just fair enough to hit the foul pole.
Taken together, those 12 innings form a universe unto itself, an heroic parade of Hall of Fame and otherwise iconic players doing impossibly dramatic things under extraordinary circumstances.
As a result, however, Game 6 also tends to overshadow what made this 7-game encounter an all-timer. This past summer I happened upon a passing reference to Luis Tiant’s epic 163-pitch, complete game performance in Game 4. I grew up in Boston and turned 11 the month before this World Series took place. I watched every second of Game 4. To my shame, apart from El Tiante running the bases in his little blue jacket, I remembered very few specifics.
Friend, let me remind you that for all its faults, the 21st century is a remarkable thing: All seven installments of this Fall Classic are available via YouTube — in their entirety, without commercials — so I watched Game 4 on my iPhone over the course of several hours in July. This sublime experience led to web-aided consumption of Games 2 and 3, in that order, as these, I reasoned, were the chapters in this epic saga that I remembered least of all.
I undertook this throwback-baseball immersion exercise at the same time I was reading Chuck Klosterman’s fine non-fiction book, “The Nineties,” wherein he posits that October 1975 was also a critical tipping point — those final cultural moments where baseball and its fans could claim “the sport held a unique place in U.S. life and would always be recognized as the national pastime.” By 1990, he points out, twice as many people watched NFL football.
Four years later, with release of his mini-series Baseball, Ken Burns presented the game as a prism through which we might better understand the American experience. A soulful, often convincing take but an excuse for the historian to treat the game like a relic, an historical phenomenon that did what it did but had since relinquished much of its civilizational juice.
So much of the American social contract came undone during the Seventies, why should baseball have been exempt? If retroactive understanding recasts the 1975 Fall Classic as a swan song, so be it. However, allowing such a raft of perfectly amazing memories to fall through the cracks unheeded and under-absorbed — when they’re all just sitting there on some Google server, waiting to be enjoyed all over again — is foolish. What follows is a YouTube-enabled report on this 3-game series within a Series, an event I first consumed as pre-teen, staying up way past my bedtime, exulting and sobbing by turn in a suburban living room exactly 13 miles southwest of Fenway Park.
World Series 1975: El Tiante en Fuego
Game 4, Riverfront Stadium, Oct. 15, 1975: El Tiante was already a Boston legend before he took the mound in Game 4, of coursre. After doing his best to thwart Sox hopes in 1967, for Cleveland (one of four clubs with legitimate pennant hopes that final weekend of the season), he’d come over in 1971 and immediately claimed our hearts. No one knew how old this amiable, rather elfin Cuban really was; I suppose we still don’t know. He was a bit dumpy and could come off as clownish though a lot of that public persona was surely down to his idiosyncratic grasp of English. But he won — 18 times in 1975, despite back issues — and he did so with singular style. After his virtuoso performance in Game 4, his place in the Boston Sports Pantheon was utterly secure.
The Reds had jumped out to a 2-0 lead, but starter Fred Norman surrendered 5 in the 4th and that’s all Tiant would need, throwing ONE HUNDRED AND SIXTY-THREE pitches to level the Series and nail down another complete-game victory, 5-4.
Yet that’s mere box-score fodder. Tiant at his best had to be observed to be fully appreciated, and he proved even more indomitable 50 years on, despite my diminutive screen. While the man had shut out the Reds in Game 1 at Fenway four days earlier, familiarity helped the National League champions not a whit. Tiant bullied and confounded them by turn — nearly picking the imperious Joe Morgan off first in the 7th, twice running the bases, scoring what proved to be the winning run, and looking utterly gnomish the entire time.
