1986:The millenium had gone deep into the Ninth Inning, and let's face it: it had not been a well-played game. Nor would it get any better during this year of Challenger and Chernobyl. Sure, President Ronald Reagan had almost vanquished the evil empire, and was coasting to the end of his second term by then, but the intoxicating prospect of boundless good times remained several years in the future. Sure, the Phillipines managed to oust dictator Ferdinand Marcos, later improving the nation's lot with a succession of reformist leaders. But in Haiti the departure of Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier led to a series of swings and counterswings in government that drove ordinary folk deeper into squalor and misery.
Within days of reaching the pinnacle of American celebrity for managing to combine dazzling athletic success and a wholesome, fresh-faced innocence, basketball player Len Blas was dead of a cocaine overdose.
Flip your calendar to Oct. 25, 1986, a Saturday.
We're in Shea Stadium, surrounded by 55,000 hostile, unhappy New York Mets fans. Our Boston Red Sox have crept within an out of winning their first World Series since 1918. We dare to believe. Gone is the curse of the Bambino, waved off by whatever supreme power was so enraged by the trade of Babe Ruth to the Yankees in 1919.
Then the cracks begin to appear.
In the 10th Inning, the Mets put together a nickle-and-dime rally, putting a couple of men on base. One scores on a weak single.
Still, we're up 5-4. The Mets have two outs. Red Sox pitcher Bob Stanley works the count to 2-2 on Mookie Wilson, then unloads a wild pitch. A run scores.
That feeling in your stomach is dread, the ugly foreboding that trouble's lurking.
Two foul balls later, Wilson slaps a high, looping grounder worthy of a career .274 batter. It's headed right at our first baseman.
Make no mistake: This is an easy play. It's the kind of grounder a reasonably competent beer-league softball player handles with ease, dozens of times a season. All Bill Buckner has to do is corral the ball and toss it to Stanley, covering first. He's made the play hundreds of times in his 22-year career. Failure vanquished. Our Sox get a chance to wrap up the Series in the 11th.
But wait. He's not making the play.
Somehow, he loses touch with the ball. It squirts under his glove, Buckner collapses in failure. The Red Sox lose tonight and, as it turns out, they lose Sunday, too. The curse lives.
Also in October, halfway around the world in Reykjavik, Iceland, Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev came within an eyelash of agreeing to junk all nuclear weapons -- if the United States will give up on its "star wars" missile-defense scheme. End of discussion.
Of course, Gorbachev and his sclerotic comrades would be hanging on desperately in several years when their centrally planned worker's paradise drove right off the cliff.
Failure: It's what makes success so special. Rarely is it so sublime, so tragic in its proportions. But across the vast sweep of a millenium, failure is our touchstone. We try, we fail, we try again.
Resounding success is a feeling few of us experience. Failures large and small we connect to. We've all been the straw man at some point, every one of us.
How do we treasure failure? In England, people light fireworks and bonfires every Nov. 5 to celebrate the foiled Gunpowder Plot to blow up the Parliament in 1605. Guy Fawkes, one of the hapless conspirators, was hanged a year later, but he's achieved immortality.
This is the way the millenium began.
This is the way the millenium ends.
Not with a bang, but with a whimper.
I realize there are a TON of things that weren't put down in this History of the Millenia. Where is the comment about Rhodes in Africa? How about them Bulls? Michael Jordan and basketball! What about the great music of history? The great thinkers. How about the movies..and the movie stars we've all known and grown to love. There is SO much that should be covered. What about the great Indian Wars and the stories of the American Outlaws and Lawmen?
Winston Churchill...Franklin Roosevelt...The Civil War in America...
I know that this is only a "thumb-nail" sketch of some of the more important, or more newsworthy events of this last thousand years. Fortunately, we have the Internet..and you can glean a lot of the stories from it, the way I did most of these.
There are six million stories in this city, but we've only covered a few of them...wait until I write the NEXT Millenia!!
| THE THIRD MILLENIA |
| STARTING SOON! |
