City Of Brotherly Love
A haven for sports fans
Many photos and videos of sports fans show young men yelling while drinking beer. It’s a fairly accurate snapshot of the human love affair with sports.
But it doesn’t capture the behind-the-scenes story in Philadelphia, The City of Brotherly Love.
Nearly every citizen in the city and surrounding areas lives, breathes, adores — and hates — Philadelphia professional sports teams.
The late summers in my childhood were riddled with the misery of the promising Phillies baseball team “heading for the cellar” as my Aunt Margaret used to say — who lived walking distance to Connie Mack Stadium.
The nuns in my strict Catholic school allowed us to bring transistor radios into the classroom in September before “Mr. October” New York Yankee Reggie Jackson, who grew up nearby in Abington Township helped lengthen the season.
We knew enough to silence the games if Mother Superior, the five-star general of the institution, visited our classroom, but she didn’t stay long as she probably had a game to get back to.
The excitement of an Eagles victory over the dreaded Dallas Cowboys threw the city into a middle of the night street party.
