Las Vegas Sun

March 29, 2024

THE OPENING LINE

There's a classic scene in "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" where Jack Nicholson (as the rebellious mental patient Randle Patrick McMurphy) is told by Nurse Ratched that no, he can't watch the blankety-blank World Series on television. So Nicholson pantomimes the second game of the 1963 Fall Classic ("Koufax is in big blanking trouble ... all right, Tresh is the next batter") much to the delight of the other patients.

I can relate to Randle Patrick McMurphy. Only when I was a kid, the asylum was a Catholic grade school and Nurse Ratched was called Sister Mary Something Or Other. Actually, most of the nuns at my school were pretty nice, except when you wanted to wanted to watch the blankety-blank World Series on TV. Then they were pretty evil.

When you are in fifth grade, you are not capable of lifting a heavy marble sink and smashing your way to freedom, or even suggesting it, so you can watch the World Series on TV. So that was not an option.

But sneaking a transistor radio into your Batman lunch pail was definitely an option, provided you didn't get any Hostess Ho-Ho on the tiny plastic earplug.

Although we were careful we were to tuck the wires under our collars so they were virtually undetectable, the nuns always detected them. They had eyes like hungry hawks. Or Rod Carew.

They would confiscate our radios and any baseball cards on our persons and not give them back until school ended, or until you swore on a stack of Bibles that your parents would put an extra sawbuck in the envelope at Sunday Mass.

But one year, we had a real cool nun named Sister Mary Thaddeus. She was quite the baseball fan, as we would discover at the annual school picnic when she raced into left-center field to make a shoestring catch, after which her wimple fell off.

There was quite the commotion. All I remember is she had bunches of blond hair all pinned up on top of her head and the Mother Superior going ballistic, as if we had just witnessed a minor miracle or something. Though it was a pretty nice catch, I wouldn't exactly deem it miraculous, as most agreed that had she not been wearing all those flowing nun garments, it pretty much would have been a routine can o'corn.

So we really weren't surprised when October rolled around and Sister Thaddeus turned on the old black-and-white TV suspended from the ceiling, the one we were allowed to watch only when one of the Kennedys got shot, to bear witness to Bob Gibson and Mickey Lolich accumulating strikeouts.

I bring that up now, because there was something special about watching the World Series during the daytime, when the air was crisp and the shadows were long and a bunch of hot dog wrappers always seemed to be blowing across the outfield at Shea Stadium when Tommie Agee of the (truly) Miracle Mets ran into the gap to snare another long drive off the bat of Elrod Hendricks.

THIS WEEK'S BEST BET

ACDelco Las Vegas NHRA Nationals

Friday-Sunday

The Strip at Las Vegas Motor Speedway

Don't you just love the smell off nitromethane in the morning?

TICKETS: $32-up

ON THE WEB: www.lvms.com

ALSO WORTH A LOOK

RE/MAX World Long Drive Championships

Tuesday-Saturday

Palms Golf Club, Mesquite

These big hitters can air mail a golf ball - although sometimes, they don't put the right address on it.

TICKETS: Free

ON THE WEB: www.longdrivers.com

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