Rick Lewis in the Misty III at the Stan Sayres Pits on Seattle’s Lake Washington, circa 1964.
Everybody has a vice in their life and the first step in dealing with such an affliction is to admit to it, so here goes. I’m a sports junkie. I admit it. I don’t have a desire to change, though, so I just deal with it.
My weakness is for high school sports, but I also will watch college and pro stuff, too. NBA, not so much. I like real basketball.
But these Methow Valley kids, many of them the offspring of children I watched grow and play into adulthood, are special, and I am grateful for the opportunity to watch, photograph and tell their stories.
Call it a labor of love, if you will, but to me, it is pure enjoyment and not so much about work. I deeply appreciate the kind words, loving corrections, and suggestions for expanding my affliction to even more sports.
For full disclosure, I was a high school “athlete.” I use quotes because my running sport daughter would argue that golf doesn’t really require the athletic training, endurance and exertion of energy that real athletic endeavors, like cross country, basketball or track and field, for example. She wouldn’t be able to teach me how to hurdle or triple jump, but I couldn’t teach her how properly swing a golf club, either, so we’re even.
I’m pretty sure my affliction (or affection) for sport began in early childhood, almost earlier than I can recall. My maternal grandfather worked his way from lower Missouri through the Midwest to Portland, Oregon in the 1920s, playing baseball and doing some piecemeal carpentry stuff. Later in life, he picked up the game of golf as a recreational pastime when he wasn’t watching baseball either on TV or in person, traveling from his Olympia, Washington, home to Tacoma to watch, if not vicariously relive, his limited time in the olden days of the Pacific Coast League, now nearly a century ago.
At an early age, I began accompanying him on several of those day-trip sojourns to Cheney Stadium to watch the T-Cubs play baseball, or to Centralia to watch his son, my uncle, play baseball with his American Legion team, the Centralia Pavers. My uncle Tom in 1964 was named to the Washington All-High School team as a senior outfielder and pitcher at Olympia High School and was drafted into the Yankees organization that year. He played a couple of seasons in the farm system, I recall in Shelby, North Carolina, before Uncle Sam called him into service in Viet Nam, which effectively ended his baseball career.
At the same time, my father was a brew chemist for the Sick’s Rainier Brewing Company in Seattle, which meant occasional tickets to see the AAA Rainiers play at Sick’s Seattle Stadium, and falling asleep at night to the vocalizations of Bill Schonely in the earphone of my transistor radio before his famous “Rip City” days as the voice of the Portland Trailblazers (in spite of my current day appearance, I’m too young to recall the legendary Leo Lassen, who left the microphone behind after the 1960 season).
Hydro fascination
Even early on, I wasn’t limited to baseball. Hydroplane racing was fascinating and at the age of 8 or 9, I served as the unofficial mascot of the Misty III, a 266cc limited inboard hydro team, and several times national champion. Paul Edgar, who was a family friend, was the owner’s name and I was saddened to learn of his death several years ago at the age of 91.
Before the Supersonics arrived in 1967, followed by the Pilots, Mariners and Seahawks, all we Seattle kids had were hydroplane drivers for our sports heroes, and that first week of August, Seafair week in Seattle, was what we lived for each year.
I was in heaven, when on my 13th birthday in 1969, my dad treated myself and my best friend, Jeff, to see the Seattle Pilots play the Oakland Athletics in the venerable Seattle Stadium, with seats halfway between home plate and third base. It was just a short time later when my heart was broken as the Pilots flew from Seattle to Milwaukee after only that one season. As a side note, we were sitting in a stadium that my dad’s father, as a union carpenter and not much of a sports fan, helped build.
The memories are still vivid of a crystal clear early fall Seattle evening, Mt. Rainier offering simple explanation for the naming of the Rainier Valley and Rainier Avenue in Seattle’s south central district. Reggie Jackson was a home run slugging rookie playing for Oakland that night. My uncle’s friend from Washington high school baseball, and minor league mate in the Yankees’ organization, Steve Whitaker wore a Pilots uniform, and the field was littered with names I recall, but mostly destined for major league oblivion — or infamy if you were Seattle’s lovable, yet bungling shortstop, Ray Oyler.
Of course, a couple of glaring exceptions were pitcher and future author and whipped cream industry spokesperson Jim Bouton, and the speedy record-setting base thief Tommy Harper. Whitaker, out of Tacoma’s Lincoln High Schoo, ended up in Seattle when he was traded on April 1 from Kansas City to the Pilots with another player for a fairly young Lou Pinella. Pinella never played an inning in the regular season for the Pilots, having been acquired in the expansion draft that year and then traded away. But now, you know that, and the rest of the Seattle-Pinella story.
I think the Pilots lost that game, but that’s not the take-away from that evening, for it was on that night that baseball finally usurped unlimited hydroplane racing at the top of my sports affliction for all but one week of the Seattle sports year. I did get reacquainted with the fast boats, finally fulfilling a bucket list item of actually driving one on Pearrygin Lake on my 53rd birthday, and while it wasn’t at 185 mph, I did get it up on a plane and slid it around the corners. It was fun, but I think I prefer my junior high aged experience of racing sailboats to actually racing the fast boats.
The early NBA days
I was also smitten by the 2-year-old Seattle Supersonic NBA franchise, and eventually their all-star guard, eventual coach and Hall of Famer Lenny Wilkins. The Supes lost me when they treaded Wilkins to Cleveland for Butch Beard, and got me back when they brought him back as player-coach and then hired him on full time after he retired from playing.
I cried when he coached them to the NBA title in 1980, and I’ll admit to becoming somewhat reflective and emotional when at the last WNBA All-Star game played in Seattle as gift of my daughter, Lenny was sitting just eight rows in front of me. I think I got a shot of home with my cell phone, sitting with Slick Watts, Downtown Freddy Brown and the immortal Bill Russell.
I also saved my shekels for occasional trips into downtown to take in Seattle Totems’ minor league hockey, dreaming of the day Seattle would gain an NHL franchise so I might get to see the Boston Bruins, Montreal Canadiens and Chicago Blackhawks. That was in the late ’60s, so call me a visionary.
I would, with several of my Laurelhurst neighborhood buds, walk to Husky Stadium on football Saturdays, and with the help of a security guard pulling up the loosely secured cyclone fence, crawl under and work our way to the hillside adjacent the student section and watch Montlake Dawgs get beat regularly by the likes of O.J. Simpson’s 1968 USC Trojans, Dan Fouts and the Oregon Ducks, and a thrilling, last-second, “Hail Mary” win for Oregon State — must have been in about 1971. I was miserable when my Cougars lost in 1971, sitting in the horseshoe end with my friend Jeff, again. Little did I know that 10 years later I would be sitting in almost the same place with my future wife, now an alumnus, watching the Cougs lose another heartbreaker in a game where the winner would go to the Rose Bowl.
The point being, I was afflicted by most things sports at an early age, and continued through my youth, and early adulthood, to current day, yet still afflicted, at the end of my third year covering local sports in our community. I’m fulfilling a dream, but it has also been my divine pleasure, watching, participating and learning about newer, to me, sports like mountain biking and becoming more familiar with some older, more internationally popular sports like Nordic skiing and biathlon over the past few years. As well, it has been my privilege to share those stories because these, as a rule, are great kids and this current crop growing in our community is truly special.
Their accomplishments in the classroom and on the field of play are exceptional, and their involvement in the community is exemplary. Adults could learn from them, and that’s what makes what I am honored to do such a special privilege in this special place.
So, it has been especially thrilling to witness some significant accomplishments by current and past Liberty Bell student athletes this year. The 2022 fall season was, arguably, one of the best in the school’s 49-year history, and the year in general, was a look into the short term future of the Mountain Lions. Get out your sunglasses, the next few years are gonna be bright.
