Yesterday, I was nine years old and tomorrow, I’ll turn 50. Life is quick – like NASCAR, a fastball, or a slap-shot. I could only hope to live to be 90, which would give me 68 more years to check every box off on my sports fan’s bucket list
Here are 10 things that I want to experience as a sports fan before I kick the bucket.
1. Attend a game in all 30 major league baseball stadiums. While this could take a lifetime to achieve, it could also take just one summer, with one friend and a minivan. Why baseball? There are no regulation sizes for baseball fields. Every ballpark is different and unique.
2. Play the Old Course at St. Andrews. At over 600 years old, the Old Course in St. Andrews, Scotland, is the birthplace of golf. The Old Course is home to ghosts of golf legends, a thousand shades of green grass, and great golf.
3. Spend a Memorial Day at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway for the Indy 500. With 300,000 in attendance per year – making it the most attended sporting event in the country – the Motor Speedway captures beautiful sound from purring engines, whistling cars, and roaring fans.
4. Watch a live professional soccer game in Europe. What Americans know as soccer, Europeans know as a religion. Futbol is what they call soccer in Europe, and it’s played by players with greater skill and watched by beer-drinking, chanting, scarf-wearing fans.
5. Hit a hole-in-one. Tee-up 1,000 balls in the tee-box on a par 3. Do this two or three times, and hopefully one ball will go in.
6. Witness a Cubs world series. Great health is required for this task, as it will likely take another 102 years to occur. When the “lovable losers” finally end the curse, I want to be at Wrigley Field partying with the most loyal fan base in sports.
7. Make the Top 10 Plays on ESPN’s SportsCenter. To achieve this task, one will need to get creative. My plan is to be the first-ever fan to jump out of the bleachers at a baseball game to make a diving catch on the field of play.
8. Square-off in the ring against heavy-weight boxer Mike Tyson for an entire minute. There are major health risks that come with checking this off my bucket list, including a bitten earlobe, the loss of all my teeth, or death. If I come out alive, I will live to tell a great story.
9. Witness a Guilford championship. By coming to Guilford in 2006, I just missed golf’s national championship run in 2005 – Guilford’s last championship. Hopefully the wait before the next Guilford team wins a championship will not be too much longer.
10. Play a tennis match on center court at Wimbledon in London, England. There is so much history behind the 142-year-old grass courts at Wimbledon. I would love to take the same steps, shots, volleys and serves as tennis greats.
When I die, I want to be cremated, so that my son or daughter, wife or friend, can dump my ashes onto the field of Yankees Stadium during a World Series game.
These are the places, sounds, people, and events that make up the sports world. I may not be able to experience all of them, but it would be worth every penny, or bone-jarring blow to the head, to cross all ten off this list.