Salute to Sports Heroes
(The Washington Post). In Washington, DC, a town dominated by monuments and steeped in the culture of politics, it seems ironic to discover a museum devoid of formerly revered and mostly long-forgotten government figures.
But that’s exactly what former Wizard’s owner Abe Polin and his associates had in mind when they envisioned and eventually built the only all sports archives in the country devoted exclusively to accomplishment of the athlete.
At the MCI National Sports Gallery, the icons are baseball heroes, hockey greats, football stars and other legends of the sports world whose only vestige of power was a bat, a puck, or a pigskin.
The gallery whisks visitors from the provincial hardball world of politics into a field of dreams where sluggers with magical names like Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams battled strike-out kings such as Walter Johnson and Sandy Koufax.
The athletes showcased at the MCI center were not simply champions, but role models whose exploits on the playing field bookmarked simpler times, real or imagined, invariably scented with the fresh aroma of hot dogs and relish, and redolent with images of the day. The turn-of-the-century player pianos, for example, characterized the first "world series" in 1903 between the Pittsburg Pirates and the Boston Pilgrims (later know as the Red Sox), along with derby hats, front porch swings, horse-drawn wagons, handlebar mustaches and chewing tobacco. That year, 36-year-old Cy Young, Boston’s 28-game winner, faced down Charles "Deacon" Phillippe. Philippe started five of the eight games, eventually tired, and Boston went on to win. Today, only memories remain, stoked by rare, nostalgic mementoes such as the 1903 series scorecard on display at the museum.
In recent years, baseball and other sports have lost their luster, diminished by soaring salaries, frequent labor disputes and hot-headed, ungrateful players so obsessed with their own self-importance that they refused to sign autographs for little starry-eyed admirers without charging them. The refreshing grace and style of the inimitable Cal Ripken, baseball’s great class act, did much to win back disgusted fans just as the sport once known as "our national pastime" seemed to reach a nadir. But the unforgettable home run race between Mark McGwire of the St. Louis Cardinals and Sammy Sosa of the Chico Cubs in the summer of ’98 perhaps did the most to get baseball back in sync with its storied past. For generations of fans, that epic battle signified a new beginning. It wrested away center stage from the overpaid blowhards who had robbed the game of its innocence, reviving memories of truly great ambassadors such as "Joltin’ Joe" DiMaggio, Williams and Koufax. It brought us back to our real roots, to a time when grace and style really counted for something.
The MCI Gallery has showcased that resurgence, in part by displaying many of McGwire’s home run balls before they were sold at auction. The gallery serves as a clearinghouse for these and other memories. It is a hallmark to heroes, where real players of yesteryear once again come tantalizingly alive, the first and only national sports museum in the United States that includes both a permanent collection and rare sports artifacts borrowed from the sports Halls fo Fame, private collectors and museums from around the country. Some featured items include:
- • A Brown and Bigelow calendar print featuring Lou Gehrig.
- • The skates worn by Brian Boitano in 1988 when he won the Olympic gold medal.
- • The football thrown by Joe Montano for his final touchdown pass.
- • A signed jersey worn by Michael Jordan during a game in 1989.
- • A program featuring the championship 1898 Baltimore Orioles.
- • The rare T-206 Honus Wagner tobacco baseball card.
- • A baseball signed by Babe Ruth.
- • The heavyweight championship belt given by the National Sporting Club of England to St.Louis.
- • A vintage decal bat featuring Shoeless Joe Jackson.
- • A 1924 Helen Wills Boody statue of Enid Fister.
- • The ball used by Wilt Chamberlain in 1968 when he became the first NBA player to score 25,000 points.
- • The "Float like a Butterfly, Sting Like a Bee" championship robe from Muhammad Ali.
