A fan’s notes Keeping an eye on the ball BY CHIP YOUNG

A sports column in an alternative paper was somewhat of an anomaly 25 years ago. I never attempted to make it sports in the typical vein, but rather looking at the sweaty sciences with a jaded and simultaneously absurdist and hopefully humorous viewpoint. This approach had served well with the good, dope-addled young adults who listened to WBCN in its early ’70s Boston heyday, where "On the Ball & Off the Wall" was first introduced to the audience on Charles Laquidara’s top-rated The Big Mattress. So making fun of the New York Mets’ Cleon Jones feeling a bit under the weather (hungover?) and parking the tiger into his mitt while in the outfield during the World Series fit right in.

Not that Little Rhody — the mobsters-and-lobsters domain, as my friends Phillipe and Jorge dubbed the Ocean State, with its motto of "What are you, an asshole?" — ever lacked for color or story content. The long-running drama that is the Boston Red Sox never failed to produce the full range of emotions — anger, frustration, elation, and heartbreak. My favorite story concerning how telling the blow of the famed error by the BoSox’ Billy Buckner was occurred 10 years after the event. I had watched the 1986 game with a packed (and screaming) house at the old Edgewood Café in Cranston. Ten years later, I sat down with friends to eat at Terminesi’s, the old haunt in Narragansett. Taking my order last, the waitress asked, "What would you like, Chip?" Not recognizing her a bit, I asked how she knew my name. "I waited on you at the Edgewood the night Buckner made the error," she replied. Not an easily forgotten moment.

Another thread running through area sports has been Providence College basketball. To this day, my friends and I amuse ourselves when having to wait in line anywhere by saying loudly, "Hey, there’s Ernie D!" Without fail, everyone immediately begins looking around for the patron saint of Friars hoops. PC too has given locals their share of joy and tears in the past 25 years. In 1987, Reverend Rick Pitino and his Traveling Magic Show had their famous run to the Final Four with physically-reborn Billy "The Kid" Donovan, but not before Pitino found out his young son had died when a state trooper pulled the PC team bus over on Route 95 to tell him as they returned from the Big East tournament after defeating Georgetown. The Friars gave it other good shots in the postseason under coaches Rick Barnes and Pete Gillen, but Pitino had the magic. And when he left Our Little Towne for the Knicks, the emotion of leaving Rhode Island was so traumatic for his wife that when the limo took them to New York to sign with the NBA team, she opened the door and threw up right in front of Madison Square Garden.

It has only been lately that the Patriots have really captured the public’s imagine — starting, of course, when they made Elvis-in-a-Revolutionary War hat their logo. The Super Bowl win in 2002 was one the most exciting in the game’s history. But even that couldn’t top the Snow Bowl overtime win against Oakland, with the infamous negated fumble by Brady that would have cost the Pats the game and Adam Vinatieri’s field goal through a blizzard that might be the best kick in NFL history. It was only right to have a Patriots player reverting to making snow angels in the end zone after another Vinatieri kick won the game in OT, and it was repeated on dry Astroturf after Adam again wrapped it up against St. Louis in the New Orleans Superdome. Add to that growing rivalries with Miami, the NY Jets, and Buffalo through both tough competition and soap opera player and coach moves, and the Patriots now rank second only to the Red Sox for local fan fever.

While URI has started to get its act together in basketball and with a new arena in Kingston, and even Brown has had a great season on the court, others have bitten the dust or disappointed. No one cares about the Boston Bruins anymore except total diehards, but the Gallery Gods and the beer-and-seat smell of the old Boston Garden have long gone. So have the likes of Larry Bird, Kevin McHale, Chief Parish, "Don’t Call Me Cornbread" Maxwell, and the rest of the Boston Celtics crew who made the 1980s a wonderful ride. Larry Legend was one of the top three most popular athletes to play in the Boston area. One of the nicest stories about Bird was when someone finally asked him why he stared at the rafters in the Garden during the national anthem, he explained he was looking at the retired Number Four banner hanging there in honor of Bobby Orr (along with Ted Williams, the third part of the toast of Beantown triumvirate), and it inspired him. Orr was appropriately amazed and unabashedly flattered. Unfortunately, Paul Pierce and company will never be able to capture fans’ hearts like the Bird brigade did.

Another goner is soccer. First it was the New England Tea Men and the North American Soccer League flaming out, and now the fledgling women’s pro league has shut down. Alexi Lalas of Major League Soccer’s initial New England Revolution crew was a curiosity, but the league’s level of play is still disappointing, despite the great support the team gets from knowledgeable ethnic fans and the suburban soccer moms and dads and their kiddies. But the fact that the stadium played host to a number of games in the World Cup could not have been more thrilling. Perhaps my most memorable moment was at the beginning of the South Korea-Bolivia game, a fairly meaningless contest. Outside, Bolivian and Korean fans took turns taking smiling photos together, shaking hands and even managing to chat a bit (in Esperanto, no doubt). And just at the start of the Bolivian national anthem, a young Bolivian man dressed entirely in a condor suit, with actual feathers and a bird-like hood atop his head, stood up on a wall in front of the end zone seats, spread his wings, and looked up into the sky throughout the entire song. Fortunately a stadium cameraman caught him and projected Condor Man onto the big screen for the entire crowd to see, which gave him and all the happy fans a huge ovation, and it brought tears to my eyes.

Condor Man and Larry Bird. Number Four, Bobby Orr. Billy Buck, you suck. And Billy the Kid, who could do no wrong. Adam V. and Ernie D. That’s what "On the Ball & Off the Wall" has been about for years. Laughter and low spots, heaven and hell. Wouldn’t have missed it for the world.