Surprise Endings Are Always Best

Today I have been thinking about endings. Not happy endings or unhappy endings, necessarily, but surprise endings, abrupt endings, unforgettable endings. You know. An ending like the Atlanta Braves have now given us, one that we will be able to recollect from here to eternity.

Here was a plain old game of baseball that should have ended like a Technicolor movie, with “The End” on the screen in large, flowery script.

Credits should have rolled. THE CAST should have come first, beginning with who starred as Sid Bream, who as Terry Pendleton, who as Francisco Cabrera. Somewhere there should have been a Hollywood producer hogging credit for an ending wherein a weak-kneed old slowpoke comes chugging around third base and hook-sliding into home plate, dodging by inches the tag of a chubby catcher, over the objections of a screenwriter who kept insisting, “Oh, come on. Way too corny.”

Bream, the baserunner--lame but game. Pendleton, the leadoff batter--a star in a slump. Cabrera, the last batter--a benchwarmer with one unexpected chance to make history. Mike LaValliere--a catcher with the nickname “Spanky” and the body of Yogi.

My favorite author, Elmore Leonard, once ended one of his novels with the line, and I paraphrase: “Endings, man, they’re the hardest.” Yes, they are. One can attend sporting events for years and years, searching for excitement with everything but a Geiger counter, waiting for that one unparalleled moment that will separate what one is seeing from anything that one has ever seen before.

It takes more than merely the home team winning. Anybody can root, root, root for the home team. There’s no trick to that. For example, the Toronto Blue Jays finally qualifying for the World Series is enough of an event to have Canadians dancing in the streets, but when the final score of the final game is 9-2, the ending, while not being anticlimactic, is hardly going to make one’s eyeballs pop.

Which endings do?

I have seen a few. Most of them, somewhat curiously, have come at events that, until that very moment, had been fairly routine, if not dreary, in nature. The final act of Atlanta’s game with Pittsburgh, as it happens, followed a game that had gone along, inning by inning, with little to recommend it, other than its importance to the winner.

Here are some classic endings, in no particular order. There may be many others, some of which might be better remembered by someone older. Rack your brain for some while you read these:

--Lorenzo Charles. His last-second lay-in gave North Carolina State the national championship of college basketball. And even though others, Michael Jordan of North Carolina and Keith Smart of Indiana among them, have done the same with more difficult shots, the circumstances of Charles’ play--catching an airball and scoring to upset a heavily favored Houston team at the horn--made it somehow more memorable than the rest.

--Kirk Gibson. His ninth-inning homer off Dennis Eckersley won Game 1 of the 1988 World Series, as we well remember. For younger people who couldn’t tell you who Bobby Thomson and Ralph Branca were, or even that Brooklyn once had a team, this seems to be the baseball highlight of choice, even though two Boston Red Sox homers, one by Carlton Fisk and one by Dave Henderson, are equally memorable to some of us.

--Dwight Clark. His leaping end-zone catch of Joe Montana’s pass gave San Francisco only a conference championship, not a Super Bowl championship, over the Dallas Cowboys, so maybe you had to be there. Emotions were running high, the fans at Candlestick Park were on their feet and Tex Schramm was pacing the press box like a maternity ward, praying: “Come on, babies. Come on, babies.” Certain NFL title games have had interesting endings--Bart Starr going behind Jerry Kramer’s block; Scott Norwood missing wide to the right--but this is a football moment that doesn’t go away.

Certainly you can think of a slam-bang hockey game that you saw, or a prizefight or soccer kick, or a magical Olympic moment like the 1980 hockey game at Lake Placid, although don’t forget that this game did not end on one dramatic blow. I actually saw an America’s Cup boat race this year that was decided by one final puff of breeze, and that was suspenseful, even though I never dreamed that I would sit here someday and still be talking to anybody about some boat race.

Jack Nicklaus winning the Masters? No, that was a special event, not a moment. The moment, the great ending, occurred a year later, when Larry Mize stroked the greatest golf shot that I have ever seen in person.

I did not see Atlanta’s baseball game in person, being in the wrong place at the wrong time. But that moment was so vivid, so incredible in its imagery, that for an instant I thought Sid Bream would slide right through my TV tube and into my hotel. This was a moment that will never go away. Treasure it, because there really aren’t that many.