Pioneer Spirit

When polo was popular on Long Island, Tommy Hitchcock Jr. of Sands Point was the Babe Ruth of his sport. (Nassau County Museum Collection)

THERE ONCE WAS a horse race on Long Island bigger than the Kentucky Derby. It happened in 1823 and one historian wrote that it ``symbolized the onset of modern sport.'' There once was an automobile race on Long Island that outranked -- in fact, predated -- the Indianapolis 500. There once was a championship prize fight here, a storied affair in the bare-knuckle days that took 45 rounds and, in mid-fight, was moved 20 miles away when a rising tide flooded the outdoor ring.

The country's first professional black baseball team called Long Island home. So did the first women's golf championship. And polo tournaments important enough to attract the future King of England as a spectator. And the reigning national bowling champion.

The stud horse imported from England who fathered the harness racing breed and whose bloodlines trace to many of the world's most famous thoroughbreds (including Secretariat) lived, worked, died and was buried on Long Island. Major international rifle competitions were here, too.

There once was a championship ice hockey team on Long Island. Long, long ago. 1983. What is ancient history to some, of course, is like yesterday to others. In the end, Long Island's place in sports annals -- like Long Island's role in America -- is significant, and surprisingly rich.

Three of the nation's sports giants -- football's Jim Brown (Manhasset), baseball's Carl Yastrzemski (Bridgehampton) and basketball's Julius Erving (Roosevelt) -- grew up on Long Island, as did the consummate Olympian Al Oerter (New Hyde Park), four times a discus gold medalist while working at his real job as head of computer programing at Grumman.

And beyond them, the list of Long Island-raised sports stars includes basketball's Ernie Vanderweghe, Art Heyman, Larry Brown, Randy Smith, Mitch Kupchak, Clarence (Foots) Walker and Jeff Ruland; football's Ed Danowski (who went from Riverhead to the famous Giants ``sneakers game'' of the 1930s), Matt Snell, John Mackey, John Niland, Vinny Testaverde, Boomer Esiason, Lyle Alzado and Jumbo Elliott; baseball's Craig Biggio, Paul Gibson, Pete Harnisch, Tom Veryzer and Frank Viola; tennis' John McEnroe, golf's George Burns III and track and field's Ray Barbuti, a 1928 Olympic gold medalist. The first woman to play in a men's professional basketball game, Nancy Lieberman, was a Long Islander (Far Rockaway). The first woman to officially win the Boston and New York Marathons, Nina Kuscsik, was a Long Islander (Huntington Station). The man who prompted anti-goaltending legislation in basketball, High Pockets Harry Boykoff, played at St. John's University. Janet Guthrie, the first woman to drive in the Indy 500, lived in Oceanside. Charles Atlas, the man who marketed muscles to 98-pound weaklings, lived in Point Lookout. The great speedboat racer Guy Lombardo, known to some as a band leader, lived in Freeport.

What exists now as the sporting scene here reflects, as it always has, the Island itself. Once it was a rich man's playground for polo, auto racing and fox hunts. Then it became a burgeoning post-war, working-man's neighborhood with a taste for softball, bowling and high school sports. Eventually, this sprawling suburb became home to youth soccer leagues, school teams that at last began to include girls two decades ago, a variety of college sports and the only big-time professional team east of the Nassau-Queens border, the once-mighty-but-now-struggling New York Islanders of the National Hockey League. The Islanders, it turns out, sum up so much of the Island's sports evolution. Though only 25 years old, and originally stocked entirely with Outsiders in a time when NHL games featured ``our Canadians'' against ``their Canadians,'' the Islanders echo the observation of poet/novelist Robert Penn Warren: ``History is all explained by geography.''

They were named the ``New York Islanders'' rather than the ``Long Island (Somethings)'' because of the area's ongoing, nagging suspicion that ``New York'' better graces a marquee. Even in their glory years as North America's most efficient professional sports franchise in winning four consecutive NHL championships (1980-83), the Islanders remained in the shadow of New York City. Their players often grumbled that they got neither the recognition nor the endorsement opportunities of Manhattan-based players. This was true. But so is the fact that Long Island's proximity to New York, combined with the Island's physical features, defined its fairly exalted place in the world of sports from the beginning.

The flat, open Hempstead Plains were perfect for America's first horse racing course, laid out in 1665 by the British governor of New York, Col. Richard Nicolls, and racing became the nation's first spectator sport even before there was a nation. Long Island Sound was a natural for yachting, and by 1911 I.E. Smith of Port Washington was building the wildly popular ``Star'' class boat for racing.

There was room on Long Island for affluent New York sportsmen to indulge their passions. Railroad heir William K. Vanderbilt Jr. and publishing boss E.S. Mead had a golf course built in Southampton in 1889; in 1892, it became the first 18-hole course in the country. By 1904, Vanderbilt turned his energies to fast cars, setting the world speed record of 92.80 miles per hour and founding the country's first automobile road race. When fatal accidents resulted and public officials banned the race on public roads, Vanderbilt constructed America's first motor parkway and staged his famous Cup races on that. August Belmont and his fellow Meadow Brook Club members brought polo to Westbury at the turn of the 20th Century; within 25 years, Long Island had become the world's polo capital.

Going back to the earliest accounts of Long Island life makes it obvious that, among original settlers, there was little time for fun and games, and the arrival of the Puritan ethic from Europe reinforced a belief during colonial days against any ``mispense of time'' in frivolous play. The Old World types who settled these shores were not representatives of the leisure class. ``Play had to be justified in most instances by a real or fancied relation to some sterner duty,'' John Allen Krout wrote in ``The Pageant of America.''

So when Col. Nicolls proposed the country's first horse race in Hempstead in the 1660s, his stated intention was ``not so much for the divertisement of youth as for encouraging the bettering of the breed of horse which, through great neglect, has been impaired.'' Good horses, in fact, were essential as primary sources of transportation and labor until the machine age. But in his 1940 book, ``A History of Recreation/America Learns to Play,'' Foster Rhea Dulles noted that some of the colonial dislike of sports had its roots in a resentment for the Europe's well-to-do -- not for Puritanical reasons. And it wasn't long before ``the English love of games and sport began to reassert itself in the colonies,'' according to Dulles.

Melvin Adelman ran with that ball in his 1986 book, ``A Sporting Time/New York City and the Rise of Modern Athletics.'' As the nation's wealthiest and most populated city during the 19th Century, Adelman wrote, ``New York City was the first urban area to feel the impact of modernizing influences . . . The characteristics associated with modern athletics in America initially appeared in New York; hence, the city set the tone and direction for the development of sports nationally.''

Sports historians agree that, until the 19th Century, the only real sport widely popular in the fledgling new country was horse racing, with Long Island as its seat. Nicolls' Hempstead track was in use for 100 years, followed by a series of new tracks in present-day Nassau and Queens counties, leading to the opening in 1821 of the celebrated Union Course just west of Jamaica. It was at the Union Course, on May 27, 1823, that Long Island-bred Eclipse beat a North Carolina horse named Sir Henry in a North-vs.-South match race that Adelman saw as ``the onset of modern sport . . . the most important horse race ever run in America . . . the birth of a new era in American sports.'' A reported 50,000 spectators witnessed the event, which made Eclipse the first thoroughbred superstar.

To cover the race, the New York Post printed a special edition, believed to be the first sports extra in American journalism. And Eclipse then became the chief transmitter of the bloodlines of Messenger, horse racing's ``great progenitor'' -- even Man o' War and Secretariat were related to Messenger -- who died in 1808 and whose ashes lie now in the Matinecock section of Locust Valley. The grandfather of Eclipse, Messenger also was great-grandfather to trotting's first superstar, Lady Suffolk, who was foaled in Smithtown in 1833 and began a 15-year racing career in Babylon.

As the vacant lot beyond New York City's buildings, Long Island continued to be home to other noteworthy firsts in sports, not the least of which came on July 20, 1858, at the Fashion Race Course in Queens. Admission (50 cents) was charged for the first time at a baseball game featuring all-star teams from New York City and Brooklyn.

Historian Krout wrote that, while British sport primarily had belonged to the upper classes, ``in America the appearance of baseball at the very beginning of the athletic era signified a mass movement affecting all groups in the population.'' As daily life evolved to a point where the growing middle class had a bit of leisure time, baseball was widely played in the mid-1800s; across Long Island, gentlemen farmers, shopkeepers, stockbrokers and lawyers began to frolic in open fields while some of the townfolk idly watched.

There was no sliding into bases then (or the players would be sternly warned about poor sportsmanship). No stealing. No bunting. No arguing with the umpire in his black top hat, long-sleeved white shirt, black vest and bow tie. No cursing (or players would be fined a weighty 25 cents).

There were shouts of ``well struck!'' when a striker, wielding a wooden bat longer and less tapered than more modern players would come to know, sent the ball of stitched, tanned cowhide on a high arc into the field. There were calls of ``Huzzah! Huzzah!'' Organized teams were everywhere, and shortly after the Civil War, semi-professional and professional teams materialized.

According to Frank Menke's 1947 ``Encyclopedia of Sports,'' the first published mention of the game of baseball appeared in the New York Sunday Mercury in April of 1853; the brief account mentioned baseball as a comparatively new game that was attracting quite a few followers. (When Long Island's first public college was opened in Farmingdale in 1912, the first sports team it fielded played baseball.)

In the 1880s, waiters and busboys at the new Argyle resort hotel in Babylon formed the first all-black pro baseball team. Pitcher Shep Trusty and power hitter Sol White were stars of the team organized by Frank Thompson, the hotel's headwaiter, who called them the Cuban Giants because, at the time, Latino players were perceived to be more acceptable to the general public than blacks.

Similar incidents of breakthroughs occasionally popped up in Long Island sports: In 1895, the first women's golf competition was staged at the original Meadow Brook Club in Hempstead. Thirteen ``ladies'' played 18 holes, with Mrs. Charles S. Brown, wife of a Shinnecock Hills Club member, winning. (The New York Times saw it as ``one of the gayest social events'' and described the contestants' ``skirts to their ankles, long-sleeved blouses with high starch collars, bow ties and straw boards.'') The next year, when the U.S. Open was held at Shinnecock Hills, one John Shippen -- whose father was black and whose mother was a Shinnecock Indian -- tied for fifth place. A half-century later, Glen Cove native Chester Pierce became the first black believed to compete against a white college in the South when he and his Harvard football teammates lost to the University of Virginia in Charlottesville on Oct. 11, 1947.

Other Long Island sports originals: The first mention of a rowing race in the United States was in 1811, when a New York boat called the ``Knickerbocker'' beat a boat from Long Island named ``Invincible.'' In 1905, when the first of several annual cross-country tours were inaugurated to test the durability of new automobiles, one of the leading contestants was a Mrs. Joan Newton Cuneo of Long Island. When the Amateur Athletic Union initiated gymnastics competitions in 1931, one of the early national champions was Long Islander Thera Steppich in 1935.

Krout, in the ``Pageant of America,'' noted the construction of rifle ranges at Creedmore in Queens, where major competitions began in 1873, when a staggering crowd of 100,000 was said to have attended. In 1874, there was a ``thrilling duel'' between U.S. and Irish teams in which ``the Irish used muzzle-loaders while the Americans -- Bodine, Dakin, Fulton, Gildersleeve, Hepburn and Yale -- all shot with breechloaders, which proved quite as effective as the older type of rifle.''

Just as thrilling, apparently, was the championship middleweight boxing match on Dec. 13, 1887, which began in Sands Point and finished 45 rounds later, and 20 miles away, after a rising tide flooded the ring and forced fighters, handlers and a small knot of furtive spectators to relocate. The whole enterprise was illegal, so a tugboat carrying the fighters and their followers had left New York under cover of night and set up a roped ring on Long Island's North Shore just after sunrise the next morning. Challenger Johnny Reagan had been matched against Irish-born champ John Kelly, who fought under the name Jack Dempsey (no relation) and was known as ``The Nonpareil.''

A dramatically written report of the fight in Ring magazine years later -- its byline was, simply, ``The Sportsman'' -- told of snow and rain and water that rose to the boxers' knees; of Dempsey being spiked by Reagan's illegal shoes; of a decision after the eighth round to move the entire party back to the tug and, two hours later, they landed at an abandoned dock to resume the bare-knuckled contest on higher ground. Dempsey eventually retained his title after an hour and 13 minutes of actual fighting. A 1955 article in ``For Men Only'' magazine added more outrageous detail: Snow being shoveled from the ring; Dempsey's handlers burning his carriage near his corner to keep him warm; and, with Reagan's cornermen at last throwing in the towel, the ice-stiffened cloth hitting Reagan in the back of the neck, taking him down a final time! A bit more genteel were the croquet games among the Gold Coast's high society shortly after the turn of the century. On the great estates of railroad heir Averell Harriman and New York newspaper publisher Herbert Bayard Swope, intensely played croquet tournaments were integral elements of parties so extravagant they inspired F. Scott Fitzgerald -- then living in the neighborhood -- to write ``The Great Gatsby.''

Just as much a creation of the rich, but far more public, were the Vanderbilt Cup auto races, which began with protests from farmers and residents in 1904, drew as many as 250,000 spectators in 1906, and were gone by 1911. The fascination -- and fear -- of automobiles and unprecedented speed caused posters to appear before the Cup races, warning ``all persons'' to keep children off the roads, dogs chained and fowl locked up. Still, the race course, a triangular path on public roads that began and ended in present-day Levittown, was in places overrun by curious spectators, leading to the death of a young boy.

The New York Times called the '06 race ``the most thrilling sporting event ever witnessed in America'' -- not because of winner Louis Wagner's ``nerve'' or the runner-up's ``recklessness''; not because of the closeness of the contest or ``the wonderful speed over a course still soft from recent rains, averaging more than a mile a minute for the entire 297 miles . . .'' Instead, the Times reported, ``The dangers, narrow escapes, the disastrous accidents in the vast crowd were what made the race seem to the crowd the most thrilling event ever seen.''

Tamer blue-blood-inspired entertainment was the polo scene that flourished between the first and second World Wars. There were an estimated 50 polo fields on the Island then, eight of them at the Meadow Brook Club alone, drawing crowds from 20,000 to 45,000 for big matches throughout the 1920s.

Elaborate parties and polo balls preceded and followed important contests, and Rockaway Hunting Club would stage a ``Polo Week'' that often would last two weeks. For a 1924 tournament at Piping Rock club, Great Britain's Prince of Wales was among the spectators and had such a good time that his father, King George V, reportedly forbade him from ever returning to the United States. (Later, of course, the prince had a short reign as King Edward VIII before he abdicated the throne, went through with a scandalous marriage to American Wallis Simpson and returned to the United States.)

On the field, Long Island polo teams dominated the national championships and Sands Point's Tommy Hitchcock Jr. was a star of Babe Ruth's stature and fame. There were newspaper stories of Hitchcock joining youngsters playing street polo on bicycles with cut-down sticks, as Willie Mays would play stickball years later with New York City kids.

A teenage soldier during World War I, Hitchcock signed up again for World War II and was killed, at 44, in a plane crash in England in 1944. So he never returned to a post-war Long Island whose day-to-day life -- and resulting sports landscape -- was changed drastically. Polo, for instance, quickly lost its crowds and its fields. The Meadow Brook Club itself became a casualty to highway development (the Meadowbrook Parkway) that symbolized suburbanization.

Newsday, another new venture in 1940, reflected the altered focus by filling its sports pages with coverage of high school sports, fast-pitch softball, harness racing and bowling. High school football rivalries gave communities, not yet part of an endless suburb, rallying points: Freeport vs. Baldwin, Southold vs. Mattituck, Farmingdale vs. Syosset, Southampton vs. Riverhead, Patchogue vs. Port Jefferson, Long Beach vs. Oceanside. In the late '30s, a reported 12,000 fans watched Freeport play Baldwin.

Illustrative of the new type of Island resident -- working members of the Great Middle Class -- was the new sort of sports star. Instead of polo's Tommy Hitchcock Jr., born to millions and Harvard-educated, there was bowling's Andy Varipapa. He was born in Italy, relocated in Brooklyn at 12 years old without the benefit of knowing English but self-motivated enough to attend day school, night school and correspondence school in his adopted country, and settled in Hempstead to raise a family.

When he was laid off as a machinist at 36, Varipapa sent himself on bowling exhibition tours before the organization of the professional circuit. He had first tried the game while working as a pin-setter in a Brooklyn billiards parlor when he first came to America and ``from the beginning, I found I could always throw strikes,'' he said years later. He won the national championship in 1947, made a short film on bowling tricks and became a star.

Varipapa was a regular at Island bowling alleys into his 90s, rolling the ball lefthanded after an old leg injury caused discomfort when he used his right hand. He died in 1984 at 93 in Huntington, proclaimed ``the greatest bowler in the world.'' By the time of his death, the Long Island sports picture had evolved into its present form.

By 1984, the Island had become ``big league,'' meaning we not only had the NHL Islanders but were wired for cable television and had the ability to watch Atlanta Braves baseball or North Carolina basketball, leaving less attention to local doings.

Hofstra had been unbeaten in football in 1959 and had become only the third college in the nation to install an artificial turf field in 1968, but its 22-year rivalry with Post was dropped in 1979. Adelphi, which had an assistant coach named Al Davis (yes, that Al Davis) in the 1950s, discontinued football in 1971.

That traditional Long Island sport of lacrosse, though still played at a high level both at local colleges and high schools, never had the drawing power of so-called ``major sports.'' And it turns out that, though lacrosse was adapted from the Indian game baggataway and Long Island's original settlers were Indians, lacrosse actually arrived here via the white man, having been picked up from Canadian Indians and brought to New York City not long after the Civil War.

Basketball? No other college team in the area ever caused the fuss that St. John's did, from its original home in Brooklyn (mostly because St. John's had ties to Madison Square Garden dating to the early 1900s). The New York Nets, Long Island's first ``big league'' team, was a vagabond outfit that came from New Jersey in 1968 and eventually went back to Jersey in '77; they traipsed from the drafty Commack Arena to the Island Garden in West Hempstead to the new Nassau Coliseum in '72 -- several months before the Islanders materialized -- but neither Rick Barry nor Julius Erving still was around when the team at last merged into the NBA. Then-owner Roy Boe, in fact, sold Erving to Philadelphia so he could afford the NBA franchise fee.

By 1984, with the modern era settling in, the Islanders had won their fourth consecutive Stanley Cup. The Jets, in spite of moving their home games to from Shea Stadium to New Jersey, had sunk deep roots into their training complex at Hofstra, with many of the players living in Long Beach and Point Lookout, and the Mets were still at Shea. All ``major league.'' All part of the march toward corporate suites and network television. And leaving behind the area's old sports habits.

Roosevelt Raceway's harness heyday had faded away, the old auto racetracks at Freeport and Bridgehampton had disappeared, the Garden City Bowl had lost its big bowling tournaments. The Long Island Ducks minor-league professional hockey team, with delightful owner Al Baron (who ran an electrical supply store in Patchogue), had been pushed aside with the arrival of the Islanders in 1972.

The past was past. There once was a footrace -- in April of 1835 -- to find a man who could run 10 miles in less than an hour at the Union Course horse track in Queens; a Connecticut farmer named Henry Stannard did (59:48). There once was a high school wrestling coach at Mepham, Frank (Sprig) Gardner, with a record of 100 consecutive victories in the 1940s. There once was a powerhouse fast-pitch softball team representing Grumman. (There once was a Grumman.) There once was a fellow known as ``Mile-a-Minute'' Murphy, who raced on a bicycle behind a Long Island Rail Road train to the Babylon station faster than 60 miles per hour. There once was a golfing pioneer, Hewlett's Helen Hicks, who helped establish the women's professional tour. There once was a barnstorming tour of Lindenhurst featuring those far-off major-league heroes, Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig.

It all happened yesterday. Or eons ago. Right here on Long Island.

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