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Pioneer Spirit

Long Island's place in America's sports history is significant and surprisingly rich

By John Jeansonne | Staff Writer

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.)