Sports

Press box is a great place to be

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OKLAHOMA CITY — I like to think the dateline is a perfect place to start this story, which really goes back 20 years and one state to the right. Rodman and I were knocking back a few beers in a saloon called Rogers Recreation Hall, Dickson Street, downtown (as it were) Fayetteville, Ark.

Rodman was a Jersey guy, 10 years older than me by birth certificate, significantly more if you factor in the places he had seen and the things he had done in that extra decade. We took different pathways to the Northwest Arkansas Times, but here we were, draining $2.50 pitchers of Pabst, putting the world to bed.

I was 25 and having a hell of a time covering Southeastern Conference football, exploring places like Oxford, Miss., and Tuscaloosa, Ala., and Knoxville, Tenn. Pay? Made enough to cover those $2.50 pitchers and the rent, and what more do you need when you’re 25?

“I give you six more months,” Rodman said.

“To live? That’s pessimistic,” I said.

“No. Here. Arkansas. The South. You can’t let too much time get away from you, you know. Twenty-five becomes 35 pretty damn quick, take it from me. And I suspect it becomes 45 even faster.”

“Cheap beer makes you extra depressing,” I said.

“Don’t forget something,” he said. “You’re living this dream for two, not just one. I’m never getting to New York. You still might.”

“I’ve fallen in with bad company,” I said, quoting a movie line I was especially fond of at the time.

“Six months,” he said.

He was right. I lasted six more months before I got myself good and fired from the Northwest Arkansas Times, before I recognized my shortcomings as a sports editor a few seconds after it was recognized for me by my bosses. Rodman took me out that night, picked up the tab, said: “Now get going.”

I’ve thought of that time a lot lately, for reasons both melancholy and meaningful. Rodman died last year, after heroically shoe-horning about 80 or 90 years of life into 55 years of living. He was a sporting iconoclast, a Packers football fan, a Giants baseball fan and a Celtics fan despite growing up in neighborhoods lousy with Jets and Yankees and Knicks fans. The day he died, the Giants and Packers were defending champions. The Celtics were runners-up.

The last time I talked to him, a few months before, he said: “I didn’t get a lot right in my life. But I got sports right.”

Tomorrow will be 10 years to the day when Greg Gallo, the longtime boss of the sports department here, offered me the job to write columns for The Post. I immediately made two calls when that bit of news came in: my father, who had brought The Post home on the LIRR for years, who had been the first one to point at a mystical place in back of home plate at Shea Stadium and said: “That’s a press box. That’s where the sportswriters work.” He started the whole thing then and there.

Then I called Rodman.

“Well,” I said. “We got the job.”

“Four columns a week?” he said, by way of congratulations. “What do you do with the other 36 hours?”

I could list the memories I’ve accrued these past 10 years, but I would need three or four extra pages to get through them all. Know this: The job was a blast the day I started, and exponentially more fun now. I feel like we’ve shared some awfully good stories together, you and I. I hope I’m privileged to keep the ride going for years to come. Because you don’t need to be my friend Rodman to know he was on to something.

Not everything in this life is always as it should be. But sports, on the whole, is one of them.

Whack Back at Vac

John Siciliano: Carmelo Anthony’s wax figure at Madame Tussauds is so lifelike. You can’t get the ball out of his hands.

Vac: Maybe the Knicks can sign Raul Ibanez to sub in for him once in a while this year.

@AnthonyD80: Bill Laimbeer was named the Liberty’s GM and coach? Does the Garden hire anyone without a direct association to Zeke Thomas?

@MikeVacc: I am very much looking forward to the announcement of Bobby Knight, media relations director.

Scott Stenzler: As a 42-year-old Islanders fan who grew up in Syosset, it’s a sad day for those of us who still live nearby and now can drive 15 minutes with my kids to a game, but it would have been a lot sadder if they went to K.C. or Quebec. They say change is good, I guess time will tell.

Vac: As melancholy as I am about the Islanders, I’m much sadder about the fact that without an arena, Long Island will be bypassed by the circus, the Globetrotters, the NCAA Tournament and by the world’s top music acts. I can’t imagine growing up without all of those things nearby.

Tom Cooney: As a Jets fan it goes something like this: They lose and it is 60 minutes of absolute nauseating torture. They win and it’s 56 minutes.

Vac:
It is remarkable to think about just how many games through the years the Jets have lost that looked — and felt — exactly like that funhouse ride in New England last week.

Vac’s Whacks

I Couldn’t have been the only one at the Coliseum the other night who was disappointed they didn’t go all-the-way with the ABA throwback genre and break out a red, white and blue ball. It would have killed them to use one for a quarter?

* As teammate Bart Hubbuch pointed out the other day: It’s hysterical that Dolphins players gladly went on the record knocking Aaron Maybin, calling him out as a “joke” among other things … but they all insisted on remaining as anonymous as confidential informants when talking about LaRon Landry. Probably for the same reasons CIs do.

* Which comeback was more surprising: Derek Jeter playing like a kid again at 38 after the struggles of 2010 and ’11, or Ben Affleck going 3-for-3 as a director now that “Argo” has joined “Gone Baby Gone” and “The Town” as instant classics after Ben the actor tortured us with “Gigli” and “Jersey Girl”?

* Anyone with a taste for old movies and the current New York Giants had to immediately conjure the money line from “The Cincinnati Kid” last week, Eli-as-Edward G. Robinson-as-Lancey Howard telling RG3-as-Steve McQueen-as-Cincinnati: “You’re good, kid, but as long as I’m around, you’re only second-best.”