Over the years, I’ve written a few things about the extraordinary “The Giants Win The Pennant!” game I attended as a high schooler in 1951. The one that ended with Bobby Thomson’s dramatic homerun.
I’ve also been interviewed a few times. Here are links to these stories.
A RECENT 2026 INTERVIEW ON NPR
https://one.npr.org/?sharedMediaId=nx-s1-5978962:nx-s1-9950675
MY ARTICLE IN THE SUNDAY NY TIMES IN 2021
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/30/nyregion/70-years-later-bobby-thomsons-homer-still-hurts.html
A 2021 AARP ARTICLE THAT INCLUDES MY BOBBY THOMSON RECOLLECTIONS
https://www.aarp.org/events-history/witnesses-to-history/
A CBS TV SEGMENT IN WHICH I RECALL THE EVENTS OF OCT 3, 1951
https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=468810457566628
AND HERE’S A NEW ONE
It’s a look at four big sporting events that have had a big impact on my life--Bobby Thomson, the first 5-boro NYC Marathon, the post 9-11 NYC Marathon of 2001, and the recent NY Knicks victory in the NBA basketball championships. Strangely enough, these events have occurred at exact 25-year intervals.
So naturally this essay is titled “Don’t Call Me Einstein.” What else?
Don’t Call Me Einstein
A lifelong New York sports fan has noticed a peculiar regularity to the city’s most historic and uplifting sporting days
By George A. Hirsch
Seventy-five years ago, I cut classes at New Rochelle High to attend the famous Giants-Dodgers playoff game of 1951. I figured that one missed day wouldn’t derail my education.
Now, in retrospect, I see that I gained a math lesson beginning that October 3. The four biggest sports events of my life have occurred at precise 25-year intervals.
The most recent of course was the New York Knicks’ victory last June in the NBA Finals. I felt buoyed after the Knicks won the first two games in San Antonio.
But Game 4 in Madison Square Garden! Damn, that was a tough trial. With the Knicks trailing by 27 points in the first half, I couldn’t stand to watch much more.
I turned to my three young grandchildren visiting from Sri Lanka. They had no understanding of basketball, so I explained a few of the finer points, particularly how a fearsome San Antonio player named “Wemby” was such a dominant force at both ends of the court.
The kids looked up at me glassy-eyed, then returned to their drawing and games. I focused on the screen again, hoping the carnage wouldn’t get worse in the game’s second half.
Soon, a miracle began to unfold, courtesy of Jalen Brunson and finally OG Anunoby. I could scarcely believe what I was seeing.
Or that it would repeat itself three days later in Game 5. Along with so many other New Yorkers from all parts of the city, I celebrated the Knicks' first NBA Championship in 53 years. Fireworks exploded and music blared outside of my Harlem apartment.
It took too long, but it felt, oh, so good.
NEW YORK CITY’S DARKEST DAY
Twenty-five years earlier, New York suffered its darkest day: September 11, 2001. I had arrived at the Runner's World office on Third Avenue just as we got word of explosions at the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers. We all rushed to the TV in the conference room. No one could fully comprehend what was happening.
The disbelief continued for several days of grit, dust, tragedy, and anger. Then it pivoted strongly to resilience.
New York had endured plenty of dark times in its more than three centuries. We would not be defeated by brazen terrorism. Five days later, my wife, Shay, and I ran the Philadelphia Half Marathon with thousands of others.
However, Philly was not New York, and the fate of that fall’s New York City Marathon couldn’t be decided quickly. The city’s first responders faced an exhausting cleanup and security effort.
But you could feel the momentum build. Everyone wanted to stage an event that would symbolize New York City’s resolve and determination. Mayor Rudy Giuliani and the New York Road Runners joined together in a “United We Run” campaign, and that’s exactly what happened on Sunday morning, November 4.
Before the start, my friend and Road Runners president Allan Steinfeld told runners: “When you look down, you won’t see the World Trade Center. You’ll see a hole there, and feel that hole in your heart. Then you’re going to start running.” And they were off, more than 25,000 strong, from all parts of the world, determined to weave 26.2 miles through the city’s five boroughs to the finish in Central Park.
Why? Because runners run, and cities survive tragedies, and both need each other.
LET’S JUMP BACK ANOTHER 25 YEARS
A quarter century before September 11—you see, it’s becoming a mathematical law—New York hosted its first five-borough marathon in 1976. Before then, the marathon had been held six times inside the hilly confines of Central Park itself.
Then a mix of visionary New Yorkers joined together to launch an entirely new concept in running. The sport had its roots in grassy British cross-country courses, or rural routes like the Boston Marathon’s early miles through the leafy villages of Hopkinton and Ashland.
The promoters included African-American legend Ted Corbitt, an Olympic marathoner and easily the city’s most knowledgeable runner, and Fred Lebow, a holocaust survivor who made “knockoffs” in the garment district. They drew in George Spitz, a gadfly New Yorker and running evangelist. Soon Manhattan borough president Percy Sutton jumped on board with his influence and contacts. He got the civic minded real estate developers Lew and Jack Rudin to put up $25,000.
When Sutton, Lebow and I met with Mayor Abe Beame to discuss the project, he needed something to create excitement and uplift a city on the brink of bankruptcy with sky high crime rates. So a marathon through the five boroughs along with the Tall Ships to celebrate the bicentennial seemed to be a good idea.
At the time, I was publishing New Times magazine, running marathons myself, and becoming friends with America’s two most famous runners, Frank Shorter and Bill Rodgers. I invited them both to compete in the new event, which gave the city’s newspapers, radio stations, and TV outlets something to cover.
Not that everyone thought this was a great idea. Neil Amdur, then a New York Times reporter and later the sports editor, remembers that many New Yorkers chuckled sarcastically over the idea that the city could close five bridges and 300 intersections. Their view: “Oh, yeah. Right.”
Rodgers, smarting from his injury-riddled 40th-place finish in that summer’s Montreal Olympics, pulled away from Shorter 18 miles into the marathon, and won in a fast 2:10:10. He would win New York three more times to go with his four Boston Marathon wins, becoming the Everyman face of American running. He recalls that the five-borough 1976 race “was kind of a gamble, but what the sport needed. It changed marathoning forever.”
Far behind Rodgers and Shorter on my way to a 2:49 finish, I marveled at how this race differed from my two previous Boston Marathons. This was truly an urban experience, full of steel, brick, concrete, and waves of distinctive spectators, colors, and languages in each neighborhood.
I didn’t realize it then, but the urban marathon was about to become the biggest development in the history of running. It became a global force that continues unabated today, with hundreds of cities staging big marathons every year.
But I recognized one thing for sure. New York and New Yorkers loved the marathon, which celebrates both human potential and urban vigor. And it all started 50 years ago with that first five-borough race.
“THE GIANTS WIN THE PENNANT! THE GIANTS WIN THE PENNANT!”
In 1951, after driving to the Polo Grounds in my 1937 Plymouth with a rumbleseat, my buddies Greg Dillion, Steve Goddard, Buster Grossman and I paid our $1.55 ticket price and rushed to find good grandstand seats. Below us, we quickly spotted our heroes in batting practice: Duke Snider, Willie Mays, Carl Furillo, Jackie Robinson.
The game developed into a pitching duel between the Dodgers’ Don “Newk” Newcombe and the Giants’ Sal “the Barber” Maglie. At the end of seven innings, the score was tied at 1-1. We ignored the hard, wooden edge of our seats, as the tension kept rising.
Maglie weakened in the eighth, and the Dodgers scored three runs to take a 4-1 lead. Both teams had already won one game in the best-of-three elimination series. The Giants now tottered on the brink.
As the home team, the Giants had a last chance in the bottom of the ninth, and they mounted a rally. First, Alvin Dark raced home on a Whitey Lockman double down the left-field line.
Still, they trailed by two when Ralph Branca was brought in to face Bobby Thomson. Branca’s first pitch hit the inside corner. Thomson didn’t move.
Strike one. It was 3:58 in the afternoon, and a deep hush fell over the crowd.
The next pitch never passed home plate. Thomson jumped on it and hit a screamer to deep left. Dodgers outfielder Andy Pafko dashed after the ball but ran out of space, as it dropped into the lower deck.
“The Giants win the pennant. The Giants win the pennant.” Radio announcer Russ Hodges didn’t stop at two verses. He repeated his refrain five times.
Newspapers called Thomson’s homer “The Shot Heard ’Round the World,” and thus it has been known ever since.
As a Dodgers fan, truth be told, I was crushed by the sudden turnaround, just as I was exhilarated 75 years later by the 2026 Knicks and their comeback heroics.
That’s life as a big sports fan. We all face many days of gloom and disappointment, along with occasional days of rapture.
We now also know, or at least so it seems to me, that our most glorious and captivating days come every 25 years.
That means a big sports event is due in 2051. Since I’m 92 now, I won’t be around then. But it’s sure fun to wonder what surprises and amazement it will bring.
George A. Hirsch, chairman emeritus of New York Road Runners, is a founder of the five-borough New York City Marathon and the founding publisher of New York magazine.
