E-Mail This Article to a Friend Twenty years of change in the wide, wide world of sports BY CHRISTOPHER YOUNG

On Friday, October 8, I against all odds will have celebrated 20 years at the Phoenix. I haven’t been writing "Sporting Eye" for all of those years — that was handled by others on an occasional basis in the pages of the various newspapers — but I have been the gatekeeper of the twice-weekly online column since February 2002, and that’s good for 243 sports-related communiqués.

Who cares, you ask? Not too many, I expect, but 20 years in any job is somewhat noteworthy, I believe, and it gives me the opportunity to look back and see how much has changed in the sporting landscape for athletes and spectators alike during two decades of memorable achievements.

In baseball, the strongest team in 1984 — and any other year, for that matter — was the Tigers. For a lot of us, it’s difficult to remember a time when Detroit regularly had a solid team, given the recent dubious history of the franchise (including last year’s 43-win juggernaut). But the Tigers of ’84 were a powerhouse, winning 35 of their first 40, and they didn’t lose their 30th game until late July. They won 104 games and won the World Series in five over the San Diego Padres. The Padres, of course, were there because of a massive — how shall we say — choke, by the Chicago Cubs (which sounds vaguely familiar 20 years later), who won the first two games of their best-of-five NLCS at Wrigley by a combined 17-2 score, then dropped the next three on the road to blow the pennant. Baseball was made up of just the AL East, AL West, NL East, and NL West back then, and there was obviously no wild card; the Brewers were still an AL team; and there were no teams in Florida (Miami or Tampa), Arizona, or Colorado (yet those four expansion teams subsequently combined to win three world titles in a seven-year period at the turn of the century).

If you’re curious, the Red Sox finished 86-76 that season, 18 games behind Detroit, but two years later would be in the World Series. That was another story altogether. Anyway, bleacher seats at Fenway in ’84 were a ridiculous four bucks, and there were, of course, no Monster seats. There were only three retired numbers: 1 (Bobby Doerr), 4 (Joe Cronin), and 9 (Ted Williams). The stars of that team were Jim Rice, Tony Armas, Dwight Evans, and Wade Boggs. Other notables: Dennis Eckersley was traded during the summer to the Cubs for an underutilized first baseman, Bill Buckner, and went on to a Hall of Fame career in Oakland; an injury-riddled infielder named Jerry Remy played his final season in the bigs; and it was the rookie season for a 21-year-old Texan named Roger Clemens. Interestingly, the only player who was in the Sox’ system at that time who remains a part of the team was a Single-A ballplayer named Curt Schilling.

On the hockey scene, the NHL was only four divisions back then, with the league comprising just 21 teams — which included such long-gone clubs as the Québec Nordiques, the Hartford Whalers, the Minnesota North Stars, and the Winnipeg Jets.

Tell me if this sounds familiar: the Bruins (49-25-6) won the Adams Division by a point over the Buffalo Sabres, but lost their first-round match-up with the fourth-seeded Canadiens (35-40-5) in three straight. There was no overtime back in those days, and a lot of players still went without helmets and few wore face shields. In the spring of ’84, the Edmonton Oilers won the first of their five Stanley Cups in the ’80s, and their line-up included Wayne Gretzky, Mark Messier, Grant Fuhr, and Jari Kurri.

In basketball, the Boston Celtics ruled the NBA and the city, and they collected their 15th championship in June 1984. Three future Hall-of-Famers dominated the team — Larry Bird, Robert Parish, and Kevin McHale — and the team’s seven-game slugfest with the hated Los Angeles Lakers was the sporting-event highlight of the year. Back then, tickets were impossible to get, and I mean impossible, and both the C’s and the B’s called the rustic old Boston Garden home. While there was yearly talk about replacing the aging facility, the wheels were not properly put in motion until Bruins owner Jeremy Jacobs finally reached into his deep pockets and decided to privately finance a new arena in the early ’90s. The Shawmut Center — soon to be renamed the FleetCenter when Fleet Bank bought out Shawmut Bank — ultimately opened for business in the fall of 1995.

People didn’t know what to make of the New England Patriots back then. The Pats went 9-7 in 1984 in their red home uniforms with the "Pat Patriot" logo, but just three years earlier they had gone 2-14 to secure the title of NFL laughingstock. Mystifyingly, that two-win debacle had followed a 10-6 season, but little did folks know that the franchise was indeed turning itself around and was destined for its first Super Bowl berth, in 1986. Given the recent success of the team — three championship-game appearances in the past seven years, and two Lombardi trophies — it’s hard to believe that it took 20 Super Bowls for the team to make its first-ever visit, and for a long time that 46-10 loss to the Bears was the biggest blowout in Super Bowl history. The Patriots, of course, also played in an antiquated facility, but Sullivan Stadium didn’t have nearly the charm or personality that the old Boston Garden did, and the aluminum bleachers and fan-behavior fiascos were staples of the organization back then. It wasn’t until James Orthwein bought the team in the early ’90s, hired Bill Parcells as coach, and eventually sold the club to New England businessman Robert Kraft that the seeds for the ultimate turnaround began to sprout. Before that, it was easy to get Patriots tickets, and the team routinely was blacked out in the Greater Boston TV area because of the NFL sellout rule. Now, with a waiting list 50,000 names long, the idea of sparkling-new Gillette Stadium with banks of empty seats is as far-fetched as it is laughable, but back then it was a totally different story.

The NFL of 1984 still included the original Cleveland Browns, the Houston Oilers, the LA Raiders, the St. Louis Cardinals, and the LA Rams, and the idea of teams in Charlotte, North Carolina; Jacksonville, Florida; and Baltimore, as an entry to replace the Colts (who had deserted the city for Indianapolis during the previous off-season), was only a pipe dream. The 49ers won Super Bowl XIX in January of 1985, beating the Miami Dolphins, and while the Niners went on to win three more Super Bowls and in the process create a mini-dynasty, the Dolphins to this day have yet to return to the big game.

Watching sports back in 1984 was also significantly different from watching your favorite team in 2004.

In baseball, there was no such thing as a "Fox Box," the corner-of-the-TV-screen feature that continuously gives you the score and situation; if you entered a room or a barroom, you had to ask the next guy, "What’s the score?" — a query that was probably the most-repeated gin-joint phrase after "What’s your sign?" There were few in-depth scoreboard features for the ballpark patron (pitch counts, speed) other than the available stats of the player coming to bat or to pitch, and the lone promotional feature at Fenway was the eighth-inning-bonanza "Guess the Attendance." Thankfully, there was no "Wally the Green Monster," nor was there yet talk of curses (Dan Shaughnessy’s Curse of the Bambino wasn’t published until 1990), Buckner, Boone, Terry Cooney, or $20-million contracts.

In football, fans in 1984 somehow had to do without the TV feature known as the yellow first-down line, which networks now superimpose on the screen to show viewers the imaginary line their team needs to reach to clinch a first down. If I’m not mistaken, the referee didn’t have even a microphone attached to his belt to announce penalties, much less an instant-replay booth. Injury reports were not nearly as important then as in the gambling-saturated market in which NFL players now ply their trade, and there was no Sunday-night football — only Monday-night, with your yellow-jacket-clad hosts, Frank Gifford, Don Meredith, and a pre-high-jinks O.J. Simpson (1984 was the first year in MNF’s then–14-year history that Howard Cosell wasn’t in the booth — and he was missed). And not only was there no aforementioned "Fox Box," but there also were only intermittent updates of out-of-town NFL scores, and certainly no in-game updated statistics for fantasy-football fans (because there was no fantasy football, or any other fantasy sport, back then).

Hockey viewership hasn’t changed all that much, although the sport is now the nation’s fifth most-popular (behind the big three and NASCAR) — if that — and the current league shutdown could ruin any last chance it had to flourish on a national scale.

The NBA also is putting out pretty much the same product for its fans, although the shorts are longer and baggier than they were in ’84, and there are now franchises in outposts (Toronto, Sacramento, Minneapolis, Memphis, a second team in LA ) that would have been laughed out of league HQ had the cities come forward bidding for entry back then.

Well, I think this old fogey has gone on long enough about the good ol’ times and what things were like back in the day. But though some things undoubtedly have changed for the better, New England sports fans have grown accustomed to some pretty dramatic turns of events: NFL championships, NBA droughts, continued NHL futility, and hope — always hope — that this year will be different for the local nine.

And on this day when I celebrate 20 years as a Phoenician, we also mark the first time in 97 years that Boston Marathon icon Johnny Kelley isn’t part of the local sports landscape. Kelley passed away on Wednesday, and this delightful gentleman and huge Sox fan truly deserved to see how it all comes out this fall.

He won’t, but we will. RIP, Mr. Young-at-Heart, from another.

Sporting Eye runs Mondays and Fridays at BostonPhoenix.com, and Christopher Young can be reached at cyoung[a]phx.com