book with the unused lock was dated January 1, 1969.
It read, “Woke up late after staying up last night to wait for the New Year. After lunch, went to the Sports Arena to ice skate. After that, watched the Rose Bowl and Orange Bowl. In the Rose Bowl, Ohio State won over USC, 27–16. In the Orange Bowl, Penn State won over Kansas, 15–14.”7
When she was ten years old, Christine was given a diary by her mother.
Courtesy of Christine Brennan
Christine made a promise to herself that she was going to write in it every day. And she did. Even if one day meant that she wrote, “Nothing happened today.” And then she turned the page and wrote for the next day’s entry, “Nothing happened today either.”8
The days may have seemed uneventful to young Christine, but there was a lot happening around her. And she was the drive behind a lot of the action.
Christine couldn’t wait to grab the sports section from the Toledo Times, Toledo Blade, and Detroit Free Press that arrived daily at the Brennan home on Barrington Drive. She read all the sports articles, for local as well as national teams.
When she was eleven years old, she’d sit by the radio in the family room, curl up on the sofa, and listen to the Toledo Mud Hens games broadcast from WCWA 1230 AM. With a scorebook her father had given her and a wrinkled and worn copy of the Blade’s special preseason section featuring the Mud Hens roster, she’d record the game.9
Her young imagination got the best of her as she listened to those games, especially the games on the road. Christine sat close to the radio, taking in every sound of those games being played in cities like Syracuse, New York, and Richmond, Virginia. She’d hear the crack of the bat and the crowd cheers, and even thought she heard a man selling hot dogs in the stands.
Christine’s father broke the news gently to her that some of the games weren’t being broadcast live. They were recreations of the actual game. The announcer sat in the radio studio and produced the appropriate sounds as he read the game plays over a ticker. Once she learned this, although she was disappointed, it brought a whole new perspective to this dedicated fan. Christine listened even more closely to the broadcast to determine if the game was live or “fake.” Often the soundtrack of crowd noises, which sounded the same regardless of the play, was the giveaway to Christine.10
As best as she could, she tried to imagine those games over that little radio. The announcer did not describe the other team’s members, what they looked like, or what numbers they wore. If it weren’t for her worn and crinkled preseason special section on the Mud Hens, she wouldn’t know what her team members looked like, or what number they wore. It was a lesson she carried with her later in life.
And Christine began to practice the lesson in her own sports reports. Christine may have been the youngest sportswriter when she started using her mom’s Olympia typewriter to crank out her previews of the “Major League Game of the Week” to be shown on NBC on television.
Christine typed up several paragraphs on each game. She placed a piece of copy paper behind the round cylinder of the typewriter, pressed on the appropriate letter keys, and the metal “hammers” instantly printed a letter image on the paper. There was no room for error in typing, so Christine had to be precise.
She had an assistant, her seven-year-old brother, Jim. He’d provide her with all the player statistics she needed from the Blade. Then she distributed her stories to her dedicated followers: her family members. Christine’s first sports writings had a grand circulation of six people.11
USA Today, the newspaper that Christine now writes her sports column for, has print circulation of over nine hundred thousand people, per day.12
She had to start somewhere.
Christine was hooked on Mud Hens baseball—so much so that she asked her dad if they could go to see the home games, live, from the stadium just twenty minutes from their home. Her dad bought season tickets along the first baseline.
The Mud Hens stadium at the Lucas County Recreation Center was an old horseracing track. The clubhouse, where the team prepared for a game, was separate from the field. Players coming from the locker room and making their way into the baseball park had to walk through an outside corridor. Fans hung out in the space, hoping to get autographs from their favorite players.
The first time Christine and her family went, she asked her dad if they could line up to meet the players as well. He gave his blessing, and soon Christine and her younger siblings zoomed around the players, chasing after all the names she had memorized from her time spent listening to the games on the radio. It was a thrill for them all.13
Christine got the bug to watch even more sporting events live, and her dad was happy to fuel her passion. The family went to one or two Detroit Tigers games a year. That’s all it took to get Christine and her younger brother, Jim, addicted to following the Tigers. The legendary Ernie Harwell broadcast the games on Detroit’s powerhouse radio station, WJR. Many summer nights Jim fell asleep to the sounds of the Tigers games coming to them from Oakland or Anaheim, California, starting at 7 p.m. Pacific Time Zone. It was 10 o’clock Toledo time. Christine often crossed the hall and shut his radio off after Jim had fallen asleep, and her parents did the same for her after she had.14
The Brennans on a family bike ride: (left to right) Christine, Jim, Kate, Amy, and their dad, Jim
Courtesy of Christine Brennan
Since they lived nearly in the shadow of the University of Toledo clock tower, the family began taking in the Rockets’ football games. Her dad bought season tickets, near the forty-yard line behind the visiting team’s bench.
“Dad was the Pied Piper with season tickets,” Christine said.15 Whenever and wherever her father went for a sports contest, Christine and her younger sister and brother were sure to follow.
Along with going to sporting events and school, Christine was still faithfully recording significant events both in her little world and in the big world outside in her diary. And something pretty important was going on with the Brennan family. They moved to the beautiful community of Ottawa Hills, just miles away from their home on Barrington Drive. Although they were further from the Rockets stadium, they still went to each home game.
University of Toledo’s undefeated quarterback Chuck Ealey
The University of Toledo
While her mom stayed home with little Amy, Christine and her dad, sister Kate, and brother, Jim, witnessed the magic of the 1969–71 seasons in the Rockets Glass Bowl. With each Rockets score, a Civil War-era cannon shot off from one of the two huge stone towers at the end of the stadium. Under the guidance of quarterback Chuck Ealey, the team scored a lot. And each time the cannon shot off, much to the fans’ delight.
The Rockets went undefeated, for all three seasons—thirty-five games in a row, leading to three straight Mid-American Conference championships and three successive winning appearances in the Tangerine Bowl, now called the Citrus Bowl.
“Every
