Mine would be a tie between a hall of famer and a guy half the people here never heard of.
The first football game I watched on TV start to finish was the 1959 NFL championship game, when Johnny Unitas and the Colts won the rematch of the greatest game ever played. On an old black and white tv, those old Colt uniforms just had something about them. He was my first football hero, and the first I really ever got to see play.
But in that same time frame, my favorite baseball player, was a short relief pitcher for the Pirates: Roy Face. AKA Elroy.Face. The Pirates were my favorite team, at least in part because living in Tulsa, my YMCA team in the second, third, fourth, fifth and sixth grade was the Pirates.
DIdn't get so see them much on tv and I've never been to Pittsburgh. We only took the Tulsa Tribune back then, and they didn't ever carry box scores of the previous day's games. Only the T World did that. So what I had daily in the paper were standings and this list of league leaders in statistical categories of the top five guys in BA D, T, HR, SB, Hits, W, ERA. Maybe top five in each league.
That year, 1959, I turned eight years old in August. By then, Roy Face had won his first dozen decisions at least and ended up 17-0 by early September. I remember the Dodgers finally beat him, before he ended the year 18-1. I didn't realize it at the time, but he was a MLB player who most resembled my future stature. Maybe one of only two or three pitchers in baseball 5-9 or shorter. I ended up 5-10. But he had this confident strut about him and when I first saw number 26 on the mound, I was hooked. A year later, the Pirates beat the Yankees in about the biggest WS upset ever, though it's given little credit for that. Mazeroski's home run in the bottom of the ninth in game seven was the only time that's ever been done to win the Series. I was hooked for more than 20 years.
Face was the number one reason that the Pirates won that Series. Pittsburgh lost games two three and six by the lopsided scores of 16-3, 12-0 and 10-0, but the won the four contested games of the series, three of them because Danny Murtaugh put Face out there for two or three inning saves before Save was an official stat. The next year in the Topps card set tradition, each game of the previous season's World Series had a card of its own. I believe it was game five when the card was titled: Face Saves The Day. I still wonder if that was part of the reason that the term Save came into being for relief performance.
When we moved to Texas a year before the Dome was built, I talked my dad into going to my first Major League baseball game when the Pirates visited Houston in 1966 I believe. Robin Roberts, at the end of his multi team career, shut the Bucs out 3-0. I think Jim Owens got the save.
(Looked it up. It was August 16, 1965. Roberts was pitching his second game as an Astro player. And threw his second straight shutout in a complete game. So it was the first year of the Dome. And in four months, will be 50 years since. That is hard to fathom. Boring game. Had we chosen either of the next two nights, the Pirates won 8-6 and 8-7 with the Pirates leading early in both and then nearly blowing the lead both nights.Roy didn't pitch either game.)
So my two are Johnny U and Roy Face.
