With the World Series slated to start tomorrow night between the Boston Red Sox and the St. Louis Cardinals, i wanted to share a little bit of information I know and have been keen to post about for quite some time, and that time is now, since it's World Series-related and a local South Florida angle.
The first North Miami Beach High School grad to ever play in baseball's major leagues was also the first former Charger to ever play in MLB's World Series, catcher Steve Nicosia
of the victorious Willie Stargell-led "We Are Family" Pirates team of 1979 Pittsburgh Pirates in 1979, against my beloved Baltimore Orioles, whom I grew-up loving, and was a mini-season ticket holder of when I was living and working in the D.C. area 20 years later, and going to about 20-25 Oriole home games a year at Camden Yards.
I watched every pitch of those painful 7 World Series games from the packed TV room of Briscoe Quad, while I was at IU my freshman year, back when only the affluent -esp girls- had a TV in their own dorm room. Trust me, I knew exactly which of my friends had a TV and what their favorite programs were, but some things need to be watched in large groups.
Even if they're Pirate fans, as most of the people in that room were.
(Did I ever mention to you dear blog readers how many people from the greater Pittsburgh area went to beautiful Indiana University in Bloomington?
Trust me, it's huge, in part because it's only about 410 miles east of Bloomington -a day trip. The most-famous IU grad from Pittsburgh this far is Marc Cuban, @mcuban.
Nobody I met at IU from Pittsburgh was a better advertisement for what a great school IU was or better company to be around than my friend, Laura Seitz. Laura was a freshman when I was a sophomore, and she lived on the same floor at Briscoe Quad where I already had a LOT of close female friends, and eventually we met and became friends because our personalities really meshed well. Among my male friends, Laura was renown for always turning so many heads when she combined her sporty good looks with her shiny red adidas IU Swimming sweat jacket whenever we went to see a movie or met in-between classes over at the Student Union, or went to an IU soccer game at the-then new Armstrong Stadium, two blocks away from Briscoe. Laura was such a charmer and so honest and level-headed! The sort of friend you can confide in and trust in any kind of situation, no matter how upsetting or awkward, and genuinely feel a great weight lifted off of your shoulders after you've shared the news with her. I always thought she'd make a great psychiatrist, esp. in Left Coast Hollywood, as opposed to the one here north of Hallandale Beach. Just a great friend to have in good times and bad.)
So getting back to the main point of today's post, just to give you some helpful context, Steve Nicosia, who still lives in South Florida with his family, was about six years older than me when he was in high school at NMB, while yours truly was doing my thing over at Fulford Elementary, in 5th and 6th grade his last two years at NMB, when he was such a phenom.
This was back when NMB High School, on the north side of the street from the then-very prosperous 163rd Street Shopping Center, was spanking brand new and had absorbed kids whose older siblings (and parents) had gone to either North Miami or Norland,
depending upon where in Northeast/Northwest Dade their families lived.
So in a rapidly developing area with lots of well-established family and school loyalties and traditions comes a new school into the mix in NMB with neither, and located in an area of the city that was hard by the side of a huge retail complex and on another side, apartments for mostly senior citizens, a demographic which seemed almost of the city at the time.
Not exactly a target-rich environment to develop school tradition!
What made it controversial from the start, as if that wasn't enough, was its in-vogue educational approach that most parents weren't so crazy about -no letter grades, just passing and failing.
It's hard to get into really good schools with that siort of subjective thing, obviously, regardless of tests scores, so parents and high-achieving kids were not down with the way things were being done
It's hard to imagine now in 2013, but there was no high school in Dade County north of N.E. 135th Street and east of I-95 -or Aventura- until NMB showed-up in 1971 and shattered that longstanding reality of life.
Yes, that's the sort of reality I can still recall, since I walked with my mother and two younger sisters on our way to 163rd Street Shopping Center thru the future NMBHS when it was merely a willowy field, from the nice apt on NE 170th Street I lived in while going to Sabal Palm Elementary for 2nd grade.
When it opened and while Nicosia was there, NMBHS was an "experimental" school, a bit of a fad that the Dade County School Board decided to try out with kids from NE Dade as guinea pigs, as if the fact that it was a gigantic two-story building with no windows wasn't enough of a tip that it wasn't a regular high school, though with cool air conditioning and carpeting everywhere.
(I wrote a fact-filled description of NMBHS in the early years about 6-7 years ago on Wikipedia, an entry that really put some meat on what was then present there, which I regarded as a paltry and unappealing description of the school.
Unfortunately, over the years, the "helper bees" at Wikipedia have taken a knife to the facts I added and turned it into a bland stew last time I checked it two years ago, removing about 75% of what I'd posted, though some scraps remain.
I'll try to remember to re-post that Wiki description I wrote here in the future, which you still sometimes find on the Internet when looking for NMB-related news of the 1970's, esp. re the 163rd Street Shopping Center.)
By almost any reasonable measure, Steve Nicosia was South Florida's most-celebrated HS baseball player between 1972 and 1974.
A result of that was that he was regularly featured on the front pages of the Herald and Miami News sports section, back before there was a Heat, Panthers and Marlins to easily distract everyone from the primacy of high school sports, and people actually going to games to support the kids even if they didn't have kids at the school, because that's what you did.
Just as is true in so many communities outside of South Florida right now.
I know about all those newspaper articles because I cut out every article on him that made it into print, since I was already a news junkie then, reading both papers every day, even when in elementary school at Fulford. (Cutting out newspaper articles -how very old-school!)
Here's a more recent piece on him, from 13 years ago, though the article greatly undersells how big a deal he was down here.
The first thing about him that jumped out at you when you looked at him was that he was very un-NMB-like in appearance, in that he resembled nothing so much as a miniature Joe Mauer, a catcher who was just more naturally athletic than anyone else on the field, something that was readily-apparent the moment he was in a position to affect the flow of the game.
He was, as I recall it, a "Natural" in every sense of the word, smooth and completely in-charge on the field and quick with a bat in his hands.
To my mind at least, he was the progenitor for everything that happened later with A-Rod in HS many years later in Miami, with the constant media attention.
If the Internet or USA Today or ESPN had existed back when Nicosia played...
Allen Park, the same City of NMB baseball field next to Fulford Elementary that I played Optimist football, soccer, Little League and Pony League on, was also the field where Nicosia played American Legion ball for NMB Post 257, back when that was really huge down here.
The stands would routinely have a half-dozen MLB scouts taking notes, stop-watches at the ready.
Me being me, I'd naturally try to size up the crowd and figure out who the scouts were and then try to matter-of-factly sit near them and eavesdrop on any baseball scuttlebutt, hoping
that one might be with the Orioles. If only...
It never was on the nights I was there.
I dug up this article on the Internet which was THE best article on him for the longest time.
Miami News
May 25, 1973
The scouts can't stay away
All eyes are on NMB's Steve Nicosia
By Jeff Klinkenberg
Make sure you see the great photos above the article!
I must've stared at those photos for 5-6 years in the manilla folder I kept with all his clippings,
plus the one I cut from the extra copy of the paper I bought and then taped on my bedroom wall.
To me, what made that black and white photo of him awesome was that because in the original that appeared in the Miami News, you could see all the sweat on his forehead and on the tops of his right shoulder coming out thru the jersey.
That was really something and people always commented on what a great photo it was
Back then, because of the novelty of the whole thing, people who didn't even live in NMB, esp. knowledgeable middle-age baseball fans, would routinely come from all over the area to the games at Allen Park.
They'd come over-and-over and even recognize me, because they'd come to gawk at him because of what they'd read, and then seen for themselves, because he was, literally, like a man-among-boys.
Trust me, that was the one-and-only time something like that EVER happened in NMB!
Chaz Stevens at his popular must-read blog, M.A.O.S. recently mentioned me in relation to my knowledge and love of baseball, which was nice of him, but the truth is that I had to reveal to Chaz recently that I was actually able to go the whole 2013 baseball season without watching a single inning of Miami Marlins baseball on TV, or listen to an inning on radio, even though I really do like their announcers.
Yes, my personal boycott of David Samson & Jeffrey Loria has remained in place since last year's team break-up, and I do hereby declare victory.
As I told many people in my original email about Nicosia, my pre-playoffs pick was the Pirates playing the Red Sox in the World Series, a rematch of the 1903 World Series, Pittsburgh vs. Boston, Cy Young over Honus Wagner. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1903_World_Series
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Other NMB grads whom you may have heard of who came after I graduated in 1979 and my sister Linda graduated in 1982, include Facebook COO and recent author Sheryl Sandberg, actress Garcelle Beauvais and best-selling author Brad Meltzer.
