Anniversaries

I assume it’s a safe guess that most of the APBA players have been playing the sports replay for a while now. We probably began rolling the dice and holding the cards at an early age and the game stayed with us as we grew over the years.

And I suspect many of us began the APBA voyage after receiving the game as a Christmas gift from our parents.

I had two APBA anniversaries last week, including one on Christmas Day in 1977 that got me started. (Actually, there’s a third anniversary—I began this blog on Jan. 1, 2012. Hard to believe I’ve been doing this for 11 years now.)

My parents bought me the football game that year. I probably began backwards; most people first play the basic baseball game as a kid and graduate to the football and other game offerings of APBA. I was indoctrinated into the world of the large red dice and small white dice, the player cards with dice roll results printed on them and the counting of each play as a measure of time keeping with the football version.

That night on Christmas, I played my first game with Washington and the New York Giants. I’m sure I didn’t do it right that time. The rules were difficult and detailed. This wasn’t the Pop Tarts card baseball or the electric football games I used to play. I remember the Giants won the game, something like 41-34, and Larry Brown ran back a kickoff for 100 yards for the Redskins.

A year later, I received the APBA basketball game – a game that received much criticism because of its complex and plodding style of play. I played a streamlined version that consisted mostly of shooting, rebounding and figuring out assists with a detailed dice system. I loved the game and it’s what made me a dedicated APBA fan for life.

Just the other day I also observed another APBA anniversary. I began playing the baseball game on Dec. 28, 1998. I was seduced by the steroid-aided home run race that season by Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa and returned to being a fan after the 1994 season-ending strike drove me away. I got the game to replicate that season’s fun.

I’ve been rolling some baseball season now for 24 years and I’ve been with APBA for 45 years.

I am sure there are scores of other APBA players who can boast much longer anniversaries of 50 and even 60 years.

And that’s the point of this game that I mention frequently. What other game has stayed with us for so long? It’s the draw of the APBA game and I think it’s what keeps us coming back to the company to get more seasons. We can live our past by rolling seasons we remember as we continue growing older. I’m doing 1972 now and I recall the season when I turned 12 years old that summer and left the security of my northern Minnesota grade school for a larger junior high. The consistency of baseball helped me get through that transitional time.

The APBA game has been with us as we grew up. We may have put it aside when we went to college or got a job. It may have waited when we got married or had kids and it stuck with us during other life changes. I began my replay of the 1991 baseball season in August 2015. A month later, I drove to Chicago and met the woman who would become my wife. It took four years to complete that replay; usually, because I have no life, it takes about a year and a half to roll a full season replay.

But now, life has settled into a routine again and I roll games nearly every day.

Twenty-four years of rolling doesn’t seem that long. But in the years I’ve been playing the baseball game, I was hired as a bureau reporter for a statewide newspaper, covered a school shooting here that got national coverage, lost my mother and wife, got laid off at the newspaper job, dealt with my own health issues and got remarried. It’s been a lot of life in that quarter of a century and APBA has been there.

Another anniversary has passed. What’s ahead for the next year of APBA games? I see myself finishing the 1972 replay late this year and beginning another season. Maybe I’ll drag out the APBA basketball game. I could finish a game in time for the next anniversary.