The moment when you find out that Santa Claus doesn’t really exist is supposed to be a traumatic event in a child’s life.
Yet I have to be completely honest and admit that I have no recollection of the moment when I discovered this lie.
I guess I just assumed one day that those elves weren’t licensed by the MLBPA to actually make my Mike Schmidt batting tee.
I wasn’t scarred for life by finding out that there was no Santa Claus.
But there were plenty of “Santa moments” in sports that left me somewhat traumatized. These are the moments where you find out something absolutely stunning and mind-blowing, that it completely changes your perspective. So here are some of my most memorable “Santa Moments” in sports:
The Moment: Finding out Al Iafrate is bald
For years I watched Al Iafrate play hockey, but it never crossed my mind that the guy was bald. Then came the 1991 NHL All-Star Skills Competition. Iafrate chose to participate in the hardest shot contest without a helmet, revealing to the world a bizarre combination of a bald head with a mullet (Later called the “Skullet”). I was stunned completely. Iafrate could have shot the puck 200mph and it wouldn’t have mattered. I was never going to look at him the same way again.
The Moment: Finding out the Milwaukee Brewers logo is actually a thing of genius
I always thought the old Milwaukee Brewers logo was lame. It was just a baseball glove with a ball inside. It looked like something an eight-year-old could draw. And then one day, my dad pulled me aside and explained to me that it was actually an “M” and a “B” put together — which stood for the Milwaukee Brewers. When I looked at it from a different perspective, it was mind-blowing. I suddenly had a new respect for Teddy Higuera. I’ve never been able to see one of those Magic Eye pictures, so this moment is tops for me.
The Moment: Finding out NFL games could end in ties
Wait … this isn’t my memory. It’s Donovan McNabb’s.
The Moment: Finding out my card collection wasn’t putting me through college
I remember sitting there one day in the early 1990s with the latest issue of Beckett magazine. I think a young Ed Belfour was on the cover. I was trying to decide if I should go to Princeton or Yale with the money from my burgeoning card collection. I was imagining buying a house with a large number of Billy Ripken error cards. And then my mom shattered my dream by telling me that the cards were pretty much worthless because they were so mass-produced. The market, she explained, was doomed to fail. I’m not sure she knew the difference between O-PEE-CHEE and Topps but she ended up being right.
The Moment: Finding out about steroids
I picked up the Toronto Star on a September morning in 1988 and clearly remember reading the headline that said Ben Johnson had cheated. I was 11-years old and had never heard of anabolic steroids before. I was crushed to find out that an athlete would cheat to gain an advantage. But in hindsight, I should have been suspicious when Johnson raised his arm in victory at the 40m mark of that race.
The Moment: Finding out Mike Tyson could lose
For any kid that grew up playing Mike Tyson’s Punch Out, this moment was absolutely unbelievable. I had never heard of Buster Douglas before he flattened Tyson. The only thing more stunning would have been if King Hippo or Soda Popinski had KO’d Tyson.