Word: semipros
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...among ten children inspired by a hotel maid. "I played Little League for about two weeks before they decided I was too rough and moved me up to the Pony League. When I was supposed to be in the Pony League, I was playing in a men's semipro league. I never played with friends my own age." In the ninth grade, he took up football just to be a ninth-grader. "Baseball was more of a game," he thought from the first, "football more of a device, a challenge too, but mostly a responsibility...
...manufacturers as GT, Haro and Red Line. Bike breaking has all the signs of a street craze going mainstream: bikers are showing up in commercials (Pepsi, Swatch watches) and in music videos, and grateful merchandisers are climbing aboard with lines of bikes, gear and clothes. Says Happy Freedman, a semipro cyclist and salesman at Larry & Jeff's in New York City: "The freestyle craze is only starting. By next summer, we are going to see it going on everywhere...
...Tartikoff. He took a job at a New Haven TV station, while playing semipro baseball for the New Haven Braves. Soon he was at Chicago's WLS-TV, run by Lew Erlicht, who introduced him to Fred Silverman. From Erlicht (now president of ABC Entertainment), Tartikoff picked up programming smarts; from Silverman, he learned the importance of loving TV. Even today Tartikoff can rhapsodize about his job as if he were a kid who has just been deeded the - candy store. "In movies," he says, "unless you make E.T., you reach maybe as many people as watched a TV show...
DIED. Edward J. Daly, 61, pugnacious founder of World Airways and originator of no-frills U.S. air fares; after a long illness; in Orinda, Calif. Once a semipro boxer, Daly parlayed two World War II military planes (cost: $50,000) into a hugely lucrative charter line in the 1950s. In 1979 he offered one-way, cross-country tickets for $99.99, but major-airline competition, a strike, high fuel costs and a grounded fleet of DC-10s during a safety scare nearly plucked World...
Billy Pierce, the ideal White Sox pitcher of the 1950s, rediscovered him on a sand lot. Kittle was playing semipro baseball, after a day's heavy work, for a Chicago team identified beguilingly as AHEPA, which, even some of the players forget, stands for the American Hellenic Educational Progressive Association. Any White Sox scout might have found Kittle, but the fact that it was Pierce means something to South Siders, who are also pleased to recall that it was Peg-Legged Bill Veeck who signed the young slugger. For Veeck still owned the team in 1978 and was presiding...