Word: vida
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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ACCORDING to eyewitnesses, it "pops," "hops," "skips," "jumps," "bams," "burns," "booms," "tails," "sails," "smokes," "swoops," "sinks" or just plain "whooshes." If it sounds like a UFO, that is only because the hitters who have faced the fearsome fastball of Oakland A's Pitcher Vida Blue tend to endow it with out-of-this-world qualities. Roy White, the otherwise stable outfielder for the New York Yankees, claims that the Blue darter "speeds up on you and then seems to disappear." Kansas City Royals Third Baseman Paul Schaal swears that "it jumps right over your bat." After his world champion Baltimore...
...Vida Blunden, president of the Associated Dance Teachers of California, says that professional entertainers, who are being called on increasingly for tap routines, helped start the revival. "Many young dancers these days are finding out that they just have to have tap." Keeping in step with the times, the 100-odd Fred Astaire ballroom-dancing schools across the country are for the first time offering tap lessons. In New York, reports George Connolly, of the National Council of Dance Teacher Organizations, the rise in tap-lesson attendance has been "phenomenal...
Baseball may be a deadly dull game to play compared to an individual sport like squash, but Vida Blue and Sonny Siebert can still snap 100,000 heart strings...
Actually, if Vida were to continue at his present torrid pace, he would amass more than 40 wins. But not even Vida is that confident. Every time he pitches he superstitiously puts two dimes into his pocket to "represent the hope of 20 wins." By that standard, he still seems a little cheap. At the very least, Vida Blue promises to be a two-bit pitcher...
...Rough. Baseball scouts knew where Vida was when, as a schoolboy in Mansfield, La., he struck out 21 batters in a seven-inning game. Football scouts were already trailing him, especially after he threw 35 touchdown passes in his senior year at DeSoto High. Turning down football scholarship offers from 25 colleges, he signed with the A's for a $50,000 bonus. After leading the American Association in strikeouts, he was brought up to Oakland late last season. In his first game, Blue, one of the few switch-hitting pitchers in baseball, clouted a three-run homer...