The Sports Page

For One Year, the Trophy Was Always Somebody's. That Year Was 1986.

A reader asked us to look back forty years, to 1986 — the greatest single year the sports calendar has ever assembled, and the last time the Mets stood alone on top of it. What follows is a diary of twelve months that refused to hand the championship to anyone twice. And, quietly, a note of thanks for the finest thing the year produced — which was not a ground ball through a first baseman's legs.

The Sports Page · A Retrospective · From the Reader's Desk · Forty years on

Some years, the sports world spreads its gifts around. A championship here, a great performance there, and long stretches of ordinary weeks in between. Nineteen eighty-six was not one of those years. Nineteen eighty-six behaved as if it had a quota to fill and only twelve months to do it, and so it simply handed out a coronation nearly every time the calendar turned a page. Forty years later, people who argue about the greatest year in sports keep arriving, a little sheepishly, at the same answer. There is a reason the argument is short.

Walk it month by month and the case makes itself. This is not nostalgia inflating a decent year into a great one. It is a ledger.

The year the trophy would not sit still

It opened in a blowout. On the 26th of January the Chicago Bears — Walter Payton, Jim McMahon, a 300-pound lineman named Perry lined up at fullback, and the most frightening defense the game had yet produced — buried New England in Super Bowl XX, 46–10, and then had the nerve to release a rap single about it. In April, a 46-year-old Jack Nicklaus, written off by every columnist in the country, walked the back nine at Augusta on Sunday and won a sixth green jacket, the oldest man ever to win the Masters and, it turned out, the last major of his life. Weeks later a 23-year-old named Roger Clemens stood on the mound at Fenway and struck out twenty Seattle Mariners in nine innings — a thing no pitcher in the history of the game had ever done — on his way to 24 wins, a Cy Young, and a Most Valuable Player award.

Spring did not slow down. A 20-year-old goaltender named Patrick Roy carried Montreal to the Stanley Cup and became the youngest man ever to be named the postseason's most valuable player. Larry Bird's Celtics — a team that still turns up on every short list of the greatest ever assembled — raised the franchise's sixteenth banner. And in the thin air of Mexico City, Diego Maradona authored the single most famous quarter-hour in soccer history: one goal punched in with an illegal fist he later credited to God, and four minutes later a second, a weaving sixty-yard run past half of England that is still simply called the Goal of the Century. Argentina lifted the World Cup. Maradona lifted the sport.

October belonged to Queens

And then came the Mets, who had spent the whole summer making the rest of the National League look like a formality. They won 108 games — still, four decades on, the most any Mets team has ever won — and finished 21½ games ahead of second place, a margin so large the pennant race was effectively over by Father's Day. Gary Carter, Keith Hernandez, Darryl Strawberry, Dwight Gooden, Lenny Dykstra, Mookie Wilson: a roster that played with a swagger the city adored and the rest of the country loved to hate. Great teams are supposed to stroll to the title. These Mets did the opposite. They made you watch every last out through your fingers.

They nearly lost the pennant in Houston, in a sixth game of the League Championship Series that ran sixteen innings and four hours and forty-two minutes — at the time the longest postseason game ever played — before Jesse Orosco struck out Kevin Bass with the tying and go-ahead runs on base. It is still ranked among the greatest games in the history of the sport. It was, remarkably, only the warm-up.

What the Mets did in the World Series has passed into folklore so completely that it is easy to forget it actually happened. Down three games to two, trailing Boston by two runs in the bottom of the tenth inning of Game Six, one out from the end of their season and with the scoreboard operator reportedly cueing up a Red Sox celebration, they refused to make the final out. Single. Single. Single. A wild pitch. And then a slow roller off the bat of Mookie Wilson that skipped under the glove of Bill Buckner and into a corner of American memory, and Ray Knight came all the way around from second to win it. Two nights later, in Game Seven, they fell behind again — and again declined to lose. That is the thing the numbers cannot quite hold: a team that was, twice in one October, one strike from winter, and twice decided otherwise.

The small print of a very large year

The famous moments were only the headlines. Underneath them, 1986 was busy seeding the future. In September a coach named Lou Holtz walked onto the sideline at Notre Dame for the first time and went 5–6 — a losing record that fooled no one who looked closely, because five of those six defeats came by a combined fourteen points. Two years later that same program would be undefeated national champions. Out on the lava fields of Kona, Dave Scott won his fifth Ironman world title and a young woman named Paula Newby-Fraser won her first, beginning a reign that would earn her the title Queen of Kona — the golden age of a sport then still explaining itself to the world, all pools and open roads and people who simply would not quit before the finish line. In November a 20-year-old Mike Tyson became the youngest heavyweight champion in history. And in the Arizona desert that winter, Penn State finished a perfect season by out-thinking Miami to win the year's college football crown.

A complete accounting owes the year its shadows, too. Nineteen eighty-six opened in grief, with the loss of the Challenger crew in January, and lost a basketball star of impossible promise in Len Bias that June. No honest diary of a year records only its trophies. But the striking thing about 1986 is how much light it produced against that darkness — how insistently, month after month, it kept handing someone a reason to celebrate.

Why we still count from here

Forty years is a long time for a record to stand, and 1986's has. No single year since has stacked this many all-time moments into twelve consecutive months; people who study these things have tried to find a rival and generally give up. For a certain kind of baseball fan it endures for a simpler reason still: it was the last October the Mets owned outright, the high-water mark against which every season in Queens has quietly been measured ever since. Some anniversaries are about looking back. This one is about remembering what a full year of joy actually feels like.

One last note, off the record. The finest thing 1986 ever produced never swung a bat or lifted a trophy. She arrives at another candle this week, carries four decades as lightly as a summer afternoon, and has been the home team every single day since. This issue is for her. The rest of you got the Mets — and, honestly, you did fine. If you have your own reason to love a particular year, the door is always open at thesportspage.net.