Last week, we had another “Question of the Week” from Mike Chamernik, and he’s back today with his latest QOTW.
Enjoy!
by Mike Chamernik
We’ve always known that pro athletes are young adults, mostly in their twenties. But every so often we get reminders of just how young they are.
Take Cooper Flagg, for instance. The Mavericks won the NBA Draft Lottery last week and will presumably select Flagg in the draft next month. A few months ago, ESPN ran a segment on how he learned basketball by watching Larry Bird videos on DVD during road trips when he was 10. Cooper Flagg was 10… in 2017. That feels like just yesterday, to me.
When have been times when you felt old watching sports? Who was the first major athlete who was younger than you? Who was the last active player who was older than you? Has your age in relation to the players affected how you watch and follow sports?
I’m in my mid-30s. During the NFL Draft last month, I noticed that I’m now closer in age to the parents than to the draftees, in many cases. Conversely, I’m very thankful that LeBron James is still among the best players in the NBA. Stephen Curry and Kevin Durant, too. I don’t feel completely washed just yet.
It’s safe to say that for most people their sports fandom peaks in their childhood and in their teens. There are many reasons for that, but perhaps part of it is that the players are still older than you at that point. It’s more natural to worship a sports hero who’s older than you than one who’s younger.
As soon as Mike asked “when have been times when you felt old watching sports?” I didn’t even need to read any further: I knew what my answer was going to be — and as I read Mike’s own explainer I was nodding in silent agreement, because my example is very similar.
Remember Jamie Moyer, who seemingly pitched well into his fifties? He retired way back in 2012, at the age of 49 — at the time (and for several years) Moyer was the oldest player in the game, and when he finally hung up his spikes, he was also the last player older than me still in the game. The day he retired, I felt old, because I had become older than every other MLBer. Now every player is young enough to be my kid (and some are young enough to be a grandchild…ugh).
Honestly I don’t think my age in relation to players has affected how I watch — there are many new or recent players I revere as much as I did my childhood heroes — maybe today’s players aren’t “heroes” to me now the same way the older players were when I was beginning to fall in love with sports. But my first love has always been, and will always be, baseball, and it’s amazing how names, faces and uniforms have changed over the years, but the game itself is timeless.
I’m very anxious to hear how our readers answer the question and if (and when) they first felt “old” watching sports.
About 5 years ago I realized that I was older than all the players on my favorite teams. When I was younger, I collected a lot of jerseys. After realizing that all the players were now younger than me, I decided that it was time to stop collecting jerseys. I could not see myself wearing a jersey for someone that is younger than me.
I feel the same way about jerseys! Dressing up like athletes who are – to me – children feels unseemly. It’s team-logo hoodies for here to the crematorium.
“from,” rather.
I feel that
I agree. I still collect jerseys, but they’re only throwbacks or blank these days.
I have memories of being at Pittsburgh Pirates games and finding on the scorecard that (a) there was a player younger than me, then later (b) there was no player older than me. The Pirates’ new manager, as of earlier this month, is older than me but born in the same year: 1980.
I’m off to Sears to buy a new pair of slacks and a reliable thermos.
I watched hockey a lot as a kid, and the World Juniors are a big deal in Canada. It felt very weird when the players were my age and looked like they could go to my high school. Same with soccer players debuting for the biggest clubs in the world at 16 or 17 when I was the same age. Now that I’m 30, it feels weird to think that guys my age are entering their declining years as athletes.
My favourite thing related to this goes back to when I was a kid in my create-a-team prime. Most of the teams I made up were just on Excel spreadsheets, but if I really liked them, I would make them in FIFA, NHL, NBA, etc. They could be completely fictional players and teams, or fantasy rosters based on a theme, like Europe vs. Africa in soccer.
Anyway, one of my preferred fantasy teams was “Young Players”, which I did for soccer and hockey. I considered a young player to be anyone under the age of 24, so at the time the cutoff birth year was…1980. I can’t help but chuckle when I look back now, as those “young” players would be 40 to 45.
I’m not the exact target audience of this question, but it still feels surprising to me how young Flagg is because he’s basically my age. It feels almost as scary to me to realize that the people you had always seen as older or mature or someone to look up to are now getting to be the same age as you, I don’t know. He missed a year of middle school because of Covid, and now he’s about to be drafted by an NBA team.
Yep. Ricky Rubio is about my age. Summer of 2008, I was screwing around, staying up all night, awaiting my freshman year of college. Rubio was playing for Spain in the Olympics and winning the Mr. Europa Award.
I feel old seeing the grandchildren of players I’ve watched playing in college/minors.
Cecil/Prince/Jayden Fielder
Bob/Brett/Jake Boone (bonus, as this could potentially be a fourth-generation player, but I’ve never seen Ray Boone play)
And the amount of father/son duos in the NBA is crazy!
You’re so right about fathers and sons in the NBA. And there’s a lot of WNBA mom-NBA son duos, too.
I’m 36 now, for perspective. I had an audible “holy cow I’m old” reaction when I heard that Peja Stojakovic’s son and Stephon Marbury’s son were teammates at Cal-Berkeley. Don’t think that was the first time I had that thought, but it’s the occasion I remember most vividly right now.
Last week, at my son’s high school baseball game. The opponent was a school that I worked for early in my career. One of their players was the son of a former student, another was the son of a former player. I suddenly felt very old.
Fun question — one that I often thought about! I’m 63 so my names go way back.
First MLB player younger than me? Fernando Valenzuela.
Last MLB player in MLB older than me? Julio Franco.
The current player that makes me feel old? 34-year-old Mike Yastrzemski. He’s the GRANDSON of the original Yaz I watched when I first followed baseball.
Typo: I’m actually 65!
It hit me when I went to a MiLB game and every player was born after I graduated from high school.
I’m about to be there.
I’m 42 now, so while I have been older than the average player for a while, for some reason that didn’t really hit me just seeing the DOBs alone. Uniforms are actually part of what reminds me I am no longer an age / generation peer to most pro athletes. The wild ugly uniforms we often bemoan on here are liked by a lot of the younger players, I presume simply because of the fact that when you are young you like and are targeted by trends and fads. Likewise, the demeanor of most athletes now reminds me of the generation gap. The “act like you’ve been there before” mentality after big plays no longer applies. I find the posturing and attention seeking post play silly or off putting, for the players and fans of their generation, it is just normal and apparently the game cannot be fun if you aren’t doing all of that.
When I watch games with my nephews and try to explain why some alternate uniform is garbage, or why a player should just high five their teammate instead of make a big show for the cameras, the reaction I get back from them is what makes me realize I’m closer to the parents of players than the players themselves.
No jerseys for men, they are for children….except your own childhood hero jersey.
I was at the White Sox garage sale thing this past weekend. I wanted a game-worn jersey, ideally of someone older than me… no such luck
It’s not so much the players being young that has blown my mind in the past as it is the coaches. When Sean McVay got a head coaching gig at 30, that was pretty wild. He’s still only 39!
A lot of GMs are now in their early 30s
I wonder if this has to do with the explosion of sports as a business. Coaching and GM were typically things former players got into, after there careers, and after apprenticing in the ranks for a bit. It would be difficult to be a top level head coach or GM at young age unless you had a short career and got into right after.
Now you have people who may have never made it pro, or maybe even never played in college, that go right into coaching and front office related fields. Coaching and front office gigs are highly sought positions by people from the beginning, as opposed to where a washed up player heads to stay in the game. Add to that the success of some younger coaches changed the view on the level of experience you need to seen as a viable leader of the team. Throw in the use of analytics, and you have an entirely different pool of candidates for these positions now.
Yeah it seems that to get a front office job, it’s probably better to be a data scientist (or whatever in analytics) than to be a former player
When I found out Cecil Fielder’s grandson and Prince’s son is a pro ball player. I think that’s the first grand kid of a player I have clear memories of their playing days.
It really started for me when Shaq started bouncing around from team to team in the late 00’s. Him playing half a season on the Cavs and then a year with the Celtics was the first time it ever occurred to me that a player I started watching when I was a kid would ever stop playing. Time really slapped me in the face when Dwyane Wade and Carmelo Anthony retired.
Vince Carter went from athletic marvel to (mostly) ground-bound role player… and it wasn’t as jarring as I thought it would be.
Saw a factoid somewhere: when Shaq came into the league he was the youngest player; when he retired he was the oldest.
It happens pretty quickly if you about college sports. When you are a senior and freshmen and Sophomores are starters it’s noticeable.
I was really excited circa 2019 when the Nats brought in sooner nearly my age. Then I saw he was something like dour days younger than me. Th3 same thing happened with the Caps around then.
Also, working with people born after I graduated from college is starting to happen.
I’m awaiting the day when I work for a boss younger than me
That happened a while ago…
I wouldn’t quite say “felt old,” but a moment when I felt like maybe I really was actually a grown-up after all came at a baseball game. I lived near Wrigley in 1999, and I knew I’d be moving to DC over the winter, so one September evening I went for a spur-of-the-moment final game at Wrigley. It was a forgettable game, a meaningless late-season tilt between teams with nothing to play for. In the middle of the fifth, with the Cubs leading, the game stopped and the team held a brief on-field ceremony to mark Gary Gaetti’s 2,500th career game. A happy surprise for me, as I had no idea G-Man was anywhere near that career mark, and he’d been a childhood hero of mine as a Twins fan in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Shortly thereafter, the wind shifted, and what had been a warm, not quite muggy late-summer day turned into the first cool evening of autumn, with a brisk wind blowing down the lakeshore from the north. As the game wound down, I realized that I was enjoying it as much as any game I’d ever attended, including several times watching the Twins win World Series games at the Dome. The experience of it, the elegiac ceremony for an aging not-quite-Hall-of-Famer, the palpable change in season, just felt magical, like a memory I would cherish forever. Which turned out to be true! If I could go back and relive attending any baseball game, it would be a mental coin flip between Game Six of the 1987 World Series or that one meaningless, magical September Cubs game in ’99. Anyway, the depth of enjoyment I felt at that random Cubs game felt like a really grown-up feeling. I was 25 that summer, and still mostly went through the world feeling like a kid who’d fooled all the real grown-ups into letting me sit at the big table. But I knew that I was experiencing that game in a way more like how I saw my dad experience games than how I had experienced being a fan in my childhood.
First MLB player younger than me? Alex Rodrigues.
Last MLB player older than me? Bartolo Colon.
A-Rod and Bartolo are the two tentpoles for a lot of people.
As a Rockies fan in Denver, I enjoyed having Moyer on the team as the only remaining MLB player older than me.
As a kid in the Milwaukee area, 8-year-old me marveled at the Brewers’ new shortstop, Robin Yount, who was only 10 years older than I was.
I’m currently 43 and for me it hit when players that I watched as a teenager and early 20s started becoming managers. That always seemed like an old man position when I was young, but then seeing guys close to my age doing it felt a little weird.
Manager ages have gotten weird. Like you say, there’s a lot of very young managers now. Then again, I remember in 2003 when the Marlins hired Jack McKeon, who was 72, and it was big deal. There are currently like 7 managers in their late 60s or older.
I remember very early in his career noticing that Arthur Rhodes was the only Oriole on the roster who was younger than me… which of course came back to me when he was the “old man” of the Cardinals in 2011.
I also noticed that I was just a smidge older than Brett Favre.
I am 67. It is unsettling when most of my favorite players from my teens are gone.
A few years ago there was a basketball player for UNC J.P. Tokoto. I once watched Jean Pierre Tokoto play soccer for the Jacksonville Tea Men -J.P.’s grandfather!
In high school (the 1970s), the first pro athlete who was close to my age was Wayne Gretzky.
Bigger milestones have been deaths of athletes who I enjoyed watching. Guy Lafleur and Mike Bossy left a hole in my childhood.
The one who affected me the most was the ballplayer who I always seem to be referencing on these pages — Dick Tidrow. Especially since Tidrow became a super scout with an uncanny skill for discovering talent that outlasted his pitching career. Was he 74? That really isn’t so young. And that makes me feel old.
Good answers everyone!
I don’t know of a specific moment when I felt old, but at some point in my early 30s I realized I was older than most of the star players. Players around my age were retiring or not getting big contracts based on risk or being described as past their “prime”. That definitely stung a bit.
Agree with many previous comments, I stopped buying or wearing player jerseys when the player was younger than me. I transitioned to team branded 1/4 zips or polos (another sign I was getting old)
Being a fan became 100% focused on my teams. Not liking specific players, buying their gear or sneakers, etc.
There are players who I followed in jr hockey, who then had long careers, retired and were inducted into the hall of fame. Now I’m going through the same process with their kids ffs!
I like to say that I’m closer to dead then cool. I’ll never stop wearing jerseys though. These days its mostly hall of famers and/or my own number and no name. But still, they’ll bury me in a damn jersey.
I will NEVER forget the day I realized all the athletes were all of a sudden younger than me. It was such a foreign thing…
It’s like, the dream of being a pro is officially over
I remember thinking, “damn, Kelly Slater is young” when he won his first world championship — he was the youngest surfer to ever do it at age 20. And then I remember thinking, “damn, Kelly Slater is old” when he won his last world championship at age 39 — the oldest to ever do it.
Well Mike, when you said, “I’m in my mid-30s,” you sank my battleship!
Not really, but almost. My modern-day measuring stick in athletics for determining how old I feel is our youngest son’s age (28, and just became a girl dad in March). If I let it bother me, any athlete who is younger than Chris makes me feel old. Then again, a select few also help to keep me feel young. I’ve really enjoyed watching Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, who is nearing 27, grow into an amazing mix of hoops talent and on-court IQ. But his humility is the X factor for me, and to see that be such an infectious trait among his teammates keeps my fandom young. I see Tyrese Haliburton becoming that type of servant leader as well.
I’m beginning to feel old watching baseball when I’m seeing more players who are the sons of players I had grown up watching. One of the MLB accounts posted a highlight of Prince Fielder’s son Jayden hitting a home run for the Brewers during extended spring training (or maybe A ball?) and it hit me that I watched his father Prince and his grandfather Cecil.
Also I still don’t want to believe the 1990s, the decade I really began watching baseball a lot on TV with occasional trips to the ballpark in person, are 30+ years ago now. That is more like a persistent sort of dread reminding me of the passage of time, haha!
Kobe Bryant (11 months older me) was the first player I remember that was my age to become a superstar and I felt old when he retired. But not too old because Tom Brady was still playing and he is 3 weeks younger than me. So until 2022 I could watch a guy my age still out there playing football.
But what on a side note, what really makes me feel old is that Marty McFly in Back to the Future went back in time 30 years to his parent’s senior year of high school in 1955. If they re-made Back to the Future today, Marty would be going back in time to my senior year in 1995.
Oh wow yeah, to put BTTF that way…..
Robin Yount is 6 months younger than I am. When he debuted with the Brewers, he was still 18 years old and I had just turned 19. That’s when I knew I’d never make the majors. (A joke — I never even dreamed I could do that.)
I think the last player older than me that was still active was Dennis Eckersley. When he retired in 1998 that was it, I was older than every major leaguer.
When I really felt old: Bill Walton was born 3 years before me, so when he was starring for UCLA I was in high school. The day I realized that his SON was not playing for the Lakers, but COACHING the Lakers — yeah, I felt old.
Emile Heskey was in the year below me at school, so we played together, so always gave a marker following pro sports. Watching him leave Liverpool meant he was on the downswing of his career, and the day he retired, I knew my own dreams of becoming a professional footballer were over.
But it was just recently with the draft and the big story being Sanders, and that thought “well I saw his Dad play” that really bought home I’m a completely different generation from what I’m watching.
LeBron James is the first player younger than me (by a few days) that I remember becoming star. I was strange watching him play in the NBA as I was finishing my first college semester.
Also, living in Minnesota I remember when Joe Mauer was just a ridiculously talented high school athlete. A good friend whose my age had the unenviable task of guarding Mauer in a high school basketball game in 2001. Now Mauer has played an entire MLB career, been retired for 5+ years, and is in the Hall of Fame. That makes me feel old.
Last active players younger than me:
MLB – Still 5 players older than me
NFL – Still 3-5 players older than me
NBA – Udonis Haslem (retired 2022)
NHL – Marc-Andre Fleury (retired 2025)
During spring training I like to pore over all the lineups and see where all the players are from as well as their ages. I stopped doing that a few years ago when I realized I have an email address older than most of these players.
I felt old when the Blue Jays signed Roger Clemens and the Arizona Cardinals brought in Emmitt Smith—both moves that felt like scraping the bottom of the barrel just to pad the final years of their careers.
I’m 58, Mike Tyson will be 59 soon, so he is last active athlete older than me. I’m not including any senior golfers cause they play on Seniors’ Tour, enough said. First true star younger than me Ken Griffey Jr, I’ve got him by a couple years. When Jim Kelly came to Buffalo is was 18, hard to grasp its been 40 years.
One of many reasons sports make me feel old:
Most of the guys on my Wall of Kickers are dead now.
A few years ago I first felt old in relation to sports was when players born in 2000 started coming into the big leagues. Also recently when media personalities infer that Alex Ovechkin is old, since he’s 5 months younger than me. However I’ve felt old in relation to pop culture for over a decade…