While watching the Braves vs. Dodgers NLCS last weekend, I got to thinking about one thing. Where were you when Sid slid home? If you are from Atlanta or this area or are a long-time Braves fan, you KNOW where you were. Moments like that are important to us as a society and as individuals. We look back at those times from somewhere in the distant future and we remember the sights, the sounds, and the smells that we experienced then. The people we were with will forever be important to us.

Oct. 14, 1992, was the date. Game 7 of the NLCS Braves vs. the Pirates. David Justice scored from third base to tie the game and they waved the big lumbering first baseman Sid Bream home from second to win the NLCS and go on to the World Series. Atlanta went wild! The Braves had gone from worst to first. To be honest, I didn’t even remember David Justice scoring the tying run. All I remember was Sid, bad knees and all, galloping home and sliding across the plate. The entire team ran onto the field and piled on him. I mean who wouldn’t remember that? The Olympics, in my opinion, did not unite or change Atlanta as much as that one moment. That one win…

Like most nights in 1992, I was hunting. We were running coon hounds down here off lower Harmony Road outside of Eatonton at a friend’s dairy farm. My best friend, Virgil Brown, (who was much older than me, but we hunted together all the time) and I were sitting on the tailgate of his old Isuzu Pup diesel pickup drinking coffee and listening to the dogs trail a coon. The night was beautiful. Bright and clear with a little bite to the air. That nearly perfect fall night. As usual, the game was on in the background. When the ninth inning came around, we turned up the volume on the old radio and were probably ignoring everything else going on by this time. By the time Justice and Bream made it on base, I remember the dogs being treed but we didn’t move. 

Virgil was more than just a hunting buddy for me. He was a mentor and a second father at a time when I needed guidance that was from someone I wasn’t related to. Virgil, his wife Dianne, and his kids moved next door to us in the summer of 1991. He worked for Norfolk Southern railroad and was from New Castle, Va. A houndsman from way back, he loved Treeing Walkers and coon hunting. He had raised, trained and hunted, if I remember right, four Grand Night Champions and a couple of Bench Champions. Virgil hunted dogs from the House line and Lone Pine up in Virginia. Dogs that were much more suited to the time before GPS tracking collars and high-speed low drag hunting. 

Two of the best hounds I ever hunted behind were his. Bo (an old female) and Racket (a young pup that unfortunately died of stomach twist around 18 months old) were close-hunting small land dogs. Both would hunt loops of about 30 minutes until they struck something. If they came back four times though you better grab them or it was going to be a long night, but they would find coons. On this particular night they treed a pair of coons about 400 yards away from us. Back then, before coyotes and the rise of the mega buck ideas that run most hunting clubs today, this wasn’t uncommon. There were a LOT of coons around and we would tree more than one at a time often down here.

I remember talking to Virgil about how happy my grandmothers would be right now. Both were huge Braves fans and would spend hours visiting with each during the summer complaining about the moves Bobby Cox or Ted Turner had made. I remember walking to the tree after Sid slid home and us talking about how much baseball had meant to him as a small boy growing up in the coalfields of Virginia. How as a child he could get WSB AM750 and that was why he was a Braves fan. Then on to Ted Turner’s creation of TBS and buying the Braves. You see, this meant almost everyone who had cable or a really good antenna and lived east of the Mississippi and south of Pennsylvania could get Braves games on TV. He was a Braves fan that had only been to one or two games ever. But he listened to them all. 

On a night like this, it’s almost anti-climactic to shoot out a coon. Once the rifle cracks the dogs will soon stop barking, the chaos will subside, and the world will go back to normal. In the racket and uproar of the tree, your world focuses down to a light hanging on your head and the scope on your 22. You try hard to pick out any ear, piece of fur, any movement in the tree. After five minutes of looking your neck muscles start to hurt and usually, the people around the tree are jockeying for position and arguing over is that a coon’s ear or not. It’s a tough thing to describe. There’s no way to compare it to anything a person who has never wandered the woods at night has experienced. I never forget a tree. I’ve never forgotten the lessons a little mountain man taught me either.

That, however, is the story of where I was when Sid slid.

Outdoors columnist can be reached at pressleyoutdoors@gmail.com.