Ripken refused to watch tape of his record
BALTIMORE — Once upon a time, before the pandemic, more than 46,000 people stood shoulder to shoulder in Camden Yards, cheering nonstop as the foremost Oriole trotted around the ballpark, slapping hands with fans in the stands and hugging players with open arms. Fancy that.
On Sept. 6, 1995, in a game against the California Angels, Cal Ripken Jr. set a mark for the ages, playing in his 2,131st straight game on national television and before a partisan crowd that showered him with a 22-minute standing ovation.
Given COVID-19, Ripken says, “It’s hard to imagine that happening today. But it’s just as hard to believe it happened then.”
Twenty-five years later, the flashpoints of that day are burned in his memory: taking seven curtain calls outside the dugout and tapping his heart each time in response locking eyes with his dad in the stands and giving him a thumbs-up greeting President Bill Clinton, who grasped his hand and said, “God bless you.”
Ripken’s remembrances are
so dear that, until last month, he refused to watch the tape of the game for fear it would blot them out.
“For the longest time, I wanted to preserve the memories I had with my own eyes. I was afraid that if I saw the game as it was, that experience would ruin it,” he says. “The night was so special that I wanted it to be my memories — and I don’t regret having done that.”
A quarter century has passed since Ripken, 35 and an Aberdeen native, stepped onto the home turf and shattered a 56-yearold record that had seemed set in stone: Lou Gehrig’s string of 2,130 consecutive games played. Gehrig, the Hall of Fame first baseman for the New York Yankees, was also 35 and suffering from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) — the fatal neurological disease that would one day bear his name — when he benched himself and made headlines in 1939.