Ranking the best sports-related gifts of childhood

There are few years when Christmas is the best. Santa is at his peak, you remember the traditions and the season seems to take forever before the magical morning when you open presents.

You can make the case that Christmas is most magical when you're 4 or 5.

Giftwise, though, I nominate ages 10 to 12 as peak Christmas. That's when you have an idea of the source of those gifts, but you also have some things you really want but see no path to getting them other than at Christmas. You're too young to work and in my day, parents didn't randomly buy us anything except food.

My best childhood gifts were always (always!) sports related. I wasn't a great athlete, but boy did I love sports. Even more, I loved the stuff that went with sports and the only way I could get those things (which weren't that expensive, but beyond 10-year-old Brad's budget) was as Christmas gifts.

With no further ado, here's a countdown of 10 sports-related Christmas gifts of my childhood, providing a window into what my parents had to seek out during those years and their hits and misses. This list doesn't include sports games (Electric Football, Monday Night Football, APBA baseball), but actual sports-related equipment.

10. Raiders rain poncho. My stepmom got it for me shortly after marrying my dad. I hated the Raiders. I loved the 49ers, but I'm sure she thought, "Oh, it's a football thing. He'll love this!" and I had to play along. For the next few years, I wore it only during downpours. Otherwise, I'd suffer wet clothes before putting on that silver-and-black monstrosity.

9. Generic football jersey. Same era as the poncho. It was yellow with brown numbers and some green. I remember thinking maybe it was a knockoff of the Steelers or the Packers, but couldn't tell. It was No. 15, so I thought maybe it was Bart Starr? I wore it, but hoped no one would ask me who it was, because that was impossible to answer.

8. Nerf football. I love all Nerf products and was thrilled to get this. A Nerf football! It wouldn't hurt to catch! I could actually grip it! The Christmas morning joy and the longevity of the gift suggests it should go higher on the list, but the fact that it rained constantly in my hometown meant that when I left it outside, it would get waterlogged and weigh five pounds for a month (an 11-year-old boy couldn't really wring it out well), moves it down.

7. Baseball mitt. Few things are more thrilling than your first real baseball mitt and mine came at about age 8 or 9, when I was in Little League. It's not higher because I rarely had someone with whom to play catch (this list is probably explaining why) and other gifts are better for the lone 10-year-old on a dreary June afternoon. That mitt did catch a lot of "grounders" courtesy of throwing of a tennis ball off the garage, though.

6. Shoulder pads. Perhaps the least practical gift on the list (did I really need shoulder pads to play football in the yard with my friends?), but so cool. I would occasionally put them on and spend 45 seconds tugging a T-shirt over them just for the experience. White, cheap plastic shoulder pads seem cool even now.

5. Wiffle ball and bat. I loved this sport as a kid and have written about it previously (actually, my research indicates I've written about wiffle ball 12 times (!), but the linked column is about my wiffle ball peak). Getting the combination of the yellow plastic bat and a few wiffle balls was great. The only reasons it's not higher on the list is that Christmas isn't in baseball season and I could go to a local hardware store and buy them with a few bucks.

4. Red, white and blue headband and wrist bands. Those sweatbands stayed with me for years as I played on our driveway basketball court in 52-degree weather (which does not make you sweat). I loved basketball. I thought sweatbands were a necessity to be a cool player. I don't know if I ever washed them, which may have been a mistake. I'll ask my sisters.

3. Football kicking tee. This probably wasn't expensive, but must have been hard to find. An orange kicking tee with ridges so you could adjust the angle of the ball? Perfect. I found a  2-by-4 board and draped it across two trees that bordered my backyard and spent many afternoons practicing field goals (soccer style kicker!), often with the aforementioned Nerf football. I probably made 5% of the kicks from about 15 yards away, so more time was spent retrieving the ball.

2. Nerfhoop. Every kid I knew wanted one. This was a perfect year-round gift, because I hung it on the door from our family room (the former garage) and could shoot jumpers, free throws and the inevitable dunks. My stepmom and sisters probably told me 1,000 times to keep quiet, but I was dunking! With a red, white and blue headband on! They didn't understand cool.

1. Red, white and blue basketball. Was my obsession with red, white and blue basketball gear more inspired by the nation's bicentennial or by the American Basketball Association? Well, I read magazines and books that included George McGinnis and not George Washington, so make your guess. I'll never forget coming out Christmas morning, seeing a squarish package addressed to me, picking it up and feeling the basketball treads. Yes! Weather didn't affect this; I could play basketball in the rain. No gift of my childhood was used with more frequency than that red, white and blue basketball.

Reach Brad Stanhope at bradstanhope@outlook.com.

My sisters and the magical disappearing battleships

I'm pretty sure my sisters cheated while playing against me in a game that is now immortal.

The 2025 class for the Toy Hall of Fame, the world's greatest hall of fame, was announced last month. (FYI, my Mount Rushmore of Halls of Fame also includes the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, and the International Towing & Recovery Hall of Fame & Museum in Chattanooga, Tennessee.)

This year's Toy Hall of Fame inductees are Slime, Trivial Pursuit and the game referenced in the first paragraph: Battleship.

It's unlikely anyone will look back at the 2025 class as particularly memorable, unlike 2023 (Nerf, baseball cards, Cabbage Patch Kids and Fisher-Price corn popper) or 2000 (Mr. Potato Head, slinky, bicycle, jacks and jump rope), but it's a reasonable class. It's like the Baseball Hall of Fame 2012 class of Ron Santo and Barry Larkin. Both solid stars. Both deserving. But Santo and Larkin were the Slime and Trivial Pursuit of baseball.

I never played with Slime as a kid. However, I was forced to dress as cartoon character Jimmy Neutron in a room full of kids during a family trip to the Nickelodeon studios in Orlando, Florida, with our two young sons. The stunt was part of a knockoff of "Slime Time Live," a popular show on Nickelodeon, so I have a bit of a history with slime.

Trivial Pursuit, of course, was the leading table game for smart people in the 1980s, so not really for me. I loved the "Sports and Leisure" and "History" categories but had no chance at anything in the "Science and Nature" or "Art and Literature" categories. I had mixed feelings about that game, based on whether I was on a team with someone who knew Shakespeare's work or the periodic table of the elements.

But Battleship? It was one of about 15 board games at my childhood home.

The premise of Battleship, of course, is to figure out where your opponent's five ships are on a grid and sink them all, presumably killing all the sailors aboard (that part wasn't emphasized in the game's description, but is clearly the case and could be related to certain current events). You can't see your opponent's board, so you guess positions on a 10-by-10 board: "E5?" "D1?"

Once you get a hit, it's easier, since the ships (which take up two to five spaces on the board) must be positioned vertically or horizontally.

In my memory, while playing against my sisters, I'd get a hit (let's say D5). Then I'd guess D4, D6, E5 and C5. They would say I missed them all.

That was impossible! Those were the only directions their ships could go! Did they have disappearing ships? Did their ships go diagonally (which is illegal)?

I'd suspect my sisters cheated. I'd suspect they made a mistake when they told me D5 was a hit. Finally, I'd guess other spaces, intending to eventually return to the area in which I got a hit. Inevitably, I'd forget (maybe I'd win and forget. Maybe we'd get into a fight and I'd forget. Maybe they'd win and I'd be bored so I didn't care), but there's only one thing I remember from Battleship: My sisters didn't play it straight.

MY SISTERS CHEATED AT BATTLESHIP!

We're all older now and I doubt they'll acknowledge that they cheated on a board game in 1973, but I'm convinced it's true. And the fact that people (by "people," I mean my sisters) could so easily cheat at Battleship makes me skeptical that it belongs in the Toy Hall of Fame.

Alas, it's now enshrined. But now the nine toys that were nominated this year but fell short – most notably cornhole, the scooter and Spirograph– have to be wondering whether Battleship, like my sisters, cheated to win.

Reach Brad Stanhope at bradstanhope@outlook.com.

Marriage of sports and gambling likely to be fatal to American sports

Gambling–not injuries, television, money or performance-enhancing drugs–is the biggest threat to sports in America.

Unfortunately, the people who run and broadcast sports are so beholden to gambling money that they don't or won't) see it. The people who should love sports the most are feeding the cancer that may kill it.

An overstatement? Nope.

Gambling and sports have a long history. Presumably, the first athletic contests (Races? Fights? Spear-throwing contests?) involved wagers. From the time people began competing, others bet on who would win.

Illegal gambling cast a shadow over American major sports since the start. The "Black Sox" scandal – the biggest sports gambling scandal in American sports history, when Chicago Whites Sox players took money to lose the World Series – took place in 1919: 106 years ago. Then came the college basketball "fixing" scandals that nearly destroyed the sport. Myriad fixed boxing matches. Pete Rose's expulsion from baseball for betting on the sport. Much, much more.

All along, those running the sports wanted to protect their games.

The specter of gambling – particularly shaving points (winning, but ensuring your team wins by less than the gambling spread) – meant that the penalties for involvement in gambling were so draconian that no rational person would consider it (Pete Rose was not rational).

Then . . . our nation embraced gambling. Decision-makers – with the blessing of NBA commissioner Adam Silver, at least – acknowledged that gambling makes sports more popular, so they largely legalized it. The blend of technology and gambling led to myriad phone apps, where gamblers can bet not only on game results, but on whether players will score more or less than a certain number of points or gain more or less than a certain number of yards. Those apps let people make real-time bets on whether a baseball pitch will be a ball or a strike or if the next football play will be a run or pass.

Bad news, right? Gambling – an addiction that so often ruins lives and jeopardizes the integrity of the games – became easy and convenient.

Even worse, those gambling apps (DraftKings, FanDuel, BetMGM and more) realized where their audience was: Watching games. So they began to advertise during games. Then they struck deals with leagues to be the official sponsor. They paid so much that TV broadcasts now show odds on the ticker and announcers talk about what parlay bets they'd make. Former athletes star in commercials about how easy it is to bet.

Gambling apps poured millions (billions?) into sponsoring podcasts and news organizations. Legit sports reporting outlets added betting partners and began running articles that include odds.

Now the piper is being paid. The avalanche of gambling scandals has begun.

One NBA player has been banned for sharing information (that he would fake an injury) with gamblers. At least two others and a coach are under federal investigation for the same.

Two pitchers on the Cleveland Indians face lifetime bans and decades in prison for allegedly tipping off gamblers that they would throw pitches that would not be strikes, so the gamblers could profit on specific bets.

It's chaotic and getting worse. Professional athletes now routinely get death threats because someone lost $200 on a parlay bet that required them to score 20 points or get two hits in a game. Friends of athletes sniff around for information to help them win $2,000.

The leaders of the sports and the media members covering those sports? They wring their hands. They say it's good that gambling is regulated, so they could discover these problems (ignoring that virtually all of the recent gambling scandals have involved "prop bets," which illegal bookies rarely allow). They say people would gamble anyway.

Nonsense. Granted, it's a lot of money. A lot of money.

But it's money that will ultimately kill sports because fans will question whether results are legitimate.

Sports leagues and media outlets are feeding the beast. They're killing their own sport. They're spending their time announcing gambling scandals while protecting the gambling apps that create them.

This is like deciding people will always take drugs, so we allow apps that provide an immediate free hit of whatever drug they use, all while advertising how great the drug app is and having influential people talking about how high you can get off the new methamphetamines.

Professional sports seem healthy, but they're not. The killer and the victim are the same organizations and the only way to fix it is the same thing that gambling addicts need to do. Stop. Now. Pay the price but get away from gambling.

It won't happen. There's too much money involved for everyone to see that they're killing the thing they love.

I hope I'm wrong.

Reach Brad Stanhope at bradstanhope@outlook.com.