As another year draws to a close, I’ve been reading a lot of list-based blog posts and articles, most of which are about books, movies, and music that I more than likely missed this year because I have no idea how to pay attention to any of it anymore. I miss the glory days of Entertainment Weekly because while I was a regular reader and subscriber, I at least knew what was out there even if I didn’t always see, read, or listen to it. And you could say the same for sports, which I have been watching more of lately but still have a problem following. I don’t know what it is, but since I don’t watch SportsCenter anymore, I can’t seem to remember to check standings or keep up with what’s going on in various leagues. Shit, I can barely tell you who the major players on a number of the teams I follow.

This was always kind of true, even when I was younger. My parents did not get the newspaper and we didn’t have cable, so the only way for me to keep up with scores was the local news; I often missed standings and stats, though. But I knew a lot of what was going on in the world of sports because I had a subscription to Sports Illustrated.

Of course, that’s nothing unique among teenage boys in America in the 1980s and 1990s. Sports Illustrated was one of the most subscribed to magazines in the country and so iconic that getting the cover could be a blessing in a “cover of the Rolling Stone sort of way” or a curse, depending on how your team was doing (Long before the “Madden Curse” was the “SI Cover Curse” where a team or player was on a hot streak, got themselves on the cover of the magazine and immediately started to slump). I can’t tell you how much of it I read on a weekly basis–although it’s not hard for you to guess that I spent a lot of time looking at the swimsuit issue every year–but I can say that it was a formative piece in my “sports education.”

Now, if you remember anything about Sports Illustrated subscriptions back in the 1980s and 1990s, the commercials always advertised two things: the amount off the cover price you’d get if you subscribed and a number of extras:

I want to say that the most famous extra of all time is probably the football phone that they gave away in the 1980s. I never got that, but when I subscribed in 1989, I received a free copy of The NFL’s Greatest Hits, a tape I must have watched twenty or thirty times. It was followed up with Super Duper Baseball Bloopers, which was a nice companion to my friend’s copy of Dazzling Dunks and Basketball Bloopers. In 1993 and 1994, though, I received that year’s copy of The Year in Sports.

Those two VHS tapes were also frequently watched, and I think that’s because my lack of access to ESPN meant that I didn’t often get the chance to watch highlight reels and montages. Sure, if I wanted to stay up pretty late to watch The George Michael Sports Machine, I could, and there were times when I remembered to watch This Week in Baseball, but for the most part I had to rely on popping these tapes in and watching them over and over. Honestly, though, I didn’t mind.

Now, my copy of 1993: The Year in Sports went to the great beyond years ago, but someone thankfully uploaded the entire thing to YouTube and in the spirit of the year-in-review season, I decided to take a look at it and see what I remembered from 30 years ago.

We start not with the highlights but with two commercials. One is for the Super Nintendo game Championship Football and Baseball, which I don’t remember ever seeing or playing (then again, I never owned a SNES despite begging my parents for one). The other is for SI: The Store. This was their catalogue that sold their highlight tapes, authentic merchandise, and sports collectibles. To my knowledge, I don’t think that they ever actually opened a physical store in a mall–or at least a mall near me–which is surprising considering that by the mid 1990s, it seemed like every popular media outlet had a store at the mall. I never called for the catalogue, although that would have been fun to flip through, and I suspect that a lot of the “collectibles” were the type of things that were expensive to buy but seem are now ubiquitous on the secondary market.

After this, by the way, is an ad for Dodge.

Yes, I remember the Dodge Viper as well. In fact, I remember that there was a show called Viper that starred … well, the car. And a few actors, I think. I just find it funny that they included it on this tape and that the ad makes Dodge seem less macho than their current ad campaigns. Of course, I could be wrong and there are family-oriented Dodge commercials but nowadays every time I see those cars advertised, all I see is manly men doing manly men things with their manly men pickup trucks.

After that ad, though, we get to the introductory montage, which is set to “Top of the World” by Van Halen, which is the closing track to For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge. It’s a montage of great plays and championship moments throughout the year and I have to be honest, I don’t think that you could pick a better Van Hagar song for it (especially considering “Dreams” was several years old at this point and “Right Now” had already been used in a Crystal Pepsi ad). It’s a reminder of what mainstream rock sounded like in 1993, and between the Vince DiCola-esque synth music used throughout the video along with various instrumental metal tracks, HBO Sports, who produced the video, is giving us “mainstream cool.”

Peter Kessler, who was an HBO Sports mainstay for years, is our narrator and he brings us in to tell us that we’re going to be checking out all of the big moments of 1993, and we start with the biggest sport in the country: football.

The footage in this segment is some of the best produced, mainly because HBO Sports raided NFL Films and they always have choice cuts. We spend a montage’s worth of time in the regular season before heading into the playoffs, which would be capped by the Bills’ third-straight Super Bowl loss, this time to the Dallas Cowboys. And there’s plenty of focus on Dallas and that Super Bowl win, which reminded me of three things: I fucking hate the Dallas Cowboys, just about every Super Bowl from 1992-1996 was a boring blowout, and I fucking hate the Dallas Cowboys.

The best part of this segment, though was what I screencapped above, which was the first round game between Buffalo and the Houston Oilers. Until the Minnesota Vikings overcame a 33-0 score to beat Indianapolis in 2022, this was the biggest comeback in NFL history and remains the biggest comeback in NFL Playoffs history. Going into the second half, the Bills were down by 32 points and were being quarterbacked by Frank Reich, who had replaced Jim Kelly late in the season after Kelly went on the DL (he’d return in the Super Bowl but I think left the game with an injury). To watch the highlights of this was phenomenal, especially considering that the Oilers had Warren Moon, who up until Buffalo started their comeback, was absolutely perfect. 

I remember watching the second half of this game, and I think it was completely by chance. The Giants had completely shit the bed that season (I think Ray Handley was still the coach) and so I didn’t have that much of an interest in football, but there was nothing on that Sunday and I’m pretty sure that I had this on for background noise until I noticed that the Bills were going on a crazy scoring run. It honestly was all anyone could talk about the following day at school and still one of the most exciting games I’ve watched on TV.

Moving into college football, I have to tell you that I remember so little of this because I’m not really a huge college football person. I think this mainly has to do with my not growing up in a college football area (New York is definitely a pro sports town) and refusing to root for Notre Dame. The championship game this year was Alabama vs. Miami and we begin the highlights of that game with commentary about how Alabama didn’t get a lot of respect and Miami was expected to roll right to the championship because they’d won the previous year and had the Heisman Trophy winner Gino Torretta. Now, I remember Miami being a great team around this time–“The U” was big-time–but I had to look up who the hell Gino Torretta was. He went to the Vikings in the third round of the draft in 1993 and spent seven years as a journeyman backup. The other thing that caught me by surprise was that ‘Bama wasn’t getting respect. That’s the complete opposite of what we see these days. In fact, as I write this they are making yet another appearance in the college football playoffs and Miami went 7-5 and hasn’t won a championship since 2001.

I have to say that I almost fast forwarded through the college football recap to get to the college basketball recap. I love the NCAA tournament and I think this year is the reason why. I’d probably paid attention in prior years and may have even filled out a bracket for the fun of it, but I distinctly remember watching a number of games from the 1993 game including the championship game between Michigan and UNC. And as you can see from the screencap, this is that championship, the one where the Fab 5 came storming in and took on a steadfast Carolina team that was coached by Dean Smith. There’s some great commentary by various sportswriters, talking heads, and players in the video about the competing styles of the two teams, and that’s before we get to the moment that anyone and everyone remembers. Down by two points with time running out, Chris Webber got a rebound off of a foul shot, took the ball down the court, and called timeout with hopes of setting up a play. However, Michigan was out of timeouts and that was a technical foul.

It’s right up there among all of the classic mental errors in sports history (one of which happened in that Cowboys-Bills Super Bowl) and I remember that my friend and I had to do a double take while watching it because we couldn’t believe that anyone would make an error like that. Plus, I had Michigan winning the game, mainly because they’d been so strong and so well-known going into it. Years later, Michigan and the Fab Five would be the center of a massive scandal that resulted in this and several other seasons being vacated by the NCAA.

I thought either the NBA or hockey would be next considering they were the other two major sports going on at the time, but instead we get a montage of bloopers. I don’t have much to say about this except that it was a nice reminder of how bloopers were a staple of sports highlights, especially in the 1980s and 1990s. I especially remember Len Berman doing the “Spanning the World” blooper reels on WNBC and a host of other TV shows and sports reporter segments winding up the week in/month in/year in mess-ups. Oh, and the video for “Walk of Life” by Dire Straits.

Then, I was surprised by boxing highlights. I had completely forgotten how huge boxing used to be. These days, I don’t follow any of it and I’m pretty sure it’s been eclipsed by UFC (which I refuse to watch), but the 1990s were one of the last decades of boxing’s prominence in the sports world. And in this segment, we have Lennox Lewis, George Foreman, and Rocky V‘s very own Tommy Morrison. The biggest match, though, is Evander Holyfield beating Riddick Bowe for the heavyweight championship, a fight that was interrupted by a guy who parachuted into the arena, something that was parodied on The Simpsons:

I know that at some point in the next year or so, George Foreman would win another heavyweight title and then go on to sell the George Foreman Grill (I owned one). Evander Holyfield would be pretty much the biggest name in boxing for most of the rest of the decade until Mike Tyson made his comeback and bit part of Holyfield’s ear off. I want to say that was 1996? Anyway, I shouldn’t be surprised that boxing had its own section (though tennis and golf both do not) because HBO Sports had a lot of boxing coverage in the 1990s (and still does) and up until he was eclipsed by Michael Jordan, the person featured on the most SI covers was Muhammad Ali.

Speaking of Michael Jordan, we finally get to the NBA and the third Bulls championship in three years. The montage at the beginning of the segment is set to … metal? Man, whoever was putting this together completely missed who the NBA’s core audience was.

Anyway, there are three things from this segment that stand out. The first is the Eastern Conference Finals between the Bulls and Knicks. These teams would go at it pretty hard in the playoffs a couple of years in a row, and this year was one of their biggest battles. There’s the memorable finish to game five where Charles Smith is under the basket and gets blocked four times by four different Bulls as time runs out, not drawing a foul or scoring any of the three points that the Knicks needed to tie. And there’s also the highlight of John Starks dunking on Michael Jordan toward the end of game two.

I kid you not when I say that Knicks fans went completely nuts over this. To the point where it became a poster. No, I’m serious.

I am pretty sure that my cousin had this poster. And I’m also sure that Knicks fans remember that in 1994, Starks bricked the championship winning shot in game six of the finals and then bricked every shot he took in game seven when the Knicks lost to Houston.

The second thing from that segment that stood out to me is that the Bulls would go on to play Charles Barkley and The Suns in a really good series, which included a triple overtime game three. The Suns won that game and then the Bulls won game four as, according to our narration, “Jordan responds like a champion.” Of course, we now know he took the loss personally.

Finally the NBA segment ends with Jordan announcing his retirement, something that shocked everyone, even those of us who didn’t follow pro basketball. Now, I was watching this with hindsight, having lived through the season he played minor league ball with the White Sox, his return to the Bulls, and the championships that he won in the late 1990s. I even remember his short stint on the Washington Wizards in the early 2000s. This is treated as one of the saddest stories of the year, which I guess it was considering how much coverage magazines like Sports Illustrated gave Jordan.

Hockey highlights are set to the only music you can set hockey highlights to: thrashing speed metal guitar. It’s still like that, too. In fact, I don’t think the NHL even allows music that was recorded after 1999 to be played in any of its arenas. I’ve heard Lit’s “My Own Worst Enemy” during hockey games this year more than I have heard the song on the radio in the past 10. By the way, the Montreal Canadiens beat the LA Kings this year for the Stanley Cup (the only time Wayne Gretzky took the Kings to the Cup finals), although everyone I was around barely paid attention to that and only talked about the Islanders making a run all the way to the semi-finals. Whatever. They haven’t won the cup in nearly 40 years. How does it feel, assholes?

The second to last individual segment is “Dubious Achievements”, which is the “Hall of Shame” for 1993. You’ve got stuff from every league, including Jose Canseco making an idiot out of himself and the Mets’ Anthony Young setting the record for most consecutive losses by a pitcher. But the biggest one of all is reserved for Leon Lett. 

I barely watched Super Bowl XXVII. I think I turned it on and watched enough of it to realize that the Cowboys were going to destroy the Bills, then went upstairs to study chemistry. At one point, tired of trying to understand chem and with my brain really hurting, I went back downstairs to check on the game and was just in time to watch Don Beebe knock the ball out of Leon Lett’s hands right before Lett made it to the endzone. It made my night.

The last big sport for the year was Major League Baseball, and out of all of the sports it was the one I was most invested in and to a degree still am. The Mets sucked hard in 1993 (and in 2023, so not much has changed), so I wound up following a lot of the other action because it was more interesting than them. And it was a really good year, especially in the National League, where the Braves fought for the NL West title all the way until the last day of the season (this was before realignment) during which part of Fulton County Stadium caught on fire (a game my wife was at, btw). In the NL East, the big story was the Phillies, who were quite possibly the most disgusting team to ever play a season.

Seriously, I had forgotten how gross this team was. Okay, I knew Lenny Dykstra was because Nails and I go back to his rookie year in 1985 and John Kruk was … well, John Kruk. But I saw one shot of Mitch Williams on the mound and I could just smell him. And they got so much coverage in the season in this “boys playing the game” sort of way, which goes to show you the levels to which we tolerated and even encouraged toxic masculinity in the early 1990s (and that was a few years before the Yankees returned to power). Thank God for Joe Carter.

Could you think of a better way to end a World Series? Watching Carter’s home run thirty years later is still a joyful experience, especially when he leaps around the bases like a little leaguer. I could watch it again and again. And show it to Phillies fans again and again.

From here, the video begins to wrap up, but before we finish with a final montage of MVPs and championship winners (including golf, tennis, and other sports not covered), there’s a short in memoriam segment with a weird transition into said MVP segment. Seriously, the Oscars have smoother transitions.

This was a nice reminder of how good sports were when I was a teenager and really how good they are now. The irony is that with so much access to sports through cable and the internet, I’ve spent the last several years not paying enough attention. But hopefully that will change in 2024.