Skip to main content

25 Years Ago in Bonac Sports

Wed, 07/03/2019 - 12:48

It happened here, sports fans

June 9, 1994

Monday's weather was, if you recall, iffy -- the skies were unsettled. And so it was with the East Hampton High School baseball team, which took a handsome 23-2 record into a first-round state Class C playoff game with Cold Spring Harbor.

As if prompted by the ambivalent atmosphere that weighed upon the North Shore High School field in Glen Cove, the Bonackers, who have played excellent defense all season long, suffered through a hideous bout of indecisiveness in the first inning. By its end, Cold Spring Harbor had been made a huge gift of four runs, and East Hampton had committed four errors, baffling those fans who had taken delight in watching them make play after play since April.

The county small schools champions recovered their collective confidence thereafter, taking advantage of some sloppy Seahawk pitching and fielding in the top of the fourth, to pull to 4-3, but try as they might, the Bonackers, who wound up losing 5-3, could not get over the top.

. . . "You've had a great season," Jim Nicoletti, East Hampton's coach, told his glum team, which gathered around him as the Cold Spring Harbor players gleefully piled on one another near the pitcher's mound. "It happens . . . don't let it detract from the great team that we are."

. . . "The best tribute I can pay them is that they played the game the way it should be played -- they respected the game and they respected each other. . . . It's still hard to believe that the season is over."

June 16, 1994

After winning his seventh straight Montauk Triathlon Saturday, Eben Jones, the 34-year-old investment banker from New Canaan, Conn., and world-class triathlete, announced that it may have marked his last competitive appearance here.

. . . Repeating a familiar, but still compelling, script, Jones was first to exit Lake Montauk after a one-mile swim, in 19 minutes and 29 seconds, first to finish the 20-mile bike leg, in 49:09, and first to cross the finish line, after having run a 35:33 10K. The whole event took him a grand total of 1 hour, 43 minutes, and 33 seconds.

. . . Recently, Jones placed a disappointing eighth in a triathlon in Columbia, Md. "I felt terrible in that one -- my legs were tight. Today, I felt real good. I couldn't have gone any faster."

June 23, 1994

Ross Gload, East Hampton High School's star senior first baseman, who led the county with 20 home runs and 61 runs batted in this season, on June 15 became the first East Ender ever to win the Carl Yastrzemski Award, which the county's coaches give to the most valuable player in Suffolk.

. . . Both Gload and Henry Meyer, the team's junior catcher, were honored as all-county selections.

Meyer led East Hampton in batting this season with a .489 average. Gload batted .488, and, in addition to his aforementioned slugging stats, school records both, scored a school-record 49 runs. He set the batting average mark last season, at .492.

June 30, 1994

Anyone wondering how the World Cup is playing on the East End need go no farther than the Old Shebeen (Gaelic for "speakeasy") on the eastern shore of Montauk's Fort Pond.

When Ireland upset Italy 1-0 on June 18, "the roof came off," said one of the bartenders, Caroline Fitzgerald, "and everyone ran outside to celebrate. They draped Irish flags on the police cars. The police were very understanding, though -- it was all in good fun."

"There are no better fans in the world," said Chris Byrne, a co-owner of the watering hole, as a throng began to assemble for Friday's noontime match between Ireland and Mexico. The bar was showing the game on a huge screen bought to chronicle the first-ever World Cup held in America, and on two other TV sets as well.

A photographer was told to take up a position near the door, "because if we score," said Dermot Hickey, a native Dubliner, "everybody will come running out."
 


Your support for The East Hampton Star helps us deliver the news, arts, and community information you need. Whether you are an online subscriber, get the paper in the mail, delivered to your door in Manhattan, or are just passing through, every reader counts. We value you for being part of The Star family.

Your subscription to The Star does more than get you great arts, news, sports, and outdoors stories. It makes everything we do possible.