MEMORABLE GIFTS
Five writers/editors at the AJC list their five favorite sports Christmas gifts:
1. Doug Roberson: The soccer balls
Just about every year, I would walk down the hallway from my bedroom, eager to see what type of soccer ball Santa had left under the tree. I played three or four seasons of soccer a year, so by end of the year, after being kicked thousands of times, the old balls’ panels would be worn out with frayed stitches and coloring.
2. Ray Cox: The Schwinn
As the youngest child and only boy, sports gifts were a constant — every birthday, every Christmas. For a while, it was all baseball — ball, bat, glove, a promise of a trip to see the Braves. The best was when I decided I would be the next Orlando Cepeda and got the first baseman’s mitt. That lasted one season. My favorite: the gold Schwinn Stingray muscle bike with the banana seat. There are times I still ride it in my mind.
3. Tim Ellerbee: The pellet gun
I was 10 when I found the Crosman pump-action pellet gun under the tree at 5 a.m. on Christmas day. By 7 a.m. it was confiscated. By the time mom and dad got up — and before dad had worked with me on the gun safety thing — I’d shot out all of the outside Christmas lights, and one unfortunate street light, in my rural hometown of Byron. We went through the safety process weeks later when my punishment ended, and I spent years in the woods with that gun. I still had it at age 28.
4. D. Orlando Ledbetter: The electric football set
Santa wrapped it in a long box, and to this day, I’ve wondered how Santa got it down the chimney. I ripped it open and there it was: my first Electric Football set. I believe the teams were the Kansas City Chiefs and the Minnesota Vikings. That buzzing noise was like music to my ears. It rang throughout the house for much of the day as I fruitlessly tried to get the quarterbacks to throw accurate sponge-ball passes.
5. Kyle Wingfield: The baseball cards
When my 9-year-old self ran to the den Christmas morning, amidst the toys sat a box full of cardboard. Not just any cardboard: the complete 1987 set of Topps baseball cards. I rubbed them out of “mint condition” poring over the stats they listed and proposing trades with friends. They didn’t pay for college, as I’d assured my parents, but they helped educate a baseball fan.
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