Of all those in Yankee Stadium 50 years ago today, it’s doubtful if anyone had a more unique experience than Ed “Nap” Doherty, the former Loyola College basketball coach and player recently named to the school’s all-time All-Star team.
Doherty grew up almost in the shadows of Ebbetts Field, a born-and-bred Dodgers fan — both baseball and football. But by 1958 he had relocated to Baltimore, where he was in his second year as an assistant to Lefty Reitz, the legendary basketball coach whose name adorns Loyola’s arena.
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Doherty scored six tickets for The News-Post so he and his five buddies could sit among Colts’ fans in the upper deck, which for him, was far from the best seat at Yankee Stadium.
“I heard it from those guys the whole game — being part of the Baltimore contingent, especially when the Giants went ahead,” recalled Doherty, now retired and living in the Towson area. “They looked at me as a traitor, but I was never really a Giants fan. I remembered Ace Parker and the Brooklyn Dodgers football team, and never really felt any loyalty to the Giants.”
Doherty said his experience at the Colts-Giants game “is almost like a blur.” But ask him about his first trip to Yankee Stadium on Oct. 8 1956, and he’ll tell you about another game of equally epic proportions, the circumstances of which he remembers vividly to this day.
“It was the perfect game,” he said, referring to Don Larsen’s Fall Classic gem against a certain team from Brooklyn and recalling somewhat bizarre circumstances that led him from Brooklyn to the Bronx. “A friend who had been in the service with my brother Danny had never seen a big league baseball game, and rather than try to tell him how to get to Yankee Stadium, I took the day off and went with him.”
As the game progressed and Larsen kept putting zeroes on the board against Nap’s team, the anxiety grew with each pitch.
“Are you rooting for the perfect game?” the now borderline family friend asked.
“Are you kidding? I’m a Dodger fan,” Doherty half-screamed, and as many former basketball referees in the area could attest, he had a unique half-scream.
Larsen would, of course, pitch the perfect game, and the irony — or tragedy in Nap’s case — is that the guy Doherty took to the game was from, of all places, Los Angeles.
“Two years later the Dodgers were in L.A., and I told Danny I wasn’t ever talking to that guy again,” said Doherty, laughing.
On successive trips to Yankee Stadium, two years apart, Doherty saw the only perfect game ever pitched in the World Series and the only overtime championship ever played in NFL.
“That’s pretty good back-to-back,” he said. “I often wondered what it would be like if I still had the ticket stubs from those games.”
