Major League Baseball

The Iron Man's Legendary Day

Updated Sep. 6, 2020 1:19 p.m. ET

By David Katz, Special to FOX Sports

September 6, 1995.

25 years might not sound like all that long ago, but in the mid-90s, the Internet was in its infancy. There was no streaming video. No smartphones. A handful of websites had popped up to provide some text information. Maybe a photo, if you were lucky.

I had spent the previous year in England, studying for my graduate degree, and the summer backpacking through Europe. Yet years earlier, I had circled this special date on my calendar.

Rome and Athens could wait. The only Coliseum that mattered was OPACY: Oriole Park at Camden Yards.

I grew up in Baltimore. And our local hero, Cal Ripken Jr., was about to break the most improbable record in all of sports – Lou Gehrig's consecutive streak of 2,130 games played. That made being there, in the flesh, all the more important.

The sense of urgency wasn't just mine. America's pastime was in a difficult place. A strike from August 12, 1994 to April 2, 1995, canceled nearly 1,000 games, including the postseason and World Series. When the sport returned, attendance was significantly lower. Interest had waned.

But as "The Streak" approached record-breaking status, fan interest in baseball started to come back. During Streak Week, Baltimore was electric. There was a buzz everywhere you went.

Historic moments are usually unexpected – viewed and appreciated in the rear-view mirror. This was unique. We knew exactly when the celebration would occur, and everything built toward that crescendo.

I, like countless others, desperately wanted to attend the record-breaking game on Sept. 6, but there was a problem – I didn't have a way in. No season tickets or contacts at the League office. In fact, I had no connections whatsoever. And secondary ticket websites were still years away.

I had managed to secure a ticket through a friend for game 2,129 – the one before Ripken matched Gehrig – in which The Iron Man hit a home run. The next day, I sat at home with my parents watching my childhood icon, the local kid whose dad was a longtime baseball coach for the O's, hit another homer in his record-tying game. Clutch.

But for the record-breaking, once-in-a-lifetime moment of Game 2,131, I had nothing. Instead, I would have to take my chances with another relic of the not-so-distant past.

I drove downtown to the stadium at 9 a.m. The start time for the game was 7:35 p.m, which gave me plenty of time to suss out a good deal – or so I imagined. Within two minutes of walking from the parking structure toward the stadium, I was approached by someone selling a ticket. I asked how much.

"$1,500."

For a poor student, that was well beyond my budget. But if I had been approached this quickly, surely there would be thousands of tickets floating around, right?

For the next ten hours, I did not see another ticket sold. Hundreds of people walked around with signs like "Need Two" and "Will Work For Tickets," but no one was selling. Maybe the brokers were hiding in spots where only the rich people could find them. Maybe Baltimoreans weren't willing to part with a ticket to the biggest event in the city's sporting history.

The enthusiam outside the stadium was building, while the seats inside were filling up. I was out of luck. Dejected, I walked to the pay phone located next to the ticket booth and called my parents.

"Start the VCR. I'm coming home."

I turned the corner, walking past the famous Warehouse to get to my parking lot. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a man come out of an official office, wearing an orange Orioles polo shirt. He held a white envelope in his left hand. With nothing to lose and not entirely sure what was within, I tried one last, desperation swing.

"Sir, I'll give you $150 for one of those tickets in your envelope."

He stared at me for a few seconds, then nodded his head. We walked around the corner. I handed him the crisp bills – and he handed me my golden ticket. To this day I don't know who he was, but for this Baltimore kid, he was Santa Claus and Christmas came early.

Hyperventilating, I walked right back to the pay phone to tell my parents that I would see them after the game. I walked in right as the lineups were being announced.

In the fourth inning, Ripken hit yet another home run. His third consecutive game. And when the game became official and the banner in right field was flipped to 2,131, they cued the John Tesh music.

I stood in awe with 46,272 fans as Ripken basked in the glow of his ultimate achievement. The love, admiration and warmth in that stadium during the 22-minute standing ovation is a feeling I will never forget. It drew me to sports and is one of the main reasons I work in this industry today.

Ron Shapiro, Cal Ripken's longtime agent and business partner, spoke with me in 2015 about the significance of the moment. "It connected with baseball fans because Cal was doing the impossible – breaking the streak of the iconic Lou Gehrig. And it extended beyond the baseball field and baseball fans, because it embodied the ultimate of the American work ethic – showing up everyday and getting the job done. It also didn't hurt that Cal was a soft-spoken and humble record-breaker. A stark contrast to so many sports heroes of this era."

And the timing of this achievement, while coincidental, elevated its importance.

"The benefit to baseball of Cal doing what he did when he did it is incalculable," Shapiro said. "After the strike-scarred year of 1994 and its lingering negative after-effects, the drama of Cal's march to the record and the streak truly captivated the public and brought many fans back to the Game, and created new fans. It certainly justified the description of Cal as the ‘Man Who Saved Baseball'."

Ripken went on to play another 501 consecutive games after breaking the record. Most remarkably during that streak, he at one point played in 8,243 consecutive innings; that's more than 5 ½ seasons without missing a single inning.

Of all of the great moments in sports that I've been fortunate to attend, this is the most memorable. It's astonishing to me that it was 25 years ago. The world is far a different place. I wrote this on my laptop, proofed it on my iPad, texted with my editor, emailed Cal's agent from my iPhone, all while checking out video clips of that day on YouTube via my high-speed WiFi.

But despite these changing times, the lessons we learned from Ripken's feat remain timeless. Thank you, Cal.