Catching Mark McGwire's 70th home run ball made Phil Ozersky a rich man.
His advice to the lucky fan who snares Barry Bonds' 756th: Take the money.
"Do what's right for you," Ozersky said while taking in Bonds' chase for Hank Aaron's Major League Baseball home run record at Busch Stadium this week. "But I definitely am happy with what I did," he said. "I benefited financially, but a lot of other people benefited, too."
A lot has changed for Ozersky since he cashed in on a lucky bounce that left the prize ball in his grasp on the final day of the 1998 season.
Comic book author Todd McFarlane paid US$3 million for the ball that extended McGwire's season record and Ozersky, then a 26-year-old genetic researcher at Washington University in St. Louis, took home US$2.7 million after paying a US$300,000 auction commission.
Ozersky is married now and has two young daughters. He has traveled the world and moved into a larger house in the St. Louis suburbs, but the windfall hasn't gone to his head. He's still working the same job at the university's genome sequencing center and he chose his new residence mainly because his sister lives across the street and has a 13-year-old daughter who can babysit.
And rather than pocket all of the money, he's spread the wealth, donating US$250,000 to charities including the Cardinals' own Cardinal Care.
"I think I've done a pretty good job of keeping grounded and not changing life too much of how I expected it to play out," Ozersky said.
The Cardinals had wanted it all, sequestering Ozersky in a meeting room and trying to persuade him to just hand it over to McGwire.
There was an impasse when Ozersky asked to meet McGwire and the Cardinals' representative said he'd have to relinquish the ball first.
"I was really adamant about just wanting to meet the guy and they were like, `the Cardinals and McGwire don't negotiate,"' Ozersky said. "It was pretty testy, and they basically made the decision for me."
"If I had met McGwire, I might have gone `duhhh' and given him the ball," he said. "I might have gotten caught up in the moment."
Other fans who got lucky during McGwire's season, which shattered Roger Maris' 37-year-old home run record, did get caught up. Tim Forneris, a member of the Cardinals' grounds crew, handed over No. 62 and got a trip to Disney World and a minivan.
Bayer 04 Leverkusen go into today’s match at TSG 1899 Hoffenheim stung from their first league defeat in 16 months. Leverkusen were beaten 3-2 at home by RB Leipzig before the international break, the first loss since May last year for the reigning league and cup champions. While any defeat, particularly against a likely title rival, would have disappointed coach Xabi Alonso, the way in which it happened would be most concerning. Just as they did in the Supercup against VfB Stuttgart and in the league opener to Borussia Moenchengladbach, Leverkusen scored first, but were pegged back. However, while Leverkusen rallied late to
If all goes well when the biggest marathon field ever gathered in Australia races 42km through the streets of Sydney on Sunday, World Marathon Majors (WMM) will soon add a seventh race to the elite series. The Sydney Marathon is to become the first race since Tokyo in 2013 to join long-established majors in New York, London, Boston, Berlin and Chicago if it passes the WMM assessment criteria for the second straight year. “We’re really excited for Sunday to arrive,” race director Wayne Larden told a news conference in Sydney yesterday. “We’re prepared, we’re ready. All of our plans look good on
The lights dimmed and the crowd hushed as Karoline Kristensen entered for her performance. However, this was no ordinary Dutch theater: The temperature was 80°C and the audience naked apart from a towel. Dressed in a swimsuit and to the tune of emotional music, the 21-year-old Kristensen started her routine, performed inside a large sauna, with a bed of hot rocks in the middle. For a week this month, a group of wellness practitioners, called “sauna masters,” are gathering at a picturesque health resort in the Netherlands to compete in this year’s Aufguss world sauna championships. The practice takes its name from a
When details from a scientific experiment that could have helped clear Russian figure skater Kamila Valieva landed at the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), the leader of the organization’s reaction was unequivocal: “We have to stop that urgently,” he wrote. No mention of the test ever became public and Valieva’s defense at the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) went on without it. What effect the information could have had on Valieva’s case is unclear, but without it, the skater, then 15 years old, was eventually disqualified from the 2022 Winter Olympics after testing positive for a banned heart medication that would later