WARSAW — In what might have been one of the more unique moments in recent local history, two World War II centenarians — Charlie Garner and Bob Gast — sat in a Warsaw coffee shop on Friday and talked in detail for more than an hour about their wartime experiences.

The event was prompted by U.S. Rep. Rudy Yakym, who organized the meeting at Maggie’s Coffee and Treats shop on Buffalo Street as part of a weeklong series celebrating American war veterans.

Maggie’s was chosen because it's the home base for a large group of veterans who meet there monthly.

The gathering was announced just a week or so ago and attracted about a dozen veterans, all of whom were quietly riveted as Gast and Garner traded war stories about their time in Europe, dating back more than 80 years.

Garner, who will turn 102 in July, remains especially sharp in his recollections, and Gast, at the age of 103, admittedly had a few minor memory lapses, but gained momentum as he provided details of when he was shot in the forearm and hospitalized.

The unstructured conversation between the two (believed to be the only surviving World War II veterans in Kosciusko County) was bolstered by Yakym, who asked about their recollections.

Kosciusko County Veterans Service Officer Darryl McDowell also helped keep the conversation moving.

Garner said he remembered counting 500 bombers flying over the skies over Omaha Beach.

Gast remembered, “Actually, we were the first troops into Paris … We ended up just riding in there on trucks.”

At one point, Garner said he dug four fox holes in one day in a small town in France in 1944.

“We pointed our mortars in four different directions, and I said, 'Does that mean what I think it does? And he said, yes, it does.' We were surrounded for four days,” Garner said.

Gast, as he has said before, made it clear he did not consider himself to be a hero.

He recalled that in his platoon, "You couldn't get any closer to the enemy. Nothing's ahead of you except Germans."

He added, "We were assigned to find and replace the 28th Division. We found them and they were destroyed."

Yakym asked them about their thoughts when they realized the war in Europe had ended.

Garner said they celebrated with bottles of champagne.

"The mood was good," Garner said. "But the problem was we knew we were being sent back to the states to get ready to go to Japan. I got back to the states on July 13, 1945 … we had to be back at Camp Atterbury on the 14th, and I was sitting there with one pitcher of beer, and a lieutenant came over and said, ‘The war is over.’

Garner added, “I went in as a private and came out as a private. I had a wife at home and I wanted to be back to her. I was fighting for her as much as I was fighting for the United States because it was important.”

After Friday's event, Yakym was asked about the opportunity to listen to their stories.

"These guys are war-torn, they went all through Europe, fighting to ensure Europe and the rest of the world would forever be free. They made tremendous sacrifices, they lost many friends in war, and to sit there for an hour and hear their stories — for me — it’s a little emotional,” Yakym said.

“It’s a memory that I will certainly carry with me for the rest of my life.”

[caption id="attachment_110642" align="aligncenter" width="738"] Charlie Garner shows Congressman Rudy Yakym a photo on his phone of when he threw out the first pitch recently at a South Bend Cubs baseball game. The bag on the table is homemade jelly that Garner presented to Yakym. News Now Warsaw photo by Dan Spalding.[/caption]

[caption id="attachment_110644" align="aligncenter" width="750"] From left are veteran Charlie Garner, Congressman Rudy Yakym, veteran Bob Gast, and Krista Brown, owner of Maggie's Coffee and Treats. News Now Warsaw photo by Dan Spalding.[/caption]

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I am not, by nature, a businessman.

I do think, however, I have a pretty good grasp on how businesses operate and how people think.

Good business minds know how to tie those two things together and sell people stuff that they need and want and make a living at it.

It continues to bother me that American sports leagues are so enamored by taking their products to foreign markets.

Maybe more so, I am bothered by the thought that commissioners are willing to throw competitive balance out the window for the sake of global staging and promotion.

The National Football League played a regular game in Brazil to start its season.
The Pacers played in Paris in the middle of their season.

The Cubs open their season with two regular-season games in Japan in March, then come back for more spring training, and then open the main body of their season the next week.

Why?

“Globalization of their brand” you hear them say.

“Expanding their outreach” you hear from others.

“A load of hooey” is what I say.

Rather than forcing your teams to play real games in other countries, why not do off-season goodwill tours where the superstars of their sport travel together to London, Paris, Berlin and wherever else they see as a fertile ground?

But that raises the next question: “Fertile ground for what? What is the ultimate goal here?”

If you look at the comments made by the commissioners of the leagues adjacent to these overseas events you see and hear things that make you think that they are fishing expeditions to judge the appetite for creating expansion franchises in Europe, Brazil and Mexico. Teams that would be just as much a part of the NFL, for example, as the Bears and Colts.

That is never going to work.

Specifically, it won’t work in Europe.

Remember, most of Europe is five to seven hours ahead of us.

Let me play this out for you.

Barcelona comes to Chicago to play the Bears. It’s a big deal and NBC grabs it for its Sunday night game of the week.

Kick-off Sunday Night Football in the Eastern time zone of the mainland United States is 8:15. In Barcelona, that is 2:15 a.m. Monday morning.

Do you think Spaniards are going to do that and then go to work after the game ends at 5:30 a.m.?

No, of course, they aren’t.

OK, so you make that a 4:30 window game.

Still a no-go … that’s a midnight kickoff in Spain.

And no one on earth thinks that having teams come from Europe to America to play in the 1 p.m. ET time slot for regional coverage where only 20 percent of the nation will be assigned that game is a good idea.

The only other alternative is to start those games at 9 a.m. ET. But look at the ratings for those Sunday morning games played in Europe now. They are well below the norm.

What American sports leagues should be seeking from overseas is TV audiences and merchandise sales.

They should be pitching TV rights and Travis Kelce jerseys — the red ones and the white ones.

We have two examples to follow here.

NASCAR spent incredible time, resources and energy to drag stock car racing from its roots in the southern states to places in the north like New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Indiana.

It worked for a while, and racing exploded to the forefront of sports. But then the economic crisis of 2008-2009 hit and people couldn’t fill their RVs for a weekend of hanging out at the track anymore.

In reality, NASCAR fans were predisposed to turn on the love of their lives because it turned its back on its core fan base in search of conquering new kingdoms.

Result: NASCAR tracks are half-empty on race days and most sports fans can’t name five drivers.

In contrast, look at the English Premier League.

They have a solid foothold here in America because they found a TV partner in the NBC family of networks.

They host “watch parties” each weekend around the US to gather (mostly in drinking establishments) to watch Aston Villa meet West Ham or for the North London Derby.

That approach exudes strength. They are projecting an aura of “we have something you are looking for, and we are happy to share it with you, all the while remembering that the supporters of Arsenal, Manchester City and Liverpool are our primary concern.”

American soccer fans are quite good with that. We don’t need the EPL to start franchises along the East Coast of the US to draw us in.

I hope our league commissioners figure it out before they do something totally regrettable.

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I love what we Americans call “soccer.”

I loved playing it, and I enjoy watching others play it now that I am … uh … older.

What I enjoyed most about it was that your height was irrelevant to the game, because most of the time the ball is on the ground. It’s true that there are moments in a match that being tall is very helpful, but gravity demands that eventually that ball will come back down to the ground where everyone has equal access to it.

I understand that not everyone likes soccer. I grew up with it in a community that didn’t have a football team. The sport is part of my DNA.

And here in the United States, we have been trying to join the rest of the world in its passionate love affair with only moderate success at the very best. We do get pretty jacked up for the World Cup every four years, but the world mocks us for coming to their party and crashing their scene.

And let’s be 100 percent honest — the professional soccer league in America is just not getting anyone’s attention.

So many of us who love “the beautiful game” turn to Great Britain and the English Premier League season to scratch that itch for us.

That league gives us great pageantry and rivalries. We don’t know the songs the fans are singing but we don’t have to for knowing what we are listening to.

The English Football League covers all 10 divisions of British football. The Premier League is the 20 best teams in the country. And teams must qualify to remain in the top league. If they don’t, they are “relegated” to the next level down.

And that’s what I want to spend this space talking about today.

Could relegation work in America’s professional sports leagues?

Before you reject it outright in your mind, let me fill you in on how it works in English football.

Those 20 best teams in the EPL play 38 matches—one home and one away against the other 19 sides. After those 38 matches, the teams with the three worst records (based on the system of 3 points for a win and 1 point for a tie) are automatically sent down to the second level.

The two best teams from the second level are automatically moved up to the top league, and the next four teams have a tournament to see who gets the third and final spot in the upper division.

When they get to the final five matches of their season, the drama in the EPL comes from both ends of the table (what we would call standings). People are watching eagerly to see who wins the championship, but they are also watching the teams who are desperate to avoid being relegated.

What would that mean here for our leagues?

Imagine if the Bears, the Texans and the Cardinals — the teams with the three worst records in the NFL last season — were relegated to play in the USFL.

Maybe a better example would be major league baseball. What if Oakland, Kansas City and St. Louis finished with the worst records in MLB and were relegated to Triple-A for 2024 and Norfolk, St. Paul and Durham were elevated to the major leagues?

What if the Pistons, Spurs and Rockets were relegated to the “G League” and the top 3 GL teams elevated to the NBA?

The difference is the draft. International sports leagues and franchises are on their own for improving their rosters and making their teams better. That is the exact opposite of American leagues, who allow the worst teams to pick the best players in an effort to help make the league more balanced and competitive.

The cool part of it would be the end of tanking.

Tanking would get you “relegated,” wouldn’t get you a top pick or lottery pick, and would be humiliating. It’s embarrassing to get moved down! It hurts your sponsorship revenue, it doesn’t make you attractive to free agents who are looking for new teams and your image gets put in the stocks in the public square for people to hurl old produce at you.

And for that reason, I don’t see the concept of relegation ever working here in the states.

But I do think there are ideas we can take from the process to use here. For example: if 20 teams in your 30-team league don’t make the playoffs, what if we take teams 11-20 and give them the better picks and make the last 10 teams pick after them?

Teams would be motivated to win games so they would move up in the standings and ultimately become more of a championship-caliber franchise.

Relegation probably wouldn’t work here, but I think it’s worth seeing what parts of it we could use to make our sports leagues better from top to bottom.

* * * 

Roger Grossman has been covering local sports in Kosciusko County for more than 30 years and is employed with News Now Warsaw. You can reach him at  rgrossman@kensington.media.

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