Thurm (Thurman Munson)

In 1948 my father took me to my first baseball game, we sat in the left field bleachers at Wrigley Field in Chicago and I have been a baseball fan ever since. I followed the Chicago Cubs in the National League and the New York Yankees in the American League except for a brief flirtation with the Chicago White Sox in 1959 when they won the American League pennant. In the summer of 1979 the New York Yankees All Star catcher, Thurman Munson, was killed while practicing landings with his new Cessna airplane. He was the heart and soul of the team and this was a devastating blow to their morale. The day following his death there was a photo on the front page of the New York Daily News of Fred Stanley a utility Short Stop looking into Munson’s empty locker. I was very moved by this photo and decided to make a sculpture using this photo as a starting point. I was able to get access to the archives of Topps Baseball Cards and as one wall of the locker I created an image of Munson based on an invented baseball card