Iron streak, golden memory: Ripken embraces 2,131st game

It’s been 25 years since Cal Ripken broke Lou Gehrig’s major league record for consecutive games played, a feat the Baltimore Orioles star punctuated with an unforgettable lap around Camden Yards in the middle of his 2,131st successive start.

Since reaching that milestone on Sept. 6, 1995, Ripken has been inducted into the Hall of Fame, battled prostate cancer and, just recently, celebrated his 60th birthday.

“I tell you what, in some respects it seems like it was yesterday. You can relive the moment, and everything is crystal clear,” Ripken said recently. “In other ways, it seems like it’s another lifetime. Twenty-five years is a long period of time. Things move on. We all move on.″

No matter where he goes, Ripken usually runs into folks who claim to be part of the sellout crowd that gathered to see him break Gehrig's record of 2,130 straight games that for decades seemed unapproachable.

“People tell me all the time they were at that game,” Ripken said. “It seems like there were a heck of lot more who tell me that than 40-some thousand people who were actually there.”

Those in the crowd included President Bill Clinton, Vice President Al Gore, and Hall of Fame members Joe DiMaggio and Frank Robinson. More important, at least as far as Ripken was concerned, his father, Cal Sr., watched the proceedings from a suite.

Cal wasted no time making eye contact with his dad after the fifth inning, when the game became official and was stopped so the baseball world could celebrate the accomplishment of the athlete known then and now as “The Iron Man.”

Cal Sr. raised his son to be a ballplayer. Then he coached him when both were with the Orioles, and briefly managed his son in Baltimore. Having his father there was arguably the most indelible moment for the man who embodied the term “everyday...