This day I was awakened a bit. I have a fairly decent memory. Actually, it is better than decent on most occasions. This is true with short-term and long-term events.
As far as my childhood memories are concerned, I am able to remember certain events with clarity. Not a lot of those events. And not for a very long period of time during those events. But certain snippets play in my mind with exactness and great detail.
One thing I was reminded of this morning was my love of sports from a very early age. A multitude of sports. My sister Julie and I used to always tune into The Wide World of Sports on Saturday afternoons, hosted by Jim McCay. “The Thrill of Victory, and the Agony of Defeat….” as the skier would crash into the fences near the bottom of the hill.
The thing I’m getting around to is the skiing. We’d love to watch the Alpine Skiing Events, and our favorite racer was Spider Sabich. But here is the thing. Here is my awakening. All these years, since I was four years old, mind you, I’ve been calling the guy Spider Savage. That’s what we called him back then, and until this morning, that’s how I knew him.
My memory has his last name listed as “Savage.” It could be that nothing is wrong with my memory and that when I was young, that is how I understood his name. I’m guessing that is the case, as I don’t see any reason, why over all the years, that I would have replaced the data of “Sabich” to “Savage.”
He was handsome and athletic. While he wasn’t ranked with the top skiers in the world, he was still in contention to win races. And we’d love to watch.
The other thing I didn’t remember was that Spider Sabich was shot and killed by his girlfriend at the height of his career.
It all happened late in the afternoon on Sunday, March 21, 1976. He was still competing then, and he had just returned from a training session in Aspen.
He got back to this Starwood home and was getting ready to take his shower. That’s when he was shot, right in the abdomen. Holding the gun was his live-in girlfriend, a singer, and actress named Claudine Longet.
Claudine and Spider met at a pro-celebrity event four years earlier in 1972 and were immediately drawn to one another. They started dating, and truthfully, they made a fetching couple.
Anyway, there in the bathroom, she claimed the gun discharged accidentally. Supposedly, he was showing her how it worked. He lost a significant amount of blood before an ambulance arrived, and he died on the way to the hospital. His girlfriend rode along with him.
Sabich was 31 years old, and Longet, who was slightly older at 34, was arrested and charged with the shooting. She stuck with her story all the way through and continued repeating her claim that the gun had accidentally fired when Sabich was showing her how to use it.
She basically got off. It seems the Pitkin County Sheriffs were the ones who made the arrest. They made a couple of big errors in the investigation. First, they took a blood sample from her and confiscated her diary without a warrant. Her blood sample showed that she’d been using cocaine. Also, her diary showed that their relationship hadn’t been so great. In court, she’d said they were peachy. To add to things, the gun was mishandled by non-weapons experts. So there it was.
The prosecutors were unable to call upon any of the disallowed material. But they did use the autopsy report. It showed that when Sabich was shot, he was bent over, facing away, and at least 6 feet from the gun. This wouldn’t be how someone would stand if giving instructions on the use of that gun.
The jury convicted her of a lesser charge. Misdemeanor criminal negligence. She had to spend 30 days in a light-scale jail.
So now, much later in life, my memory of “Spider Savage” has changed. I guess we should always be willing and open to this possibility, that our memories may not be not exactly as accurate as we think they are.
And just like the skiers, it may be all downhill from here.
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“Our memory is a more perfect world than the universe: it gives back life to those who no longer exist.”
― Guy de Maupassant
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“Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.”
― Marcel Proust
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“Right now I’m having amnesia and déjà vu at the same time. I think I’ve forgotten this before.”
― Steven Wright
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Not your average Spider Man.
