They said it was the “Curse from the Bambino.” They stated “the criminals won.” Today among baseball’s all-time great guys, NY Mets tale Mookie Wilson, tells his part of the story-from the ground ball through Costs Buckner’s legs that capped the miraculous 1986 Globe Series Video game Six rally against the Boston Crimson Sox to the rise and fall of a group that boasted such outsize personalities as Darryl Strawberry, Keith Hernandez, Dwight Gooden, Gary Carter, Lenny Dykstra, and Davey Johnson.

Growing about Mookie: Life, Baseball, and the ’86 Mets up in rural South Carolina in the 1960s, Mookie took to heart the lessons of his dad, a diligent sharecropper who thought in the abiding power of faith-and trained his son the game that would change his life.

When Mookie landed in Shea Stadium in 1980, the Mets were a perennial cellar-dweller overshadowed with the crosstown Yankees. But motivated by Mookie’s famous hustle, they might soon become the toast of NY. And even when their off-field antics-made well-known by a contingency of the team called “the Scum Bunch”-eclipsed their on-field successes, Mookie stayed above the fray.

In 1986, the Mets were a juggernaut, winning 108 video games during the regular season and edging the Houston Astros for the Country wide League pennant following a grueling 16-inning Game Six classic. In the Globe Series against Boston, in an epic at-bat that led to the Buckner mistake, Mookie would ignite a fireplace under the Mets, helping to force a game Seven. New York would win to become World Champions.

In an era when role models in sports were hard to come by, some tarnished by their own hubris and greed, Mookie Wilson remained the exception: a guy of humility and honor when it mattered probably the most.

HAVING A FOREWARD BY KEITH HERNANDEZ