Sunday, November 03, 2013

Tom-Toms Moore & Giffen together in sunny Florida for 10th year


BJ newsroom retiree Tom Moore is in Florida for his 10th year of helping former BJ sports editor Tom Giffen on the 25th anniversary of the Roy Hobbs World Series for older baseball players.
 
The games are played in Fort Myers, Florida. Tom provides interviews and game information in a daily newspaper for players from about 200 teams around the world.


The series is divided into age divisions---youngest group is 28-plus and oldest is 70-plus. The teams play on the fields the Boston Red Sox and the Minnesota Twins use for spring training. 

Giffen in 1990 formed a four-team league of adult men playing out of Akron. The next year the league grew to 11 teams and joined Roy Hobbs Baseball, which was owned by Ron Monks of California. In 1992 Monks sold Roy Hobbs Baseball to Giffen and his wife, Ellen.

For several years, Giffen ran Roy Hobbs Baseball out of his basement and continued to work at the Beacon Journal. In the mid-1990s, as the organization brought in more and more teams, Giffen resigned from the BJ to work full time at his Roy Hobbs enterprise.

Roy Hobbs is the fictional hero of Bernard Malamud's novel, “The Natural,” and the movie with Robert Redford as Hobbs.

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