Yankees hero Bucky Dent is featured in the comic, but the swear words cost extra

His parents gave him his birth name, which no one calls him by: Russell Earl O’Dey.

When he moved in with his aunt and uncle at a young age, they changed his name to Russell Earl Dent.

His grandmother added a splash of color by calling him “Cooterbuck,” but the boy found the nickname too complicated. He shortened it to Bucky.

But the genesis of the former New York Yankees shortstop’s most memorable nickname – the profane one – is harder to describe. How to choose among the legions of Boston Red Sox fans who said it in unison when Dent crushed their dreams with a three-run homer on October 2, 1978?

Dent’s preferred origin story is the version in which then-Red Sox manager (and later Yankees coach) Don Zimmer served as baseball’s Oppenheimer by dropping the first F-word into his middle name.

“I guess Zimmer and his wife were driving home after the game,” Dent, 72, recalled Wednesday, “and he stopped in the mountains, got out of the car, just walked over and yelled, ‘Bucky Effing Dent!'”

Was Zimmer the first to say that? We can’t swear to it. But wherever it came from, that enduring epithet achieved a new form of immortality this week.

Dent teamed up with the Pop Fly Pop Shop, which produces delightfully nostalgic sports art, to create a comic-book-style tribute to Dent’s role in the 1978 championship race. The unlikely power hitter hammered a Mike Torrez fastball into the field in a rare 163rd tie-breaker game to clinch the 1978 American League East title in a race that the Red Sox led by as many as 14 1/2 games in July.

Just released: Celebrate (or lament) Bucky Dent’s iconic 1978 home run with this Pop Fly collaboration. Choose from regular prints, editions signed by Bucky, or special versions inscribed with “F’n.” Available for one week only before it’s permanently discontinuedhttps://t.co/Z0WQ6ccGad#yankees #RedSox pic.twitter.com/XriTbN6HLs

— Pop Fly Pop Shop (@popflypopshop) July 7, 2024

The price of the print is intended as a reference to the suffering that exists throughout New England.

For an unsigned print the price is $64.

A copy signed by Bucky Dent costs $135.

For a signed Bucky damn Dentit costs $145. These are the ones he signs in curse script.

It’s the perfect gift for the Yankees fan in your family. Or for the Red Sox fan you want out of the house. The limited edition prints will remain on sale through Sunday, July 14.

“I love it, man. I love that name,” Dent said, laughing. “It’s great. It’s kind of stuck with me forever. I never thought I’d get a new nickname from hitting a home run, but I love it.”

Dent sat down with Daniel Jacob Horine, the artist and owner of Pop Fly Pop Shop, for a hilarious chat on YouTube earlier this week to promote the superhero-themed cover. The hosts usually took a genteel approach, calling him Mr. Dent. (All quotes in this story are from that session.)

Dent was asked early on by host Evan Siggson if he would sign the prints with “Effing” instead of writing out the whole word (in a way that The athlete I certainly wouldn’t.)

“Whatever you want,” said Dent, laughing.

It’s an obscenity that has been part of his name for nearly 50 years. The three-time All-Star considers the word a badge of honor. Dent also welcomes all the heartbroken people who stop him on the street for an impromptu therapy session

“Hardly a day goes by when someone doesn’t say, ‘You ruined my childhood,'” Dent explained. “Or, ‘You hit that home run and I threw my TV out the window.'”

Dent has heard from friends over the years who have taken behind-the-scenes tours of Fenway Park that the docent would explain to tourists, “When the ball hits the wall, it leaves a dent. But we don’t call them ‘dents’ anymore. We call them ‘dents.'”

The comic book cover captures this eternal torment. If you look closely in the background, you’ll see that the shadowy blue faces are the aggrieved Red Sox fans.

“So it doesn’t necessarily represent the 1978 team or anything like that,” said artist Horine, “but it’s just the spirit of Boston, past and present. The continuation of the curse that Bucky Dent was the continuation of.”

On the other hand, another population group has much nicer things to say.

“On the Yankees side, they tell me how they pulled off the road, jumped up and down and started screaming,” Dent said. “That’s why the rivalry is so big. And that day got more and more exciting as the game went on. It was the most tense game I’ve ever played in.”

The Oct. 2 matchup was essentially a playoff after the Yankees spent the second half of the season chipping away at Boston’s once-unassailable division lead. After 162 games, the two teams were 99-63, heading into a tiebreaker at Fenway Park.

This made for dramatic circumstances anyway, but the genuine animosity between the franchises increased the emotional stakes.

“In the ’70s, the two teams didn’t like each other. I first felt that when I moved in 1977,” Dent said. “When we got to Fenway, people were screaming, throwing nickels and dimes and darts and …”

Here Siggson interrupted.

“Did you say darts?” he said.

“Oh yeah!” Dent replied. “Chris Chambliss tells a story about being on third base and suddenly going ‘Oooh!’ and there was a dart stuck in his arm. … Mickey Rivers always wore a hard hat in center field because all kinds of things were thrown back and forth.”

Bucky Dent, beloved in New York, waves before a game against the Astros at Yankee Stadium in 2023. (Adam Hunger / Getty Images)

In some cases, fans take a geographic rivalry more seriously than the players, but that was not the case with the Yankees and Red Sox of that era.

“A lot of these guys played against each other in the minor leagues,” Dent explained. “Thurman Munson didn’t like (Carlton) Fisk. Lou Piniella hated everybody. Graig Nettles broke Bill Lee’s shoulder in a fight. So that kind of continued. There was always a lot of tension when we played.”

The other factor was that the Red Sox continued to suffer from the “Curse of the Bambino,” a World Series drought since the team traded Babe Ruth to the Yankees after the 1919 season.

It looked like 1978 could be Boston’s year when the Red Sox took a 2-0 lead in the seventh inning. Then Dent came to bat, Chambliss at second and Roy White at first.

Dent faced Torrez in a movie-worthy at-bat. Dent missed a pitch painfully with his left foot. Rivers noticed that Dent had broken his bat and called over a batboy, who brought one of his models to the plate as a replacement.

Dent used the bat of a current center fielder named Mickey, channeling the power of a player from the past.

“As a kid growing up in the backyard, I always wanted to hit a big home run. I always wanted to be Mickey Mantle,” Dent said. “And then to be in a moment like that, it makes it even worse. In the moment, you don’t think about it. You just think about what you have to do as a hitter.”

“And to hit a home run in such a big moment? That’s all your dreams come true.”

Pop Fly Live Chat with Bucky Dent https://t.co/ZQjWYXb7qQ

— Pop Fly Pop Shop (@popflypopshop) July 9, 2024

Dent’s home run wasn’t a walk-off. It simply made the score 3-2. But it also knocked out the electricity in the stadium, and some fans suddenly remembered that the Curse of the Bambino was not so easy to overcome.

“I remember circling third base and how deadly quiet it was in Fenway Park,” Dent said.

There was still a little more drama left, but Goose Gossage thwarted Boston’s final threat by bringing in Carl Yastrzemski for the finale after a 5-4 win.

And soon an unusual new nickname was born for a good shortstop with little power. The 6’1″ and 175lb player never managed more than eight home runs in a season.

Baseball writer David Krell, in his great profile of Dent for the SABR Bio Project, unearthed the Fisk quote that captured the sentiment that would last forever:

“Bucky Effing Dent! Maybe the only time in Bucky’s career he heard, ‘That’s a long fly ball, deep, deep to the left!’ He never hit a ball deep to the left!”

The Yankees beat the Kansas City Royals in the following ALCS to reach the World Series for the third consecutive year. Any guesses as to who the World Series MVP was? Dent batted .417 with seven RBIs in the six games against the Dodgers.

In October 1978 he was the last Mr. Effing.

“We weren’t supposed to win the playoff game (against Boston). We weren’t supposed to beat Kansas City. We were two games behind the Dodgers and we came back and won,” Dent said. “So it was a magical year, that 1978 team.”

One of the charming things about the Pop Fly Pop Shop cover is that it packs so much detail into the 7″ x 10.5″ page. The signature on the bat is Rivers’. The token price is 78 cents. The print shows that it is issue #20 – that was Dent’s uniform number.

There is also something for comic fans. Many of the phrases go back to Incredible Hulk No. 1, on the cover of which was the famous line: “Is he man or monster? Or is he both?”

In Dent’s artworks it is said: “Is he the herald of heroes or the harbinger of sorrow? Or is he both?”

During the phone call, Horine and Siggson asked Dent if he had been interested in comic books as a child.

He was. As a follow-up question, they wanted to know if he was more attracted to the heroes or the villains.

“Oh, the heroes,” Dent said immediately. “Yeah, I hated the villains.”

(Top photo of Bucky Dent’s three-run home run: Dick Raphael/Sports Illustrated via Getty Images)