Like Their Idol, Coneheads Making Comeback

By Pete Bowles
Staff Writer

April 3, 2003, 6:53 PM EST

The Coneheads, the pointy-headed groupies who used to cheer David Cone 15 years ago during his glory days at Shea Stadium, will be making a return visit Friday night to welcome their hero back to Queens.

"He is coming back like we are coming back -- it's great," said Andrew Levy, 37, who has rounded up 50 Coneheads to watch Cone, 40, return to the pitcher's mound at Shea. "This is something he needed to do to cap off his career where he cut his teeth and exceeded as a New York sports icon."

Levy, who runs a sports marketing company and is vice president of the David Cone Foundation, said the Coneheads will be sitting in their old perch -- way out in the upper deck in left field.

They will be waving their original banner, a tattered bedsheet retrieved from Levy's old closet in his parents' home in Connecticut, which proclaims: "Cone Co'ner."

"We thought it would be a fun thing to get together out there again," Levy said. "It may be a little tougher to breathe up there now, and I can assure you we won't be making our seventh-inning run through the upper deck. But we will be out in force."

Levy and a few friends formed the Coneheads in 1988, the year that Cone, with a 20-3 record, led the Mets to the National League East title.

"We were sitting around in an apartment in Long Beach trying to figure out what we could do with the name Cone," Levy recalled. "We first thought about ice cream cones. Then we came up with the name Coneheads based on the characters from Saturday Night Live."

The group grew from about 10 to almost 60 by 1992, Cone's last year as a Met. Friday night's reunion will be dedicated to one of the group's founders, Scott Saber, 36, a business executive who was killed Sept. 11, 2001, while attending a financial conference at the World Trade Center.

"Buff helped secure the banner at our first game," Levy said using Saber's nickname.

Levy, in organizing the reunion, said he found it a little more difficult to get the crowd to a ballgame these days.

"Before, we could get out of our day jobs in time to take off our suits and ties, a la Superman, and put on our coneheads," he said. "Now we have careers and families and kids we can't break away from."