That's almost 200 sporting events. About 11 per year, with that number skyrocketing during my college years, and fading a little recently while living in "god damn it I can't get a fucking ticket because all these teams keep winning and they keep selling out despite absurdly high ticket prices" Boston. Stupid good teams with their stupid pink hat wearing stupid fans.
When Walter and I first moved to Boston, the Sox were a better-than-average team, but not championship material. In September, my Tigers came to town. We were able to show up 3 days in a row and get tickets no problem. We sat in the outfield during a beautiful day game, shirtless, shoeless, drinking beers together, like 2 buddies perfectly secure in their sexuality. It was glorious. Not a chance in hell of that happening the last 8 years.
Baseball Trip 2009 in the bleachers in Denver. As the Flintstones once said - "we'll have a gay ole time!"
So while I may not get to go to as many games as I would like to (and I won't until the Boston teams start sucking again and Fairweather Nation goes back to their shanties), I've had a pretty worthy career attending games so far and can't really complain all that much. And this of course leads to the portion of the post where I brag about the cool shit I HAVE seen live.
A Title Game
This one happened to be at the Granddaddy Of ' Em All, The Rosebowl. We made it out for Michigan's 21-16 win over Ryan Leaf and Washington State in 1998. Technically not a title game like the universally-loved BCS has now, but it was the de facto title game that year, and gave Michigan a share of the national title (just a half-share, thanks largely in part to Peyton Manning shitting the bed in their bowl game against Nebraska. And a pre-Colts Manning hatred was born). We spent New Year's in the Vegas airport on a layover. We slept on the street of the parade route since our hotel room was rented out.We denied offers of $700+ for the tickets despite being poor college students . . . and it was all worth it.
The Biggest Sporting Event in the World
World Cup 1994. USA vs Switzerland. Silverdome. After going down 1-0, the US ties it up with an Eric Wynalda free kick. I'm 14 and get upset when the guy behind me spills beer on my program while celebrating. I still have the program. It still kind of smells like Bud.
The Greatest Team in the World
Yes, American sporting leagues. It's very cute that you call yourself "world champs" when you win. Hooray. USA is #1! But FC Barcelona? They really are the best in the world. To quote Poppy, "on this, there IS . . . NO . . . DEBATE!"
A Buzzer Beater.
November 4, 2005. My Pistons versus the hometown Cetlics. I'm wearing a Pistons shirt, along with fellow attendees Angela and Laura. We get razzed all game in the upper deck by Celtics fans, and the Celtics end up going up by 1 with 0.8 seconds left on a Mark Blount jumper. Mark . . . friggin . . . . Blount. The Garden erupts. We prepare to sprint out to limit the heckling after the game ends, but Rip Hamilton ends up as a savior as he curls off a screen, gets of his shot off, and it goes in. Time expires. Pistons win, and the Garden has the largest swing in decibel levels I've ever seen. It's quite fantastic.
Overtime Greatness
July 7, 2007. The Tigers take on the visiting Red Sox. The game goes 13 innings before the Tigers win it 3-2. We stay the whole game, the longest I've ever been to, despite having a 6am flight the next day. We are bad mamma jammas.
Orange Bowl, 2000. Michigan vs Alabama. A legend is born. Tom Brady, in his final game in a Michigan uniform (a team that he started for over 20 times! I have as big of man crush on him as anyone, but stop perpetuating the myth that he wasn't even a starter in college Bostonians. He's great enough already, what with those flowing locks and manly goat-holding abilities). Anyway, Brady leads us back from 14-0 and 28-14 deficits to send it to overtime, where he throws a TD on his first pass. Alabama then scores on their possession . . . but they miss the extra point. I almost cry, half out of joy, half out of drunkenness. We pass many a pissed off redneck in the parking lot, and Joe buys a Alabama T-Shirt for $2, just so he can burn it.
Controversy (with a side of Overtime Greatness)
Thanksgiving, 1998. I was at "The Coin Flip Game". The Lions and Steelers go to overtime. Jerome Bettis calls tails on the coinflip. It comes up tails . . . but the ref thought he heard Bettis say "heads". Lions "win" the coin toss. Normally mild-mannered Steelers coach Bill Cower nearly has a heart attack about 30 feet from us, and Jason Hanson kicks the game winning field goal on the Lions' first possession.
A Great Comeback
December 13, 1997. Oh-so-easily-hate-able #1 Duke comes to Ann Arbor to take on "amateur" athlete Robert Traylor and unranked Michigan. Down 17, Michigan comes storming back, and ends up winning by 8. The court is rushed . . . though we only watch it get rushed as we got to enjoy our freshmen upper deck tickets.
Walk-Off Glory.
October 5, 2007. Game 2 of the ALDS. Bottom 9, 2 out, and Manny Ramirez hits what is probably the longest homerun I've ever seen hit in person. A bomb over Monster on Landowne. The Sox go on to win the World Series, and Manny Ramirez goes on to take a gametime piss inside thew Green Monster, high five a fan during a catch in Baltimore, and fail a steroid test.
Not a bad resume. But of course, with the highs, come the lows.
A World Series Game
2004. The Red Sox finish off the Yankees after being down 0-3 in the series. The Steal. The "bloody" sock. You know the story. I'm in grad school at Purdue, 1000 miles away from Fenway, but I put my name in the World Series ticket lottery . . . and win. Though my Sox fandom will never surpass my Tigers fandom, I had been following them fairly hardcore for 4 years by then, and since a chance to win a World Series after 86 freakin years is kind of a big deal, and since I wanted to see Boston devour itself in riots in person, I had to buy tickets and get my ass back to Boston. And since getting back for Games 1 or 2 would have been real tough, and real expensive, and since I would rather see them win a Series clinching game, and see the celebrations to follow, I got tickets to Game 6. Row 1, centerfield, by the Sox bullpen. Close enough that I could steal a ball away from the Cardinals Jim Edmonds, helping the Sox to baseball glory. I could have been that guy! . . . had the series not ended in 4 games in St Louis. Instead, after not getting the refund on the shipping and handling charges for the tickets, I ended up with $30 souvenirs for a game that never happened.
See a Baseball Brawl
August 11, 2009. My hometown Tigers take on the Sox at Fenway. In the bottom of the 2nd, roid-raging Kevin Youkilis charges young Rick Porcello after being hit. Porcello did his wrestling scouting of Youkilis though, and executed a nice reversal for the takedown. FIGHT! FIGHT! FIGHT! Benches clear. Bullpens empty . . . and I catch the aftermath of it all on the monitors by the beer stands as I exit the bathroom. Almost 90 baseball games in the last score (yeah, I used "score" in the Abe Lincoln sense), and no brawl eye-witnessed.
Catch a Foul Ball / Homerun
April 9, 2008. It's my and my girlfriend-at-the-time Angela's anniversary. We're both Sox fans, and coincidentally, she won the ticket lottery and scored 2 seats on top of the Green Monster at Fenway, arguably the most sought-after ticket in baseball. And again coincidentally, my Tigers are in town. She wears a Sox jersey. I weat my '84 Trammell Tigers. Yup, we're that couple. We have standing room tickets, but there's a small portion of the 3rd row of Monster seats for the handicapped, and since no handicapped folk wanted to make the 40 foot trek to the top of the wall, we snag a couple seats.
Fast forward to the 4th inning, and the Tigers' Marcus Thames hits a shot that heads right for a spot just below us (the 3 rows up there are set up like 3 rows of bars and stools, with a wall in between each row). I reach over our ledge, stretch as much as I can and . . . stretch to far. The ball ricochets off my wrist, down to some stupid kid or something. I'm too distraught to care, and spend the next 5 innings contemplating what I could have down differently, and how I would redo it all. But as the 9th rolls around, and the Tigers are rolling 6-2, and faithless Sox fans on the Monster have started to clear out . . . REDEMPTION TIME! Carlos Guillen hits a shot 15 feet to the right of us, and thanks to the beat-the-traffic Sox fans, there's empty seats and I sprint over to ready myself . . . just so I can reach over the ledge too far once again and have the ball go over my hands, hit the wall below us, and again roll to some stupid kid. I . . . am . . . emasculated.
In my defense, the physics of the situation are not conducive to actually catching a ball. The Green Monster is the maybe the second shortest homerun in all of baseball, with the Pesky Pole in right at Fenway being 8 feet closer. So when a line drive homerun is hit, at that short of a distance, it's fucking FLYING. And being 40 feet up only adds to the difficulty level. I've played baseball back in my day, and can play a mean outfield in softball these days, but both of those balls were near impossible to catch gloveless. However, on the hand, I just suck.
So there you go. I'm still missing some items on the typical sportsfan's checklist. But on the recent baseball trip to Minneapolis, I was able to knock out one more - after 200 sporting events, I got on the Jumbotron.
It was around the 6th inning. We had standing room tickets, but eventually found our way to centerfield and a set of open sets (baseball trip seat theory goes like this - sit as far away as possible from anyone else so you get let your inner jackass out and not worry about it). And in between innings, the Jumbrotron catches a close-up shot of Walter, McCarty and myself. Maybe they thought we were hot, or maybe they got a kick out of Walter wearing jorts and a Randy Moss Patriots jersey (remember, he used to play in Minny) while doing his classic chicken dance (sorry, baseball trip Rule #1 - incriminating/embarrassing baseball trip videos or pictures do not make it to the interwebs). I assume it was the former.
So we get on screen, and as soon as I notice, I do what any sane person would . . . I lifted up McCarty's shirt. Why? I don't know. But at least I do now know why people act like jack-asses the second they do end up on some reality show. The camera may add 40 pounds, but it also subtracts 40 IQ points.
My psychiatric take - I also used to have this weird life goal of not just getting shown during Sportscenter, but specifically getting my nipple shown. Again, I don't know why. But then I "grew up", and Sportscenter became an hour long piece of self-aggrandizing unwatchable garbage, and I lost that goal. Perhaps this was a reinvention of that goal, one in which I realized I had been drinking beer for the last 3 hours and my beer belly wasn't jumping at the chance to be on screen for 40,000 people. That, and maybe I just wanted to see McCarty partially shirtless because in the 16 or so years I've known him, after being on baseball trips that included oceans, and pools, and hot hotel rooms that aren't conducive to sleeping with your shirt on, I've NEVER seen him shirtless. If he's known for anything, it's A, being tall, and B, never being shirtless. I secretly wonder if he has an advanced form of Tobias Funke's never-nude syndrome. Anyway, the Jumbotron gave me the diversion to actually make it happen. So suck it McCarty!
After a few seconds of enjoying ourselves in all our Jumbotron glory, I was able to remember my duty as the official baseball trip phtographer, and I quickly grabbed it to take the following.
Note Walter on the right is partially through a Ravishing Rick Rude pelvic swirl (skip to 28 seconds in). And if you zoom in, you can get a feel for what the shot initially looked like of just the 3 of us.
Water, McCarty, myself
And if you zoom out just a bit further, you can see 4 other baseball trip members 2 rows behind us, along with a guy who I now envy - a guy who actually did proudly display his nipples for all to see. Congratulations sir!
Almost 2300 words on what was 5 seconds of glory. Not bad. Though it helps that I'm currently in the midst of a list challenge item - no TV or video games for a week. Almost 3 days down, 4 to go. Full diary to come after the week is over.
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