Big boys do cry
It was one night shortly after we were married that my wife became aware of the rather embarrassing fact that sports can turn me into an insufferable sap.
Cal Ripken of the Baltimore Orioles had broken the record that evening for playing the most consecutive games in his sport, a record held forever by the legendary New York Yankee Lou Gehrig, whose speech at Yankee Stadium after being diagnosed with ALS, commonly known as Lou Gehrig disease ever since, contained the iconic line, “I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth,” and can still cause hairyarsed men to break down and weep.
On his record-breaking night, Ripken — bolstered by the raucous, non-stop cheering of 40,000-plus Oriole diehards — jogged around the perimeter of his home field of Camden Yards in Baltimore, many of the fans in the box seats reaching over the rails to try and touch their favourite superstar (if you’d like a local comparison, recall the way in which Danny Williams devotees would try and merely brush against the then premier’s expensive suit as he stepped off the St. John’s Airport escalator after another of the us-against-them battles in Ottawa).
As Ripken meandered around the field, most people outside the confines of the baseball world could not have cared less; after all, there was war and hunger and climate change and the seal hunt to worry about.
And already, I’m sure, there are those of you in readership land on this Saturday afternoon
who are already dismissing such adulation as another example of misguided glorification of millionaires who catch a ball or chase a puck or slam dunk a basketball.
Not me, though.
And as Ripken was midway through his trot of tribulation, my wife, knitting away and half-watching the television, looked over in my direction with a quizzical expression.
“Please tell me you’re not crying,” she exclaimed in a mocking tone. “It’s only a baseball game, for God’s sakes.”
I couldn’t respond because there was a lump in my throat the size of a large plum. Heather burst out laughing. Move the calendar ahead more than 20 years, and there we were, the two of us the other night, viewing a lengthy, maudlin ceremony extolling the life and career of baseball player Roy (Doc) Halladay, who was killed in a plane crash the week before at the age of 40. (The only difference between Ripken’s celebratory jaunt and
Halladay’s service at a Florida ball field, at least in our home, was the fact that there were two sets of eyes in moist mode this time around; I have had an influence, I guess, for better or for worse, as the matrimonial ritual has it).
And, look, I know Halladay deserted the Toronto Blue Jays in his prime for greener pastures in Philadelphia, and was a millionaire a hundred times over, and, yes, perhaps he was reckless in crashing what some have described as an airborne recreational playtoy into the Gulf of Mexico, leaving behind a wife and two young sons.
But, hey, Doc was my man when he was with the Jays, delivered thrill after thrill, was part of my escapism, so I choked up unabashedly as his relatives and former teammates eulogized one of the greatest pitchers in recent baseball history.
I believe the first time I shed a tear or two at a sporting event was way back in the late ’50s while watching a game at the old Gander Gardens when my
10-year-old psyche could not handle the abuse fans were hurling at my father’s best friend, Maurice (Mossie) Doyle, a referee and one of my adult troutin’ mentors.
“Why are they screaming at Moss?” I asked Dad through watery eyes.
I’m sure Dad offered up some sort of token explanation for the verbal assault on Moss (a player-turned-ref who, ironically, picked up more than his share of penalty minutes in his playing days and was nicknamed “Dirty Doyle”). Or perhaps Dad merely dispatched his rink-rat offspring to the smokefilled canteen with a nickel to buy an Aero bar.
There has been no shortage of tear-inducing moments in my sports-viewing life ever since.
When the New York Mets won the World Series in 1969, my jock-filled emotions brought me to within a whisker of expulsion from the junior college I was attending after I charged into a classroom on a fall afternoon and disrupted a professor’s
history lecture with my own historic news: “The Mets have won the pennant!”
Or when Mark Messier raised the Stanley Cup in 1994.
Or when Joe Carter smacked that World Series-winning homer (“Touch ’em all, Joe!”).
Look, I recognize there are more significant events taking place in the world than sports, but it’s my therapy, my nonprescription route to giddiness, and I make no apology for my healthy addiction.
And sure, CBC National could have been accused of strange journalistic priorities when it began its newscast with the Doc Halladay story on the day he was killed.
But what can I say? If I’d been in charge of what television people call the “lineup,” I would have probably led with Doc’s death as well.
And then choked back a tear.