Children bring ‘purpose’ to Marlins players’ lives
Bryan De La Cruz doesn’t have to look too far to remember who he’s playing for. Hanging just below his neck on a silver chain is a picture of his two kids, Eliel and Noriel, going down a slide.
“Three years ago, God blessed me with the opportunity to be a father, and it did change a lot,” De La Cruz said. “They became my motivation, my strength. Every time I go to the baseball field, if I’m feeling tired, if I’m feeling like I want to go run away or something like that, I see a picture of them and I know why I get up every morning, why I do what I have to do, why I have to grind. They are the reason of my life and that’s why I keep them very close to me all the time. Every time I feel sad or powerless, I just see them and I get all the energy.”
De La Cruz isn’t the only player in the Miami Marlins’ clubhouse who shares that sentiment. Of the 26 players on the team’s active roster,
The championship parades would have been right around now. The Heat’s would have been on the familiar route along Biscayne Boulevard downtown, near the arena. The Panthers’ maiden celebration was planned as a boat parade on the Intracoastal in Fort Lauderdale.
We reflect on two months of building exhilaration, disappointment at the finish line, but an overriding feeling of positivity and appreciation as we imagine what’s next for the Heat and Panthers.
These things we take from what two teams have just done — done for us, a South Florida community fractured by politics and so much else but still able to join hands and raise voices as one. Cinderella had on sneakers one night, skates the next for two No. 8 seeds’ magical, historic runs to the NBA Finals and Stanley Cup Final.
We had never seen that before, together at once, and might never see it again.
It punctuated a spring-intosummer for the ages in South Florida sports.
Lionel Messi announcing he will play for Inter Miami ... as the Heat and Panthers play for league championships ... and even the Marlins are winning ... as the Dolphins prepare to enter training camp the best they have been in years ... after Hurricanes men’s basketball reached the Final Four.
It has been not short of a collective renaissance.
The feelings are more complicated, though, as we reflect on the concurrent Heat and
Panthers journey.
For me, there also is a sense of great and rare opportunity lost, times two. The parades on our mind. These were not two typical eight seeds in happy-to-be-here mode. They were would-be champions both, but for that small whisper (“What if ...?) that might never go entirely away.
The Denver Nuggets earned their Thursday championship parade and the Vegas Golden Knights deserved their Saturday
coronation. Yes, yes.
But what if the Panthers had not had a handful of key players toughing through broken bones toward the end including scoring star Matthew Tkachuk missing the final game and being limited the two prior?
“We didn’t need puck luck,” as coach Paul Maurice put it. “But we ran out of health luck.”