NOS AMOURS: LOTS OF SMILES AS EXPOS FANS RELIVE THE GOOD TIMES.
Montreal baseball fans pay tribute to Gary Carter as heartbreak over team’s loss fades
For most Montrealers, the Expos are like that car you just passed on the highway.
It’s still on the radar, but after awhile it gets smaller and smaller in the rear-view mirror until it’s a mere speck in the distance.
Even for those whose love affair with the Expos was lifelong and heartfelt, life goes on – as it must. After nearly eight years, the heartbreak they felt that fateful day in September 2004 when the team left for Washington, D.C., has eased, even if it will never disappear.
On the rare occasions when they gather again, such as at Thursday night’s tribute evening to Gary Carter at Hurley’s Pub on Crescent St. to raise fund for the Cedars Cancer Institute’s Sarah Cook Fund, there finally is more joy than tears.
“It’s a lot easier for me now,” event organizer and long-time season-ticket holder Dave Kaufman said. “I have a lot more fun. It’s not all about having lost the Expos, about the team being taken away. I didn’t see anybody crying (Thursday) night; every time we’ve done one of these, somebody’s sobbing.”
The event raised more than $10,000 from ticket sales, silent-auction proceeds and a $2 donation from the pub for every beverage consumed.
There were Expos jerseys, and T-shirts, and hoodies, and every variety of ball cap in the crowded bar. And there was Kaufman’s epic white Expos cardigan, an item his friend came across in a Village des Valeurs store years ago and bought for a song.
Kaufman says that in the video of the 1981 playoff run, half the fans in the stands are wearing them, clearly some sort of giveaway to season-ticket holders to help them weather October play- off baseball north of the border. Where the rest are is a mystery; no doubt some are packed away in attics and basements, along with other cherished but distant memories.
The cardigan is in fantastic condition for its age. In a way, it mirrors the team’s fan base. So many were minted, so few survived. Those that did are a hardy lot.
“I look forward to it. It’s all I think about,” Katie Hynes, perhaps the most recognizable face of the Expos legion, said of these types of gatherings.
To this day, people still stop Hynes in the street saying, “Salut, Madame Expos.”
“I get high as a kite. And I don’t mean with any other influence. Baseball high,” she said of these rare occasions to reconnect with her friends of summer. “I have a hard time keeping in touch with everybody because I still feel such pain about it. But they’re all sitting there, all the people from my old section. It’s wonderful.”
The youngest of them, Max Harris, also was on hand. Harris was barely into his teens by the end of the Expos’ tenure, ending a relationship that began when he was 4 years old.
Now 21, he can do what he couldn’t do then: have a few beers while he sits and talks Expos with those of like mind.
“It’s just community, more than anything else,” he said. “It’s sort of like you get it, or you don’t. If you were an outsider who had never seen an Expos game before, you would have almost no appreciation of this kind of gathering.
“Somebody can pull out their 1970s Expos Youth Fan (membership) card, and the five or six people at my table looked at it like it’s an aged artifact worth millions of dollars.”
The evening featured an impressive lineup of musical entertainment. Montreal rapper Annakin Slayd opened with a live performance of his Expos tribute rap, with the accompanying video playing on a screen behind him.
No matter how many times you’ve seen it, only the most hardened of hearts could fail to be moved once more by the succession of images: Carter, Dawson, Cromartie, Guerrero – right down to closer Rocky Biddle – all of whom made their contribution to the franchise’s 35-year history.
Once more, the video was a reminder of what a beautiful place Olympic Stadium could be when – for those few heady moments – it magically transformed into baseball nirvana from the cold, cavernous, unwelcoming concrete behemoth it became again at the stroke of baseball midnight, when Cinderella turned back into a pumpkin.
Many of the Expos diehards still get their baseball fix. But it will never be the same.
“Every once in awhile, I hear a certain Spice Girls song and you say, ‘Big O.’ Just things that remind you,” Hynes said. “I’ve loved the game since I was a little girl. But I cannot be as passionate as I was before. There’s less emotion involved. I can watch a game, and I don’t even applaud.
“I’m an observer of all, loyal to none. My stomach never gets churned up. I’ll never look at my seatmate saying, ‘ What am I gonna do? I’m not going to sleep tonight.’ It’s completely different. It’s not fun.”
On this one night, everyone was back in their narrow blue seats a short lob from the Expos’ dugout, together as one.
“I love the team, and I love the game,” Harris said. “But it’s the fellow season-ticket holders, the shared experience of coming out every single night. It’s hard to describe, but it’s a special bond that you have with these people. Not only do these people get it, but they’re there. To them, I have a separate connection. I think as Expos fans we don’t have that much right now, but what we have is each other, all those shared memories and experiences. I think that’s what this event brings out more than anything else.”
Perhaps that’s why there was little or no talk Thursday night about major-league baseball returning to Montreal.
It’s a long-shot at best, a pipe dream at worst. But everyone gathered at Hurley’s knows that even if Montreal did somehow get another team some day, it would never – could never – be anything like the one they lost.