by Jay Onrait
We decided to concentrate the trip on the East Coast. There were so many potential trips we could have done in the Midwest and out West—Wrigley Field in Chicago beckoned, as did the beautiful and much lauded Pac Bell Park in San Francisco. But we only had a week and we wanted to take in the maximum number of ballparks possible. Besides, by sticking to the East Coast, we would also be able to hit the two most famous sports halls of fame in America: the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, and the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio, just outside of Cleveland.
DAY ONE
To get from game to game, we decided on my 2005 Nissan X-Trail, a vehicle that my wife liked to call a “soccer-Mom car.” “Any vehicle that comes in champagne should not be driven by a man,” she said. Mine was black, but it still wasn’t very cool. Still, it was a comfortable ride and it had a six-disc CD changer, which was still somewhat revolutionary in the days before MP3s and then streaming took over and changed the way we listened to music. We actually brought CDs on the trip. We decided to allow ourselves five each, taking into account that we were possibly trying to introduce each other to some new bands.
One of the things that used to make me laugh the most about Reid when I first met him back in Saskatoon was his unabashed love of the English hair-metal titans Def Leppard. Growing up as we did in the ’80s, Leppard was just about the biggest band in the entire world. Their first album, High ’n’ Dry, made them stars, their second, Pyromania, made them bigger stars. And then they took a long hiatus following a tragic accident in which drummer Rick Allen lost an arm, then learned to drum again while in hospital using a revolutionary computer foot-pedal system. Once Rick had the technique down, they went back into the studio and recorded their third album, Hysteria, which made them total megastars. The album ended up being one of the biggest sellers of all time and spawned a myriad of hit singles that dominated rock and Top 40 radio throughout 1989. Everyone, and I mean everyone, was into Def Leppard that year. They filled stadiums around the world multiple times over. Then they took another unexplained four-year hiatus before returning with Euphoria in 1993, featuring perhaps the worst follow-up single to a megaselling album ever, “Let’s Get Rocked.” As I heard the song and watched the horrible computer-animated video for the first time at the young age of nineteen, I just knew it. “It’s over,” I told myself. They were done being a megaband and would continue on for the next couple of decades as a nostalgia act, alongside groups like Kiss, Poison, and Cinderella.
But Reid had taken an entirely different view. While I was listening to Radiohead’s OK Computer and Fatboy Slim’s You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby in 1999, Reid was acting like the past ten years had never happened—for him, Leppard was still on top of the music world. He waited for every new Leppard effort like he was a thirteen-year-old waiting for the Backstreet Boys to release their new chart topper. I thought he was joking at first, pretending to be into such an unfashionable band simply to be ironic, but he was absolutely serious about his love for Def Leppard.
So when Reid showed up for our road trip, I wasn’t at all surprised that he’d made sure to bring Vault: Def Leppard Greatest Hits, along with a few other staples of classic rock, like Van Halen’s Greatest Hits, and a future classic, Queens of the Stone Age. I predictably gravitated toward indie rock that I hoped might pique his interest in some newer music, though in the end the album of mine he ended up liking the best was Weezer’s Pinkerton, an initially maligned follow-up to the band’s debut album that effectively ended their careers before becoming a classic in hindsight and reviving the band’s fortunes years later.
With our CDs loaded in the six-disc changer, we were ready to hit the open road. We crossed the border at Niagara Falls, drove through Buffalo as fast as humanly possibly (sorry, Buffalo), and began to make our way east toward Cooperstown for our first stop: the Baseball Hall of Fame.
I honestly don’t know what I was expecting when we pulled into Cooperstown on a surprisingly poorly marked road that afternoon. I guess I was picturing a charming little town in the middle of upstate New York with a beautiful shrine to America’s Pastime. For the most part that’s what I got, though I couldn’t quite believe how different baseball’s approach was compared with hockey. Hockey historians have famously argued about the birthplace of Canada’s favourite game. Did the first stick and puck action take place in the Maritimes? Ontario? Quebec? It seemed the easiest and most logical solution to situate the Hockey Hall of Fame in neutral territory—Toronto’s downtown—where it has thrived for the most part in an old bank building close to the Air Canada Centre, home of the Maple Leafs. Cooperstown has history on its side, because all baseball historians acknowledge it as the birthplace of the sport. The town is literally centred around the Hall of Fame—and pretty much nothing else. There is really nothing else to do there. The entire town is even more remote than you might expect. But the Hall was really spectacular and set up beautifully.
The thing I remember most distinctly was the newest display in the Hall at that time: Curt Schilling’s bloody sock. Schilling, a talented veteran pitcher who had joined the Boston Red Sox as Boston attempted to finally break the Curse of the Bambino and win their first World Series in eighty-six years, had torn a tendon in his right ankle earlier in the 2004 post-season. In any other situation a pitcher with such an injury would be out of the lineup for a while, but Schilling refused to sit, and after having doctors suture his torn tendon he took the mound in Game Six of the American League Championship Series in one of the most memorable relief-pitching appearances in history. The Fox TV cameras kept cutting to Schilling’s ankle just above his right cleat where blood appeared to be leaking out and staining his sock. The Red Sox went on to win the ALCS after being down 3-0 to the Yankees and then went on to the World Series against the St. Louis Cardinals, where the same scenario repeated itself for the cameras as the gutsy veteran Schilling started Game Two.
Legend had it that the ALCS bloody sock was thrown in the trash at Yankee Stadium, but the World Series Game Two bloody sock was immediately donated to the Baseball Hall of Fame after Boston won the World Series and finally exorcised their demons. Our visit to Cooperstown was just a couple of years after that happened so the whole scenario was still fresh in our minds, and everyone who visited the Hall that day gathered around the glass case to admire the sock. Pretty hilarious to think about all of us gathering around a display case to admire a sock, but that’s what makes the Hall so great: real baseball fans gathering together to see little pieces of history in person.
Sadly, not even ten years later in 2014, Schilling was broke—the victim of some bad investments—and decided to auction off the sock to pay his creditors. I suppose we were lucky to see that bloody rag when we did. When the sock did sell it went for almost a hundred grand! A little piece of baseball history gone to the highest bidder, and we had been there to see it.
DAY TWO
After catching an afternoon game at old Yankee Stadium, in which Sammy Sosa finished up his career as a designated hitter for the Texas Rangers, we hopped on the subway from the Bronx and rode downtown to Katz’s Deli in the Lower East Side. Old Yankee Stadium had history but not a ton of charm. Normally, I hate to see old buildings torn down, but in the case of Yankee Stadium, it made perfect sense to me. I would have led the charge to have it torn down. It was just old and worn out, and somehow it didn’t age as well as other old baseball stadiums. After the new stadium was built across the street, I returned to see it a few years later and was surprised by the negative reaction it had received. Yes, it was massive—probably too massive—but I loved the façade on the outside as you walked up to the stadium. To me, it felt historic the first time I saw it, like something that would age really, really well.
On our way into Manhattan, Reid confessed to me that he felt he’d hit a wall in the business and wasn’t sure he could continue the way he was going. Reid was an Alberta boy through and through, and he loved covering the Alberta Junior Hockey League in whic
h Lloydminster had a successful franchise, but living in the town was proving tiresome for him. It was a small town built around oil and agriculture, not too far removed from the town he grew up in, but there just wasn’t anything there to offer him joy in his off-hours anymore. It wasn’t as if he had ambitions to move to Toronto or New York or Los Angeles. He just wanted to return to Edmonton, where a guy who was into comic books and Def Leppard might find a little more to make him happy.
Beyond that, though, his frustration was with the nature of our business itself. Reid knew more about sports than I ever would, and he’d learned more about the teams in his small market than anyone before him. You simply could not find a more prepared, diligent, and hard-working guy. He was completely easy to get along with. He had applied for job after job after job, but each and every time he came up short, often to younger broadcasters who were working for him. With each “no” he became understandably more and more dejected. I couldn’t deny how unfair the whole process was. The bottom line was that Reid didn’t have conventional TV good looks and no one wanted to take a chance on him. The visual medium had thrown a wall up in his face and now, after putting years of his life into the business, he was starting to wonder if the whole thing was a fruitless exercise.
I felt a little sheepish listening to him. Clearly the only reason I had moved up faster than Reid was that I had looks that were just good enough for television and enough charm to let me bluff through the rest. It certainly wasn’t knowledge, because when it came to sports, Reid had me beaten hands down. Why should it be this way? Why should I have succeeded while he got left behind? All along, I had told him to continue fighting the good fight—to keep applying for jobs when I knew he probably wasn’t going to get them. Now, listening to him break down on the subway, I changed my position. I told him to quit.
“Just go back to Lloydminster and quit. You’ll be a helluva lot happier.”
That piece of advice went against everything I used to believe in. Quitting was easy; sticking it out was the hard part. I was always a big believer in paying your dues in this business and embracing the steps it took to get to the market you wanted to work in. But in my mind Reid had done all he could as an on-air television sports broadcaster; it was time to move on.
DAY THREE
The next day we drove to Boston for two games at Fenway Park. Fenway had been refurbished instead of replaced when pretty much the entire city protested after the Red Sox announced they wanted to build a new park in 1999. It’s hard to imagine a more spectacular place to cheer on your home team—no wonder Boston fans have remained so loyal to their proud franchise, even during those lean years. This was a baseball stadium. Bench seating behind home plate that looked very similar to a small-town Alberta hockey rink? Yep. Terrible hotdogs wrapped in what appeared to be slices of white bread? Flat-out classics as far as everyone in Beantown was concerned. Then there was the history of the place: the Green Monster, Pesky’s Pole, the manual scoreboard out in left field. All of it lived up to the enormous hype as I walked into the place just off of Yawkey Way. We saw two games there, a Sunday game and then a Mother’s Day matinee.
The Mother’s Day matinee was truly memorable. Jeremy Guthrie was pitching a gem for the Orioles that afternoon and Baltimore was comfortably in control all the way until the bottom of the ninth inning. Guthrie was a rookie at the time and was doing magical work on the mound. In the bottom of the ninth, after getting the first out, the Red Sox hit a pop-up near home plate and the Orioles catcher missed it, allowing Boston to get a runner on base. No worries, we thought. Guthrie had thrown a ridiculously low number of pitches, something like eighty-three in total. The base runner clearly wasn’t his fault, so there was no need to take him out. But they did take him out. And after watching the Orioles reliever get the first out, thinking Baltimore would get out of the inning and pick up the win, the Red Sox suddenly started hitting everything. All this despite the fact that they had taken Manny Ramirez, arguably their best hitter, out of the game. The Red Sox scored six runs in the ninth and came back to win 6-5, sending everyone home with a slightly drunken smile on their face. Amazing what a six-run comeback will do for a baseball-crazy city.
It was 2007, the year they won the World Series.
We hit the town that night and had a great time—or so I thought. In a cab on the way back to our hotel, Reid suddenly wasn’t feeling so good. Was it the clam chowder? The wine? Truth be told, it was probably the vodka shots, or better yet a combination of all three. Either way, we were almost home free when Reid began to vocalize a serious issue with his stomach and then actually start puking.
Puking in the backseat of the cab. All over the floor.
We were on a freeway so we couldn’t open the door, and it came on too suddenly for him to get the cabbie to pull over. The driver was understandably furious with us, yelling and screaming from the front of the cab while weaving in his lane. “I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” Reid choked out as he opened the window and tried to vomit outside while we were moving fifty miles an hour, his spittle hitting the back of the cab. I felt bad for him, but at the same time I was a little frustrated. How could he have not known he wasn’t feeling good? Couldn’t he have said something earlier? Maybe we could have pulled off into a residential area where at least we could have found a place for him to puke on the street. I was embarrassed. Reid was never a partier, but this seemed almost childish. I was suddenly filled with regret about the whole trip for reasons I couldn’t really explain. Maybe I hadn’t spent enough time with the guy, and maybe I should have before agreeing to this, because we still had five more days on the road together.
DAY FOUR
The next day we stopped in Baltimore to see the Orioles play at Camden Yards, the first of the new “old school” stadiums. It was completed a couple years after Toronto’s SkyDome and effectively rendered that stadium outdated just three years after it was built. Camden Yards was a true modern classic, but the team was a mess in 2007 and the park was barely full. It seemed such a shame. Although I did appreciate getting to sample Boog’s Barbeque—a stand on Eutaw Street behind the right-field bleachers owned by legendary Orioles first baseman Boog Powell. Now this was great ballpark food! Orioles fans may have been treated to some pretty bad baseball during that time, but at least the barbeque somewhat made up for it.
From there it was on to Pittsburgh, but we decided to do the trip over two days, stopping halfway in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. All due respect to the good folks of Wilkes-Barre, but we didn’t find a lot of action in town on a Monday night. We did find a twenty-four-hour Costco, however, where we bought beer and Reid picked up some apple juice. I had never travelled with a grown man who drank apple juice every morning. It was another thing about him that annoyed me. Couldn’t he drink orange juice like a normal adult? Was he stuck in suspended adolescence?
DAY FIVE
The next morning we woke early to grab a quick breakfast in the hotel diner before getting on the road to Pittsburgh for the Pirates game that evening. I ordered pancakes and orange juice. Reid ordered cereal and apple juice. I tried to hide my annoyance at his choices as I scarfed down my flapjacks. Besides, soon we’d be back on the road.
I started behind the wheel. I’d been doing most of the driving on the trip since we had taken my car. I think we were listening to “So This Is Love?” by Van Halen when disaster struck. I started to feel my stomach gurgling—that familiar feeling that my lower intestines were in serious distress and I desperately needed to find a toilet. What the hell happened, I wondered? It’s not like I ate a ton of breakfast potatoes with garlic, onions, and hot peppers. I had pancakes, for Christ’s sake! Reid continued to chatter away in the passenger seat while I muttered “yes” and “no” answers, all the while concentrating on not filling my pants.
We came upon a massive truck stop about an hour outside of Wilkes-Barre, and I pulled over and went inside. It was the type of mammoth complex that features five or six restaurants, close to fifty gas
pumps, and hundreds of shitters. Thankfully, the men’s restroom was lined with about a hundred stalls to handle all the truckers, families, and highway travellers who needed to put their waste somewhere on their long journeys.
PNC Park in Pittsburgh had recently beaten out the much more hyped AT&T Park (at the time called Pac Bell Park) in San Francisco in an ESPN poll of the most beautiful baseball stadiums in the country. People had been absolutely raving about it, so we were understandably pretty excited to see it. There was absolutely no way I was going to let some stupid stomach bug keep me from going to a game later that evening. But whatever was making me sick was relentless and simply would not stop.
A gas station restroom is pretty much the closest thing to hell on earth, and on that dreary afternoon I was the devil. I just destroyed that toilet, and when I was done destroying that toilet I didn’t exactly feel much better. I had nothing left to shit out, but I also knew anything I ate from that point on would immediately go in one end and out the other. Not to mention the fact that my stomach still wasn’t right. I was filled with rage. How the hell could this happen to me now? Was it the heavens punishing me for not being more sympathetic to Reid when he got sick in the cab back in Boston? It sure felt that way.
Meanwhile, Reid had gassed up the soccer-Mom car, paid the bill, and was now sitting in the front seat starting to worry about me. He actually wandered back toward the men’s restroom just as I was coming out, and I was so full of rage and anger and in so much pain I just walked past him and said, “Let’s get out of here.” As we walked toward the car, we passed a family of four heading inside for lunch. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a four- or five-foot-tall garbage can with flaps on either side. All of the anger over the fact that I was starting to realize my chances of attending this baseball game were becoming slimmer and slimmer by the second made me do something I will forever regret.