by Rob Simpson
I had a banana, a little bit of water, half a cup of coffee, and peed again. Twenty minutes from our start time, I began the greatest stretch of my life, singularly focused, methodical, perfect. I was getting anxious. Then I took a final small leak. I wanted to be completely empty. I had no intention of stopping for any reason during the marathon, especially to take a whiz.
After a few more minutes of apprehensively standing around, our wave regrouped en mass on the base of the bridge, and my marathon began with a mixture of relief, disbelief, and fascination. I suddenly found myself running in a herd of humanity up and over the Verrazano Bridge on the way to Brooklyn. It’s actually a decent climb. The adrenaline, the people, the pace, carries you along with a tempered joy.
The Boston Marathon in the spring of 2013 had been bombed. The New York City Marathon seven months later had security like you wouldn’t believe. One indelible image remains with me. Halfway across the bridge, just before the crest, looking left, an NYPD helicopter hovered perfectly still just dozens of feet away from us, with the city harbour and skyline as the backdrop. The Statue of Liberty, the Hudson River stretching away, downtown, the East River, and Brooklyn, our next destination.
Kypreos recalls it. “I mean I lived in New York and won a Stanley Cup there, but I’ve never seen New York quite like that before, that was one of the coolest things I’ve ever done.”
The crowds gradually pick up as you leave the bridge and work your way into Brooklyn. By the time you hit a ridiculously long trip up Fourth Avenue, there are tens of thousands of people lined along the sides of the route. There’s garage bands, an opera singer, reggae, a jazz quartet, set up blocks apart, and a cop on every corner on both sides of the street all the way through. I ran along the left edge by the median and fist bumped a bunch of policemen on my way by.
“You’d think at some point over twenty-six miles that the crowd would waver a little bit,” Kipper adds, “but Brooklyn, with their signs, and just, they were relentless in their cheering, they never wavered. They were always pushing you. They were as involved as the runners, the people watching. That’s incredible. You try to describe it to people but you have to experience it.”
The crowd encourages you through most of Brooklyn. You finally turn right onto a lovely tree-lined street that takes you east about twenty or so blocks before you turn back north towards Queens. The crowds wane through Park Slope with just the occasional Hasidic Jew or two wandering along on either side. Through Williamsburg the crowds pick back up as you meander towards the Pulaski Bridge that takes you over the Newtown Creek and, finally, into the next borough. The relatively short trip through a little slice of Queens is pleasant knowing that the Queensboro Bridge isn’t far off. The adrenaline kicks in again as tens of thousands more supporters await you in Gotham.
It’s at this point every marathoner must be concerned about what’s called “hitting the wall.” The wall is the psychological barrier that screams, “You’re done, you can’t do this anymore, where the hell do you think you’re going?!”
It can actually happen on any long run as your brain starts to consider reaching the finish.
“Oh, yeah, absolutely, absolutely,” remembers Kypreos. “I was maybe about sixteen or seventeen miles in and that’s when I was just like . . . what am I doing?”
Coming off the bridge, mile sixteen is the start of the long stretch up First Avenue in Manhattan, a pretty typical place for the wall. About a mile into this stint, I felt my acute mental anguish. I dragged ass for four miles until I hit the Willis Avenue Bridge to the Bronx. Thank God for the bagpiper waiting at the other end of the bridge. I first heard him, then I saw him, then I passed him, and at that point I knew I was good to go the distance. Not sure if it was some emotional connection with my Scottish heritage or the fact that the route through the Bronx offered short stints of road, with quick turns, and no long stretches. We weaved back and forth and then into Manhattan via the Madison Avenue Bridge.
Way uptown on Fifth Avenue, I left any thought of quitting behind as I popped a Tylenol, eventually taking three of them over the final five miles. My legs were hurting, but I knew I would finish. Masking an injury? Oh well, at that point I didn’t give a shit. Comfort first.
“You just try to envision finishing it,” adds Kipper. “Getting to Central Park was really tough for me; it was actually easier once I got into Central Park. That’s when I felt like there was light at the end of the tunnel. Prior to that there was a short stint of three or four miles to get to Central Park where I really battled.”
I felt a similar calm. I had run the Central Park loop dozens of times, meaning the last four miles of the marathon were alongside and inside my comfort zone, a familiar friend. We actually exited the south end of park onto Fifty-Ninth Street on the east side near the Plaza Hotel, ran the width of the park along its base before re-entering at Columbus Circle. The satisfaction of running that last short bit on the west side, envisioned so many times before, is difficult to describe. Surreal, still unbelievable — a mountain climbed.
Never say never and never give up.
~
I finished the marathon in four hours and forty-four minutes. Kypreos is a wanker simply because he finished it in 4:40. That’s right, four minutes faster. By the way, we never actually saw each other; we were running in different waves. Ultimately, the times meant nothing. We ran the whole way and we finished. There is little chance either one of us will ever run another one.
Roger Fredericks went on to become one of the world’s leading golf instructors, utilizing his unique focus on flexibility, fitness, and video analysis. Based in So-Cal, he’s helped the likes of Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus, and a number of celebrity golfers.
Meanwhile, the simplest thing on my long-term goal list was to slam dunk a basketball at age thirty-five and forty. I have since done it at forty-five and fifty, with fifty-five still in the plans. There is only one thing I have not yet accomplished on that list. What’s referred to in Hawaii in the local Pidgin language as bachi prevents me from revealing and jinxing it.
The actual skydive on YouTube: Simmer Hawaii Skydive
THE GROWLING
“Yeah, well, don’t get too worked up about all this radio stuff . . . I thought you wanted to be a veterinarian.”
Marge Simpson (my mom), January 1980
If the Detroit Pistons hadn’t stunk, I probably wouldn’t have been given the opportunity to cover them as a
teenager.
Eric Forest, Ric Blackwell, and I worked together as students at WBFH-FM, a high-school radio station in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, a white-collar, middle-class to affluent area about twenty-five minutes north of downtown Detroit and about twenty minutes from the Pistons’ former home, the Pontiac Silverdome.
The experience started in tenth grade with Fundamentals of Radio Broadcasting class, also known among its graduates, and to the teacher, Pete Bowers, as “fun with mentals.” It was here we learned to disc jockey, to write copy, and put together two-minute news reports. We also learned the necessary FCC rules and regulations to get our operators’ licenses. Back then, you needed a license to be a DJ. This meant taking a government test, which was remedial once you had completed the fundamentals.
Eric was first to contact Bill Kreifeldt, then–public relations director for the last-place Pistons. “Mr. Kreifeldt,” as we will refer to him eternally, was very open to the idea of allowing young students the opportunity to be exposed to the world of professional media. I’m sure he was this generous with novices like us only because the Pistons were absolutely lousy. Our local NBA basketball team was in the midst of the 1979–80 season, which would see them finish with a franchise-record worst of sixteen wins and sixty-six losses. Media coverage for the club was apathetic at best. Tickets and media passes were easy to come by. Of course, we didn’t mind being in the right place at the right time.
On January 13, 1980, I wa
s riding in Eric’s Chevrolet Chevette, a glorified golf cart, with a bit of an upset stomach. Not only did Eric’s erratic driving make me nervous, but I had only about ten minutes to get my thoughts together before arriving at the dome. The Pistons hosted the Chicago Bulls. The game meant little in the standings, but it meant everything to me: my first as a reporter. I was excited as I clutched my little brown sports bag with the white stripe over the top. In it, an oversized cassette recorder, a handy little microphone, two pens, and a note pad.
Eric parked the Chevette in the vast concrete pasture of the parking lot. We hopped out, made our way to the east gate, down the huge outdoor funnel of an entry area, and into the revolving doors.
“Dubbayu-bee-ef-aich,” Eric spat out into the slot at the will-call window. Eric had kind of a lispy speech impediment. The lady behind the plastic window shuffled some tiny envelopes and then slid one towards Eric.
“Thanks.” Eric turned and nervously tried to open the end of the envelope with his thumb. His hands were shaking as he turned the envelope in his hands, trying to get his finger under the fold. His chronic nervousness was making me anxious.
“Let me see,” I urged.
“I got it!” Eric tore the envelope open and pulled out two little square white cards. On the front was the Pistons emblem, beneath it a line with the date on it, and below that another line with “Chicago” stamped on it. The top of the card had a hole in it with a little white string tied through the opening.
I snagged one of the cards from Eric and attached the string to one of the belt loops on the front of my pants. We proceeded down a stairway leading through the huge main lower section of blue seats, stepping down about fifty or sixty rows from the top of the section all the way to court level. The further we descended, the bigger the Silverdome seemed to get.
It opened in 1976–77 as the home of the NFL’s Detroit Lions. The area at ground level that made up the football field was cut in half by a nine-storey blue curtain that hung along the fifty-yard line. On our side of the curtain, a hardwood basketball floor extended out from the corner of the end zone. People sat in the football stadium seats on one side and end of the court, while temporary grandstands were rolled in and set up along the other side and far end of the court. I can’t seem to recall why the Pistons moved from downtown Detroit, from the acoustically perfect Cobo Arena, to play basketball inside a football stadium. Oh, yeah, that’s right, people had been getting stabbed a lot in downtown Detroit.
The featured high-school game, which served as the warm-up event before the Pistons game, was wrapping up. In twenty minutes or so, the NBAers would take to the court for their pregame “shoot-around,” their idea of loosening up.
The little white card dangling above my groin worked magic. We slid past the guards at the bottom of the steps with a “How ya doin’?” and made our way along the end of the court. A gradual left turn brought us face to face with the yawning mouth of the Silverdome’s tunnel.
The tunnel.
I had stared at it dozens of times at NFL games in the past, wondering where it led and what was inside. It was the tunnel Billy Sims, Al “Bubba” Baker, and Gary Danielson had disappeared into time after time, often during or after a loss.
Now I was making the walk into the echoing dimness.
The concrete sloped up from under one big hydraulic door, and forty yards or so further, there was an even bigger door at the back of the tunnel. The floor was sloped enough that you could feel a slight effort in your legs. Although dumbfounded as I walked, I managed to notice the Pistons locker room door off to my left about fifteen yards up. The door was painted blue, with a big red-and-white Pistons emblem painted in the middle. We continued past.
Fifteen yards from the end of the tunnel, I wondered where we were going. Straight ahead of us stood the aforementioned second huge door, which was big enough to allow for a tractor trailer, or an elephant, or both at the same time. To its left, a regular walk-in door was guarded by a grumpy-looking rent-a-cop.
“Hey?” He paused. “Where are your passes?”
Who’s this dipshit? I thought, glancing down at the card hanging from my belt loop.
“Umm, right here,” Eric and I said together, nervous with inexperience.
“Sign in,” the guard ordered, turning the sheet in a binder towards us. Eric’s hands shook as he scribbled. As he was doing that, I noticed a well-lit corridor running off to our left, next to the security guard and his little podium. Eric handed me the pen, and I scribbled my name and WBFH. The gruff, cranky-looking guard cracked a grin. I waited as if something else was supposed to happen.
An awkward moment later, Eric turned and led me into the light.
A closed double door, which turned out to be the entrance to the visitors locker room, stood in front of us, but, before reaching it, we took a left turn down a shorter well-lit corridor. Then we took a right, where the press room opened up in front of us.
The room was quite simple. White concrete walls surrounded us, steel-framed cage lockers ran along the left side, and seven or eight rows of long dining tables and chairs crossed in front of us and blocked our way to the back of the room. It was clean, but it smelled like chicken. Dinner trays lined the longest table of them all, which ran half the length of the room on the right, perpendicular to the others. At one end of this long table, paper plates and napkins; at the other, little brownies, each square placed on its own individual mini dessert plate. The middle of the table held trays full of chicken, potatoes, rice, and salad.
Behind the edibles stood two women dressed in Elias Brothers waitress outfits — Elias Brothers being the local equivalent of Big Boy Restaurant. One woman was slim and attractive; the other, short, stout, and not so attractive. To me, this was glamour.
So I’m thinking, Let me get this straight. We get a free pass to the game, we come in here for a free meal served by a hot babe and her chubby friend, and then I get to interview basketball players?
We grabbed our plates and made our way along the table. The babe picked out a couple of chicken breasts and set them on my plate. We found a table with no one at it and sat down. Now what?
“Eat,” Eric said as if hearing my thoughts. “I’ll grab the game notes.”
Eric went to a locker and grabbed us a glossy program and a small stack of white statistics sheets. He dropped the packet in front of me. Glancing through the notes, I was startled and impressed. There were updates on every player, including their efforts from the last game, season stats, quirks, injuries, and personal notes. There was also a section about the rest of the NBA and more in-depth items about the Bulls, the Pistons’ opponent.
So that’s how sportscasters know all of that stuff: someone hands it to them.
Scanning the room, I recognized only a couple of people. I’d seen Charlie Vincent’s little picture above his column in the Detroit Free Press. Nice guy.
After dinner, Eric led the way out of the press room, down the tunnel, and out towards the court. The press table courtside was full. We still sat very close to the action, in a media spill-over section just to the left of the Pistons bench behind the baseline. Had it been a football game, we’d have been sitting in the back corner of the end zone. The play was intense. We could see the sweat fly and hear the contact, the moans, the language, and the trash talking.
At the end of the half, it was time to head back up the tunnel to grab a soda pop. After a little schmoozing in the middle of the tunnel, mostly just with Eric, we headed back out carrying our little clear plastic drink cups.
I always savoured that walk, particularly before and after the game when the path to the court was roped off. Fans stood along the sides craning their neck, waiting for players to walk past. At one point or another, they’d get me instead. I’d walk by making sure not to stumble. Just before we media types reached the playing surface, we’d slip under the rope and walk down the aisle at th
e end of the court to take our seats. A few — including me, once I gathered the confidence — would walk right onto the court, along the baseline, and then to our seats. After the games, it was even more fun because, if you hustled, you could catch the players leaving the court and join them as they strutted back into the tunnel. This opened the opportunity for informal rap before the players could reach the locker room. Sometimes I’d just walk next to them or behind them and marvel at their enormous size. It was literally like strolling among trees: huge men — the forwards averaging six-foot-eight, six-foot-nine, 230 pounds — grumbling along, sweating, and, sometimes, cussing.
As the second half began that first night, I had already begun thinking nervously about the post-game. Soon I would be talking to these guys. The statistician’s runner, a relatively short, thin guy with early Beatles hair and a moustache, dropped off a copy of the first-half stats to each of us, and I began to study the sheet. I was bent on being prepared. The second half seemed to last an eternity, especially the last three or four minutes. The teams must have called six timeouts. Finally, the horn sounded. The Pistons had lost again, and it was time to make my interviewing debut. We walked hurriedly back to the press room to grab our tape recorders.
“I’ll grab the Pishtons, you grab the Bulls,” Eric slurred as he lumbered off awkwardly at his top speed.
“Great.”
The hallway that led from the tunnel to the press room branched off and turned towards the visitors locker room as well. I made my way in that direction and steered toward what looked like a group of reporters in front of the locker room door. I assumed they were waiting to go in.
I stopped behind the group and nervously began walking in small circles. Looking up, looking down, looking this way and that, I tried to look preoccupied.
“When do they let us in?” I asked the nearest guy.