No Heavy Lifting

by Rob Simpson

  Johnny was a starving artist, originally from the upper peninsula of Michigan, a “Yooper.” By day, he worked in a bookstore as a stock guy, and by night, he’d occasionally play solo acoustic gigs at various venues around crispy, crunchy-granola Portland. Each time the Hawks came for a visit, I’d meet up with him and buy him a few beers at a tiny, triangular, basement bar that sat in the middle of a fork in the road on Burnside Street.

  When I set down the box of radio gear in my hotel room, I remember feeling a slight twinge in my back, a twinge above and beyond the normal spasms I’d grown accustomed to. Undaunted, I trotted out to meet Johnny at the bar. We laughed it up, chatted with a few of the locals, and each drank about five or six beers. Besides catching a buzz, I was also going about the business of dehydrating myself with alcohol. My bad back, my drinking, and my not-so-heavy lifting earlier were all about to rendezvous for a memorable rebellion.

  Most of the motels we used in the Northwest League were of the Super 8–Ramada Inn–Best Western ilk. Something a middle-class family of four would stay in on a driving trip across the country. Only on rare occasions would our motel be upgraded to a hotel. Portland was one of these times. Not glamorous by any stretch, I think it earned the “hotel” distinction simply because it had more than three storeys. This building had five.

  Also rare in this case was the fact that Tommy and I had our own bedrooms. In most places, we shared a motel room with two twin beds and a tiny bathroom. Here, we had a main room off the common balcony entrance, a bathroom to the right, and two separate bedrooms. Tommy’s was to the right; I was to the left behind the living area.

  When I came home from the bar, I went straight to bed. It was probably midnight, and Tommy hadn’t arrived back. I closed the bedroom door and turned in.

  Normally, as we all know, one wakes up in a variety of relatively routine ways. One might arise gently and naturally after a good night’s rest, or be startled out of a nightmare, or awakened by a barking dog or a loud noise.

  Physically, the usual occurrences might include an arm, leg, or hand feeling “dead” or having “fallen asleep” after being slept on funny. For a man, the potential also exists to wake up sporting a Woodrow after enjoying a pleasant dream of some sort. Both of those sensations are much more pleasant than the one that awakened me.

  Apparently, I had rolled over or twisted in my sleep just enough to herniate my bulging disc. It essentially blew out, the pieces pressing against my spinal cord and the particles scattering down my spinal column.

  I woke up screaming! I was experiencing unbelievable pain and disbelief at the same time. The level of my anguish was alien; I had never come remotely close to suffering this type of acute and protracted agony. It was like a chef was using my lower vertebrae to sharpen a paring knife. I couldn’t move.

  “Oh my God, this is insane,” I said to myself. “Tommy! Tommy! Tommy!” I tried in vain to wake up my passed-out broadcast partner through two closed doors. Mustering enough voice was impossible. The act of yelling caused slight movement; slight movement brought excruciating pain.

  It took me the next twenty minutes just to strategize how I was going get to the floor, and another fifteen to reach it. I managed to roll over onto my stomach, inch my way to the edge of the bed, and then “walk” off the end of the bed using my arms and hands as legs and feet. I lowered myself to the floor like finishing a push-up, with my feet scraping down the edge of the bed to the floor.

  The good news: I knew I wasn’t dying. The bad news: I couldn’t stand up, I couldn’t crawl on my hands and knees (yet), and there’d be no using the potty.

  My endorphins, the body’s natural painkillers, had kicked in a little bit, but still not enough to allow me to do anything but belly-crawl. This I did, out into the little hallway, past the bathroom, and into the main room. It took about a half-hour, between gasps, grunts, and groans.

  This is when I started to get really concerned about the ball game and the broadcast. It was six a.m., which meant I had about eight hours to get ready for the two p.m. start. Conventional wisdom dictated that I should skip the game, but there was no way I was missing the chance to call the deciding contest for the championship.

  I was determined to figure out a way to get on the air. While I should have been worried about someday walking again, or taking a dump, or at least getting off the floor of this Portland hotel room, I was more worried about the show. I was the lead broadcaster in just my second season at a new gig, this was my first championship series of any kind, and my fellow broadcaster, Tommy Smith — fresh out of Santa Clara University and who normally did the play-by-play for innings four, five, and six — simply wasn’t very good. That’s not stating something Tommy didn’t know. He got the job mainly because he had a relative in the ownership group, and it was a one-season experiment heading into the summer. Tommy’s uncle Pete, a great guy and a very understanding investor when it came to his nephew’s broadcast limitations, was open-minded about the end result: if he were decent, they’d keep him. It didn’t help that Tommy was replacing my very accomplished partner from 1996, Jon Sciambi, a guy who went on to call baseball games regularly on ESPN.

  I loved Tommy like a little brother, and still do, but there was no way I wanted him soloing for the final game of the Hawks championship series.

  I lay on the floor of the hotel room in front of the TV for two hours waiting to call Hiner. I didn’t want to wake him up too early following a night out, but I needed some ice.

  “Dude, my back exploded, you gotta get down here quick,” I begged Hiner.

  “What? Hold on.”

  Hiner came and took a look. He had a good chuckle, knowing my life wasn’t in danger, ran out, and a few minutes later returned with a bag of ice.

  I lay there for another two hours until Tommy finally rolled out of the sack. He burst out laughing.

  “Dude, what the hell is going on?” he said.

  “Dude, my back blew up,” I said.

  He felt bad and thought it was funny at the same time.

  “Dude, no way.”

  We said “dude” a lot in 1997.

  With that, he asked me if dude needed anything, stepped over me, and headed out to get breakfast. He brought me back some McDonald’s. A few minutes later, Hiner brought me a fresh ice pack and some meds.

  “Can you crawl yet?” he asked.

  I could. And I did. Out the door, along the outdoor balcony that ran in front of all the rooms, into the elevator (where I had a delightful conversation with a fellow hotel guest while staring at his ankle), through the lobby, across the hotel’s driveway, and onto the back seat of a Boise Hawks employee’s Suburban.

  All the while, Tommy and Ryan Brach, the Suburban’s owner, walked alongside me, carrying my garment bag and the radio equipment. Only twice did Brach have the nerve to say, “Heel.”

  Although I could crawl, I couldn’t sit — it put too much direct weight on my lower back. I wouldn’t be flying home with the team the next day; even if I could sit, I couldn’t get up to walk onto the airplane.

  Fortunately, because this was the championship series, Brach and a couple other front-office employees had driven the six and a half hours to Portland, and, fortunately for me, they hadn’t come in a pick-up truck.

  The plan was in place: when the game was over, I’d crawl into the back seat of the Suburban, lie down, and ride 430 miles straight to a hospital in Boise.

  Another break in my favour came thanks to old Civic Stadium being a bizarre ballpark. Among its idiosyncrasies, the press box and our broadcast position were at field level behind home plate. Fellow broadcasters referred to it as Eva Braun’s bunker (as in Hitler’s wife): cement floor, blue cement walls, and a wire cage to look through about twenty feet behind home plate. Calling balls and strikes was great, depth perception, not so much. A broadcaster would have to wait to describe balls hit in the air to avoid ca
lling an infield pop-up a fly ball to right, or a home run a line drive to left. It was simply difficult to pick up distance off the bat.

  The great thing about the location on this occasion: I didn’t have to crawl up sixty steps to a traditional press box. A driveway ran right down into the guts of the building behind the bunker. I crawled out of the Suburban, into the press box, and lay across two chairs. For the game itself, I lay on the counter where we’d normally keep our notes and broadcast equipment. I called innings one, two, three, seven, eight, and nine lying sideways with my right arm propping up my headset-laden cranium.

  Lounging like a Kardashian, all six-and-a-half feet of me was stretched out, face pressed up against the screen — a minor-league diva. The counter was only about twenty inches wide. At one point, manager Kotchman, who walked by after talking to the ump or something, stopped and stared at me like I had six eyeballs.

  He must have thought, What the hell is wrong with this guy?

  “I screwed up my back,” I tried to explain through the screen.

  “Uh, huh.” This confirmed his suspicions about my overall mental stability.

  The ball game didn’t go so well. For me, the next three hours were literally the dictionary definition of adding insult to injury. At one point, with a chance to tie the game in the top of the sixth, Boise base runner Paxton Stewart got doubled off second base when he took off running on a pop-up to left field. That was after his walk and a base hit to start the inning. Ugly. The Hawks lost Game Five 4–2, and the series.

  No championship, no ring, no nothing — but the disappointment would have to wait. I was actually relieved to be crawling into the Suburban to start the long ride home.

  Cell phones were rare in 1997, but we had one on this occasion, which was nice when the fellas decided to stop in Pendleton, Oregon, halfway along our journey, to gamble at the Wild Horse Casino. They ran in for about forty-five minutes while I lay on a bag of ice in the back seat chatting on the phone with my wife, Nora, who planned on meeting me at the hospital.

  Talk about taking one for the team: acutely injured guy lying alone in the back of a truck while his buddies played blackjack. Actually, I thought it was kind of funny, and it was the least I could do, given how much I appreciated the lift, and because the boys cancelled overnight plans in Portland to drag my gimpy ass home.

  Three hours after the gambling stop, we pulled up to St. Alphonsus Regional Medical Center in Boise. My wife walked up and thanked my colleagues, while an orderly with a gurney came outside to get me. I crawled from seat to stretcher.

  Once inside, the nurse on duty wasn’t buying into the seriousness of my back problem. To find out just how bad it was, she gave me a shot of something, Demerol I think, into my right butt cheek.

  “In a few minutes, I’ll have you get up and we’ll check it out,” she said.

  Oh really? Take your time. After what seemed like just a few moments, I was flyin’.

  “Yeah, baby,” I said to Nora. “Oh yeah, this stuff is goooood.” I was on Pluto. The pain was absolutely gone — until the nurse had me stand up.

  “Ouch, ah, damn! Oh, no, no, no. Can’t do it,” I said.

  “Really?” she answered. “Well, let me give you one more shot on the other side, and we’ll check again.”

  “Works for me.” I smiled as I lay back down. Moments later, my happy-happy, joy-joy buzz was revitalized. This was an acute, high-potency shot of painkiller pretty close to the nerve centre.

  “Oh yeah, I gotta get me some of this,” I said, laughing, to Nora.

  “Knock it off,” she ordered, smiling.

  “Man, I’m tellin’ ya!”

  The nurse came back in.

  “Okay. Get up.”

  Nope. Again, once I stood up and tried to move around upright, the pain crashed the party in my extra-terrestrial brain.

  “Alright,” the nurse determined, “you’re going for an MRI right now.”

  Upon further review, the doctor determined that surgery was required almost immediately. I was admitted to the hospital as a patient, my first time since birth. The next morning, I’d have a partial discectomy.

  Lying on the operating table, looking up into a light, I saw the face of the anaesthesiologist as she put a mask over my nose and mouth.

  “Okay,” she said. “Count down from ten.”

  “Ten, nine, eight, seven . . .”

  ~

  Tommy Smith married his college sweetheart, Shannon, is in the medical sales business in Arizona, and has four kids.

  Kotch is managing in the Gulf Coast League in the Boston Red Sox organization.

  Clausy is the global scouting coordinator for the Red Sox.

  At last word, Benny was coaching baseball in Australia.

  Hiner owns a training center outside of Boise.

  THE PEEWEE PRESS

  “I’m not never gonna be crushed by anything that happens . . . because I take life day by day.”

  Earvin “Magic” Johnson, March 1981

  (a decade prior to his HIV announcement)

  I had a few zits and my voice hadn’t completely changed. My buddy Ric’s voice really hadn’t changed. We’d tease him with Mickey Mouse comparisons.

  He was sixteen, in the visitors locker room after a Detroit Pistons game, when he approached New York Knicks forward Toby Knight.

  “Toby, can I ask you a few questions?”

  “Nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnno,” Knight answered and smiled.

  “Really?” Ric followed.

  “No, go ahead.”

  “What was the difference tonight that allowed the Knicks to win tonight?” Ric asked.

  “Well, on the scoreboard, we had more total points than they did, thus it was a victory for New York,” Knight answered. “Ha, ha.”

  “Really?” Ric held his ground. “You guys have been coming around lately, playing better ball.”

  Toby finished chuckling and then straightened up.

  “We were struggling for a while, playing hot and cold, and the team is starting to get a bit . . . come together, and we’ve got it coming along. Tonight was a good . . . an indication of better ball,” Knight concluded.

  “Thanks,” Ric said.

  Every once in a while, a player would mess with us like that or ask a question in response to our first question.

  “How old are you?” they’d say.

  We’d explain how we worked for a high-school radio station and also for a professional station, under the table, getting post-game sound.

  “Well, that’s cool,” they’d respond.

  The defining moment of our first season occurred when that grumpy old rent-a-cop who guarded the press room entrance saw Ric and me approaching before a game and announced for all the world to hear, “Here comes the peewee press.” He had what we call “summer teeth” in hockey: “summer here and summer there.” He grinned from ear to ear; neither Ric nor I was laughing.

  The idea over the course of time was to gradually shake the “peewee” off the press. This would involve being patient while keeping our ears open and our mouths shut.

  Early in our journalistic career, at the end of the 1979–80 season, we were witness to an event common to anyone covering pro basketball, or any sport for that matter: watching someone get fired. Detroit coach Richie Adubato was the first person I ever observed getting ousted. He had replaced Dick Vitale twelve games into the campaign, moving up from an assistant coach position. When Adubato took over the Pistons, he inherited a team in shambles.

  The Pistons had traded M.L. Carr and a first-round draft pick to Boston for Bob McAdoo. McAdoo quickly earned the nickname “Mc-A-Don’t.” The former scoring champ and superstar spent a portion of his first two seasons in Detroit sitting on the bench with a sore foot and an injured groin.

  Detroit also dumped longtime fan favo
urite, Bob Lanier. They sent him to Milwaukee for Kent Benson. Eric Money came from Philadelphia, little-used Steve Malovic from Washington, and “Kamikaze” Ron Lee came from Atlanta. Among the injured players: James McElroy, Greg Kelser, and Terry Duerod. Duerod, Terry Tyler, and John Long had all followed Coach Vitale from the University of Detroit. Tyler and Long lasted a bit; Duerod didn’t.

  With all this instability, it’s not surprising that under Adubato, the Pistons would win just twelve ball games. They finished the season with sixteen wins and sixty-six losses, and when it was over, Adubato was finished.

  When the final home game of the season ended, I was sullen. I knew it would be five months before I had the surreal opportunity again to interview people like Julius Erving, Larry Bird, and Magic Johnson.

  However, after spending time in the locker room that evening, I completely forgot about my own petty concerns. Instead, I stood by and watched a ritual that takes place every year, in every league, in a handful of cities: a head coach being let go. Adubato was brought in as an “interim” coach, and he wasn’t about to hold the job, with only two road games left in a disastrous season. His impending departure gave me a strange feeling. What if something like this happened to my dad?

  A farewell banner, which had hung from the middle level of the Silverdome, signed by dozens of fans, had been brought down and draped inside the little room where Adubato conducted his interviews. A few Pistons employees stuck their heads in to wish the coach well. As the post-game interviews wrapped up, I hung out to listen to the last few questions and comments. Richie was a man let go, a two-game lame duck, a man without a team, a man forced to say farewell. I was a little bit sad and a lot more contemplative. I wondered what Adubato would do next.

  Less than a year later, I saw him holding a post-game beer in the visitors locker room at the Silverdome as an assistant coach with the Atlanta Hawks.

  That same season, year two of our little pro-sports endeavour, Ric and I began to get much more comfortable. Of course, as teenagers, we still had to mind our “p’s and q’s.” For example, I had no right to argue with an NBA head coach. I had no right to doubt him, question him, or even talk to him for that matter. I knew very little about life in the NBA, let alone about how to coach a professional basketball team. But there I stood, in fantasy land, playing reporter.