Project

The Flatirons

July 11, 2020Boulder, Colorado

Escaping the corn (maize)

There had been hours and hours and hours of corn. That’s the drive from Oklahoma City to Denver, where the highlight is the left turn from I-35 onto I-70 in Salina. And once you’ve made that turn, there’s corn until you hit the Denver airport offramp.

But that’s the kind of thing we do for our kids, and this was an especially important three-day hockey camp. Further proving parental dedication, the camp was drop-off only, no parents in the building, no watching our little superstars play the game. Thanks a lot, COVID.

We were in the northwest suburb of Superior at a place called the Sports Stable, and because not even accomplished 13-year-old hockey players can skate 12 hours a day, there was some free time.

The closest place of interest was the Pearl Street Pedestrian Mall in Boulder; close enough to get to quickly and, at six blocks long, short enough to meander for a while and get back to the rink in time for the next session.

Pearl Street was a lot less crowded and there were a lot more empty storefronts than the last time I was there, but there’s still enough to stay busy. An ice cream store every 10th yard, a store dedicated to fancy kites, soda pop shops, funky jewelry stores, tourist T-shirt shops, bars, restaurants and an occasional street musician. The whole thing smelled like tomato sauce, which drifted from an Italian restaurant

And bookstores. Independent bookstores selling new and used. Three of them. Three! In six blocks! And two more on the outskirts! The most appealing was the unimaginatively named Boulder Book Store, which has the sort of entrance that defies you to walk past without entering. One peek will sell you: Just inside the entrance there’s a staircase leading down to the basement level and everyone knows that all great bookshops have great, dusty, delightful basements full of used books sure to sag your backpack and fill you with exhaustion and gleeful anticipation.

Thirteen-year-old hockey players are disinclined to browse bookstores, which is probably a survival skill; there’s no way we’d have made it back to the rink on time if he’d turned me loose.

Instead, we continued our saunter amid coeds in ruffled cotton sundresses and at least one man having a heated conversation with an acquaintance visible only to him. Both got the 13-year-old’s attention.

Raymond, the unlikely son of a 60s-era San Franciscan took it in.

“Dad,” he said, “this place is pretty hippie.”

I had the good camera in its special backpack slung over my right shoulder and there were street portraits everywhere. I missed the best one; I couldn’t get to the camera fast enough. A Black man, in his 70s I suppose, was seated on a public bench or planter or something in front of the Wells Fargo. He’d have been a terrific portrait subject; his skin was very dark and he had a short white beard and cropped white hair. He had the homeless look and the signs of mental affliction, as though he was in a familiar place but frightened by his surroundings nonetheless.

A tall, young, curly haired man walked out of the bank. He was wearing a longsleeved white shirt and a dark skinny tie and he carried a paper coffee cup.

In most of the places I’ve lived, the next scene would be the banker shooing the man off the bench, worried he was scaring customers away or detracting from the institution’s imagined majesty. But what really happened was this: The young banker greeted the man on the bench by name.

“Here you go,” the banker said. “I got you your refill.”

The old Black man nodded and said something I couldn’t hear, probably, “Thank you.” It was clear the ritual had played out many times.

And even more than three bookshops in six blocks, it made me think that Boulder must be a pretty good place. Even if it’s pretty hippie.

July 21, 2020

Butterfly Leaf

August 1985Pescadero, CA

Today was supposed to be Opening Day

Charles Fracchia hasn’t missed Opening Day since 1978, the year he fell in love with the San Francisco Giants. Today he is left looking out the window, waiting for baseball.

Sure, there are some flowers popping up here and there, tulips teasing the Cubs in Chicago and bluebonnets beckoning the Astros in Texas, but it is not spring until someone in Cincinnati throws a pitch.

Never mind the clichéd metaphors about Opening Day, all the near-Easter references to the return of life after winter’s darkness, the possibility of all things, short-sleeved shirts, and sundresses and the usefulness of caps with a bill. We wait through the winter because we know the sun will come out tomorrow, bet your bottom dollar there’ll be sun.

But it’s 2020 and there is no sun, no joy in Mudville, no real-life detergent commercial of a fresh-cotton frolic among the daffodils. Baseball is spring’s starting line, not the vernal equinox. Test it. Ask 50 strangers which day opens baseball season and which day the vernal equinox occurred. The former will elicit more correct answers than the latter. We can watch the Bradford pears put out their cumulus blossoms and the redbuds burst into cotton candy, but there’s no surer sign of spring than red, white and blue bunting hung on a green wall in foul territory.

From pagan fertility festivals to Christian miracles and foaling season at the ranch, there are myriad reminders that spring is here, yet those go largely unnoticed. Channel 5 doesn’t send a crew for the arrival of a newborn filly and the 20-second clip of the community egg hunt comes and goes with less fanfare than the resetting of our clocks. Community anticipation, and media attention, is directed toward the pitcher’s mound. Without it, spring isn’t official.

Thus the gloom of 2020. The natural springtime occurrences go on but we sit under a grey canopy and wait. We wait for school, we wait for restaurants, we wait for work, we wait for movies. They will trickle back, faster, probably, than our 401(k)s. We have already forgotten about hockey and basketball, despite our astonishment just weeks ago when the Thunder stopped it all and sent everyone home. We’re not waiting for the Red Wings or the Warriors to finish their seasons; we’re waiting for the Yankees and Dodgers to get theirs started. Spring is about beginnings. Spring is hope.

We’ve put hope on hold. Our binoculars have been refocused from what might be to what must be; we hope for more masks, for fewer infections, for a flattened curve and a reliable paycheck. Baseball, by comparison, is frivolous. It’s a national pastime that’s unavailable when all we can do is pass time, a game for young men with a stick and a ball and an agreed-upon set of rules that matters not an iota in the context of human survival. Yet it will be baseball, that first pitch of a shortened season, that tells us it’s over, that the greyness of the coronavirus winter has lifted at last, the stone rolled from the tomb so that we may all go outside and play again, our lives having come back to life. It is as certain to be the salvo that signifies our rebirth as the pistol’s sudden report starts a footrace.

In the meantime, we’re left to sit with Charles and stare out the window, stuck in a day that’s grey and lonely, wondering when the streak will continue, which day will be the Opening Day, when we know by way of a long fly ball to deep left field that we’re really back.


March 26, 2020

Hemmingway's Home

Dec. 24, 2017Key West, FL

"Jeopardy!" vs Baseball

I was unaware of the big deal that's been airing on Jeopardy!. Perhaps you are more culturally savvy than I, but James Holzhauer, a professional gambler, had a 32-game run in which he won almost $2.5 million, nearly beating the all-time record, which was set in 2004.

Finally, he lost to Emma Boettcher, a 27-year-old librarian toting an English degree from Princeton and a master's degree from UNC.

The New York Times covered all this in more depth than one might imagine. In one story, by Julia Jacobs, the Times examines Boettcher's playing strategy. It's in this piece that we discover the clue is, "Well, my arm feels pretty good and I think I can help this ball club," and the answer, of course, is, "What is a cliché?"

Illustrating that athletes and game show contestants are more alike than one might imagine (Princeton diplomas aside), here is the quote from Boettcher that appears about halfway through the story:

“I was trying just not to dwell on it,” Boettcher said of Holzhauer’s dominance. “I had already steeled myself to expect the unexpected, just roll with whatever was happening, take one clue at a time.”

That's right, Emma. One game at a time, one inning at a time, one at-bat at a time. That's how the game is played.

Like a professional athlete, Boettcher spent years honing her skills. Playing along, she used a retractable pen to practice buzzing in but later traded it for a cardboard tube that better approximated the device in the studio. She tracked her answers to identify the weak spots in her game and read up on sports, a topic outside her interests. She studied successful players' game strategies, noting that the most successful players were aggressive, going all-in on Daily Doubles and taking the high-value clues first.

Her Jeopardy! fascination was so high she wrote her master's thesis on whether the language used in the clues was predictive of the question's difficulty. She used an algorithm to analyze more than 22,000 Jeopardy! clues, concluding there was a correlation.

She first auditioned when she was a high school senior but was not selected until her fourth attempt.

In other words, she went to the batting cages to hit thousands of balls, studied every pitcher's repertoire, and spent years analyzing which pitch was most likely to be thrown by whom based on the count and the game score. She went to camp, got cut, hit a few thousand more balls, went back, got cut, hit more balls, and finally made the roster on the fourth go-round.

And when she, the underdog, managed to bring down the dynasty by knowing that the answer to "The line “A great reckoning in a little room” in As You Like It is usually taken to refer to this author’s premature death" was "Who is Marlowe?" about 10 million people were watching.

When the Nationals played seven games against the Astros in the 2019 World Series, the average viewership was 13.91 million.

Her winning streak was short, so she will be the footnote to Holzhauer, become the target of an asterisk just as the Kansas City Royals are for putting a halt to the Cleveland Indians' 22-game winning streak in 2017.

The average Major League Baseball player was paid $4.48 million in 2019, an average of $27,654 per game. Boettcher won $97,002, an average of $32,334 per game.

The competition and rewards may be comparable, but when has a Jeopardy! contestant ever charged the host and been ejected from the game or aged out because her knees couldn't take it anymore? There's no Tommy John surgery to repair your buzzer finger.

It's OK to miss practice this afternoon, son. And yes, I guess you can read one more chapter before bed.

Just remember, you have some of the best fans in English. It all comes down to this. You just have to take it one chapter at a time.

Dec. 18, 2019

Snow Day

Jan. 4, 2019Edmond, OK

Spaces

There are two sheets of ice, a bar, and some wrought-iron-fenced parking. It's unusually clean and well-lit for an ice rink, although that might be more common when there's an NHL team in residence. In a universe of 31 it's hard to know but compared to the Dallas Stars practice facility, it is palatial. We're in hockey country now.

Minnesota calls itself the State of Hockey and Detroit is the self-proclaimed Hockeytown, but Chicago remains one of the best. Recently, the very best, with three of the Blackhawk's Stanley Cup wins coming in 2010, 2013 and 2015.

It's a thrill for 11- and 12-year-olds to play on Blackhawk ice, to aim at the same nets that, in this case, Patrick Kane used just a day earlier to polish up his shot before taking it across the street and collecting a hat trick against the Wild.

When Blackhawks owner Rocky Wirtz fist talked about a new practice facility in 2014, the discussion was about a single sheet next the the United Center for $30 million. One year later he was talking about a two-sheet community ice center two block away that would privately funded and used mostly for youth hockey. In the end, it was a $65 million deal that became a youth hockey haven.

That's good PR and there's plenty of Hawks-inspired interest in hockey right now; bringing home three league championships in six years has the effect. But the locker room tucked away behind the ice has nothing to do with Pee Wee hockey.

St. Louis-based architecture firm HOK has designed flashier facilities; take a look at the new Mercedes Benz Stadium in Atlanta for one. But MB Ice Arena's genius isn't in the shape of the building or the 23,728 square-foot green (as in there's grass growing on it) roof. Hidden from the public eye is a locker room with an aura. A magic. A mystical force that controls those who enter.

It's a lot nicer — and a lot bigger — than the dank, rubber-floored stink pit to which every beer leaguer has grown accustomed. That's expected. So are the individual spaces with gear stowed just so by a competent equipment manager who has turned all the jerseys one direction so it's clear which player goes with which space. Kane. Toews. Saad. Keith. Crawford. It's as though they're ghosts are in the room; you can feel them in the room the way a character in a movie might, someone such as Kevin Costner if Field of Dreams, or the way visitors sometimes feel at Gettysburg or the empty halls of a recessed Supreme Court.

Turn a corner, or turn your head, and the feeling grows, just as it must for every player who hangs a jersey in that room. The team logo, an imagined likeness of Sauk leader Black Hawk, is sculpted into the carpet at the room's center. Tradition and superstition demand that no one step on it.

The popular One Goal slogan adorns a wall in every room, a persistent reminder to all who enter that the only reason to be in the room is to win the cup.

Step into a hallway and is a wall dedicated to every Blackhawks player ever to win one of hockey's individual trophies. There are 20 such awards, some dating to the 1920s: the Hart Memorial Trophy for the league's MVP, the Lady Byng Memorial Trophy for sportsmanship, and the Vezina Trophy for best goaltender. The Hart trophy has gone to seven Blackhawks players, the Lady Byng to four, the Vezina to eight. The names — Eddie Belfour, Patrick Kane, Tony Esposito, Charlie Gardiner, Bobby Hull, Stan Mikita — are known to anyone who cares enough about hockey to be in that room. They are known in the hockey world the way a list of U.S. presidents is known in a fifth-grade classroom.

Turn another corner and six Stanley Cup replicas are displayed with the year and the players that brought each of the coveted trophies to Chicago. Above them, the ubiquitous phrase: One Goal.

The locker room is not a space one merely walks through, gawking like a tourist in a roadside museum. The room has an aura. No one can be in that space without feeling as though he is part of a much larger force, the goal for which must church architects strive but fall short. There is no stained glass here, no 300-rank pipe organs or soaring, three-pointed arches. It's just windowless sheet rock, yet it carries the power to inspire even the most temporary inhabitants.

The message from those walls to the captain of the pee wee team as well as the aging beer league goalie is the same. "You are part of this," it says. "There is no other like it. You have been given this opportunity, so go do your part. It's your time to hold up your end of the bargain."

I am not a Blackhawks fan, at least I wasn't. And I am the least skilled player on the lowest level team at a rink in a state that shutters its schools over a half-inch of dry snow. And even I felt compelled to lace 'em up, grab a stick and go play one hell of a hockey game.

I've known paintings and music scores and books that have elicited that kind of emotion, but never a locker room. Not until I spent 20 minutes in this one.


Jan. 5, 2019