(Not that You Asked)

by Steve Almond

  Inexplicably, I wound up drafted directly into “the majors,” a league composed of kids up to twelve years old. There should have been some rule forbidding this, a ban, for instance, on boys who still sucked their thumbs. But there wasn’t. Big Jeff Wilkins, coach of Round Table Pizza, decided I was going to be a star, once he could find a pair of pants small enough to fit me.

  This dream died rather quickly, thanks to Kathy Schindler, the league’s only female player. Schindler was, to put it delicately, pubescent. She stood nearly six feet, wore two batting gloves, and, on occasion, spat. I was—just a reminder—an eight-year-old who still sucked his thumb. We had no business interacting. The only reason we were forced to interact is because I was playing second base at the precise moment Schindler (having been walked yet again by our terrified pitcher) broke for second.

  I took the throw from home in plenty of time, but forgot I had to tag the runner. On came Schindler—blotting out the field of play, the sun, the sky above—and plowed into me, spikes up. The umpire threw his arms out and yelled Safe! “You gotta tag her, son,” he murmured to me.

  Coach Wilkins came roaring out of the dugout. He was perpetually sunburned, with a neck that belonged in the Fat Neck Hall of Fame.

  “Do you understand what just happened?” he said.

  “I forgot the tag.”

  “Is this a play we went over in practice?”

  I nodded.

  “And?”

  I glanced down at my stirrup socks, puddled idiotically around my cleats. My spit had turned to paste. “I should have remembered.”

  “And who was counting on you to remember?”

  “You.”

  The band of flesh that joined Coach Wilkins’s cheeks to his neck flushed. “No, Almond. Not me. Your team. Your team was counting on you.” He gestured grandly to my teammates, who were watching my humiliation with great satisfaction.

  “Because what did we say, at the beginning of the season?”

  For half a minute, I wandered the small corral of my mind for an answer. But it was all sheep shit up there.

  Coach Wilkins glanced toward the stands and tried to shape his massive face into an expression of distress. He was experiencing something like ecstasy. This was one of the few pleasures granted the Little League coach: the right to publicly mock children under the guise of nurturing them. It stood as the sole reward for the hours spent lugging equipment bags, devising lineups, extending advice to children who, frankly, not only would fail as players, but would be lucky to escape major injury in the course of their woeful, stunted careers.

  “There is no I in ‘team,’” Coach Wilkins said. “Didn’t we say that?”

  “I guess,” I said.

  “No guess about it!” Wilkins roared. His rage was by now operatic. “There is no I in ‘team.’ Spell it out.”

  “T-E-A-M.”

  “How many I’s in that word?”

  “None,” I said cautiously.

  “You sure? You want to count again?”

  I shook my head.

  “That’s right,” he said. “None.”

  THUS BEGAN MY inexorable transition from failed jock to full-time jock sniffer, a transition ratified by my decision to apply for an internship as a sports reporter with my hometown newspaper following my sophomore year in college. Soon after, I received a letter on Peninsula Times Tribune stationery, informing me I had been hired for $60 per week.

  “What do you want?” the editor said, when I showed up in June.

  “I’m your intern.”

  “Already got an intern,” he said.

  This was a fair introduction to the world of sports journalism.

  There are a good many bitter people on earth—I like to think of myself as one of them—but there are not many people quite so bitter as sports reporters. (Picture a locker room full of dorks. Now picture them tussling over a bag of Cheetos.) As the subintern, I had no desk. My first real assignment was an interview with Billie Jean King.4 By August the editor, tired of tripping over me, dispatched me to cover an A’s game. Why not? Everyone else was on vacation, and the team was awful.

  I entered the press box woozy with the honor. A tray of free hot dogs had been set out for us credentialed reporters, but I was too frightened to eat even one. I sat in the back row scribbling notes furiously while the beat reporters discussed how many weeks it would be before the new manager, Tony LaRussa, took his own life.

  After the game, I followed the veterans down to LaRussa’s office, where he sat behind his desk, a grown man in a rumpled uniform, muttering glum assessments.

  Someone mentioned the bullpen.

  LaRussa shrugged. He speculated that his newest relief pitcher—whose disastrous outing had just lost the game—might have arm trouble. (For reasons involving personal safety, specifically mine, I shall refer to this player simply as Pitcher X.)

  When LaRussa was done, we were released to the main locker room, and here I found it difficult to concentrate. I was surrounded by naked A’s, many of them my boyhood heroes, all of them much larger than they appeared on TV, their great penises bouncing as they strutted from the showers. Here was Carney Lansford, all-star third baseman, looking oddly bookish in spectacles. The mountainous Dave Kingman, moisturizing all eight feet of himself. And José Canseco, not yet bloated by steroids, a vainglorious rookie attending with much product to his Tiger Beat coiffure. Autographs, I thought. I could get so many fucking autographs.

  But I was a reporter (remember!) so I hovered with the other supplicants. An elaborate code of rules prevailed in the locker room, developed to inoculate all parties against the inherent homoperversity of the ritual. You didn’t interview a player while he was naked. You didn’t look at their bodies. You waited quietly for them to complete what the French might call their toilette. Above all, you did not ask any questions that might offend, which reduced discourse to a safe zone of cliché (tough loss, just keep battling, 110 percent, ibid.).

  I was unaware of this last restriction, and so I marched up to Pitcher X—thinking it vaguely odd that no other reporters wanted to talk to him—and asked him about the health of his arm.

  X’s face (a natively sweet-looking face) twisted. “What?”

  “Your arm,” I said. “I just wondered—”

  “You saying something’s wrong with my arm?”

  “No,” I said. “I’m not saying that.”

  X took a step toward me. “So who’s saying that?”

  “The manager,” I stammered.

  “Now you talking to the manager about me?”

  X took another step toward me. I was obliged to take a step back ward. The other reporters had noticed what was developing and gone silent. A headline briefly flashed before me:

  INTERN FATALLY WOUNDED BY ENRAGED RELIEF PITCHER

  BASEBALL BAT, BLEEDING FROM MULTIPLE ORIFICES CITED AS CAUSE OF DEATH

  I certainly didn’t blame old X for wanting to kill me. He was at the tail end of a middling career and fresh from a performance that would send him packing from the big leagues with an official ERA of infinity. And so I slowly backed away, toward the main scrum of reporters. The players were watching me, too, all except Canseco, who stood before a full-length mirror, transfixed by his deltoids. He turned away from his image with reluctance, plainly heartbroken that, in the real world, there was only one of him.5

  PITCHER X DID not in fact assault me. I survived the summer and returned to college only to discover Red Sox fever in full bloom. I should have mentioned this earlier: I had chosen a school in New England, just a hundred miles or so from Boston. Back then I was only vaguely aware of the pivotal role I would come to play in the fate of the Red Sox. This was my Anti-Christ-in-embryo phase. Or, to provide a more accurate visual, my young-Judas-Iscariot-with-a-mullet phase.

  In either case, the year was 1986, and so I suffered the noisy exhortation of my classmates all that fall, as the Sox beat the Yanks for the pennant, then clawed back from a 3–1 deficit to top the
Angels in the AL Championship Series. Dave Henderson’s game-tying homer in the ninth inning of Game Five unleashed outside my dorm room a chant of All Hail Hendu that went on for 103 hours straight. I sat alone with only my ill wishes for company. I wanted the Sox to lose, as traumatically as possible.

  That being said, I refuse to rehash the details of the ensuing World Series, and specifically the Agonies of Game Six, a fervent recitation of which—Roger’s blister, Stanley’s wild pitch, Buckner’s epic muff—has become the official Stations of the Cross in Red Sox Nation. All you need to know is that the Mets’ comeback win in Game Seven (and the subsequent suicide watch issued for all Sox fans) transpired on the occasion of my twentieth birthday.

  TWO YEARS LATER, my very own A’s squared off against the Sox in the AL Championship Series and administered what I would respectfully characterize as an ass-raw whupping. I took this as further proof that whatever negative sway the team held over me in the past had been banished from this earth, or perhaps compacted into some kind of giant spiky lozenge, then stuffed up the ass of Red Sox Nation.

  Yes, thanks to my unflagging devotion—those years of loyalty in the face of hundred-loss seasons—Oakland had been resurrected. Campy and Catfish and Reggie were gone. But now we had Canseco and Mark McGwire, the team’s anabolic glimmer twins, and a ferocious pitching staff led by Dave Stewart, whose very plateward stare was registered with the FBI as a lethal weapon. The team was filthy with talent, and I looked ahead joyfully to the World Series against the meager Dodgers.

  In the very first inning of Game One, Canseco bopped a grand salami. The only question in my mind was whether the A’s would reach a hundred runs. But the team’s bats fell silent, and they found themselves clinging to a 4–3 lead in the bottom of the ninth.

  I was still not especially worried, because our closer, Dennis Eckersley, was the best in the league, the second coming of Rollie Fingers, right down to the mustache. He quickly retired two batters, then surrendered an uncharacteristic walk. Kirk Gibson strode to the plate as a pinch-hitter, though strode is the wrong verb. Gimped makes more sense. Gibson had a strained hammy on his left leg and a twisted right knee. Incapable of planting his legs, he flailed at two fastballs in the manner of a soused ballerina.

  By all rights, Eckersley should have punched him out with high heat. Instead, as so often happens when you are pitching against someone who appears to need crutches, Eckersley got cute. He nibbled at the edges. Then, at 3–2, he delivered the lazy backdoor slider for which Gibson had been waiting. The pitch dipped toward the bottom of the strike zone and Gibson lunged batfirst, catching just enough on the barrel to send the ball sailing over the wall in right.

  I was watching the game on a tiny black-and-white TV at the pottery studio my brother Dave managed in Berkeley, and my cry of anguish brought him running from the kiln he’d been loading.

  “What’s the matter with you?” he said.

  “Is the kiln going?” I said.

  “What?” he said. “Why?”

  “I might want to stick my head in there for a minute or two.”

  “It’s just one game,” Dave said. “Calm the fuck down.”

  As wise and compassionate as this counsel was, I could not calm the fuck down. Instead, I stared at the screen, where CBS was broadcasting the first of 137 replays of Gibson’s shot, all of which I would inexplicably watch.6

  The truth is, I had never entirely trusted Eckersley, and it now occurred to me, in the same way a knife wound to the back might have occurred to me, why: because Eckersley was a castoff…from the Red Sox. He carried in his veins the doomed blood of that franchise, and he had now come and visited that doom on me. Or, no, perhaps Eckersley was a double agent dispatched directly by the Lord God of Sport. How else does the game’s best reliever give up a homer to a man who was essentially crippled?

  I wanted to explain this situation to Dave, to ask for his help in the performance of some kind of ritual sacrifice, perhaps. (We had the purifying flames of the kiln at our disposal!) But Dave is not a fan. He would have insisted I was being “irrational.”

  The A’s never recovered from the Gibson homer and fell obediently in five.

  IN A GRAND history of my team, 1989 should have been an exalted year. Oakland stormed through the regular season, managed to avoid Boston in the playoffs, and made short work of their crosstown rivals, the Giants, to claim the title for which I had been waiting fifteen years. But that Series (if it is remembered at all) is remembered for the giant earthquake that struck the Bay Area minutes before Game Three, and sent the media into the sort of instantaneous frenzy triggered by natural disasters, which helpfully mimic action films. For the next week the entire world sat transfixed, watching the same stretch of I-80 collapse over and over, while baseball officials tried to explain exactly why playing the rest of the Series would restore hope to a stunned nation. Most of my family lived in the Bay Area, and though none of them had been harmed in the least, I was obligated to consider just how tragically the tragic events of such a tragedy might trage. It was not a lot of fun.

  Like most people, I initially viewed the Loma Prieta earthquake as a freak occurrence. It would occur to me only later that the Occult Forces of the Sox were delivering one of their nasty Occultograms:

  TO: RED SOX ANTI-CHRIST

  This is what we can do to you and your team STOP

  Any time we fucking want STOP Enjoy!

  IN 1990, THE A’s once again faced the Red Sox in the AL Championship Series. This time they outscored Boston 20–4. Any decent person with even a hint of clemency about him might have used this occasion to forgive Red Sox Nation for past transgressions.

  I, on the other hand, gloried in the carnage, which I watched alone, on a borrowed TV, in my dank apartment in El Paso, Texas, where I was passing myself off as a newspaper reporter. Did I mind watching these games alone? Absolutely not. The true fan is always in a state of spiritual solitude when watching games of import. This arrangement also allowed me to devise and perform what might be loosely defined as a fight song, set (and I can now see how unfortunate this choice will seem to those not in the spirit of the thing) to the MC Hammer hit “U Can’t Touch This.” Please feel free to sing along:

  A’s beat the Sux!

  (Dooo-do-do)

  ’89 redux!

  (Dooo-do-do)

  Beantown reflux!

  (Dooo-do-do)

  Swept again, ya fucks!

  The Series pitted us against the Reds, a rematch of the 1972 tilt that spawned my affliction. The A’s had now swept three playoff series in a row, and everyone on earth assumed they would make it four against the Reds.

  I don’t have to tell you how this turns out. What unsettled me was how meekly my A’s went down. Stewart got pounded in the opener. Eckersley gave up the lead game-winning hit the next night. In the fourth and final game, the fat and utterly average José Rijo reduced our mighty lineup to corned beef hash. It was as if the A’s had been replaced by a squad of zombies.

  My friend Holden—a well-meaning if deluded loyalist of the Texas Rangers—was the first to suggest what should have been obvious to me from the beginning: My anti–Red Sox mojo had boomeranged.

  I MORE OR less took a pass on the A’s for the rest of the nineties. I was in Miami for much of the decade, where the Lord God of Sport had decided to place not one, not two, but three shiny new franchises, in the hopes of seducing me. Instead, I turned for comfort to another of my Oakland teams, the NBA’s Golden State Warriors.7 The LGS also sent me a new best friend, a six-foot-five-inch Sox addict named Pat Flood, who spent many useless hours trying to explain to me why it was a mortal sin to refer to Carl Yastrzemski as “dumbshit Pastrami.”

  These were my years of alleged artistic growth. The Miami sun baked all sorts of delusions into my skull and I shipped off to grad school in the suburbs of the South, happy to pack my brutish fandom into a steamer trunk and ignore the occasional thudding. No, I was going to become the other sort of guy
, who concerned himself with more refined matters, who wrote poetry and recycled.

  I was pretending, of course, and poorly. I still read the sports section of any newspaper I could get my mitts on, still rifled the box scores for some sign of divine approval, still snuck off to a hidden dorm lounge every weekend to get my lonely fix. And then grad school ended and I needed to decide where in the wide world I might live.

  Over the years, I’ve provided many semiplausible reasons for moving to Boston. I wanted to teach college. Sure. I wanted to stay far away from the kryptonitic effects of my family. Understandable. I wanted to be in a city with lots of single women who might not see through my fraudulent sensitivo routine. Well, two out of three ain’t bad.

  In fact, I moved to Boston in the autumn of 1997 not of my own volition, but as a matter of prophetic necessity. I had a score to settle with Boston and its baseball fans. This is how it works with us Anti-Christs: We blow into town confident of our own righteous mission. It never quite occurs to us that our presence might serve as a prerequisite to the salvation of our enemies.

  ON MY SECOND day as an official Bostonian, I scalped a ticket to Fenway Park and watched from behind a large green girder—the scalper had promised a seat along the third-base line, he just hadn’t mentioned the girder—as the Royals thumped the Sox, 9–2.

  Fenway was gorgeous. So gorgeous that I raced home and wrote a barfy poem. I still hated the Sox, but I was also trying to fit in to my new hometown. Both our teams sucked and I saw no reason to allow old ghosts to curdle my goodwill. Besides, Boston seemed to have enough problems. Half the streets were being torn up on behalf of an absurd automotive boondoggle called the Big Dig. Some goon squad of developers had punched the Boston Garden in the mouth so as to put up a parking lot (another barfy poem). Revelations began to emerge that some of the local clergy subscribed to the Mark Foley School of Teen Mentorship. Overall, the city trudged along in its unofficial capacity as New York’s Bitch.