LockhartSteele.com Tumblr Outpost: This Morning Resembles Nothing So Much →
lock:
as the morning of October 17, 2003. The only saving grace being that this morning—which began with a crushing hangover and the vague realization I had a meeting to attend in 15 minutes so I probably shouldn’t still be in bed—wasn’t quite as bad as that morning. No morning could be as bad as that morning.
October 17, 2003, was the worst morning of all time. The night before, Aaron Boone hit a walk-off home run to win Game 7 of the American League Championship Series for the Yankees. The night itself hadn’t been particularly great. Right after the Boone homer, one of our friends got in a brawl with Yankees fans outside the Riviera, where we’d watched the game. Car horns were honking and people cheering, and as I walked numbly towards the East Village, I started crying. Full-on open weeping. We stayed up until 3:30 in the morning playing Coldplay’s “Everything’s Not Lost” over and over again on the jukebox at Tile Bar.
The next morning I had to get to my job in midtown, which meant taking the 6 to Grand Central. I wasn’t at all prepared to deal with the reality of the Sox loss, so I trained my eyes to avoid all newsstands. But a block from my office, the front page of the Post or the News, in a vending box, caught my eye. It showed a photo of Aaron Boone, arms raised running towards first base. The headline: DESTINY. Perhaps even more than the home run itself, it was the worst thing I had ever seen.
At the office, everyone treated me as though a loved one of mine had just died: quiet murmors of condolence—or outright avoidance. Somehow made it to my office and shut the door. Checked email. More notes of condolence. Lots of kind words.
And then, from Andy Bernstein—my good friend, Pharmer’s Almanac co-author, and now the visionary behind Head Count—came this email:
From: Andy Bernstein
Subject: Just wanted you to know…
Date: October 17, 2003 11:02:02 AM EDT
To: Lockhart Steele… that while I’m not a huge baseball fan, I really got sucked into this series because I got off on the idea of the city of Boston and all of New England being frustrated and cursed by New York City.
I started thinking about all the New Englanders who can’t drive, have funny accents, and have this New York inferiority complex.
At that point I started pulling for the Yankees HARD.
And now that the entire city of Boston is on a suicide watch, and you undoubtedly are having a very rough day, I figured I’d rub some salt in your wounds, NEW YORK STYLE!
Today, there is only this: this morning is not as bad as that morning.
This is why I sign off on all of my emails to Red Sox fans that concern baseball with the words
Aaron Boone,
-f.
My Freshman year at college, the dorm accross from me was filled with three drunks of somewhat mysterious origin; Dorm Drunks were rare at the University of Utah, but we didn’t ask many questions and felt lucky and blessed to have them. I’ll never forget when we found out what they were about, though: I had some post-season baseball on in my room, and it was particularly loud, and I still somehow managed to fall asleep to it. I woke up to what I thought was a horror movie - maybe the game was long over - because I woke up to bloodcurling screams, except I turned my head to see: the game was still on. The screams were coming from across the way. Still disoriented, I finally looked at the TV and put it together: some guy I’d never heard of was wearing a shit-eating grin and rounding the bases, it was the bottom of the 11th, the rest of the Yankees were waiting for him at home plate. I had become mildly acclimated to sports fans by then: coming from Vegas, the only thing close to a professional team were the 1990 UNLV Rebels (basically paid like a pro team) and the XFL’s Las Vegas Outlaws (featuring Rod “HE HATE ME” Smart). I’d witnessed for the first time somebody cry over a football game (Packers fans, 2003), but nothing like these Boston guys. The next morning, EXIT signs hung by a wire from the ceiling, a door had been ripped off its hinges, I’m pretty sure the elevator had been pissed in (especially hilarious, considering we all lived on the first floor) and the posters advertising in-dorm events looked as if a teething greyhound had snacked on them all night. That’s how I remember Aaron Boone: It was as close to a mass spiritual breaking of the Geneva Convention as one might ever experience. There are Red Sox fans who died between 2003 and 2004. I actually feel legitimately bad for those people.
If you ever go to a baseball game and see someone wearing a Boone Yankees shirt - which were really only order-able for a few months, and even after that run, weren’t rampant, because Boone made a star play but wasn’t yet a star, and still, wouldn’t be, because he busted his knee playing in a basketball game in the off-season and was dropped by the Yankees shortly thereafter - recognize him as not just an asshole, but an impressive asshole, one who goes to great lengths to proliferate assholery. A Boone Yankees shirt makes a “Buck Fawsten” shirt look positively mild by comparison.
Best of all? Aaron Boone now does commentary for ESPN on Sox players. Whenever this happens, it makes Baseball Tonight a DVR-worthy occasion.
