Green, White and Parquetry

I know I've been unable to post an actual stadium story in a while, but it's been busy. Hopefully this one can satisfy you for the time being.

Originally written February 15, 2010.

There is an art to making these trips and finding quirks in the schedule. After all, with 122 teams across the four major sports and 113 of them outside my immediate area, making 113 separate trips would seem an exhausting and expensive venture.

Mostly expensive.

Given that, I often have to scan the schedules to find opportunities to maximize my output. That is to say, if there are two teams in one city that play on back-to-back nights, it is a golden opportunity to strike multiple targets off the list in one shot. When such an opportunity presents itself, I’m generally hard-pressed to take advantage.

One such opportunity presented itself in January of 2009. I had been considering coming up to Boston to visit Luisa and my friend Jenn Reiss and with the Devils visiting the Bruins on January 29, 2009 and me having two days off from work the timing seemed right. When I noticed that the Celtics would be home against the Kings the night before, a trip to Beantown seemed all too sensible. I enjoy Boston, but I find the city very strange, mostly because it feels less like a metropolis to me than it does a large town. I know it comes off as condescending, and I don’t mean to seem that way since I really do like walking around the place, but there is one thing about it that always seemed odd to me.

Boston closes at midnight.
Every time I’m there I find this to be completely stunning. Perhaps this is because I’m spoiled as a resident of New York with 24-hour subway access and bars that stay open until four in the morning, but I struggle to see how a major city mostly shuts down before the night gets started. And indeed, Boston doesn’t necessarily shut down at midnight – the T operates until 12:45 and most bars are open until 2 a.m. – but with mass transit stopping so early on a Friday or Saturday there hardly seems any good reason for the drinking masses to stay out much later.

I do enjoy the T because it feels classy and old, while the subway generally feels rundown, but I can’t see staying out to socialize without a ride home.

Of course, I was far more likely to stay out in Boston four months after this visit, when I made my trip to see the Mets visit the Red Sox. That trip featured weather that was pleasant and enjoyable. When I went to see the Celtics the weather that first night provided little incentive to go anywhere but a warm bed.

See, I was lucky enough to plan my trip in the midst of a blizzard that streaked up the eastern seaboard. A week earlier, my friends Bert, Matt and I had made a spur of the moment trip to Washington D.C. to see Barack Obama get sworn in as the 44th President of the United States. That night the drive was smooth and the weather was clear. I suppose it would have been greedy to expect that a second time. This time around the snow had put into question whether or not I would get to Boston in time for the game that night.

As we took an alternate route at the behest of our driver, my bus pulled over to the side of the road on a hill for reasons I still don’t understand. When the driver put his foot on the pedal again, the bus went nowhere, stuck in the snow and rocking back and forth as it failed to gain traction. It was frighteningly similar to the last time I had driven to New England, a trip to see our friend Dan Sonshine at Brown that my friend Justin and I took during our senior year of college. That day a typically three-hour drive took six, and we saw numerous spinouts and accidents along I-95. I’m not sure why I thought it was a good idea to get behind the wheel that day. Aside from the dangerous weather, I was in the midst of a two-week stretch that saw me get four tickets across four different states.

It might have been wise to let someone else drive.

On this trip, as the bus rocked back and forth in the snow, I started worrying that it might tip over. Eventually we heard the driver call into his bosses to tell them someone might have to come tow us out of the drift. They then suggested he put the bus in the lowest gear – why that hadn’t yet occurred to him I have no idea – and sure enough out of the ditch and off to Boston we were.

We eventually pulled into South Station with plenty of time to spare and I hopped on the T to Luisa’s apartment near Hoynes Convention Center. This was my first full-fledged introduction to the weather that day. When I write I don’t generally like to use curse words. In regular conversation it’s entirely different story. I talk like a sailor far more than I should. When I write, however, I only resort to swearing when there simply is no other way to put it.

That day the weather was shitty. Really shitty.

The entire city was covered in slush, it was cold enough to be uncomfortable and warm enough that rain didn’t turn into snow. And boy did it rain. The drops poured down as I made the most uncomfortable three block walk of my life from the T station to Luisa’s apartment in Back Bay. By the time I arrived, I was frozen and soaked to the bone with no desire whatsoever to go back outside. Of course, with three tickets already purchased on Stub Hub for that night’s Celtics game against Sacramento, staying in the apartment would have defeated the purpose of the entire trip.

Throw in the fact that Luisa had to leave the apartment to teach a course on implementing organizational change at MIT and five minutes later we were back outside. Luisa and I walked across the Charles River into Cambridge where I headed to Harvard so I could meet up with Jenn. Jenn and I had known each other since elementary school, and at the time she currently was in her second year at Harvard Law School. While part of me felt bad for dragging her from her studies, she seemed perfectly content to talk English soccer and hound me for gossip on our former classmates from high school. If it meant I had someone to escort me to what was then called TD Banknorth Garden, I was fine with it. A year later the building would shorten its name to simply “TD Garden”, but whether it was either of those two, or the Fleetcenter as it was called when it opened in 1995, most people simply fall back on the habit of calling it “The Garden”.

The building itself looks fairly nondescript from the outside, appearing as though it were just a large concrete box with its only personality coming from its curved arching roof. It sits near the unique Zakim Bridge and atop Boston’s North Station, much like Madison Square Garden in New York rests above Penn Station, meaning before the games crowds of both fans and commuters gather en masse.

Jenn and I grabbed a pint and a burger at a pub not far from the arena before we made our way into the building. As we took the escalator up I was stopped in the ticket line by security because I was carrying my messenger bag.

“No bags allowed,” the man told me.

While the Yankees had been restricting bags from entering Yankee Stadium for years I had never come across it elsewhere and all I could think to tell the security personnel was, “Seriously?”

He gave me a look that said, “You’re a fucking asshole,” and directed me to a much younger, and one might assume, more patient guard, who I was told could give me my options for what to do with my bag. The first one I was given was to go back to my home or hotel and leave my bag there. Considering this was presented to me with the game tipping off in 10 minutes, I could not possibly understand why that was the first option. The guard then told me that I could run to a bar two blocks away from the arena where I would be allowed to check my bag.

This, too, is similar to Yankee Stadium, where bags can be checked across the street at a bowling alley that is frequently full of drunk fans before and after games. I told Jenn to sit tight while I sprinted across the street, and when I checked my bag I expected some cost. That the price was $10 was well beyond my expectations. Clearly the racket was doing well.

“$10?”

“Yeah, I know,” the attendant said. “It’s highway robbery.”

“You know, at Yankee Stadium it’s only $5. Though I guess I’m in the wrong city to bring that up.”

“Don’t look at me,” the attendant said, nonplussed. “I’m a Mets fan.”

It was annoying, but when they’ve got you, they’ve got you. I paid the $10, sprinted back to the arena and in we went. TD Garden is a wonderful facility, but it has a strange aspect to it as you walk through the concourses. The building feels clean and modern, with plenty of Celtics and Bruins memorabilia in cases around the hallways so you know who plays there. But it has the peculiar combination of housing two legendary franchises – the winningest in NBA history and an Original Six NHL team – and yet the building doesn’t have the same legendary feel to it.

Unlike Fenway Park, to say you felt the ghosts of the arena’s past wouldn’t be right. The Celtics have won more titles, 17, than any other franchise in the NBA and when I went to see them, sure enough, they were the defending champions. But their 2008 title was their first in this building and the first since 1986. This building didn’t have the aura that reminded you this was the team Bill Russell, Bob Cousy and John Havlicek won titles for. You couldn’t smell the cigar smoke of Red Auerbach. But despite being a Knicks fan with no fondness for the Celtics, I will say this: That legendary green and white jersey hasn’t changed, and the classic parquet floor is still there. If you can tune out the building you’re sitting in and see only the game you’re watching, and only those jerseys on that floor, it can give you chills.

If the classic sight of green and white on that floor doesn’t inspire you, a look up towards the top of the building might. I’ve heard that at UCLA’s Pauley Pavilion they use banners as wallpaper, but the blue and gold has nothing on the 17-time NBA Champions. Their banners hang from the arena rafters in three dizzying, mesmerizing rows with the years reeling off in succession, 1957, ’59, ’60, ’61, ’62, ’63, ’64, ’65, ’66, ’68, ’69, ’74, ’76, ’81, ’84, ’86, ‘08. And unlike other arenas, which hang every division title or sellout, this is not the case for the Celtics. Save for retired numbers, every green and white tapestry says, “World Champions.”
They have no use for those other banners here.

Of course the fact that it’s no longer the Boston Garden isn’t all bad. Fans can talk about the ghosts, the legends, the quirks all they want. The building may well have had the character older Boston fans talk about, but it was also reputed to have some of the worst sightlines in professional sports. At TD Garden there isn’t a bad seat in the house. And speaking of the seats, the best decision they may have made in the construction process, and there were many good ones, was that the seats are still the same iconic black and yellow of the Celtics and Bruins’ former home.

The old Garden was cramped, its rink was nine feet shorter than the NHL’s regulation size, and the infrastructure was riddled with problems. The building lacked air conditioning which led to fog developing over the ice during Bruins’ playoff games, and the B’s experienced electrical failures during not just one, but two Stanley Cup Finals appearances in 1988 and 1990. I’m all for history and antiquated charm when it comes to stadiums and arenas. But the lights need to stay on. When they can’t, it’s time to move.

Luisa eventually showed up in the middle of the first quarter and the three of us settled in for a game I wound up enjoying much more than I expected. Not that I was dreading the event, but despite not particularly liking the Celtics, the energy and excitement of the crowd was hard to ignore. Luisa and Jenn managed to find a way, spending most of the opening quarter talking about how attracted they both were to some of my high school friends they had both met.

It’s hard to blame them, though. The Celtics got off to a slow start, eventually falling behind the Kings by ten points. While, I could have cared less who won, this made me look awful after I told Jenn the Celtics should be ashamed of themselves if they don’t win by 20 points. In the early going, it appeared Boston, which had won eight straight games heading into the night, was making a liar out of me. It was only a matter of time before Sacramento, which itself was on a six-game losing streak, let the lead slip away, however.

The Celtics opened the second quarter on a 25-9 run and never looked back. By the fourth quarter the lead would stretch out to 24 points mostly on the shoulders of point guard Eddie House, who sank eight three-pointers, including a 4-for-5 performance from behind the arc in the final 12 minutes. Whenever he touched the ball the crowd would chant his name and he was treated to a standing ovation when he was taken out with just over four minutes to play. By the time the clock wound down, Boston had polished off a 119-100 victory. Although it was one point less than I said they ought to win by, Kevin Garnett, Paul Pierce and company took care of business .

I would have appreciated getting 20 points on the dot, but you can’t have everything. This I realized as soon as I walked back outside into the still driving rain. In fact, that was really the only problem with the day. I would have appreciated getting back to Luisa’s apartment that night and not being soaked to the bone, but sometimes you can’t help those delightful New England winters. At least we were able to get home. The game had ended early enough.

Boston wasn’t yet shut down for the night.

The Frozen Tundra

Originally written January 2, 2010

The Peters are a tall family.

To a person modest in stature such as myself, this is the most readily apparent fact about them. Kyle stands somewhere in the neighborhood of 6’4”, his father is in a similar range and his brother, whom I didn’t meet during my stay at their home in Elm Grove, Wisconsin, is apparently somewhere in the neighborhood of 6’7”.

Just to make things clear about how much larger they are than you, their television is a 73-inch HD flat screen which took up the entire wall of their den.

Their distinct height advantage is somewhat intimidating. Ironically, Kyle is anything but. He is confident and sure of himself, but also one of the most genuine people I’ve ever met. I first met Kyle during an ill-fated flirtation with Northwestern’s club Ultimate Frisbee team my freshman year of college. I wouldn’t get to know him well until the next year when we took multiple German courses together.

By the time senior year came around, Kyle lived down the block from me on Foster street between Maple and Ridge, and we would occasionally get together to watch football. That said, Kyle and I ran in different social circles, so outside of German classes we didn’t socialize all too often on a regular basis, which left me somewhat surprised at the beginning of senior year, when he called me to let me know that he was going home to Wisconsin to see the Packers-Saints game on September 17, 2006 and would I like his extra ticket.

This was the Packers. This was Lambeau. The Frozen Tundra. The Oldest Football only facility in the NFL. Home of the Ice Bowl. Home of Bart Starr, Paul Hornung, Max McGee, Vincent Lombardi. This was it. This was Lombardi in his fedora stalking the sidelines and Starr diving over Jerry Kramer to land the Packers in Super Bowl II. This was the deep baritone voice of John Facenda as the camera pans up on those high green walls on NFL Films Presents. Lambeau Field, the cathedral of the modern National Football League, and a place legendary for its fans, its tailgating, its atmosphere and, perhaps most notably, its championship be-decked tenants.

“Yes, Kyle. I will go.”

This journey wouldn’t be so far, however. Milwaukee is a mere 90-minute drive from the north side of Chicago, so our trip to Kyle’s home in Elm Grove, Wisconsin would be a breeze. Until, that is, I arrived and realized how much shorter I was than everyone else. Not that the intimidation lasted very long. The Peters’ height was outstripped by their hospitality. Not more than five minutes after I walked through the door I had been made aware of the television, my bed for the night, and the stocked fridge to which I was more than entitled.

To say I was overwhelmed by the homespun-ness of the Badger state in my first real excursion outside Madison or Milwaukee was to put it lightly. My first real sign of this was the Sunday morning talk radio decrying the Packers’ signing that week of Koren Robinson. In fact, one talking head called it “the bottom of the barrel”.

Why?

Robinson was not terribly far removed from several productive seasons with the Seattle Seahawks, but, you see, he was a drug addict. I, personally, am as straight as an arrow. Perhaps too straight. But I tend to fall on the side of drug users deserving understanding and aid rather than ostracism. However, what shocked me was less the ostracism than the actual offense. Robinson had not been addicted to heroin or cocaine. He had been using marijuana.

It’s not my thing, but I never considered it a particularly dramatic concern either. It had always been my experience that pot smoking happened among a large sector of high school and collegiate America, and I never believed it to be a serious problem.

My cohorts in the car to Green Bay seemed to feel differently.

They also considered Robinson’s pot use to be a significant offense and to chalk it up to Midwest naïvete would be insulting to them. They were all intelligent people. But it was clearly a dramatically different cultural line than I was used to, and a surprising one considering Brett Favre’s own struggle with pain killer addiction, an issue I considered little better.

Perhaps the most telling part of the experience however, came along I-43 when Kyle’s mother was pulled over by a highway trooper for breaking the speed limit. If there ever was a sign of how dedicated the state of Wisconsin is to the Green Bay Packers there is none more obvious than when a representative of the law bends their rules for the Green and Gold. The trooper was a female officer in her mid 30s with short blond hair and a soft Wisconsin accent. Upon staring into the car and noticing the preponderance of Packers jerseys she asked the only question she could, and perhaps the most unnecessary.

“Are you going to the game today?”

After informing her that, yes, we were she did not skirt her responsibilities. She wrote the ticket, but rather than explaining all the complexities, she made quick work of it, telling Kyle’s mother when the ticket was due to be paid by before apologizing to us pulling us over and then wishing the Packers the best of luck and sending us on our way. Surely, there were responsibilities for her to attend to, but on Sundays in the Dairy State the Pack reigns supreme.

Green Bay is a remarkable town. At a population just over 100,000 people, it is by far the smallest city to have an NFL franchise. Compared to the likes of New York, Chicago or even St. Louis it is fairly small and sleepy. When the Packers play just about all of downtown is completely barren with the exception of the stadium and the sports bars surrounding it.

What is most wonderful about Green Bay is that it is the last remaining link to the NFL in its purest foundations. I’m not one of those obnoxious antiquated scribes who refuses to believe anything can match the magic of yesteryear. That is a total fallacy. The NFL today is better than it ever has been in my life.

Still, Green Bay harkens back to when the NFL was a rag-tag group of traveling teams based in smaller Midwest cities. The Frankfort Yellow Jackets, Canton Bulldogs, Duluth Eskimos or Pottsville Maroons would never survive in the modern NFL. The fact that the Packers have managed to stick is a testament to a time when the League was a far less rigidly – and far less financially solvent – version of its current self. Smaller teams had a way into the fledgling League but with the increase in travel costs and the onset of the depression most went the way of the dodo.

And yet the Packers live. Green Bay might have joined them were it not for the efforts of Bears owner George Halas, who heavily campaigned for the city to help fund the construction of Lambeau Field, or City Stadium as it was known when it opened in 1957. While Halas was in one of the biggest cities in America, he felt it was important to have the NFL maintain connections to its small town roots, and with other NFL owners threatening to force the Packers to move to Milwaukee if their stadium conditions weren’t improved in the mid-1950s, Lambeau Field saved the only connection the league has left.

You certainly feel this as you pull into the area around the stadium. While we parked in the Stadium lots, people far and wide were offering their lawns as parking space for a mere $10 a car, a situation you almost never see in professional sports now. As I would find throughout the course of the day, a Packers home game feels like a college game with the rowdiness and single-minded dedication of its fan-base and the tightly packed-in nature of its seating configuration. It is intimate while feeling huge and huge while feeling intimate. It is intense, and crazy from early morning tailgating to the final seconds of the fourth quarter.

It is, in short, the most fun atmosphere I have ever experienced at a sporting event. And the home team didn’t even win.

Who knew watching a team named after a meat packing factory could be so fun?

Of course, this was surprising considering I was disappointed when we pulled into our parking spot and I got my first glimpses of the stadium. Unbeknownst to me, Lambeau had undergone an extensive renovation a few years earlier. The affect on the building was actually fairly minor – much of the construction revolved around the addition of luxury boxes and a large atrium outside the walls of the bowl – but that, right there, is what was missing. The new atrium looks nice, but at its expense was the iconic green walls I had always seen on TV.

No matter. This was Wisconsin and I was still going to get my fill of brats, cheese and beer before entering the stadium regardless of what it looked like. And damnit I was going to like it. It was about two beers and several servings of cheddar cheese and crackers in that I noticed Kyle’s friend Casey had a ring on his finger. Casey, you see, was hitched. This really threw me. Casey was my age and happily married, but he certainly didn’t look much older than, well, a youthful college student.

While this was hardly a significant, or perhaps even unusual development to everyone else there, I couldn’t stop thinking about it for most of the day.

But if Casey had a curveball he had thrown me, I had one to throw him. That came about when a man in the parking lot was trumpeting his tuba to the strains of “Roll Out the Barrel”. For the uninitiated, “Roll Out the Barrel” is a drinking song very popular in the upper Midwest. That is, I must assume, the only place it is popular. In fact, while I have heard it a number of times, I have never heard it anywhere but within the borders of the state of Wisconsin.

According to Wikipedia the song, officially called the “Beer Barrel Polka” is actually a Czech song popular during World War II and that it has popped up in various bits of culture ever since, including Marx Brothers movies, Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman” and the regular set lists of Liberace. Of course, I don’t believe any of that for one second. Until I attended a Milwaukee Brewers game in 2001, I had never heard of it before, and after I attended a Wisconsin-Northwestern football game in 2005 I hadn’t heard it since. Perhaps it is actually a Czech song and a huge influx of immigrants from former Soviet Republics to the Midwest following World War II brought their beloved polka with them, popularizing it across Wisconsin, Minnesota and Iowa.

More likely, I think, is that people in Wisconsin just really love beer. Well, they do. That much is irrefutable. After all, their baseball team is called the Brewers and they play the song during the seventh inning stretch of every game.

When the strains of “Roll Out the Barrel” were wafting towards us I said to Casey, “You know that no one outside of Wisconsin knows this song, right?”

“What?”

“I had never heard it before I came here. No one sings it. Ever.”

“Not even at ball games?”

“No, that’s what we have ‘Take Me Out to the Ball Game’ for.”

If Casey had given me something with which to ponder the stability of my reality, I felt sufficiently confident that I had returned the favor.

With kickoff nearing we made our way into Lambeau for the start of the game. The aforementioned addition ran up a $250 million-tab between 2000 and 2003, somewhat jarring when you consider the $960,000 price tag for the entire building in 1956. Still, the atrium is gorgeous, and reminds me very much of the main entrance of Miller Park, while the added luxury suites, restaurants and Packers Hall of Fame no doubt keep Green Bay a financially viable and competitive franchise among the big dogs of the NFL.

Walking in you can feel the history, as if you were at Wrigley or Fenway, and that is because when the Packers made their renovations, they avoided the mistake of the Yankees, who essentially rebuilt the original Yankee Stadium in the 1970s and robbed it of its antiquated mystique. While the Packers may have changed the external appearance of their home, the interior bowl remains relatively unaltered. It is a crowded, packed and thoroughly un-modern grandstand, with tight seating arrangements and poor traffic flow.

And that is what makes it great. Sitting in the stands now one feels as if sitting there during the heyday of Lombardi was no different. Watching Brett Favre and watching Bart Starr must have been markedly similar.
Kyle’s seats were in section 113, a mere 20 rows off the 20 yardline. We would see Favre up close early on, as he hit Greg Jennings for a touchdown in the first quarter. The Packers would jump out to a 13-0 lead. Jennings made the storied Lambeau Leap after scoring.

Of course, the joy would be short-lived. New Orleans overcame three early turnovers by Drew Brees to eventually pull out a 34-27 victory. The last seven of those Packer points came on a touchdown pass to recent Northwestern alum Noah Herron. If memory serves correctly, the three Wildcats among us broke out in a chorus of the Northwestern fight song when Herron broke the plane, but looking back, it’s entirely possible that it was just me.

I spent much of the day glancing at the scoreboard, a time-honored sports tradition these days. With the onset of nationally televised games and fantasy sports, keeping track of the league as a whole has become more important than ever before. And as a result I spend more time than I care to say staring at the out of town scoreboards.

I find few things more fun than the spontaneous, widespread reaction of a crowd watching a dreaded opponent win or lose on the out of town scoreboard. Of course in this particular instance, the entire section would not be cheering with me when I started screaming. This happened when the Giants, who had trailed 24-7, pulled out a remarkable 17-point fourth quarter to force overtime in Philadelphia. If you’ve ever cheered on your own team via the out of town scoreboard in another, entirely unrelated stadium – and I know that is a rather particular set of circumstances – it is a bizarre experience.

When Big Blue tied it, though by what means they had done it I had no idea, I was not silent. Of course, with the Packers trailing by 14 points at the time, much of the section was befuddled by my excitement, causing many confused looks from the crowd around me and one young boy to ask his grandmother why on earth I was so happy.

This theme would continue in the car ride as the Packers postgame announced on the radio that Eli Manning had thrown a 31-yard touchdown pass to Plaxico Burress in overtime to give the Giants the win. As I celebrated in the back of the car, Kyle, his mother, Alec and Casey were all extremely unamused.

For those of you who haven’t been to Lambeau, the one positive you can take from that is you’ve never had to leave it. This is not because it is such a wonderful monument to the gridiron that you want to stay forever – though that is true – but rather, Green Bay, geographically, is pretty far up there and for most fans there is only one way to leave. As a result, traffic stands still.
For a while.

It took more than three hours to make a return trip to Elm Grove that should have been only two.

But even with the traffic, Packers fans always have one trump card that the rest of us don’t. Every Sunday they get to watch a team so deeply connected in the veins of NFL history and the heart of their community. It’s a team that they, themselves in the city of Green Bay own. It is a situation unlike any other in the NFL.

And perhaps best of all, they get to watch them at Lambeau. That, too, is an experience unlike any other.

The Mecca of American League Baseball

Originally written June 15, 2009

It bothered me for quite some time that the Cubs were out of town on my first major college visiting trip. When we first had decided to take a jaunt to the Midwest, seeing a game at Wrigley Field, the legendary home of old National League baseball with its ancient grandstands and ivy-covered outfield walls was my biggest priority.

Those priorities had to be reordered after glancing at the schedule, but fortunately, a year later I would not be in a similar spot when my mother and I made a college tour in Boston. Yes, the point of the trip was, ostensibly, to look at universities like Tufts or Harvard – the latter of which I never seriously considered applying to – but for me the entire purpose of the drive to Beantown was to get out to Yawkey Way and make my first visit ever to Fenway Park.

My mother and I checked the schedule after planning our trip and found the Sawx would be hosting the highly mediocre Tampa Bay Devil Rays that week. In a building so rife with history and so low on capacity the seats were appropriately overpriced, but there are only so many opportunities an out-of-towner has to see a hallowed part of baseball history that is mostly unaltered from the day it opened. My mother bought tickets for the two of us as well as her high school boyfriend Richard, who now lived in Massachusetts, and two of his children. For the two of them it was a reunion. For me it was a religious pilgrimage.

We arrived well in advance of our guests and, as I always do when given the opportunity, I stuck along the baseline in the outfield during batting practice in hopes of snagging a baseball. That we, as rational, thinking, complicated psychological creatures go so gaga and go to such desperate lengths to grab a piece of cow hide that is easily purchased at a sporting goods store is always something of a mystery to me, but as I have spent countless hours attempting fruitlessly to snag one, I am in no place to criticize.

On this particular day I came as close to finally bringing a ball home as I ever had before when former light-hitting Mets utility infielder Jason Tyner stepped into the cage for some BP. While I remember Tyner because I enjoyed his scrappy play and quick start when he came up with the Mets, I’m fairly certain that the only people who remember that Jason Tyner ever played Major League Baseball are me, Tyner and my friend Adam Litterman, who could never grasp why his beloved Twins batted Tyner at DH when he had no discernible power stroke whatsoever.

As I waited eagerly and at attention down the leftfield line, Tyner hit a hard ground ball into foul territory and right towards where I had plotted myself against the wall. Sensing my moment for defensive greatness had come I leaned over the wall and put my hat on the ground in hopes of scooping it up as it rolled in. Instead, the ball zipped into my hat, rimmed out and rolled to the unattended nether regions of left field.

While this wasn’t as psychologically damaging as when a middle aged woman pushed me to the ground so she could snag a foul ball I was chasing after at a New Jersey Cardinals game when I was ten years old, I was nonetheless disappointed.

One could possibly assume this was hubris after I had just defended my wearing a Mets hat at Fenway Park to a curmudgeonly usher who grumbled at me upon seeing my headwear.

“May I help you?” I asked, wondering what my offense was.

“A Mets hat?”

“It’s not a Yankees hat.”

“It’s not much better.”

“I was one in 1986. Don’t blame me. Blame Buckner.”

This was the point at which I walked away believing I had cleverly one-upped the Fenway employee. It wasn’t until repeated viewings of Game 6 of the 1986 World Series had shown me I was being a bit presumptuous. While Bill Buckner undeniably bore most of the brunt of Boston’s anguish and outrage after the Red Sox collapsed in Game 6, any astute and knowledgeable student of the game would know that clearly relievers Bob Stanley and Calvin Schiraldi are truly to blame for the Sox squandering their would-be first title since 1918.

While Boston would finally shake the Curse of the Bambino two years later, in absolutely stunning fashion, no less, I became aware that day, April 26, 2002, that my mother was unfamiliar with the Red Sox plight. One of the nice features of Fenway is all of its pennants are posted on the center of the main grandstand behind home plate. As I explained to my mother which ones indicated mere American League titles and which represented World Series Championships, she pieced the math together and realized that Boston hadn’t celebrated a World Champion in baseball in, at that point, 84 years.

I proceeded to explain to her in detail the Curse of the Great Bambino with special mentions to Babe Ruth, Harry Frazee, Bill Buckner, Mookie Wilson and No No, Nanette. This was a profound surprise to my mother who had no clue of any Beantown misery. Of course, by the next time I visited Fenway Park, in May of 2009, Boston’s fortune’s had changed dramatically. The Red Sox had won two championships in the previous five years and were consistently one of the best teams in baseball.

It’s a good thing I made that second trip as I remember a stunningly small amount about the game and the stadium from my first visit. I can probably chalk most of this up to spending most of the night attempting to flirt with my mother’s high school boyfriend’s daughter who had attended the game with us. This was, clearly, an unsuccessful and, given the ties between our parents, an extremely awkward venture, but as an awkward 16-year-old I knew naught for propriety or smooth talk with the ladies. In fact, in the near decade since that game I’m fairly certain that's still the case.

Any time I managed to actually win one over – and it happens once in a while – is a tremendous stroke of luck.

My second visit to Fenway Park very nearly failed to get off the ground, as I had been planning to attend the Mets’ first trip to Boston in three years with my good friend Luisa. Luisa was the first good friend I met in college, as we were grouped together on an outdoor wilderness trip before orientation Freshman year. Ups and downs persist as they do in all relationships, but she, a Bostonian and I, a New Yorker, have relied on our east coast elitism to forge a strong bond with one another.

When I first took note of the Mets’ 2009 schedule I sent Luisa an e-mail with the following words:

“Mets. Sox. May 22-24. Fenway Park. We are fucking going. Period.”

Perhaps my language was a bit brash, but Squeeze, as she was sometimes called, never shied away from profanity and so with months to go before the first pitch, the plan was on. After weeks of scouring auctions on eBay, I finally happened upon two standing room tickets for the series opener on Friday, May 22nd. Unfortunately I was unable to get more than the one day off from work, so my whirlwind trip to Beantown would last a total of 17 hours.

I could generally live with that, but I was unaware that the fun was just beginning. For starters, my bus driver arrived 45 minutes late and announced that he was originally expected to drive a bus to Washington, D.C., but our driver had somehow disappeared.

Into thin air.

I had made the bus reservation fairly early to budget for such a mishap, but one can never anticipate a truck carrying gasoline that explodes in the middle of I-95 and completely shuts down traffic in both directions as a result. That seems like a difficult contingency to prepare for. And so, my bus remained motionless for more than an hour in southern Connecticut as I fretted about my best laid plans running dramatically astray and considered that my hopes of arriving early for batting practice would be reduced to praying I would actually make it for the first pitch. Fortunately, I wasn't the only person on the bus in this position. The man across the aisle from me heard me tell someone I was concerned about making it to the park on time and he turned to me and informed me that no matter what, we were making that game.

I was intrigued to see what plan he had ready for that, but once we passed the completely burned out 18-wheeler traffic picked up. In the end a bus originally scheduled to arrive at 2:15 p.m. finally pulled into Gate 21 at Boston’s South Station around 5:45. I sprinted to the nearest T station, headed to Luisa’s apartment in Back Bay, dropped off my bags and off we were. Luisa was sporting a Sox jersey with her last name on it, which her mother had been presented with by the team at an event once. Luisa asked me if it was lame of her to wear her own name on her jersey, and I told her not to be too concerned by it as I turned my back to lead her out the door and reveal “KALAN” embroidered across my back.

She was elated to not be the only one.

Fenway is, as a co-worker of mine put it, Disneyland for adults. The stadium is so ancient and yet rich with quirks, character and history that placing it all into context in your mind is merely impossible. More than rich with history however, is how rich with fun the building is. Rather than take your tickets at the gate, tickets are required just to get on Yawkey Way behind the stadium, enclosing the street so it can become a large drunken cookout as Red Sox Nation starts a veritable celebration that something greater than any of them is about to happen – a Red Sox game at Fenway Park, the historic mecca of the American League.

Like so many newer stadiums, the outside walls are a rich, red brick face, but these bricks were not thrown in to recreate some architecturally fashionable retro kitsch. These are the bricks that held brand new Fenway Park when it opened its doors in 1912. These are the bricks that housed Carlton Fisk’s waved homer off the foul pole in 1975, Bucky Dent’s back-breaking homer in 1978 and the spark for the Sox’ great rally in the 2004 ALCS. This was home to Johnny Pesky, Dom DiMaggio, Carl Yazstremski, Luis Tiant and perhaps the greatest pure hitter of all time, the Splendid Splinter, Ted Williams.

There is immeasurable history in those walls, and unlike Yankee Stadium, which has seen more than its fair share of history and triumph, Fenway – save for a few alterations – appears the same today as it did then. When you stand within those walls, you feel it. Seeing in person the building you’ve seen on TV a number of times, but never quite grasped until you set foot there is a wild experience. The gigantic John Hancock sign, the far-back stretching bleachers, the short right field wall, the construction beams in the grand stand, Pesky’s Pole and, of course, the Green Monster all pop at you as you walk into the field level and make you feel like you’re somewhere special.

If you’re lucky, like Luisa, you get to experience this every time you go to a baseball game. Much as I adored Shea Stadium and enjoy Citi Field, it is laughable to believe they are comparable to coming here. And given that I rarely have the opportunity to find myself there, and that I had standing room tickets, I was determined to move my way down and get as close a look at the field as I could.

Luisa had clearly never been taught by her father the ancient art of “moving down”. She was not practiced at the old tradition of usurping more valuable seats that you would never in your right mind actually pay for. This was an education for her. Upon walking in, we had already missed batting practice, but the ushers were few and far between, and so we walked about freely needing only to find a pair of seats no one would show up for. Our first stab was in the tenth row behind the on-deck circle, but those seats, we soon found, were spoken for, as were the pair five rows in front that we tried next.

Luisa was anxious we might get in trouble, but I told her to give me one last shot, and so it was that we plopped down some 20 rows behind the first base on deck circle as the game was beginning. The seats had not yet filled in around us and late arriving fans were still coming in through the first three innings. Eventually, the entire section filled to capacity – with the exception of the two seats we had taken.

With the only drawback being a particularly obnoxious Mets fan who sat behind us and yelled brazenly throughout the first several innings – and perhaps Boston’s tradition of singing Neil Diamond’s “Sweet Caroline” every game – we had spectacular seats to enjoy, and, at least for me, a spectacular game. Mets ace Johan Santana was on the hill and delivered a dominant performance as the Mets pulled off a 5-3 win in hostile Fenway. It wasn’t as hostile as normal of course, hundreds of Mets fans made the trip, all of them giving me a vote of confidence when I passed them on the streets of Back Bay afterwards. While the park was divided, we all understood, clearly, that our divisions did not run as deep as our caps and jerseys might have implied.

After all, we all hated the Yankees.

After the game, Luisa and I walked around Fenway, caught some drinks and ate a dessert that was far too large for the two of us, and toured her neighborhood where she gleefully pointed out the palatial manse of the Patriots’ Tom Brady. I will never stop being surprised by how early Boston shuts down, but it didnt' matter as a long day had worn me out and I had an early bus to catch the next morning so I could make it to the office in time. The trip was rushed and hectic to be sure, but few are the opportunities to see a place like Fenway. For all things considered, sightlines, amenities, etc, it is not the best stadium in baseball. Of the places I have been to, I will still defer to Jacobs Field for that designation.

But watching a game at Fenway is an experience unlike any other. I spent less than 24 hours in Boston for the purpose of a baseball game, which, to some, surely, is insanity. But after two games in Fenway Park, I have come to the conclusion that while few places warrant that type of frenzied dedication, if I had to select just one, this would be it.