So.
How was YOUR week?
Mine was okay. I did some stuff at work that I can't talk about, beat The Force Unleashed (the dark side ending is delicious), picked up the new LA Confidential DVD, watched Supernatural, showered a lot. You know, the usual.
There was something else, though... what was it... eh, I'll remember it eventually.
Anyway, about The Force Unleashed. Once I realized that the Death Star was the end of the game I...
Oh, wait! The Phillies won the World Series! THAT'S what I couldn't remember. That whole thing.
I hope you were able to take at least some part in the festivities on Friday. It was... you know, I've searched for words to describe it since then - searching for and finding words generally being, you know, my thing - but honestly, all I've come up with whenever anyone has asked is, "it was really something." (Kudos to you, by the way, if you can successfully navigate the elaborate-yet-grammatically-
Any good trip planner knows the key to a day in any city is to leave your car where you're going to end up, so I drove down to the pub at 8:45 on Friday and met less traffic than I might at 7 on a Sunday morning. I made it door-to-door in about 20 minutes, which on a weekday is a record that will stand for centuries. Once I hit the street I grabbed a cab and told the driver, "get me as close as you can." As close as he could get me turned out to be right smack in front of the Gershman Y. I'm out on Broad Street on the day of the first championship parade in 25 years and I am right smack on the ropeline. Sure, I'll have to hold this spot until my friends arrive, and in total I'm going to have to stand up for something like four hours straight, but I'm wearing sneakers. I'm on the ropeline! The only way for me to be closer to the parade is if I were batting cleanup for the Phillies. It's all good.
The trouble is that I don't get a hold of my friends until about 10:30, and even that took calling one of our mutual friends in Connecticut and having him call someone ELSE in the group to then have THEM tell... let's call him, say... "Kevin of Clementon, NJ" to TURN ON YOUR GODDAMN PHONE!
About three minutes after I have to initiate the third-party call I finally get in touch with Kevin. "Yo, we got a great spot, we're up at Locust, come on up here," he says.
"I'm right on the ropeline here, man. Is your spot better than this? I mean am ON the ropeline," I tell him.
"It's great! Come on up!"
I march up to the Doubletree to find that Kevin and Company's "great spot" is, in fact, four people deep in a crowd that is ten people deep going half a block down Locust in both directions. There is no way I am going to get anywhere near them, much less see anything of the parade when it passes.
I call Kevin.
When he answers I tell him, I think quite reasonably, "you're a fucking idiot!"
"Why?"
"Because I'm on the other side of the goddamn street and this is as close to you as I'm going to get, dumbass," I tell him. "Get everyone and come back down south of Pine. I'll be on your side in front of PTC. There's no one down there." When I had headed northward the sidewalk in front of the Philadelphia Theatre Company was barely populated; there was no reason to believe it wouldn't still be so ten minutes later.
"What's PTC?" he asks.
Jesus fucking Christ. "Just walk south on Broad until you see the big guy wearing a Phillies sweatshirt who LOOKS JUST LIKE ME."
On my way back down to the part of Broad Street that was not already teeming with a crushing mass of humanity, I walked behind three Phillies fans, one of whom delivered this assessment of the Phillies World Championship experience: "Yeah, it's great that they won, but I'm sick of listening to my girlfriend talk about how cute Cole Hamels is, man. All the time. 'Ooh, look at Cole, he's so hot, look at Cole Hamels, isn't he cute, oh, he's so adorable.' Man I wish she would stop with that shit." Pause. Pause. Pause. "He is pretty, though." I am not making this up.
I eventually found a spot between the Symphony House and PTC that had nothing but a very short couple between me and the ropeline, looked wistfully across the street at the family now setting up lawn chairs in the spot I once had, and figured standing behind a bunch of short people wasn't all that much worse in the grand scheme of things. Kevin and Co. arrived a few minutes later and, frankly, we stood around waiting uneventfully for about three hours.
Eventually the parade started, and as that first part of it came into view, the horse-drawn carriage, I squinted at it in the distance.
"Is that Chase Utley?" I asked.
"I think so," Kevin said, though in reality we were both shouting at the top of our lungs. I readied the camera on my phone (more on that in a bit) and the carriage got closer. When it was about half a block away the person riding in the front stood up to wave to the crowd and once I saw how large he was, I'm not going to lie to you, folks, I got a tear in my eye and said, "that's not Chase Utley."
Call me a damned sentimental fool, but I thought having Pat the Bat lead the parade was a beautiful touch.
The parade continued; the first truck stopped with Harry Kalas RIGHT in front of us and the fans went berserk, shouting "HAR-RY! HAR-RY!" Ryan Howard and Chase Utley went past and waved happily (Chase Utley, perhaps, delighting in his soon-to-be-executed evil plan). Jamie Moyer looked overwhelmed. Matt Stairs threw candy to the fans. I gamely took pictures with my camera. Everyone in the crowd waved and screamed and jumped for joy.
I have never been among so many people so happy in the same place. I doubt very much I ever will again. For that matter I doubt -I- will ever be that happy again. It has been noted that I am not someone to whom unbridled joy comes easily. On Friday it did and then some.
Once the parade passed and everyone else - I still cannot believe this - just started following it down Broad Street, we booked it over to the pub. We were lucky enough to get there when it was still basically empty; by the time the rally at the Bank started the place was packed to the gills. The people in the pub clapped and pounded the bar as they showed highlights from the playoff run on television - the double play to win the division, Utley's brilliant pump-fake, Lidge falling to his knees - and cheered every player as they made their entry into the stadium. You had trouble hearing a lot of what was said on the TV over the yelling and clapping and cheering.
When Chase Utley stood up and ensured that Phillie fans will love him forever (moreso than they would have, at least) the bar went completely berserk and the day went from something already fantastic to one of those special things that you will always remember exactly where you were and every single person you were with when you heard Chase Utley say "world fucking champions!"
The party continued - I was at the pub well into the night - and in the midst of the bedlam I realized two things:
Firstly, in all the confusion I somehow set the camera in my phone to the "ultra-ultra-small" setting - at one point I even remarked to myself that 211,000 pictures seemed like an awful lot for my memory stick - so all my parade photographs are the size of postage stamps.
Secondly, days like that, whether you're surrounded by a million people on the street or a hundred people in a bar or your family in your living room, days like that are why sports matter, and why they matter to us. It's not about whether your team wins or loses or whether your favorite player makes the basket or stops the puck or hits the double that scores the winning run in the World Series. It's about the person standing next to you, about sharing the highs and holding each other up in the lows, about how we are stronger and most importantly better together than we are apart.
World fucking champions indeed.
JLK
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