Number Two (8 page)

DAY TWO

After catching an afternoon game at old Yankee Stadium, in which Sammy Sosa finished up his career as a designated hitter for the Texas Rangers, we hopped on the subway from the Bronx and rode downtown to Katz's Deli in the Lower East Side. Old Yankee Stadium had history but not a ton of charm. Normally, I hate to see old buildings torn down, but in the case of Yankee Stadium, it made perfect sense to me. I would have led the charge to have it torn down. It was just old and worn out, and somehow it didn't age as well as other old baseball stadiums. After the new stadium was built across the street, I returned to see it a few years later and was surprised by the negative reaction it had received. Yes, it was massive—probably
too
massive—but I loved the façade on the outside as you walked up to the stadium. To me, it felt historic the first time I saw it, like something that would age really, really well.

On our way into Manhattan, Reid confessed to me that he felt he'd hit a wall in the business and wasn't sure he could continue the way he was going. Reid was an Alberta boy through and through, and he loved covering the Alberta Junior Hockey League in which Lloydminster had a successful franchise, but living in the town was proving tiresome for him. It was a small town built around oil and agriculture, not too far removed from the town he grew up in, but there just wasn't anything there to offer him joy in his off-hours
anymore. It wasn't as if he had ambitions to move to Toronto or New York or Los Angeles. He just wanted to return to Edmonton, where a guy who was into comic books and Def Leppard might find a little more to make him happy.

Beyond that, though, his frustration was with the nature of our business itself. Reid knew more about sports than I ever would, and he'd learned more about the teams in his small market than anyone before him. You simply could not find a more prepared, diligent, and hard-working guy. He was completely easy to get along with. He had applied for job after job after job, but each and every time he came up short, often to younger broadcasters who were working for
him
.
With each “no” he became understandably more and more dejected. I couldn't deny how unfair the whole process was. The bottom line was that Reid didn't have conventional TV good looks and no one wanted to take a chance on him. The visual medium had thrown a wall up in his face and now, after putting years of his life into the business, he was starting to wonder if the whole thing was a fruitless exercise.

I felt a little sheepish listening to him. Clearly the only reason I had moved up faster than Reid was that I had looks that were
just
good enough for television and enough charm to let me bluff through the rest. It certainly wasn't knowledge, because when it came to sports, Reid had me beaten hands down. Why should it be this way? Why should I have succeeded while he got left behind? All along, I had told him to continue fighting the good fight—to keep applying for jobs when I knew he probably wasn't going to get them. Now, listening to him break down on the subway, I changed my position. I told him to quit.

“Just go back to Lloydminster and quit. You'll be a helluva lot happier.”

That piece of advice went against everything I used to believe in.
Quitting was easy; sticking it out was the hard part. I was always a big believer in paying your dues in this business and embracing the steps it took to get to the market you wanted to work in. But in my mind Reid had done all he could as an on-air television sports broadcaster; it was time to move on.

DAY THREE

The next day we drove to Boston for two games at Fenway Park. Fenway had been refurbished instead of replaced when pretty much the entire city protested after the Red Sox announced they wanted to build a new park in 1999. It's hard to imagine a more spectacular place to cheer on your home team—no wonder Boston fans have remained so loyal to their proud franchise, even during those lean years.
This
was a baseball stadium. Bench seating behind home plate that looked very similar to a small-town Alberta hockey rink? Yep. Terrible hotdogs wrapped in what appeared to be slices of white bread? Flat-out classics as far as everyone in Beantown was concerned. Then there was the history of the place: the Green Monster, Pesky's Pole, the manual scoreboard out in left field. All of it lived up to the enormous hype as I walked into the place just off of Yawkey Way. We saw two games there, a Sunday game and then a Mother's Day matinee.

The Mother's Day matinee was truly memorable. Jeremy Guthrie was pitching a
gem
for the Orioles that afternoon and Baltimore was comfortably in control all the way until the bottom of the ninth inning. Guthrie was a rookie at the time and was doing magical work on the mound. In the bottom of the ninth, after getting the first out, the Red Sox hit a pop-up near home plate and the Orioles catcher missed it, allowing Boston to get a runner on base. No worries, we thought. Guthrie had thrown a ridiculously low number
of pitches, something like eighty-three in total. The base runner clearly wasn't his fault, so there was no need to take him out. But they
did
take him out. And after watching the Orioles reliever get the first out, thinking Baltimore would get out of the inning and pick up the win, the Red Sox suddenly started hitting everything. All this despite the fact that they had taken Manny Ramirez, arguably their best hitter, out of the game. The Red Sox scored six runs in the ninth and came back to win 6-5, sending everyone home with a slightly drunken smile on their face. Amazing what a six-run comeback will do for a baseball-crazy city.

It was 2007, the year they won the World Series.

We hit the town that night and had a great time—or so I thought. In a cab on the way back to our hotel, Reid suddenly wasn't feeling so good. Was it the clam chowder? The wine? Truth be told, it was probably the vodka shots, or better yet a combination of all three. Either way, we were almost home free when Reid began to vocalize a serious issue with his stomach and then actually start puking.

Puking in the backseat of the cab. All over the floor.

We were on a freeway so we couldn't open the door, and it came on too suddenly for him to get the cabbie to pull over. The driver was understandably furious with us, yelling and screaming from the front of the cab while weaving in his lane. “I'm sorry! I'm sorry!” Reid choked out as he opened the window and tried to vomit outside while we were moving fifty miles an hour, his spittle hitting the back of the cab. I felt bad for him, but at the same time I was a little frustrated. How could he have not known he wasn't feeling good? Couldn't he have said something earlier? Maybe we could have pulled off into a residential area where at least we could
have found a place for him to puke on the street. I was embarrassed. Reid was never a partier, but this seemed almost childish. I was suddenly filled with regret about the whole trip for reasons I couldn't really explain. Maybe I hadn't spent enough time with the guy, and maybe I should have before agreeing to this, because we still had five more days on the road together.

DAY FOUR

The next day we stopped in Baltimore to see the Orioles play at Camden Yards, the first of the new “old school” stadiums. It was completed a couple years after Toronto's SkyDome and effectively rendered that stadium outdated just three years after it was built. Camden Yards was a true modern classic, but the team was a mess in 2007 and the park was barely full. It seemed such a shame. Although I did appreciate getting to sample Boog's Barbeque—a stand on Eutaw Street behind the right-field bleachers owned by legendary Orioles first baseman Boog Powell. Now this was great ballpark food! Orioles fans may have been treated to some pretty bad baseball during that time, but at least the barbeque somewhat made up for it.

From there it was on to Pittsburgh, but we decided to do the trip over two days, stopping halfway in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. All due respect to the good folks of Wilkes-Barre, but we didn't find a lot of action in town on a Monday night. We did find a twenty-four-hour Costco, however, where we bought beer and Reid picked up some apple juice. I had never travelled with a grown man who drank apple juice every morning. It was another thing about him that annoyed me. Couldn't he drink orange juice like a normal adult? Was he stuck in suspended adolescence?

DAY FIVE

The next morning we woke early to grab a quick breakfast in the hotel diner before getting on the road to Pittsburgh for the Pirates game that evening. I ordered pancakes and orange juice. Reid ordered
cereal
and
apple juice
. I tried to hide my annoyance at his choices as I scarfed down my flapjacks. Besides, soon we'd be back on the road.

I started behind the wheel. I'd been doing most of the driving on the trip since we had taken my car. I think we were listening to “So This Is Love?” by Van Halen when disaster struck. I started to feel my stomach gurgling—that familiar feeling that my lower intestines were in serious distress and I desperately needed to find a toilet. What the hell happened, I wondered? It's not like I ate a ton of breakfast potatoes with garlic, onions, and hot peppers. I had pancakes, for Christ's sake! Reid continued to chatter away in the passenger seat while I muttered “yes” and “no” answers, all the while concentrating on not filling my pants.

We came upon a massive truck stop about an hour outside of Wilkes-Barre, and I pulled over and went inside. It was the type of mammoth complex that features five or six restaurants, close to fifty gas pumps, and hundreds of shitters. Thankfully, the men's restroom was lined with about a hundred stalls to handle all the truckers, families, and highway travellers who needed to put their waste somewhere on their long journeys.

PNC Park in Pittsburgh had recently beaten out the much more hyped AT&T Park (at the time called Pac Bell Park) in San Francisco in an ESPN poll of the most beautiful baseball stadiums in the country. People had been absolutely
raving
about it, so we were understandably pretty excited to see it. There was absolutely no way I was going to let some stupid stomach bug keep me from
going to a game later that evening. But whatever was making me sick was relentless and simply would not stop.

A gas station restroom is pretty much the closest thing to hell on earth, and on that dreary afternoon I was the devil. I just destroyed that toilet, and when I was done destroying that toilet I didn't exactly feel much better. I had nothing left to shit out, but I also knew anything I ate from that point on would immediately go in one end and out the other. Not to mention the fact that my stomach
still
wasn't right. I was filled with rage. How the hell could this happen to me now? Was it the heavens punishing me for not being more sympathetic to Reid when he got sick in the cab back in Boston? It sure felt that way.

Meanwhile, Reid had gassed up the soccer-Mom car, paid the bill, and was now sitting in the front seat starting to worry about me. He actually wandered back toward the men's restroom just as I was coming out, and I was so full of rage and anger and in so much pain I just walked past him and said, “Let's get out of here.” As we walked toward the car, we passed a family of four heading inside for lunch. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a four- or five-foot-tall garbage can with flaps on either side. All of the anger over the fact that I was starting to realize my chances of attending this baseball game were becoming slimmer and slimmer by the second made me do something I will forever regret.

Just as the family of four walked past, I yelled “SHIT!” and karate-kicked the garbage can like I was Daniel LaRusso in
The Karate Kid Part III
, knocking it over and spilling its dirty contents on the ground.
The whole incident was over in a split second, and I was instantly embarrassed and a little shocked by what I had done. I turned around to see the family staring at me, the father grabbing his children by the shoulders and leading them away from the monster I had become.

“Sorry!” I yelled out to no avail. Reid just turned away and started walking toward the car in silence. So much for the jovial bonding session that we'd planned back in Toronto.

After a couple more hours in the car, during which I lay across the backseat in agony while Reid put the pedal to the metal with Weezer cranked to full blast, trying to get us to Pittsburgh as soon as possible so he could finally separate himself from me and my bowels, we finally made it to the outskirts of the city. The whole time we were driving I stared at the ceiling of the vehicle trying to figure out what the hell was causing me to feel this way. And then it hit me.

It was the Goddamned
orange juice.

Suddenly, all those glasses of apple juice were starting to look pretty good.

The OJ was just too acidic for my sensitive stomach, and it was wreaking havoc in a way that nothing had ever done before.

The highway we were on was thankfully not that busy, and Reid was in an understandably strange state—unsure of the road, with its many tunnels. As I felt sicker and sicker in the back, and as I discovered the culprit of my peril, I got more and more vocal: “Fucking orange juice. Fucking orange juice . . .” I kept muttering as Reid turned up the volume on
Pinkerton
. “If I ever go back to Wilkes-Barre, I'm going to find the chef from that hotel and kick him right in the nuts.” Reid felt helpless. He was such a people pleaser and there was nothing he could do. I was making him more uncomfortable than any acidic beverage could ever make me. I consoled myself with the knowledge that this long nightmare of a drive would soon be over.

Instead of GPS or a navigation system, we had literally printed out dozens of Google maps, so one of us would have to navigate while the other drove. This was just a bit before GPS systems were commonplace on smart phones. Our system had been working quite well until I went and consumed too much acidic morning beverage and destroyed my insides. Now Reid was forced to drive
and
navigate through a city he had never set foot in. Our hotel was at Exit 4. I was in the back becoming more and more uncomfortable and subsequently more and more belligerent. “Why haven't we made it yet? Are we there yet? I'm about to paint the back of this car with my poop if you don't drive faster.”