Bermuda Shorts - James Patterson [38]
At a rainy Monday night football game, most of section 115 had gone home by the second half. O’Reilly said he wasn’t feeling well, thought he’d leave, too. Before he did, he held out his hand. I was startled by the unexpected formality. “I just want you to know what a pleasure it’s been sitting next to you and talking all these years,” he told me.
I arrived at the next game to find his seat empty. His daughter and son-in-law explained sadly that the Friday before that Monday night game O’Reilly had gotten some bad news about his health. He had walked out of the stadium at halftime and stepped in front of a fast-moving bus.
I was the last person known to have seen him alive.
“It was like going to church,” a friend and long-time Skins devotee told me when the team moved out of RFK. “It meant that much to people.”
Now, those afternoons and evenings at RFK are just old news. The highlights from those years look grainy and dark, which is so odd when the memories are so vivid. The current stadium the Redskins inhabit holds ninety thousand fans. Contained therein are fifty-five thousand broken hearts. It won’t be long before we are gone as well.
In an interview with Darrell Green at the end of his career, I asked him if the players could feel the passion of the fans in the stands. He looked at me with wide-eyed incredulity. “You’d have to have been brain dead not to feel it. People talk all the time about Soldier Field in Chicago, or Lambeau Field in Green Bay. Trust me, they couldn’t compare to what was going on in Washington, not even close!”
I’m glad the Redskins have moved on. It would be painful to see an advertisement slapped over the name of the place that holds so many myths, such legendary events. Thirty-six years of friends and football deserve better. Perhaps the team’s mascot should change too. The Native North Americans I knew growing up during summers in rural Canada called themselves redskins. It was a mere distinction, like “white men.” But the epithet “wahoo,” that was a go as far as fighting for Native pride was concerned. But that’s neither here nor there. The name “Redskins” is an antiquated throwback to a time of racial segregation and division that for some is still too painfully recent, and, once it’s gone, will be an embarrassing memory. Plenty of other names would serve just as well. It is, after all, only a football team. Certainly, people matter more.
I don’t go to the Redskins games anymore. Hey, nothing stays the same.
But every now and then, as football season returns, I look up from the sports pages to find myself still sitting in old RFK, section 115, row 9, seat number 2, gabbing with O’Reilly, and still missing Sonny.
I Study the Crowds
I’ve always been fascinated by the myriad faces and types of humanity that populate the human zoo. And in America, there is no better place to study our particular version of the human animal than at a baseball game. Unlike other sports, all manner of Americans can, and do, love baseball. To me, the term National Pastime has never meant the most popular sport in the nation, although for a long time it was, and, truth be told, may still well be. Instead, I always felt it meant that the best way to candidly observe an American in his and her most natural habitat is when passing time at a baseball game.
I Look at the Pictures
The photographs of the fans in the stands go all the way back to Civil War America. The pictures open a window to another universe, a lost world to which it may seem a personal connection simply isn’t possible. It is possible, however, and those old photos provide the formula for making that connection real. We are all—them, us, then, now—watching the game.
As I scan the crowds, the men wearing hats, coats, and ties, the women in hats, too, and dresses covering them up to the neck, it is not difficult to effect a Ted Turner-style colorization in my mind, to insert the sound of hubbub and spontaneous roar. I know the grass was green, the sky was blue. I hear the crack of the bat, the slap and pop of leather. I see the attitude