July 24, 2004. Never forget.
Fenway Park, in Boston, is a lyric little bandbox of a revenue-generator. Everything is painted green and seems in curiously sharp focus, like the outside of a nearly-ripe avocado. It was built in 1912 and rebuilt in 1934, and offers, as do most Boston artifacts, a compromise between ownership’s Croesean profiteering and the townies’ beguiling profanities.
The battle between Jason Varitek and Alex Rodriguez had been no mere summer dust-up; it has been a war, composed of skirmishes, mutual contempt, and, toward the end, an epic confrontation. It falls into three stages, which may be termed Youth, Maturity, and Face Wash; or Thesis, Antithesis, and Synthesis; or Jason, A-Rod, and Justice.
Understand that we were not a rational people. We knew that an ass-beating of A-Rod cannot be produced at will; the right pitch from Arroyo must be perfectly met by the chemically enhanced form of the Yankee, and luck must ride with the ball. Nevertheless, there will always lurk, around a corner in a pocket of our knowledge of the odds, an indefensible hope, and this was one of the times, which you now and then find in sports, when a density of expectation hangs in the air and plucks a beaning out of the future.
Arroyo, after his unsettling wait, put the pitch into A-Rod’s back, and A-Rod overreacted mighty. The crowd grunted, seeing that classic whining, so entitled and familiar, exposed, naked in its failure. A-Rod slunk, jawing, toward first, Tek jawed back, and there it was. The glove climbed on a diagonal line into the vast volume of manicured stubble over A-Rod’s chin. From my angle, Tek’s mitt seemed less an object in motion than the tip of a towering, motionless construct, like The Naked I theater or the Zakim Bridge. It was in A-Rod’s face while it was still in the sky.
Like a Karen caught in a vortex, A-Rod swung his metaphorical purse at the center of a mob of Sox. He remonstrated as he always remonstrated—insincerely, a phony, backpedaling, as if Tek were a storm of rain to get out of. We thumped, wept, and chanted “Fuck Yeah Tek” for minutes after. Tanyon Sturtze was seen in anguish, wailing, crying to be saved. The papers said that the other players, and even the umpires on the field, begged Tek to leave some of A-Rod’s substance intact, but he never had and did not now. Gods do not answer letters. Neither does John Updike anymore
Fenway Park, in Boston, is a lyric little bandbox of a revenue-generator. Everything is painted green and seems in curiously sharp focus, like the outside of a nearly-ripe avocado. It was built in 1912 and rebuilt in 1934, and offers, as do most Boston artifacts, a compromise between ownership’s Croesean profiteering and the townies’ beguiling profanities.
The battle between Jason Varitek and Alex Rodriguez had been no mere summer dust-up; it has been a war, composed of skirmishes, mutual contempt, and, toward the end, an epic confrontation. It falls into three stages, which may be termed Youth, Maturity, and Face Wash; or Thesis, Antithesis, and Synthesis; or Jason, A-Rod, and Justice.
Understand that we were not a rational people. We knew that an ass-beating of A-Rod cannot be produced at will; the right pitch from Arroyo must be perfectly met by the chemically enhanced form of the Yankee, and luck must ride with the ball. Nevertheless, there will always lurk, around a corner in a pocket of our knowledge of the odds, an indefensible hope, and this was one of the times, which you now and then find in sports, when a density of expectation hangs in the air and plucks a beaning out of the future.
Arroyo, after his unsettling wait, put the pitch into A-Rod’s back, and A-Rod overreacted mighty. The crowd grunted, seeing that classic whining, so entitled and familiar, exposed, naked in its failure. A-Rod slunk, jawing, toward first, Tek jawed back, and there it was. The glove climbed on a diagonal line into the vast volume of manicured stubble over A-Rod’s chin. From my angle, Tek’s mitt seemed less an object in motion than the tip of a towering, motionless construct, like The Naked I theater or the Zakim Bridge. It was in A-Rod’s face while it was still in the sky.
Like a Karen caught in a vortex, A-Rod swung his metaphorical purse at the center of a mob of Sox. He remonstrated as he always remonstrated—insincerely, a phony, backpedaling, as if Tek were a storm of rain to get out of. We thumped, wept, and chanted “Fuck Yeah Tek” for minutes after. Tanyon Sturtze was seen in anguish, wailing, crying to be saved. The papers said that the other players, and even the umpires on the field, begged Tek to leave some of A-Rod’s substance intact, but he never had and did not now. Gods do not answer letters. Neither does John Updike anymore
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