Wednesday May 13th, 1998
Stadium: Tiger Stadium
Gas: Paw Paw, MI $5.98
Lodging: Gross Pointe, MI
Today's game still has a lingering feeling of what could have been. We'll get to that later.
We left Chicago early that morning. We had not driven our car for 2.5 days so it felt kind of weird to get back behind the steering wheel. One of Brian Sweet's friends, Dave was flying out of Detroit later that evening and was planning on taking the train to Detroit, but we told him we had room so he came along with us. Sweet was taking the train to Detroit and the plan was for us to meet him at the Amtrak station in Detroit later that afternoon. We dropped Dave off at the Detroit airport in the late morning and now had some time to kill before meeting up with Sweet. We headed downtown to the Renaissance Center where we figure we could get some lunch and then explore downtown. We found a place to park and as we were walking there people kept staring at us, I guess because we looked like tourists because they were not used to seeing tourists tour downtown. I have some friends from Detroit who like it very much (Hello Goodwills). But let me say, when we were there 10 years ago, it looked like an old, rundown, dangerous city. 70% of the buildings were empty, graffitied, and/or falling apart. It reminded me of the images they show of war-torn cities like Sarajevo or Baghdad. Nobody else was really out on the streets and those that were did not make one feel safe. We had lunch at the Renaissance Center, but that was about all there really was to do.
Finally it was time to go get Sweet at what we thought was the place we were supposed to meet him. Unfortunately, as everybody exited the train, there was no sign of Sweet. Apparently, there is another train station a few miles away which is where he got out of (Remember, this was before everybody had cell phones). So after much concern and fear of being stuck without Sweet (Who was going to take us to his friends house to spend the night), we finally tracked him down.
It was then off to Gross Pointe, one of the nicest communities in the country. This is where Ford, Chrysler, etc. all had their homes. So suffice to say, it was pretty nice. Me, Brian, and Sweet were going to spend the night at his friend's "Beef" house. Brian and I were imaging some huge, bulky guy if his name is Beef. However, when we met him, he was a really small guy. We found out he got this nickname because his real name is Michael Gerke aka Beef Gerke (Get it? Beef Gerke? Like Beef Jerkey)
And this is where the problems began to happen for us. Beef's dad had season tickets (really nice season tickets that he was letting us use. Like, 3rd base 3 rows behind the dugout kind of tickets). We decided we were going to carpool of course too because he had a parking pass. But Beef was a big fan of beer and since we under 21 in the states, that meant traveling south into Canada before the game(Yes, Detroit is actually north of Canada. Go figure) So Beef took us into Windsor to get him some Labatt's Blue. The problem with this was that our ritual was to arrive as early to stadium as possible so we could walk around the outside, get inside and climb as high as we could behind home plate, and all around the rest of the stadium. We snapped countless pictures at these points to document what each stadium was like. But Sweet and Beef did not hold these same ideals. They held the ideal of drinking age in Canada is only 19. Brian and I kept looking at our watches, realizing that with each passing second meant one less chance to take a picture. And it's not like crossing back into the United States is easy. You do have to stop at customs which meant more time. Brian and I were getting really anxious now. Not only were we going to not take pictures, but we might not even make the first pitch, which is almost sacrilegious to us. We finally got our car parked and made it to our seats during the bottom of the first. Fortunately, we had a radio we could listen to play-by-play and able to keep accurate scores in our respective scorebooks. The problem was we still did not have any photographic evidence of our trip to Tiger Stadium.
We had to wait until after the game to get as many pictures as we could. The ushers were pushing people out of the stadium so they could begin the cleanup. Fortunately for us, we were able to sweet talk an usher who let us climb up to the top and snap a picture. But when you look at all of our other pictures, it is still daytime with the batting cages up during batting practice. All except Detroit, which is at night time with the sprinklers on the field following the game. We still to this day feel somewhat robbed of our chance to see Tiger Stadium in all of its full glory and it brings up some contentious discussion about Beef and his beer and how we should have insisted on taking our own car to the stadium while they went to go to Canada. Of course, hindsight is 20/20.
0 comments:
Post a Comment