In the summer of 2001 I moved from Rogers Park to an apartment in Lakeview that was probably three quarters of a mile from Wrigley. I remember being on the back porch shortly after we moved in and hearing a loud roar. My roommate and I looked at each other wondering what that sound could possibly be. Then it dawned on me, the Cubs were playing. It seemed so cool to know that I could hear the crowd from my apartment. I quickly realized, though, that there were two different levels of the sound. If most Cubs made a good play, I had to have the TV turned down and the windows open to hear the sound. When Sammy hit another one of his homers, though, the sound made its way through the windows. He just got the crowd so jacked up.
Like most of the country, my life was disrupted on 9/11. I had a personal connection. My uncle Mike was on the 101st floor of the first tower. I didn’t see a lot of Mike when I was growing up, but I always had a connection to him that I never had with any of my other aunts or uncles. He was the cool uncle who was always joking about going out with me to find a nice set of triplets, two for him and one for me. He had lived a tumultuous life, but by the time I got to know him, nothing seemed to bother him. He loved life and he made everyone around him smile.
Over the next couple weeks, the country tried to heal its wounds and return to some sense of normalcy. I went back to Iowa for a memorial service for Mike and tried to do the same when I got back to Chicago. One way I tried to do that was to attend the first post 9/11 game at Wrigley. I am not a very open person emotionally, so I had bottled things up to the point that I shed some tears during the National Anthem. In the bottom of the first, Sammy came out to a roaring crowd and crushed the ball. He did his hop and stopped at first base to take a small American flag from the first base coach. I had heard that crowd roar for Sammy so many times on TV, from my apartment, and in person at games. This was too much for me. I watched Sammy circle the bases and collapsed in my seat and sobbed. I stayed for the rest of the game, watched the Cubs come up short in a ninth inning rally against Billy Wagner and had a foul ball graze across my outstretched fingertips. Some of the details may be mistaken, but that’s my memory and I don’t want to look up the game to change what is special to me. Anyways, that may not be a great memory of Sammy, but whenever I think of him, that always comes to my mind.
1. MB21 (view all comments) — Jun 04, 2009 @ 02:16 PM
Definitely! That’s awful about your uncle and this is a very personal take on Sammy Sosa. I appreciate it. Thanks a lot.