You may have heard somewhere that a baseball team called the San Francisco Giants won something called the World Series a few days ago.
Not all that many people much cared about this event. But one person did, so much so that he looked up my name on the Internet and emailed me the day of the final game of the Series.
I have not spoken to this once young man for fully three decades.
Ted and I were as thick as thieves. He was the son of a chemist who went on to win a Nobel Prize, and a brainier guy you'll never know. He did his AP Brit Lit and his Calculus. But school wasn't what we had in common.
We liked baseball.
Ted was not a great athlete. He was a nerd who used to joke that if he unbuttoned the top button of his shirt, he'd get a cold. Ted was, however, a huge fan with encyclopedic knowledge of players and statistics. We spent thousands of hours together playing tabletop baseball. One year we spent purt near an entire summer together playing tabletop baseball, taking breaks now and then for tabletop hockey, or a Hostess Ho-Ho. He was a funny guy, completely unself-conscious, humble, and yet whip-smart.
I thought he was going to be the next great American sports journalist or broadcaster.
Our one shining moment came in our freshman year of high school.
Ted won the presidency of the ninth-grade with a no-nonsense campaign against a girl who clearly wasn't ready to challenge a baseball-loving nerd. I stayed in the background politically.
But we both worked for our school newspaper, which was the brainchild of my favorite teacher, Mrs. Holsing. Mrs. Holsing was a creative writing teacher who inspired slavish devotion from her students, and when I took her class in ninth grade, it was my third straight year of enrollment.
Creative writing was something most of us Holsing devotees knew frontwards and backwards, and she didn't have 3 years of new curriculum to lay on us. So we spent a lot of my ninth-grade year putting together a newspaper/literary journal that she mimeographed in a back room.
One of my friends, now a seasoned journalist, used the paper to expose the questionable educational practices of one of the physical education teachers. He received a stern reprimand from various faculty members. But he discovered the power of the press.
Ted and I wanted to write sports. We probably did write some sports, although I don't remember ever going to a game and reporting on it.
What we were famous for was a column we called Broadcast Banter.
We wrote this column as a dialogue between two real-life baseball radio announcers for the San Francisco Giants. Since the Giants were a bad team, the announcers spent a fair amount of time cracking jokes to keep the mood light. Ted and I would listen religiously, and we remembered the jokes, so we reproduced them in "Broadcast Banter."
No one but us liked this column. The editorial team lobbied to have it cut. But Mrs. Holsing championed us. "Write something else, then," she'd counsel the nay-sayers. "They're producing the copy. Where's your copy to replace it?"
So it wasn't exactly a ringing endorsement from my favorite teacher. But it was true. We regularly met our deadlines and the other kids, as they say, "got nothing."
It was a glory.
As we got older, we played less tabletop, and my playing sport shifted from baseball to soccer, but we reunited senior year at our school newspaper, where I became sports editor and he was editor-in-chief. Ted went on to cause a sensation in our graduation year at the Senior Prom. I will let him tell that story if he should wish to. Then he went off to university and I went off to university and that was it.
So, many years later, Ted wrote, sounding much the same as he had those many years ago.
We may get together again sometime, though we live 3000 miles away from each other. He read my blog and worried that I had become "95% serious and that at this stage of your life, your view of the Giants might be something along the lines of a childhood diversion."
Not a chance, Ted. Not with friends like you in my past. That would have been a serious moral failing. It took 30 years, buddy, but finally the Broadcast Banter turned into Championship Chatter.
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