Death in the Crease

There's a famous poem that starts, "April is the cruelest month." That may be true for poets, but in my line of business--professional sports--April is the most happy month. It's the month in which baseball season opens, basketball and hockey playoffs get underway, golf tournaments make a swing into the thawing north, tennis and track come outside, and sports groupies strip down to the minimum apparel tolerated by law. In April we shed the morbidity of winter and join hands in a kind of orgiastic communion of spectatorship. It is no accident that all of this coincides with the Easter and Passover holidays, themselves vestiges of profligate fertility rites conducted during planting time in days of yore. Myself, I look my vacation for April. Let others winter in Palm Beach or summer in Ireland; I take two or three weeks in mid-April through early May, and I attend. If I can't cadge free tickets from my friends in league or commission offices, I buy them at the box office; if I can't get them there, I buy them from scalpers at outrageous tariffs; if the scalpers don't have them, I watch the games on television, sometimes firing up three sets at once so I can catch every moment of action from every source.

Obviously, the guy who wrote "April is the cruelest month" never sat in Shea Stadium when Pearl Bailey threw out the first ball, or stood for Kate Smith's rendition of "God Bless America" at the opening round of Stanley Cup Playoffs. And just as obviously, anybody who waxes as rhapsodic as I do about April is going to be pretty ticked off if something comes up to prevent him from indulging his passion for sports that month. It shouldn't be difficult to imagine, then, how profoundly upset I was to get a phone call from Vincent Sturdevant, president of the National Hockey League, asking if I'd be willing to undertake a secret assignment that happened to coincide with these two or three weeks a year for which I live. But Sturdevant's request was couched in terms equivalent to a command, and a man in my position could not afford to refuse a command from a man in his. At least, not out of hand; I was obliged to fly up to Montreal, where the NHL is headquartered, and hear the proposition out. He would not give me a clue about it over the phone.

Which is how I came to be sitting in the death-seat of a windy, creaky, and none-too-stable MG darting in and out of the interstices between leviathan gasoline trucks and tractor trailers coming off the Triborough Bridge heading for Long Island, a little before eight on a Friday morning in mid-April. The driver was my secretary Trish, and possibly the only thing that kept my rage and depression from being total was the sight of her long legs, exposed to within a millimicron of her crotch, operating the pedals of the car.