(An excerpt from "Along the Banks" in answer to a request from some friends)
The journey you’ve now completed (from Dublin to Enfield) is about 45 kilometres long and constitutes one of my favourite stretches – I’ve done parts of it many times and the full route is something I always enjoy. But entering the town of Enfield itself is always a little bittersweet for me, and to tell you why I have to talk a little bit about Babe Ruth, lost coins and being an American ex-pat in Ireland.
Don’t worry, it all comes together.
A Word About Things Found
I moved to Ireland from America, more particularly from around Boston, some 20 years ago now. It was a good decision, made much easier for me by my Irish born wife and her family, not to mention my own Irish roots. But anyone who makes a move like that and tells you they don’t miss anything is lying. You may not miss the day to day grind (and if you do you should move back) but you do miss the big events – the wedding of a favourite cousin, the funeral of someone who was important to you – those sorts of things. Being about as mad a sports fan as there is I include matters involving any of the Boston teams on this list of “major events”. And so, in the fall of 2004 I found myself missing home as the Boston Red Sox prepared for an attempt to break what had (foolishly) become known as the “Curse of the Bambino”.
The Bambino in question would be one George Herman “Babe” Ruth, the greatest baseball player in history (I will brook no debate on this point) and someone who the Red Sox had, in a moment of pure greed on the part of their then owner, sold to the New York Yankees in 1919. Since that fateful move the Red Sox had failed to win a single World Series championship, a trail of tears that extended 86 years.1 This wouldn’t be so bad except that the team had come so incredibly, impossibly, excruciatingly close to victory on numerous occasions. In 1946, 1967, 1975 and 1986 they had been within one game of ultimate triumph (in the case of ’86 actually within one strike). In other years they had fallen victim to defeat in special play-off games (twice), labour disputes, losses in the regular seasons’ final games and, most frustratingly, had managed to lose to the hated Yankees themselves the previous year when, needing only to hold on to a three run lead over the last two innings, they had ended up losing in extra frames. Now the team was poised to take on the Yankees again, with the winner to advance to the World Series. I prepared myself for late nights in front of the television watching events unfold back in America.
It seemed at first that there weren’t going to be too many late nights. Following a Saturday defeat (that took place at a relatively sane hour for Europe), in which the Yankees scored 19 runs and absolutely destroyed the Red Sox pitching staff, the Sox found themselves down three games to none, which meant the Yankees needed only one more victory to close things out. “Not to worry” you might say “all they need to do is win four games in a row – surely that’s been done before”.
Except it hadn’t – not in baseball history anyway. Major league baseball extended back to the turn of the prior century and not once had a team come from three games behind to win a series. There had been plenty of chances – but it had never happened.
This was the prospect that faced me as I dragged myself out of bed on Sunday morning, 17 October 2004. It was late and if I wanted any breakfast I’d have to go out to a nearby bakery to pick something up. I made my way to Leixlip and parked the car, as dejected as you can possibly imagine. Then, while closing the car door, my eye caught sight of a Euro one cent coin towards the back tyre. Now understand something - a Euro cent is so worthless a monetary unit that it is being eliminated from the realm of coindom. You literally cannot spend it on anything. It is not worth the metal contained in its exceedingly small circumference. It was, to me, probably not worth the effort to bend down to pick the thing up. Nonetheless – I did it anyway, thinking that found money might represent just enough good luck for the Sox to eke out a victory, just one victory, and avoid the ignominy of being swept by the Yankees. I put the coin in my pocket and promptly forgot all about it.
That night, in a thrilling game that lasted into the wee hours of the morning Irish time, the Red Sox did manage to win at least the one game, salvaging a little pride and keeping the flame of hope, however flickering, alive for another day. The Red Sox had miraculously come back against the Yankees’ best pitcher, tying the game in the ninth inning and winning in the twelfth. Players like David Ortiz, Dave Roberts and Bill Mueller etched their name in baseball history with this win. I, of course, reserved a certain amount of credit for myself and the dinky little coin I had rescued from the roadside.
The next morning was a work day – and for the second year in a row I was forcing myself to get to the office on time by napping right after supper and grabbing whatever sleep I could after the games finished. That strategy wasn’t proving to allow me much sleep as the Sox and Yankees had spent the last two Octobers setting records for the length of the epic battles between them. This was rough enough on the U.S. based fans who were getting to bed past midnight every night. For someone facing a five hour time difference it was a killer. But – you do what you have to, and every morning I’d wander into work like a soup sandwich, where I’d meet up with another ex-pat (albeit an English one) and bring him up to date on the latest events from the baseball realm.
That sympathetic ear belonged to Ian Storrar, a massive man who had been a Metropolitan police officer in London prior to moving to Ireland and becoming head of security for our office. Aside from his 6’6” rugby player’s frame Ian stood out in a crowd for his booming good natured voice, willingness to organise a good time at the drop of a hat and, most impressively for the owner of such an outgoing personality, his ability to listen. Ian was a follower of Arsenal soccer club (he often said that he didn’t have to read Nick Hornsby’s “Fever Pitch”, the classic book outlining the obsessions of an Arsenal fan, he’d lived it) and he understood the vagaries of following a team from afar. He listened to my tales of Red Sox woe, the miraculous win of the night before (along with my having found the lucky penny) and understood exactly what was going on. I finished my tale with one small addendum “On the way in to work today I spotted a ten cent coin next to a doorway”.
“You grabbed it up didn’t you?” queried Ian, immediately grasping the importance of the event. Ian was a man who would understand that where you sat, what you wore and the type of meal you ate could have drastic consequences for your team.
You bet your ass I had. Striding in to work with my wife Margaret that morning I’d spotted the brassy glint out of the corner of my eye. I took about two steps before what I’d seen registered, then I broke off and went back to retrieve my prize. Margaret, whom I hadn’t yet filled in on the importance of the previous day’s find, looked questioningly back at me as I bent down to pick up scraps from the sidewalk.
“It’s 10p!” I said, as if I’d suddenly won the lotto and we would now be retiring to the Greek islands.
“O – K” she said haltingly “I’m so happy for you – don’t spend it all in one place”.
I then explained the circumstances to her and, being the exceedingly good sport that she is, she understood right away what was going on. (The woman did, after all, marry me).
That evening the Red Sox were again on the brink of elimination late in the game when they once more improbably rallied to force extra innings. The game stretched out for nearly six hours until, with the season in the balance, the Sox pushed across a run to somehow eke out a win. The exploits of Messrs. Varitek, Wakefield and Ortiz would be carved in the annals of the sport. They had done well – and of course there was my coin to be considered.
On the way in to work that morning we were crossing Clarke’s Bridge (which spans the Royal Canal just below Croke Park) when I shouted out to Margaret (who was by now actively searching as well) “LOOK!”
There, shining on the footpath over the bridge was, amazingly, one two Euro and two one Euro coins. Just sitting there – in the middle of the bridge. I scooped the coins up and put them in my pocket. Now – one cent was immeasurably small, and ten cents barely moves the needle, but it’s not every day you find four Euro just sitting in the middle of the footpath. That was more than five bucks American at the time. Something was happening.
Margaret and I just looked at each other, shook our heads, and continued in to work. When I saw Ian, even before telling him of the previous night’s win, I told him about the money. “You’re on to something mate” he said, confirming my suspicions. I was on to something – but whether it continued was dependent upon my finding money prior to every damn game. That night’s game was now seemingly covered – but I would have to keep this up.
Later that day, in an anteroom off the Red Sox clubhouse, a doctor stood over the ankle of that night’s starting pitcher, Curt Schilling. He looked down at the sutures he had put in to said ankle only the day before, when he had improvised a procedure that had, up to then, only been attempted on cadavers as practice for this unique treatment. Schilling’s ankle had been severely injured in a previous game, rendering him unable to push off with his foot. The surgery was designed to alleviate the discomfort enough to give him back the mobility he required. Amazingly – it worked. Despite the sutures leaking blood throughout the match (leading to its famous designation as the “Bloody Sock” game) Schilling performed admirably. In addition to this medical miracle the Red Sox benefitted from the reversal of two calls – one when a Yankee fan reached over to grab a ball hit into the stands and again when Yankee third baseman Alex Rodriguez intentionally interfered with a fielder. These things never, never, went the Red Sox way in the past. Now, in one game, everything came together. Schilling, Dr. Bill Morgan, Mark Bellhorn – all gave great efforts to allow the Sox to draw level. But then, there was the fact that I just happened to be holding €4.11 in found coins.
Just sayin’.
By now I was obsessed. I needed to find lost money. So much depended on it. On my way home from work that night I stopped at a local ATM machine to stock up on cash, seeing as I was not going to spend any of the funds I had found until after this incredible streak was over. There, on the ground near the machine, was a scattering of about seven cents worth of coins. I gathered them up, not sure whether cash found the night before a game had the same power of treasure found the morning of the contest. I hoped it did as I was unable to find a cent on the ground on the way in to work, a fact I nervously shared with Ian over coffee, the liquid that now fueled my existence.
“I think you’re OK” he said, completely seriously. “I think it still counts”.
The man was right. Not only did it count, it produced a blowout. The Red Sox had miraculously stormed all the way back from the brink to eliminate the Yankees and advance to the next stage of competition – the World Series. The same World Series they had not been able to win for 86 torturous years. Sure, Johnny Damon’s two home runs, David Ortiz’ continued heroics and Derek Lowe’s pitching were key factors – but I would simply like to record that I had found money every day of the comeback.
Just sayin’.
So on to the World Series. Four wins and we could put all the nonsense about curses, and Babe Ruth and 86 years and the entire laundry list of near misses to rest for good.2 If one thing was clear above all others it was that I had to keep finding lost coins. An entire nation (Red Sox Nation) – was depending on it. So I kept looking for change every morning – and I kept finding it. For the first three games of the series I would stumble across money on the way in to work. I never knew there was so much dropped change in the world. Each morning I’d show Ian the day’s take, and each game the Sox won. They were now only one win away from the elusive championship. Boston was on a knife’s edge. Friends and relatives, knowing and sharing my obsession called each night to run through the sheer improbability of it all. We seriously discussed whether it was theoretically possible that a total eclipse of the moon (scheduled for the night of the potential clinching game) could somehow divert an asteroid from its course thus bringing about the end of civilization just as the Red Sox were about to win the World Series. MIT is in Boston. I believe astrophysicists were consulted. The general consensus was that this was unlikely. Most Sox fans focused on the world “unlikely”, noting that it was not “impossible”. The skies were scanned nervously.
Closer to planet Earth I was having a really rough time finding any loose change on the morning of Game 4. I absolutely could not go in to work without at least a found penny in my pocket, but I seemed to have hoovered up all the stray coins within a 10 square mile radius. Then, just outside a small convenience store, while looking down into one of those grates that they put beside a planted tree (and within sight of the Royal Canal, by the way), – I spotted a five cent coin. It was wedged down amongst the discarded soggy cigarette butts, chewing gum, general rubbish, rat entrails and God only knows what else – but it was a coin. The only question was whether I’d reach down into that slimy mess to fish it out.
C’mon.
Later, when I was displaying the coin to Ian over coffee I confided that if the only way to get it out was with my tongue I’d have still gone after the damn thing. “Of course you would mate – it had to be done” he agreed – “I wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t even brush your teeth after”.
The result is probably well known even to the most casual observer. The Red Sox won that World Series. Following my initial coin find they had reeled off eight straight wins for the single greatest comeback victory in all of American sports history (on this point I will also brook no debate). Manny Ramirez, Keith Foulke, Kevin Millar, Terry Francona and the rest of that incredible team combined to do the impossible. I sat in my house in the early hours of that morning, after the game had been won, fielding calls from the States and making a few myself, watching the replay over and over, revelling in the triumph of the moment, knowing that I had to get through one more day at work and could then go to sleep at a reasonable hour. I also didn’t need to find any more coins.
Now I accept, deep down, that the Red Sox winning was not due to my finding all that lost change.3 But the win was still an intensely personal event – and like I said at the beginning of this whole story –it’s the events that you miss. I knew that at the same moment I was heading in to work, Boston was like New Orleans during Mardi Gras. Meanwhile, I was like a kid with the biggest secret in the world – I had this great news – but there was nobody I could tell. Baseball isn’t really on the Irish radar. I trudged in to work, looking forward to at least sharing the information with Ian – but to be honest, on that morning, I felt a long, long way from home.
Anyway, I entered the office via a side entrance and went down the short hallway to the cafeteria. I opened the door ready to grab my coffee, but barely got my foot inside before a huge roar went up, followed by an ovation. High fives all around. It seemed like the whole place was there. Storrar had heard the result and had organised the whole thing. Let everyone know I’d be in, got them all assembled, clued them in on what had happened, watched for me to come through the door. I could see him towering over the crowd, grinning like he’d just won the series himself, although he may never have seen a baseball game in his life up to that point. But the man had still managed to make me feel like I was right in the heart of the celebration, had brought a little bit of Boston into that office.
There aren’t too many friends like that.
Since he’d moved to Ireland Ian had met and married a wonderful Irish girl named Elaine and they bought themselves a house in Enfield. Margaret and I went to their wedding and even after I switched jobs we stayed in contact, golfing or meeting for a beer after work. One day I got a call from Ian – he was obviously a bit shaken. “I had some kind of a seizure” he said – “the doctors are going to check me out”.
I won’t draw this part out. The news was bad, about as bad as it gets. There was a tumor. Cancer is a terrible disease. Ian fought like you wouldn’t believe, but in the end that evil ailment called home the man who had brought a little bit of home to me. Elaine still lives in the house in Enfield. I think of Ian every time I go through the town.
That’s not a bad thing, he’s a man worth remembering – and there is no way I’d ever avoid this section of the canal – I like this particular stretch too much for one thing. It’s a part that merits revisiting. For those who can I’d urge you to find such a fragment along the banks and then go back multiple times – different seasons, different weather, with different people or different purposes. There are, I believe, two types of people in the world, those who will tell you that there are two types of things in the world, and those that will never use such a simplistic, meaningless and ultimately misleading rhetorical device.
Having cleared that up let me just say that there are two kinds of journeys in the world, first time journeys and repeat journeys. The value of going somewhere for the first time is that you know from the outset that everything will be new and exciting. The value of going back on a repeat journey is to surprise yourself as to how new and exciting everything still feels. It’s like re-reading a favorite book and discovering little nuances in the author’s use of words or remembering just what you were doing the first time you read it.
The majority of the narrative in this book has been one of initial impression, talking as if you are going down the Royal Canal for the first time. In truth I try and cycle down the canal over and over again. It took me several times before I even realized, for instance, that you can actually see Connolly’s Folly from the towpath near Carton House. New appreciations and enjoyments rise up with each trip. One time I’ll go down a stretch and it seems slightly boring – but if I give it a second chance – well, maybe I’m rewarded with a glimpse of a kingfisher, or there is a new type of flower blooming – or this time there is a fisherman landing a huge pike. The canal is the kind of place that is just reassuringly familiar enough to allow you to experience it new each time, if that makes any sense.
[1]
The term “World Series”, for some inexplicable
reason, seems to piss my European brethren off more than anything other than
Donald Trump. “How can it be the World
Series if only American teams play?” they ask
indignantly. Where to start. First of
all – Canada is a country (really, you can look it up), and they can have a
representative in the Series (in fact they’ve won it – twice). Secondly, the teams are based out of American
cities but you don’t have to actually be from Milwaukee to play for the Brewers
folks. Baseball is as international a
sport as there is – every team has players from all over the world – Japan,
Cuba, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, South Korea, Australia – all have players
in the Majors, some have hundreds. The
difference really is – there aren’t that many Europeans (a few – there are
German and British players). To the
continent that puts sports like luge, biathlon and rhythmic gymnastics in the
Olympics a non-Euro-centric sport is an anathema. Also – baseball is not ruled by an
international cartel like FIFA or FIBA (thank God) and so international play is
not dependent upon pseudo nationalistic fervor such as accompanies the Olympics
or the World Cup. When the championship
is won in baseball no one pontificates about the superiority of their system of
government or genetics. They just spray
champagne over each other and get drunk. I like the World Series just fine the way it is, thank you very much.
[2]
For the record – I never believed in any curse.
I definitely had an incentive to keep finding coins (it was working,
after all), but not because the Red Sox were cursed.
The reason the litany of near misses hurt so much wasn’t because the Red
Sox were so bad – it was because they were so good
– just not quite good enough. And here I’ll use the “C” word only to put it in
context – the Red Sox and their fans were never cursed, (we’d seen
the greatest hitters, many of the greatest moments, had the best ballpark,
etc.) we were, to be quite honest, blessed. Just not blessed with a
championship. We knew, the hard way, that despite all the magic – championships
don’t always follow even the seemingly most perfectly scripted seasons. We needed that one little bit of mojo to
complete the circle.
[3]
Bullshit. It was totally down to my
finding those coins. I’m expecting my
championship ring in the mail any day now Mr. Henry.
