The Greatest Story Ever Told About Almost Getting Hit in the Head With a Hall of Famer’s Jock
The year was 1986. For the vast numbers of you who aren’t old enough to remember that time, the world was a very different place. Things we can’t live without today... the internet, GPS, the DVR, Selma Hayek’s boobs... were the stuff of science fiction. The most popular band at the time was a quartet out of Ireland by the name of U2. Indiana Jones movies were all the rage. The tabloids were filled with stories about Madonna getting divorced and sleeping with baseball players. You couldn’t turn on a TV without seeing Howie Mandel. Gas was $1.30 a gallon. George Bush was in the White House. And the US auto makers were crawling to Washington, begging for bailout money. I suppose that all sounds pretty ridiculous today, but that’s the way things were.
It was also a watershed year in the history of Boston sports. The Patriots had just made a miraculous run to the Super Bowl. The World Champion Celtics were arguably the greatest team in NBA history. And the Red Sox had one of their top five most unforgettable seasons ever. The Bruins... well the Bruins were there too. I was a skinny college kid who, through a series of happy accidents, walked into the Red Sox locker room, the flight path of a future Hall of Famer’s jock strap and a brush with baseball immortality that I would never forget. I’ll start at the beginning.
I worked my way through school at a video production house in Kenmore Square. The place filmed commercials, corporate videos, recorded radio ads and the like. Oddly enough, I had nothing whatsoever to do with that end of the business, as I was hired to work in the kitchen of the corporate dining room, preparing food for the staff, clients, and crews working on the shoots and such. It was an interesting job to say the least. And bizarre to say the most. Occasionally you got to encounter the famous and semi-famous. Like the one commercial we filmed with a bratty, self-absorbed little fat preteen kid who would later turn out to be Jerry O’Connell. I met Johnny Most a few times because his son worked with us. (He looked so horrible I remember thinking “Johnny Most is going to keel over and drop dead and I’m going to be there to witness it.” Only to find out that everyone who met him had been having the exact same thought for the last 30 years.) Another time Boston kicked off their reunion tour with a press conference in our studio then started rehearsing. (Completely off the topic, I never spent two seconds of my life caring about Boston’s music. After six chords of “More Than a Feelin’” I got bored and left, feeling a little guilty that there were people in the world who’d give a kidney to be standing where I was, but it wasn’t worth two minutes out of my life. In much the same way that there are CEO’s trophy wives who get 50 yard line seats to the Super Bowl even though they don’t know if a football is inflated or stuffed. That was the first time it struck me just how unfair life is. The second time was when Jerry O’Connell started Sarah Michelle Gellar and the third was when he married Rebecca Romijn.)
But back to 1986. I was just a part timer at the place an easily the lowest rung on the corporate ladder. Still, one of the executives, a guy named Jack, was executive producer on a project they’d landed, which was to produce a video yearbook for the Red Sox. It was late September, and this was a coup because the Sox had improbably already clinched the AL East and clearly this was their best team in over a decade. As it turns out, Jack was another in a long series of older guys I’ve known who have given up following baseball, either because the Sox once broke their heart or the first time someone signed a million dollar contract or something. In his case, I seem to recall it being a player’s strike or something. So he pulled me out of the kitchen one day for a sit down because he knew I was arguably... OK, without question... the biggest Red Sox fan on the staff and he wanted to find out everything he could about them.
We talked for a half hour or so, with him wanting to know why the Sox were doing so well and me explaining how they’d finally put together a great pitching staff, anchored by a breakout year by Roger Clemens. Jack asked a lot of questions, listened to my answers, even took notes. It was probably the first time anyone had ever asked me something that began with “Do you think...” and wasn’t immediately followed by “...I’d go out with you in a million years?” Which was nice. Afterward he explained to me that he was headed over to Fenway with a camera crew and if I was interested, he’d get me a press pass and I could come along. Of course I jumped at the chance.
We spent the night filming little interviews in the stands. I was along just to carry a bag filled with camera batteries that I think were powered by flux capacitors because they weighed 10,000 lbs each. Still it was great. We walked around sticking the microphone in people’s faces and eliciting those idiotic fan comments that always make their way into any TV show about the Red Sox. Goofy looking doofuses saying “Weeah going all the way, baby!” and cute chicks trying extra hard to be cute by screeching “The Sox are awesome! Wooohhh!!!” with that high pitched, ambulance siren, falsetto, cute chick “Wooohhh!” they all practice. At the end of the night, Jack told me to keep my press pass and gave me his because they were both good for the next night’s game. He’d gotten enough usable footage of doofuses and annoying cute chicks and said I was welcome to take a friend to the game on the passes. It was like I’d hit Megabucks.
As soon as I got home I called my friend Kenny and we made our plans. The only problem we figured to run into was that while the press passes were 100% legitimate, neither Kenny nor I were. At least we didn’t look it. I didn’t yet have the rugged good looks I’m famous for today. In fact, at the time I was probably getting carded at R-rated movies. Kenny has always looked like Danny Ainge, only at this time he looked like high school sophomore Danny. (Today he looks like 70 year old Ainge, but that’s what will happen to look-alikes when one is a Mormon and the other is a raging alcoholic.) The two of us knew we weren’t going to be hobnobbing around the Fenway Park press box without arousing suspicion, no matter how real our passes were. Mine might just as well have said I was a 25 year old Hawaiian organ donor named “McLovin.”
And we were right. As I look back on the night, I cringe at how self-conscious (read: terrified) we were. For starters, we made our way up to the roof top entrance to the press box to our surprise, found a lounge up there. Not a concession stand, but an actual little bar room with tables and chairs and a buffet laid out. We immediately ordered a couple of beers and when we went to pay for them, the bartender looked at us like we’d tried to pay with beaver pelts. “Uh, the drinks are complimentary, gentlemen.” I was dumbstruck. You mean sportswriters get to eat and drink at every game for free?” I asked. “Then why the hell are they all so miserable?” and the bartender shrugged.
I soon got my answer. We took our beers into the press box and grabbed seats down front. You might think that to earn a living watching baseball games while eating and drinking for free, then ripping the very people who paid for the food and booze in the newspaper the next day, would be a life filled with magic and wonder. But you’d be wrong. Very, very wrong. Being in the Fenway press box was like sitting in the scummier sections of Raynham/Taunton Greyhound Park. The denizens were all grey, downtrodden, soulless creatures, with hollow, sunken eyes. As uncomfortable is was, we had beers, great seats, and we were watching a game for free. We were talking quietly between ourselves, when the ink-stained orc behind us asked if we had press passes, so we showed them to him. A short time later, we were talking and got interrupted by a wretched troll two rows back, “Hey! No cheering in here!” and he asked if we had passes. Not long after, I spotted Dick Bresciani, the Sox press secretary, making his way over to us. Finally summoning some balls I said to Kenny “Watch me make this guy kiss our asses.” Bresciani introduced himself and asked who we were and what media outlet we were with. So I laid it on thick. I gave him our names and the name of my company and told him we’re producers gathering info for our yearbook project. “Is there something we’re doing that we shouldn’t be? Is there something we should be doing that we aren’t? The reason I ask is my associate and I are trying to work on our project and you’re the third person now who’s questioned our credentials...” I might as well have given him the “Abe Froman, the Sausage King of Chicago” speech. And it worked as ol’ Dick grovelled at our feet. But at that point, we were done. Sitting in the Fenway press box had all the charm of watching a game from the patient’s floor in “Cuckoo’s Nest” and we decided we’d be better off among the groundlings in the stands, even if it meant we had to pay for our beers.
Like I said, at this point the Sox had already clinched the division, and were just tuning up for the playoffs. For that reason, there was one and only one, interesting thing to happen in the game. Clemens, the MVP of the league, was hit on the pitching arm by a line drive and rushed by ambulance to U Mass Medical. (That’s where the players always went under the old ownership, which was a good idea. Because of course there are no good hospitals in Boston, five minutes away.) No matter what, that was the story of the night. The only thing anyone would be talking about.
Ken and I spent the rest of the night kicking around Fenway. Minutes after the game ended we were under the stands and noticed a crowd of the same lowlifes and scumbags from the press box standing outside a door. When the door opened and they all started to file inside, we realized that had to be the door to the Sox locker room so we followed them in. We’d taken no more than five steps when we looked up to find ourselves standing in the middle of Manager John McNamara’s office. We would’ve been only marginally less surprised to be standing in the Oval Office. A surly, irascible dwarf of a man, McNamara announced he’d take questions from the print reporters first, told the TV camera crews to wait outside and asked someone in the back to close the door. To my amazement, that someone was Kenny. It was at that moment that I was trying to pass myself off as a newspaper reporter and I didn’t have as much as a pencil on me. I did have a stat sheet that they gave out in the press box so I held it close to my chest and faked like I was taking notes. Johnny Mac started out by warning the reporters from the outset it had been a long night for him, but he’d take questions. A long, tense silence followed. Finally Leslie Visser, now of CBS but then with the Globe spoke up and they had this exchange.
“You’ve announced you’re starting Bruce Hurst in Game 1 against the Angels?”
“Yes”
“So... you’re not worried about starting a lefty in Fenway?”
“IS BRUCE HURST LEFT-HANDED?!?!?!”
End of interview. And all the reporters put their heads down and silently filed out of the room like a school of fish swimming away from a predator. To this day I regret going along with these cowards. I mean, what did I owe McNamara? I’d never see him again. If I could live my life over again the only thing I would change would be to go back to that moment and start peppering him with questions like “What do you think of the new Wham! album?” or “Is a dog’s mouth really cleaner than a humans?” or something.
Anyway, we filed out of his office and found ourselves standing in the middle of the Red Sox locker room. It was surreal. And terrifying since we had no business being there. A crowd of reporters surrounded Al Nipper’s locker since he was notoriously Clemens’ drinking buddy, prompting one Sox player to say to no one in particular “What the hell are they asking him anything for?” Ken pulled me aside and said “Do you think Dave Sax has enough shoes?” and sure enough, Sax, the third string catcher who played in all of four games that year had cleats piled three feet high in his locker. Legendary carbon blob Bob Stanley stepped out of the shower buckass naked while Kenny said “So now we know what Stanley’s hog looks like.” Calvin Schiraldi bent over to dry his feet while his sphincter... the same brown eye that would later pucker so badly vs. the Mets in the World Series... stared out at us. I found myself in the middle of a crush of reporters gathered around team doctor Arthur Pappas while he gave Clemens’ medical update. It was then, at the worst moment possible, that the nerves, McNamara’s meltdown, Stanley’s shrunken Johnson, Schiraldi’s hideous cornhole, all came together and I got the uncontrollable giggles. No lie. I couldn’t stop myself. Standing there in the shadow of Dr. Pappas’ massive, awning-like eyebrows I couldn’t help myself. Like a kid in church, the harder I fought not to laugh the funnier it all was until finally I had to push my way out of the crowd.
This was the days of Jean Yawkey’s Jim Crow Red Sox, which meant they had all of three black players on the squad: Jim Rice, Don Baylor and Dave Henderson. And they had their lockers next to each other, which I’m sure is the way that barren old bag preferred her locker room: segregated. I was standing in the middle of the room still trying to process where I was and how I’d gotten there, when something flew past my head, almost hitting me. It was followed by a voice yelling “Hey! Sorry, man!” and I looked over to see Rice laughing. He was talking to me. I’d been standing next to a laundry bin into which Rice had lobbed his massive jock from across the room. “That’ll teach me to stand here,” I said back. By that point, Ken and I had had enough and left.
And you know the rest. The Sox went on to the most excruciating loss in World Series history. Clemens went on to become a philandering, perjuring, money-grubbing douchebag. This past week, Jim Rice and his jock strap got elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame. And that skinny kid who almost got decapitated by Rice’s gigantic, flying athletic supporter grew up to write for Boston’s leading smutty sports page. So congratulations, Jim Ed. And thanks. Somehow I think when you launched that smelly jock across the room at me, you launched my career.