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Our Polar girls went to the soccer State Championship game at the Dome the autumn of my senior year. The warm and airy, blue and green, plastic and nylon and concrete Dome. Not very outdoors y. Mike Ditka called it the “Rollerdome”; he actually put on rollerskates before one Bears game just to ridicule us, and was out there like Bambi on ice with all the photographers and reporters and everyone laughing. Laughing at us.
But that’s where, like a week or two earlier, the Twins had just won the World Series. Where Hrbek hit that grand slam over that silly-short right-center garbage-bag fence. Where the Cardinals had problems with all the fake pumped-in noise, and problems with the flyballs that climbed on air pockets to the white trashbag ceiling, and with the high-hops on the concrete slab field covered by that 3/8ths-inch of green porch mat.
I’ll never forget that corny banner down the right field foul line: “Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome. Minneapolis, Minnesota. WE LIKE IT HERE.” Corny, sure, but truth be told, that always did get me a little emotional for some reason.
A couple weeks before, I’d been out in the lower left field seats for Game Two of the American League Championship Series against Detroit, when Jack Morris was the starting pitcher for the Tigers. Yes. Jack Morris. From St. Paul. Who four years later would pitch the greatest World Series game – 10 shut-out innings – for our Twins in Game Seven against Ted Turner’s team. Twins Win! Twice! (I was at that game, too.)
But in the ‘80s Jack played for the Tigers. We were on him all game. Just rode him. Loathed him and his “I am the Walrus” mustache. It was “MORris. MOR-ris. MOR-ris. Sucks!” all the time till he was pulled.
So here we were in support of our girls. I was bouncing like a chameleon between a couple groups of friends at the time: the popular homecoming kings and princes; some nerds; a few jocks. But that cold autumn night we were all one school and brotherly and sisterly. We were all of us the Walrus together now.
I think it was set up so the fans of the two schools were on what would’ve been the long, fairly straight third base side of the Dome. They were Wayzata or Minnetonka or something like that. You get the idea.
I had never seen a girls soccer game before. I don’t think I’d ever seen our girls practice before. Never seen them in uniform before. I can’t remember if they where in white or red that night. Heidi, our goalkeeper, was in yellow, or bright chartreuse, and she had those big Minnie Mouse gloves on. She was a queen and a princess and a model, and we’d been in school together 12 years and grew up a couple blocks away and had never talked once.
I can call to mind most of our side: Jill (Sr.) and Kristen (Sr.); the twins Sue and Nancy (Srs.); two other Sues (Jrs.); Lisa (Jr.); Kayleen (my crush) (Jr.). Maybe Melanie (Sr.) or Piper or Angie or Ann (Jrs.).
Anyway, they won. We won, I mean. They just dominated, but won by only a goal or two. And that was one of the few times when you could feel proud to be from our little old flyover suburb that had peaked in my mother and father’s generation and been new and beautiful and promising in my grandparents’. Now the money and beauty and power had sprawled out further to White Bear Lake and Hill-Murray and Stillwater.
I had my own little moment of pride the year before when our JV football team beat our rivals across the tracks, the Tartan Titans (the 3M high school). That was quite important and a great accomplishment, as we were not talented or a very cohesive unit. Sort of early Bad News Bears-like. I was the quarterback, and since we didn’t have a real coach for the JV team and since I couldn’t throw, we just ran the ball and relied on our offensive line (Ron [LT], Bob [LG], Mike [RG], Nick [RT], Kurt [TE]) and their heart and our backs (Keith, Mark, Jim) and their legs. And – I guess – on my audibles – my playcalling at the line of scrimmage, which was a lot of quarterback sneaks when Tartan was in the 4-5 defense and I could run up my center’s backside and gain an easy two yards to the middle linebacker and then a difficult one or two more. Or when they ran the 5-4 defense and I could sneak in the gap for a couple yards like that old Bart Starr photo.
I’m sad to say I can’t remember which of my two centers was playing that day, Mark (So.) or Mike (Sr.), they were so similar – tall and lean – and they both played heroically for me in a few alternating games and without second guessing my strategy. Which was just run the ball, compress the playing field, keep it tight, and the cohesion would come quarter by quarter. Fight for inches on the ground and fight for seconds off the clock.
The only fans for that game were my father and some nerdy girls that liked to make fun of my butt with that rectangular tailbone pad running down my crack. No hard feelings. My father was really happy.
It was shortly after that when I went AWOL from the football team in order to just duck hunt and trap muskrats after school, and then soon following I just quit football altogether. I just couldn’t live up to the pressure of being a bad quarterback – and playcaller (Who am I? Bert Jones?). And then I didn’t like the laughing that I attracted from all sides. Not to mention the pummelings. And beatings.
Some few years earlier when I was a schoolkid the high school got into the eight-team State High School Hockey Tournament. It was a big deal. Hockey was big. I never played hockey. They flamed out in the Thursday game though.
In the winter everyone – students and teachers and parents and locals – would go to the hockey games. We had two home ices: Polar Arena was on campus and very old and small and cramped and a lot of bad fun was done behind the girders, not much on my part. Aldrich Arena was a couple miles away but still in our turf and was “World-Famous” (that was plastered on the side of the building – quotation marks and all). It was built like the old Met Center, and seemed massive to us anyway. We were fierce about hockey. That’s where we stood our ground. We were like the Blackhawks or Bruins and everyone else was the damn Montreal Canadiens. What did Al Michaels say in Lake Placid? “Now you’ve got BEDlam!!!” Or Vin Scully after the Montana-to-Clark Catch? “It’s a MADhouse at Candlestick!!!”
It was all so very damn important back then, all of it. And then it became less and less important as life got bigger and more expansive than Aldrich Arena or the Dome or a hometown or even Minneapolis. Why is it becoming so important again to me lately, now that I’m getting older?
Life was new and beautiful way back then, and then I became an adult and a man and peaking and powerful and some but not all or enough promises became real. And now maybe I should look back with accomplishment and some little pride, although still not enough of either to win over the heartsickness.
“Children, don’t do / What I have done…” ~ The Walrus Himself.
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