A Glaring Omission

"Sorry is the fool who trades his love for hi-rise rent
Seem the more you make equals the loneliness you get
And it’s fitting. he’s barely living a day he’ll soon forget"
--Soon Forget, Pearl Jam

In my haste to get through the weekend wrap-up and get to the good stuff (youth baseball, obviously) yesterday, I forgot to mention the most meaningful experience from my two-day stint in beautiful San Diego. No, it wasn't waking up at 4 a.m. on Sunday to make sure my friends got to the marathon on time (nor was it returning to the hotel room to grab four extra hours of sleep once they departed). It was a chance encounter on 6th Ave. as I stopped at my car to change tapes in my digital video camera before heading down to the game...
Sitting on the passenger side (of his best friend's ride--sorry, TLC reference) of my car with the door open as I worked on the camera, I was approached by a homeless gentleman on a bike, a little shaggy but quite friendly. I was in no hurry at this point (11 a.m., game didn't start until 1:35 p.m.), so I stayed in my seat and engaged in some conversation. My new friend (Halbert is his name, I quickly learned) has lived a rough life, no doubt. Until a few years ago, he lived in Mississippi, and moved out to the West Coast after a divorce took his kids. He worked in telemarketing (he repeated for me the pitch he used to give, word-for-word) until one crazy night in an emergency room parking lot. He had just come from getting a cut on his thumb sewn up and was sitting in his car in the parking lot (much like I happened to be as the story was recounted for me), when a man approached him and asked for directions. After giving the requested directions to this stranger, the guy grabbed the gold chain around Halbert's neck. Halbert didn't seem to me to be a guy you wanted to mess with, and this guy quickly found that out. Hal jumped out of his car and slugged the guy, knocking him to the ground with a series of body shots, yelling at him as he beat him down: "You don't touch me! You don't take my s---!" After about thirty seconds of the beatdown, he heard a sickening sound from directly behind him. A shot rang out. BANG! And then another. The second, he said, sounded muffled, and he fell to his knees. He glanced down at blood and unidentified guts now spilling into his hands, and then...nothing. He woke up two months later in the hospital (as lucky a place as any to suffer such a horrific calamity, meaning he didn't have to be moved very far), with no family around and no money to pay the rapidly accumulating hospital bills. After recovering sufficiently to leave the hospital, his employer did nothing to help, and he was basically S.O.L. Even though they kept him alive, there was another procedure that they didn't do, something that needed a whole lot more money to take care of. It wouldn't kill him to leave it be, but wow. At this point, he lifted up his shirt (I was obviously more than a little uncomfortable with this) to reveal the strangest thing I have ever seen on a human body. I almost can't describe it with words, but I'll try. Just above his waist, surrounded by an incredible number of scars, was a Nerf-football-sized growth,. Absolutely disgusting (though I hid my disgust quite well, I hope). We got into more conversation about the problem, the impossibility of affording the necessary medical coverage to have the operation (he's looked into it, and it would actually take two separate operations, probably costing six figures), and then discussing the difficulty of even making it through each day without a place to sleep. The thing that touched me the most (not literally, thank goodness) was when a few other people walked by, not even looking in our direction. "See that?" he said. "That's worse than anything. They walk by and pretend you're not even there." I was definitely convicted by this. While I was talking with him at the moment, I knew that I do what the other people did far more often than I stop to talk, or give money, or anything else. After probably half an hour of standing and talking, I gave him a twenty and my business card, telling him (genuinely) that if he ever finds a way to get close to this medical procedure, he should get in touch with me, and I want to try to help him get it done, whatever that would entail. He seemed really touched by the latter gesture (much more than by the twenty measly dollars), and started into a little discourse on how God touches people and God puts people in other people's lives for a reason. I agreed, and we talked about God's role in his life for a little while at this point. He even said that he's thinking about becoming a preacher, because he's seen the worst and he's seen how programs that minister to the homeless fail--he's been refused admittance to numerous shelters and outreach programs because of his "condition." I probably would have stayed and talked with him all day--part of me even wished I had a third ticket to the game--but he set off in search of the next meal as I bid him farewell. Now this part almost brought a tear to my eye--almost. "God bless you, Halbert," I told him as he rode off. He stopped and replied, "He just did." Dang.

Without proper time to digest all that, I'm trying to segue into the normal tone of this blog. So take the necessary break to move from heartfelt to sarcastic, from human emotion to the insignifance of sports...proceed whenever you're ready...

There are few things as exciting in sports as a Mike Tyson fight, and we've got another one coming up on Saturday night--against the immortal Kevin McBride (his nickname is "The Clones Colossus"--what??). It's unbelievable to think that he's been fighting for 20 years (Tyson, not the Colossus), and that there hasn't been a real star in the heavyweight division since his decline. Holyfield, Bowe and Lewis were all decent, but nobody can touch Iron Mike, the train wreck that he is.

Baseball, sure. Football, okay. Even boxing. But curling? Dude got suspended from CURLING for two years after testing positive for a banned substance. I really can't come up with anything clever to say about this. It's CURLING.

Reasons I could never coach girls' basketball, No. 79: SportsCenter just aired a WNBA highlight featuring Suebiscuit (Sue Bird) and the Seattle Storm against some team (I'm ashamed enough that I know one team's name), and something hilarious happened. Bird went in for a layup (may I never again write a sentence about basketball where "Bird" does not refer to Larry), and on the ensuing runback, one of her teammates got all pissed off at her because she was open on the play. Sue proceeded to put up the hand and shake her head as they walked to the bench for a timeout, giving every impression that she was saying something to the effect of, "Oh no she didn't!" See, even when they're playing basketball, chicks are still chicks. Catty and moody and prone to blowups like this, probably having something to do with a nasty look Sue gave the unnamed teammate on the way out of practice yesterday, but Sue didn't mean anything by it, she just had something in her eye and sorry if it looked that way, but who really cares, I don't like her anyway--and all of this emotional crap plays itself out on the court. How does a guy like Bill Laimbeer handle this kind of a job (he's the coach of the Detroit Shock, by the way, and I only know this because he's been on the show as such)?

Can't wait for the worst NBA Finals in history (maybe second-worst, behind the Knicks-Spurs debacle in the strike season) to start tomorrow night. Pray for Halbert.