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BY DAN LE BATARD
DLEBATARD@MIAMIHERALD.COM
A long time ago, right around here, I fell in love for the first time.
I learned how to be Cuban down the street, at Abuelita’s house, but this is where Dad would bring me on the best Sundays, my little hand tucked into his big one. I remember that so vividly, reaching up to hold his hand, calloused from the work week, as he guided me through all this new bustle and buzzing. Back then, O.J. Simpson was just a running back, and I screamed hard for the Dolphins to squeeze the Juice. Maybe Mom didn’t want to go or we couldn’t afford more tickets, but I remember that as Dad Time when I look back through a child’s awed eyes. Sports are such a strong glue; bonds us still more than three decades later.
This was back before we had Marlins championships or LeBron James or that hockey team that is always eight points out of the eighth playoff spot. All we had was this magical orange place, and a little park the stretching and jogging New York Yankees would visit for a few weeks before going to play their games that mattered. The Orange Bowl was the biggest, most amazing place I’d ever been. The sound and size, I remember, felt as vast and overwhelming to me as the first time I entered Disney World. Kids want to be astronauts and super heroes, but I knew right then, hand tucked inside my father’s, that I wanted to spend my life around games.
I went back with Dad this week to tour the new place, and you can already see how another generation of kids will fall in love here soon enough. We put on construction hats, yellow vests and protective glasses and walked over wires and around sparks, marveling at the size and promise of tomorrow while amazed by how fast yesterday went. There are a lot of stairs, so many, and the elevators don’t work yet, so I put my hand on Dad’s elbow to steady him as we climbed, but he shooed me away . So proud. So stubborn. Wouldn’t even put a hand on the railing just to show me he didn’t need the help. OK, Papi. I’m happy that you are still so strong, but I worry, you know?
Home plate is the only part of the diamond that is in place, surrounded by orange fencing to give you a baseball perspective amid all the dirt and strewn metal.
“I think we sat over there in the Orange Bowl,” my father said, pointing high to what soon will be the area north of left field.
They were very bad seats, I can see now, but I don’t remember them that way.
More than 800 construction workers are here daily, six days a week, but you can’t see them because the place is so cavernous and so many of them are working in the bowels. You notice the size of the army only when the lunch trucks come. Such a massive project. Fifteen million dollars is going to just furniture and fixtures. Team president David Samson, an obsessive-compulsive insomniac, is so consumed with every detail that he will sit in every seat himself just to make sure there are no obstructed views or uncomfortable spots.
Even the view from deep center field, tucked between home plate and downtown Miami’s skyline, is breathtaking. It’ll be quite a bit different than the antiseptic, antiquated mausoleum where the Marlins play now.
TIMING A KEY FACTOR
It is an odd time to finance and celebrate this, of course, in our broke city as the mayor is recalled and the county manager resigns. A gaudy $500 million project in ragged Little Havana now is only slightly less strange than stacking the $500 million there one dollar at a time. But up it goes a little more every day, men walking perilously with hands and feet on thin beams way up there on the still-under-construction roof, tied to wires and a job many of us would not ever want.
My parents, fleeing communism, stronger than I’ll ever be, sacrificing so much so that I would never have to, came to this country with no money and no English to build step by step, just like those men way up there, but they did not have helpful wires tied to their waists.
Got a letter from a kid this week, an old soccer teammate I haven’t seen in 30 years. It was about my Dad. I try to live with gratitude, but I forget sometimes. Then this helpful reminder from three decades ago arrives, from a kid my father helped shape through sports with something as simple and as complicated as love, and it makes my eyes water.
My father used to be consumed with work. He’d come to my baseball games in a hurry and in a tie, and I’d strike out a lot, and he would get mad. Mom pulled him aside. I can teach him a lot, she said, but I can’t teach him how to be a man. And from then on, in every one of the sports photos from my childhood at Miramar Optimist, the head coach you’ll see standing in the back is always Dad.
FATHER FIGURE TO ALL
He helped so many kids who didn’t have fathers, taught so many of them how to be men. I remember two brothers having it so rough at home that my parents sat me down and asked how I would feel if we adopted them. And now this kid from 30 years ago writes, thanking my Dad still, so grateful all these years later that he could simply be around a man sometimes that I got the blessing of being around all the time.
I can’t make the argument on behalf of building a new stadium in our broken city and feel like it is good or right, not when those tourist dollars could go to so many other places of need. The only argument to be made is emotional, not practical. So I put my arm around my Dad as we left the new stadium this week, and I thanked him for introducing me to this world. He is not an expressive or emotional man.
“That was nice,” he said as we left.
Yeah, it was.
I don’t know what this place will be worth to you or angry taxpayers or people who don’t care about sports.
All I can tell you is how much value it holds for me.
DLEBATARD@MIAMIHERALD.COM
A long time ago, right around here, I fell in love for the first time.
I learned how to be Cuban down the street, at Abuelita’s house, but this is where Dad would bring me on the best Sundays, my little hand tucked into his big one. I remember that so vividly, reaching up to hold his hand, calloused from the work week, as he guided me through all this new bustle and buzzing. Back then, O.J. Simpson was just a running back, and I screamed hard for the Dolphins to squeeze the Juice. Maybe Mom didn’t want to go or we couldn’t afford more tickets, but I remember that as Dad Time when I look back through a child’s awed eyes. Sports are such a strong glue; bonds us still more than three decades later.
This was back before we had Marlins championships or LeBron James or that hockey team that is always eight points out of the eighth playoff spot. All we had was this magical orange place, and a little park the stretching and jogging New York Yankees would visit for a few weeks before going to play their games that mattered. The Orange Bowl was the biggest, most amazing place I’d ever been. The sound and size, I remember, felt as vast and overwhelming to me as the first time I entered Disney World. Kids want to be astronauts and super heroes, but I knew right then, hand tucked inside my father’s, that I wanted to spend my life around games.
I went back with Dad this week to tour the new place, and you can already see how another generation of kids will fall in love here soon enough. We put on construction hats, yellow vests and protective glasses and walked over wires and around sparks, marveling at the size and promise of tomorrow while amazed by how fast yesterday went. There are a lot of stairs, so many, and the elevators don’t work yet, so I put my hand on Dad’s elbow to steady him as we climbed, but he shooed me away . So proud. So stubborn. Wouldn’t even put a hand on the railing just to show me he didn’t need the help. OK, Papi. I’m happy that you are still so strong, but I worry, you know?
Home plate is the only part of the diamond that is in place, surrounded by orange fencing to give you a baseball perspective amid all the dirt and strewn metal.
“I think we sat over there in the Orange Bowl,” my father said, pointing high to what soon will be the area north of left field.
They were very bad seats, I can see now, but I don’t remember them that way.
More than 800 construction workers are here daily, six days a week, but you can’t see them because the place is so cavernous and so many of them are working in the bowels. You notice the size of the army only when the lunch trucks come. Such a massive project. Fifteen million dollars is going to just furniture and fixtures. Team president David Samson, an obsessive-compulsive insomniac, is so consumed with every detail that he will sit in every seat himself just to make sure there are no obstructed views or uncomfortable spots.
Even the view from deep center field, tucked between home plate and downtown Miami’s skyline, is breathtaking. It’ll be quite a bit different than the antiseptic, antiquated mausoleum where the Marlins play now.
TIMING A KEY FACTOR
It is an odd time to finance and celebrate this, of course, in our broke city as the mayor is recalled and the county manager resigns. A gaudy $500 million project in ragged Little Havana now is only slightly less strange than stacking the $500 million there one dollar at a time. But up it goes a little more every day, men walking perilously with hands and feet on thin beams way up there on the still-under-construction roof, tied to wires and a job many of us would not ever want.
My parents, fleeing communism, stronger than I’ll ever be, sacrificing so much so that I would never have to, came to this country with no money and no English to build step by step, just like those men way up there, but they did not have helpful wires tied to their waists.
Got a letter from a kid this week, an old soccer teammate I haven’t seen in 30 years. It was about my Dad. I try to live with gratitude, but I forget sometimes. Then this helpful reminder from three decades ago arrives, from a kid my father helped shape through sports with something as simple and as complicated as love, and it makes my eyes water.
My father used to be consumed with work. He’d come to my baseball games in a hurry and in a tie, and I’d strike out a lot, and he would get mad. Mom pulled him aside. I can teach him a lot, she said, but I can’t teach him how to be a man. And from then on, in every one of the sports photos from my childhood at Miramar Optimist, the head coach you’ll see standing in the back is always Dad.
FATHER FIGURE TO ALL
He helped so many kids who didn’t have fathers, taught so many of them how to be men. I remember two brothers having it so rough at home that my parents sat me down and asked how I would feel if we adopted them. And now this kid from 30 years ago writes, thanking my Dad still, so grateful all these years later that he could simply be around a man sometimes that I got the blessing of being around all the time.
I can’t make the argument on behalf of building a new stadium in our broken city and feel like it is good or right, not when those tourist dollars could go to so many other places of need. The only argument to be made is emotional, not practical. So I put my arm around my Dad as we left the new stadium this week, and I thanked him for introducing me to this world. He is not an expressive or emotional man.
“That was nice,” he said as we left.
Yeah, it was.
I don’t know what this place will be worth to you or angry taxpayers or people who don’t care about sports.
All I can tell you is how much value it holds for me.
Read more: http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/03/2...#ixzz1HGkXVGnO
Great piece.
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