Keeping score: Biding my time

[ Originally published on: Saturday, February 23, 2008 ]

Good morning!

My friend and colleague Gary Sanderson wrote recently in his Thursday column of the travails of winter and the onset of cabin fever. I know the syndrome well, having endured it for most of my life until that January morning in 2004 when I could take no more. It was eight degrees below zero and I had just returned from a morning jog. After peeling off several layers of clothing, I stepped into the bath for a hot shower and discovered the pipes were frozen.

It was then I resolved to never spend another winter checking the Old Farmer's Almanac for when the sun starts to set after 5 p.m., or to be awakened by the grating sound of snowplows. For the last four winters, I've chickened out and sojourned to Florida, hopeful that nobody down here confuses me with Whitey Bulger.

The Sunshine State is the New Jersey of the Caribbean. It has strip malls, condo towers as charmless as the UMass high rises, and the third-highest violent crime rate behind only the District of Columbia and South Carolina.

Its political system is akin to New Hampshire in that it has no state income tax, motorcycle helmets aren't required by law, nor does it require bottle deposits on cans and bottles. Unlike the Granite State, Florida's allure is that summertime is a three-hour flight from Bradley. It has 663 miles of beaches (to New Hampshire's 14) and 7,700 lakes, not counting the man-made variety that look more like Highland Pond but real estate agents use to boost the price of homes as ''waterfront property.''

The presence of Disney World helps suck up a lot of the tourist trade, thereby leaving more room for the rest of us who are averse to the pricey phoniness of the theme park that Carl Hiassen so deservedly eviscerates in his book "Team Rodent."

The state's non-indigenous species include everything from armadillos to boll weevils, but what rankles native Floridians the most are the two-legged seasonal creatures that invade their space. ''If it's tourist season, why can't we shoot 'em?'' asks a popular bumper sticker.

''I don't care much for northerners,'' a law enforcement officer named Phil Spillane told me a few days ago at MacArthur State Park. Spillane was annoyed because I'd parked horizontally in a vertically-lined parking lot, although mine was the only car in the lot.

Eventually Spillane came around and I got him to pose for a photo holding his Remington 12-gauge pump shotgun and tell me tales of the real Florida. He talked about being stalked by a panther while hunting. ''I could sense him walking parallel to me. I walked out of the woods with a pistol in one hand and my rifle in the other.''

He spoke of swimming next to a friend who was bitten by a cottonmouth, and the time he killed a rattlesnake and wrapped its skin around his hunter's hat.

The next day, I drove over to Roger Dean Stadium where the Cardinals and Marlins train. I took a seat in the empty ballpark and watched the grounds crew prep the baseball diamond for when the Grapefruit League season begins on Feb. 27.

''They won't step foot here until February 24,'' said Marshall Jennings, the stadium's facility operations manager. Jennings was sitting on a John Deere infield groomer watching his help measure the base paths and scrape paint off a dugout roof, while another helper mowed the lush outfield grass.

''It's '419' Bermuda, over-seeded with Bermuda Rye,'' he said. ''We've had it out since December 17. With two teams here, we don't get the breaks. The big thing is the weather, the rain. We don't like refunding money.''

Without any baseball to watch, I ventured down Route 95 to Delray Beach the following day to watch the International Tennis Championships. After I paid $65 for a second-row seat at center court, a woman handed me a free issue of ''Tennis Life Magazine.''

''I don't know much about this sport. You're supposed to get the ball over the net, right?''

''Yeah,'' she smiled. ''Inside the lines. It's a great game.''

And temperamental to boot, considering that the previous day, an 18-year-old prodigy named Donald Young had flung his racket out of the stadium and onto a sidewalk, narrowly missing a passerby. I asked an elderly usher if she had seen the heave that netted Young a $5,000 fine, and she nodded and pointed a crooked finger toward the south end of the court.

''He threw it right over that tent. He had a good throw. I couldn't get it that high.''

During a doubles match, my attention was drawn to an intense young player named Jamie Murray, the younger brother of top-ranked British player Andy Murray. The 22-year-old lefty wore black socks with black shoes and sported a black wristband around his left forearm. He wore his cap backwards over long curly brown hair and was dressed in traditional white Adidas apparel with blue trim.

Murray was a bundle of unbridled energy as his partner Max Mirnyi prepared to launch a 120-mph serve. He was crouched eye-level to the net when the imposing 6-foot-6 Victor Hanescu returned serve, backhanding the ball away from both opponents for another point en route to the doubles championship.

Watching Murray's ability to angle shots off his backhand reminded me of the time my senior year at Deerfield Academy, when the tennis team's spindly 165-pound captain, David Hahn, arm-wrestled football player Dave Zewinski to a draw. A Greenfield native, Zewinski stood about 6-2 and weighed 225 pounds, but his arm strength was neutralized by Hahn's imposing wrist strength.

There were no temper tantrums or racket launches during the match, just the usual shouts of ''You! You!'' and ''I got it!'' Once Murray uttered ''s---'' under his breath after he missed a backhand, and another time he held his hands three inches apart to show Mirnyi by how much the baseline judge had blown a call that went against them.

''Open your eyes!'' a spectator shouted to the judge.

Murray turned in the direction of the fan and said in his British accent, ''That's all right. He called it, eh?'' Once after a ball was deflected into the stands, a fan walked two aisles down, leaned over and picked it up, then threw it to a ball girl.

Good thing it wasn't me or I'd have kept it. I had to remember this wasn't baseball, where fans keep the foul balls.

That'll begin on Wednesday when the Nationals play the Marlins, and a few days later the Red Sox will be in Jupiter. It won't be long before it all moves north, including warmer weather that portends the bloom of forsythia, rhododendron and mountain laurel.

Soon the sap buckets will be up and the corn fritters will be in the fryer at Gould's Sugar House. Be sure to save a place for me.

Chip Ainsworth has penned his observations about sports for four decades in the Pioneer Valley.

 

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