Didn’t Make the Book: Fenway Park

As I worked on the twenty drafts of A Long Walk Home, I wound up with a lot of material that didn’t really serve the story as powerfully as they wanted. Some of it was trash and some of it (I thought) was pretty good. So from time to time, I going to post up passages that never made the final cut. Today’s passage is from Draft #10 which was written in December 2024.

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In 1999, Nils watched Roger Clemens pitch for the Yankees against his old team, the Red Sox. Pedro Martinez was on the mound for the Sox. Fenway was standing room only. This was a pitching match-up for the ages. It was an amazing, memorable night. He called the love of his life to share the energy. He called his cousin – the biggest Yankee fan he ever knew – to share the energy. A pay phone in the corridor behind the right field seats did way more to relay the excitement of the moment than a cell phone video could ever do. It’s too bad people don’t answer their phones anymore, because sending a text totally sucks the humanity out of the moment. Ey. Yer not gng2 bleve dis. I’m @ da Yankees Sawx game. Itz awes. Having a gr8 time. That falls so seriously short of sharing the joy of an amazing and eminently shareable moment. No wonder no one is happy anymore. No wonder no one feels connected to anyone anymore. We’ve stripped away our own humanity because technology made it easy to do.

The phone call was immediate, in the moment and completely unexpected. Nils didn’t think twice about calling and the folks on the receiving end didn’t think twice about answering. They weren’t obligated to answer. The simple act of picking up the phone let Nils know they were down for whatever nonsense he was about to drag them into. A moment of fun for the sake of fun. A Facebook reel is just more noise and chaff to wade through. It’s just not the same, but a call from Fenway with Clemens and Martinez on the mound? Try it sometime. Today, we all want to be Social Media sports reporters, endlessly typing every development as fast as possible in order to beat the other billion people doing the exact same thing. In 1999, a phone call was a human link to something magical.