Pudge and Max.
A good friend told me once, with a politician’s certainty, that he knew me well enough to know that I would rather watch my team embroiled in an epic, punch-for-punch battle, a game for the ages, and lose by the narrowest of margins — just for the experience — than to miss a game my team played and find out later that they won.
Wrong.
Sports can distract, can momentarily detach, and sometimes that’s needed.
Sports can distract, can unite, can bring all sorts of people together, strangers but not, and it can bring back memories, really good ones, and deposit new ones in the bank.
Pudge did that last night. And I saw none of it. (Yet.)
Max did that on Saturday, too.
On a day that I would imagine a bunch of us needed the distraction.
I won’t beat you guys down with personal experiences here (for once), but I will say for the record that our Saturday night was awesome and uplifting and energetic and good.
I missed Pudge’s moment, and I’m 100 percent sure it offered all of those things, too.
I didn’t see a second of Texas 8, Houston 3, and it sounds like it offered a ton as well.
I didn’t see a second of that game, with zero regret. I’m fired up about the win.
And about the Rangers’ decision, I’ve heard, to bring back a bunch of former (and current) players who wore a Rangers number 7 before Ivan Rodriguez chose to, and since, for the ceremony. That’s an awesomely cool and thoughtful thing.
The DVR’s gonna get a workout today.
I didn’t see any baseball last night and that’s more than OK. You can only be so many places at once, and some things happen just one time. True for the Pudge ceremony, and true for my family. It’s not often that you get to be surrounded by so many friends and so much family in one place, at least for happy reasons, and the second half of our Saturday rocked. It rocked for our family and hopefully, on some level, for 100 others who were with us, a small handful of whom might be reading this and had their DVR’s set, too.
Sports can distract, can unite, bring back great memories and create new ones.
Pudge did that last night, and Max Newberg did, too.
