Simply Phenomenal
Once, maybe twice in your life, you will feel like you’re the main character in the triumphant final moments of a movie. Not in the sense of “it’s up to me to save the world and get the girl,” but more in the Earth-stopping, gasp-inducing, I-can’t-believe-that-really-happened vein. I suppose that feeling is something we subconsciously chase our whole lives, and when we get it, we don’t know how to get it back. I had that moment nearly a decade ago, coming as a sort of salvation after a nightmare from which I have yet to awake.
It’s hard to elucidate everything I felt the week that my Uncle Paul died. I can tell you that he was my godfather, my father’s brother and simultaneously his best friend, a chef, a great husband and father, and so on, but his presence ran so much deeper than a topline summary of the labels he accumulated.
He was something of a lifeline for my paternal family, the centerpiece of every gathering, regardless of whether he was cooking or not (although parties were indeed cranked to “11” when he was in the kitchen). New Year’s Eve, the Super Bowl, Labor Day, birthdays, even just a plain old fall Sunday with the Jets game on — everything deserved a celebration in his eyes, and he was the straw who stirred the drink.
He was fundamental, a universal truth for the first 14 years of my life. He was one of those male figures in my life that sat like a king in my mind — and I knew the day I could sit beside him and hold my own with the big boys would the day I’d achieved real manhood.
That day never came. He died on October 18, 2011, just a few days before his 51st birthday, and that rock-solid force vanished. His death from cancer was colossal in every sense of the word; his stout figure left a literal gap in our family, superseded only by the imprint that his larger-than-life personality left on us. It was as if all the trees in the world disappeared overnight; the world still turned, but something vital was gone and nothing would ever feel quite right like it did before.
The day he died and the days that followed were a blur. The house where he lived with my aunt, his mother-in-law and three cousins became Ground Zero, and we hardly left. People moved in and out constantly, the chatter hummed along a half-step down from its normal pitch. Even the funeral home where we had the wake was a stone’s throw from the house. We hunkered down and dedicated everything we had, physically and mentally, to remembering Uncle Paul, because that’s the bare minimum of what a man like him deserved.
Those days melted into each other, and by the night before the funeral, in good Irish fashion, we had exhausted our outward sense of grief. The only way we could express how we felt, the only way to properly honor the life of the party, was to, well, party. We ate, we drank, we laughed, we cried, we did everything humanly possible to get our bodies to the point where we could just stop the pain. I don’t know if we ever got to that point (and I’m still not sure if any of us are even there yet), but we gave it a damn good try.
After we cleaned up the McDonald’s and White Castle (Uncle Paul was quite fond of fast food, going so far as to take mess-hall level Arby’s orders during family trips to the Poconos), the time came to say our final physical goodbyes. I only remember three things about the funeral: my father broke my heart with a Bruce Springsteen quote (from “Terry’s Song”: “When they built you, brother, they broke the mold”), everyone cracked Uncle Paul’s drink of choice — a Budweiser — at his gravesite, and I had a semifinal baseball game looming the next morning.
Of course, my attendance was posed as totally optional given the circumstances, but the 2011 Astros had a better chance of winning the World Series than I did of skipping that game. We honored Uncle Paul many ways that week — crying until we had no choice but to party and then partying until we had no choice but to cry again — but the best way I could personally do him justice was by suiting up and getting on the diamond.
Uncle Paul’s life revolved around three points: his family, food and sports, and usually they coalesced into a single night. I remember sprinting back and forth between the TV in his living room, the table on his backyard deck where my dad sat, and the grill where he worked his magic when Chip Ambres drove in the go-ahead run in the 10th inning of a July Mets-Dodgers tilt in 2007. It was a meaningless game, but we lived for days like that. He was a student trainer for the St. John’s University baseball team. The first family gathering we had after he died was one of those plain old Sundays with Jets football on. It would have been a disservice to everything that connected me to my uncle if I didn’t play in that game.
It was a gloomy Sunday, or at least that’s how I remember the morning after the funeral. Nevertheless, my dad was rocking sunglasses — a reminder of how thoroughly he had remembered the spirit of Uncle Paul the night before — when we showed up to the field.
Looking back on it now, though, most everything else felt unimportant. This isn’t one of those sports movies that goes frame-by-frame, pitch-by-pitch from start to finish until we reach the hero’s conclusion. To be honest, I can’t remember much about the details of the game, save for a few salient points:
- We were playing the top-seeded team, a polished collection of cyborgs that drove themselves to the ballfield.
- We, a ragtag group of travel-team rejects that squeezed a fall season in between studying for AP classes and marching band practices, had almost no chance to win that game.
- I had been red-hot at the plate but didn’t feel totally comfortable swinging my bat, a $30 TPX Warrior, so I used my friend’s white Louisville Slugger Omaha.
Other than that, the only thing that remains in my brain from that morning is the moment. How many balls and strikes there were means nothing now, and I honestly couldn’t care less about what inning it was.
All I remember, all I need to carry with me for the rest of my life, is the way the ball met the bat — the same way that butter meets a warm knife. The way it vanished into the overcast sky like a raindrop in reverse. The way it sailed as if someone watching from high above lassoed it and carried the damn thing to its destination, saying, “I got you, kid. I always will.” The way I rounded the bases, not jogging but floating in some ethereal fog until I touched home plate, smiled, and pointed to the sky.
If you’re scoring at home, that swing ended up as: HR, 2 RBI, 1,000,000 feelings that language has yet to describe. I wanted to pump my fist and whoop it up with my teammates, but my body couldn’t recall even a primal grunt until I concluded the high-fives and back slaps and found my dad’s arms at the end of the dugout. We didn’t exchange a single word, but that hug spoke more than anything humankind has authored.
Only after we let go could I muster a single sentence: “That was for Uncle Paul.”
I screamed it as loud as my 14-year-old lungs could handle, hoping that maybe he heard me, and maybe he smiled.
Eventually, life had to go on. We won that game but got shellacked in the championship bout. I finished high school a few years later and ended up retracing Uncle Paul’s steps to the campus of St. John’s University. My sister, meanwhile, worked for Disney, one of his most beloved institutions. Six weeks before he died, he promised me that he’d help me pick up 10 miles an hour on my fastball by the next spring. Of course, that ended up being an impossible promise to keep, but the way our lives have turned out thus far, it looks like he’s keeping an even bigger promise:
He’s got us. He always will.
It may seem downright stupid to be thinking about sports during a global pandemic, but that’s where the majority of Americans go to clear their minds after a long day in the “real world.” Sports are the sandbox at the playground, far away from the challenging monkey bars and winding slides with unexpected twists; we can play pretend, make-believe and dream hard for a few hours without life interfering.
It’s that boiled-down essence that keeps us going back for more. At their core, sports are something that we connect to emotionally, something to which we attach our strongest memories. They’re something we laugh, cry, scream and feel for. I’ve been thinking about this a lot; living without sports has made me think about why they’re so important in my life.
Why that moment, why that man, is so important to me.
