[real-eyes] devoted baseball fan
- From: Chip C.Bloch <Chip.Bloch@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: "'real-eyes@xxxxxxxxxxxxx'" <real-eyes@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 25 Aug 2010 11:45:09 -0500
Monday, August 23, 2010
Updated: August 24, 11:53 AM ET
Toughest fan you'll ever meet
________________________________
By Rick Reilly
ESPN.com
[cid:image001.jpg@01CB444A.F8236910]
Jane Lang, who is blind, is one of the New York Yankees' biggest fans. During
Hope Week, manager Joe Girardi (left) and pitchers David Robertson, Chad Gaudin
and Joba Chamberlain escorted her on her two-hour trip to the park.
Ask yourself whether you'd do this: Leave home. Walk 20 minutes to the train
station. Take a 70-minute train ride to Penn Station in New York City. Weave
for 10 minutes over to the subway station. Take a half-hour D train ride to
Yankee Stadium. Navigate the vendors and chaos to get to your seat.
Now ask yourself: Would you do all that blind?
Jane Lang does it, accompanied at most games by only her Seeing Eye golden
retriever, Clipper. Thirty times a year. At 67 years old.
Which is why she was so gobsmacked Tuesday when she set out from her home in
Morris Plains, N.J., only to find Yankees manager Joe Girardi and four current
and former Yankees waiting on her doorstep.
They didn't have a limo. They didn't have a fleet of Suburbans. They had only
sneakers. They were going to make the journey with her.
"Oh my God!" Jane said.
"We think you're amazing," Girardi said.
"Follow me," Clipper seemed to say.
You have to understand what a two-hour, one-way journey to a baseball game
takes for somebody like Jane. She's been blind since birth, and these trips
have not always turned out well. Once, some kids decided it would be fun to
spin her around a few dozen times. Another time, she fell onto the subway
tracks and was nearly killed. But ever since she got a guide dog, she's been
intrepid.
The whole bizarre troupe: Jane, Clipper, the Yankees, their security guys, the
PR men and the media -- paraded past the florist, Tony's pizza parlor and the
little barbershop where one of the customers came out to wave and holler at
Jane with the apron still around his neck.
It's mind-melting to watch Jane and Clipper make their way down the clogged
streets of Manhattan -- Clipper, taking cues from Jane, weaving her through a
maze of street vendors, suits, iPhone zombies, boxes, bums, secretaries and
scaffolding.
Jane and Clipper walk at we-just-robbed-a-bank speed, which caused current
Yankees pitching star Joba
Chamberlain<http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/players/profile?playerId(847> to
holler, "Hey! Slow down!"
Soon Yankees fans figured out what was going on and joined in, along with
nearly everybody in town. By the time they reached the train station, it looked
as though Clipper was leading a marching band.
They crammed aboard the train, whereupon ex-Yankees star Tino
Martinez<http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/players/profile?playerId#88> slumped
into his seat. "I can't imagine doing this," he'd say. Girardi, who was sitting
next to Jane, said, "She's amazing. We should've done this blindfolded to give
us an even better idea of what it's like."
Pah! You think this is hard? Wait 'til they'd see the next leg -- Penn Station
and the streets of Manhattan.
[cid:image002.jpg@01CB444A.F8236910]
In Monument Park with Paul O'Neill, Lang touches the Mickey Mantle plaque.
It's mind-melting to watch Jane and Clipper make their way down the clogged
streets of Manhattan -- Clipper, taking cues from Jane, weaving her through a
maze of street vendors, suits, iPhone zombies, boxes, bums, secretaries and
scaffolding.
"And we complain about a little traffic on the Deegan [Expressway]," Girardi
mused, shaking his head.
Usually, when Jane finally gets to the D train and takes her seat, she feels
for eight pieces of candy in her right pocket. Every time the train stops, she
transfers one piece into the opposite pocket. When there's one piece of candy
left, she knows the next stop is Yankee Stadium. No need this time. The very
people she was traveling to see were telling her it was time to get off.
Once Jane and Clipper reached Gate 6 -- two-and-a-half hours from start to
finish -- Girardi and the players took over. They introduced her to former
Yankees star Paul
O'Neill<http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/players/profile?playerId77>, who let her
feel his face. She touched it the way a sculptor would. They let her hold Babe
Ruth's bat<http://espn.go.com/video/clip?idT74171>, Joe DiMaggio's hat, the
2000 World Series trophy. She felt the monuments. When she got to Mickey
Mantle's face, she said, "He looks tired."
You don't know the half of it, lady.
They introduced her to Mariano
Rivera<http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/players/profile?playerId240> and Derek
Jeter<http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/players/profile?playerId246>, who let her
feel his famous mug. And once, when there was finally nobody talking to her,
she crouched down and felt the infield grass as though it were finely spun silk.
Imagine. She had learned the game as a girl, when her father had set up a
checkerboard like a baseball field and guided her hands over it. She's been in
love with baseball ever since. Now she was getting a guided, one-woman tour of
the very heart of it.
[cid:image003.jpg@01CB444A.F8236910]
In a rare moment alone, Lang bends down to touch the field at Yankee Stadium.
"I'm the luckiest person in the world," she purred. "I always have known there
were three different things I always wanted: a house with a roof that didn't
leak, someone to love me and kids. And now I got this. It's the utmost
frosting, you know what I mean? I'll never get sick of this frosting!"
Tuesday was just one day of the Yankees' Hope Week, a genius idea dreamed up by
their public relations extraordinaire, Jason Zillo, who seems to have an
addiction to helping people in ways nobody has thought of before. The Yankees
gave $10,000 in Jane's honor to The Seeing Eye Inc., a place in Morristown,
N.J., that trains guide dogs.
Still, the day was Jane's, and strong, young millionaires kept coming up to
her, praising her guts, skills and moxie. To which Jane would only shrug and
say, "This is just my way of being free and living in the world the way it is."
And as she stood there relishing the moment, it made a person think that the
world the way it is can be awfully sweet.
Special reporting by George Lenker.
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