Wednesday, April 30, 2008

The New York Post to the Rescue?

On the other end of the line a voice said, “Are the guy that sells the asterisk.” “That’s me.”

A quick introduction later the caller asks if I’m going to sell any in NY. He said if I would come to New York when the Giants are at Shea he would do a story. I told him if the Post will do the story I’ll come out and give away a thousand foam Steroid/Asterisks. We agreed. I’d be there. In five days! The levy was about to break.

Thank God for my Dodger loving wife who loves baseball because without her, believe me, none of this would have happened. So together we began to put the wheels into motion. We ordered one thousand asterisks to be delivered to the Quality Inn in Queens. We rented a van. We ordered two tickets to New York. My Dodger loving wife has to work so we can pay for all of this, so a good friend of ours offered to come along and help. He’s a Stanford grad… very bright… to bright for this kind of outing I thought… but there he was helping the cause.

The writer at the Post called me and read me the story over the phone. It was brilliant. He sent out a photographer to take pictures of me for the article. He said look for the picture and article on page seven.

The Asterisk Party was on. In the morning the NY Post was going to tell the fans about a guy who was giving away 1,000 foam Steroid/Asterisks before the game!

The next morning we threw one thousand asterisks into the van headed off to Shea. But first we stopped to pick up the NY Post. I rifled through to page seven… and there it was. The headline read, “Barry Needled at Shea”

Huh?

There was a picture of a fan holding up a handmade sign “got juice” Wait a minute I thought, I’m giving away

1,000 asterisks today. I kept reading and not a word. Instead the story talked about how, at the previous night’s

game, the fans were giving Barry Bonds the “cheat cheat cheat” chant. Not a word of 1,000 free asterisks?

No photo? I was stunned. I called the Post writer and woke him. He had not yet seen the paper.

“It’s there” he said.

Well I can get into the conversation a bit more but that would entail using some pretty foul language so let’s just say I gave him a piece of my fed up Cub fan mind. And soon he discovered the article was not there. In the end he apologized and said he would try to get into the next days paper.

“This has never happened to me before”, he said.

Now reader, I don’t know how low you have been in your life but I was certainly down on one of the lower rungs of the ladder and the ladder was in a deep hole. I was low.

I was down and truth be told I may well have given up right there but for my Stanford friend who didn’t seem to think anything was so earth shattering. I guess we did still have one thousand asterisks in the van. And the van was paid for. And there were fans at the game. Fans who I was sure would gladly take a free asterisk and wave it to honor the traditions of the game. I even thought about selling them but if the Post article were really going to run the next day I thought I should do what I said I was going to do. Give them away. So off we went to Shea.

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