The JournalSPORTSPage 14 WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 4, 2012 PRESCOTT JOURNAL

By Caitie McRae

In the heart of Mich-igan, lying northwest from Cleveland and southeast from Minneap-olis, at 42° 19’ 53” N, 83° 2’ 45” W, there sits a city. I feel the need to describe its whereabouts in detail because it’s become an overlooked, non-descript wasteland; a promising future that collapsed by the wayside. Some call it Motor City; others, Hock-eytown. But for Detroit, which at one time was the mecca of Motown and the birthplace of the as-sembly line, its enticing character has dwindled as much as its population.

My boyfriend and I had tickets to the Dec. 11 Lions-Vikings game. I had been a big Lions fan (and admittedly, my pas-sion for them has grown this season) since the days of Tim Taylor’s Super Bowl parties on Home Improvement episodes, so not only was it ob-viously mandatory that I get my butt to a game but that I get to experience, firsthand, the D.

My boyfriend, being the real-life version of Clark Griswold, made sure we left dark and early at 4 a.m. sharp to begin our trek along I-90 through the good ol’ US of A. His enthusiasm and almost manic excitement some-times scared me; there were many times where I thought we’d veer off onto the scenic route to visit the world’s second largest ball of twine and end up at Wally World. But I knew that, like me, he couldn’t wait to see the city itself.

After 12 hours and way too many pit-stops of American artery-clog-ging, “would you like fries on your salt?” fast food, we sped past the sign wel-coming us to “Pure Mich-igan” and into Motown itself.

Maybe the shock that came along with our arriv-al into the city is partially my fault; I had ignored my friends’ warnings of Detroit’s high murder rate and the nostalgic musings

of adults over the age of 50 claiming the city wasn’t what it used to be. I didn’t want it to tarnish the im-age of the city I had con-jured up from all those years of watching Tim Taylor blow up the dish-washer or glue his head to a table; I had a carefully crafted image of Detroit in my head, and the rows of boarded-up houses and dilapidated buildings that greeted us was enough to put a dent in our weekend before the weekend even began. As we drove (cau-tiously) along the main strip to our hotel, all I kept thinking about was Dave Chappelle’s stand-up rou-tine about being taken to the ghetto: “Liquor store, gun store, liquor store, gun store…” . For every semi-decent building, there were four crum-bling ones. Unoccupied. ‘For Lease’ signs smacked all over them. Windows busted out of exquisite nineteenth century build-ings that had been re-duced to a decayed pile of broken brick. The Detroit Free Press Building? Six-teen floors of unoccupied space. The Packard plant? Decrepit and abandoned. The city was like a ghost town out of the Wild West movies where you’d ex-pect a tumbleweed to roll by; in fact, my boyfriend was able to do numer-ous u-turns along a main boulevard, with absolute-ly no oncoming traffic, right smack in the middle of the day.

Eerie. But to be fair, the part

of the city which is home to Ford Field and Com-erica Park is modern and inviting, but it’s a small section; a few blocks of peace interrupted by in-your-face ruins. Nonethe-less, we ended up really enjoying our weekend. My Lions defeated the Vikings 34-28 and we got to sit so close to the turf I could almost reach out and snip a lock off of Jared Allen’s mullet. But for all the anticipation of the game and the posh quarters of our hotel, the most important memory

to me and one of those “Oh-my-G od-I-can’t-believe-that-happened” moments took place on Monday, Dec.12, 2011. It wasn’t the surprise I got when I sipped/gagged on the worst Bloody Mary ever made (3/4 vodka and a splash of tomato juice somewhere in there….maybe) or the beaming smile on my face when I realized our hotel’s room service gave us extra tater tots for breakfast.

No. It was bigger than that.

We were leaving that afternoon but my boy-friend decided he wanted one last Clark Griswold moment and that we should attempt some sight-seeing. We ended up, albeit briefly, visiting the Motown museum and the abandoned Highland Park factory (the birth-place of the Model-T) but it was our visit to the old Tiger Stadium—or should I say field—that has etched a permanent spot in the “amazing mo-ments” section of my brain.

What was remarkable about the field was how unremarkable it was. The stadium itself had been torn down in 2009, but the Tigers had played their swan song at that location 10 years earlier. The field had now been reduced to a non-de-script, fenced in park with copious amounts of litter covering the perimeter. It looked like your average, run-of-the-mill field, the kind of place you’d take your dog for a walk but not your child because the amount of garbage could almost guarantee your toddler would pick up a used needle. And this litter wasn’t the same kind of empty nacho trays and plastic cups you get after an MLB game that’s the aftermath of a crowded stadium and cheering fans; this garbage repre-sented the carelessness and ignorance of a city suffocating under the death of their auto indus-try. There were no signs leading us to this histor-

ical mass of land; we had to Google Map it. In fact, when we drove into the city on the previous Sat-urday, we passed right by it, not knowing it was the home of the Tigers for 87 years. How would we have known? The city is nearly bankrupt with next to no funds to support upkeep of these historical proper-ties; the old Tiger Stadium is one of the undeserving victims, its regal, exorbi-tant features now a disfig-ured hodgepodge marred by unfortunate circum-stances.

“We should try to get in,” I say to my boyfriend, as we stand squinty-eyed, peering through the fence, marveling at the upkeep of the infield, soil still in-tact.

“Yeah, I think I saw an opening in the fence,” he says.

An opening in the fence? I didn’t believe him. Here lay the remnants of a stadium which at one time housed over 52,000 fans, brought friends and family together to em-brace America’s Pastime surrounded by Tigers jerseys, chili dogs and luminous stadium lights and now two regular Joes can just traipse onto this iconic soil? No way, this mythical opening in the fence couldn’t possibly exist.

It did.As we pushed past the

rusted gate, I felt a bizarre mix of awe and guilt. The awe part came from my instant recognition that I was walking onto a field that saw the 1984 Detroit Tigers win the World Ser-ies over the San Diego Padres. I could hear the faint cheering of the crowd and the cracking of the bat and in a totally cliché Field of Dreams-esque moment, I could almost see the ghosts of baseball past making their way around the bases.

A total shock-and-awe moment.

However, as I made my way toward the in-field, I became aware that my shoes were pressing into the same grass as Ty Cobb’s cleats did; the sand I was sifting through my hands was the same sand that Joe DiMaggio’s jersey slid into when stealing second, or the same sand that Babe Ruth spit onto when standing at bat. I started to realize how much this moment would have meant for so many Tigers fans and I began to feel guilt. Guilt at the thought of how many times a father turned to his son in the stands and said “Oh wow, how

cool would it be to get a chance to walk out onto the field?” The moment I was experiencing, purely by accident, was a mo-ment that so many fans, die-hard or not, would have envied. How did I, a first-time tourist to De-troit and fairweather fan of baseball, deserve this opportunity?

The Chicago Cubs. The Lovable Losers. The boys have been suffering through the debilitating “curse of the Billy Goat” for 103 years.

103 years. Fans of The Boys in

Blue going their entire life without seeing their team win the World Series. And their children after that. And their grand-kids after that; all waiting a lifetime for the expected to un-expectedly never happen.

And then Tigers fans, fantasizing their entire life about being escorted to the dugout and shaking hands with The Georgia Peach; or getting a Louis-ville Slugger autographed by Charlie Gehringer as he stands at second base during practice; or having the director of player per-sonnel nod at them to go hit a few to Willie Horton out in left field.

I’m standing in left field.

I’m right there, the yellowing grass beneath my feet and the deafen-ing sound of disinterest and indifference blaring from adjacent, unkempt buildings. The moment, I should say, has come ex-cept I’m not the one that should be starring in it and to be frank, I don’t know if Tigers fans of baseball past would want to see what this stadium has been reduced to either. It’s like the way people are shocked and sickened to see a beloved one’s disin-tegration after a terminal illness; pluck a Tigers fan from the Gehringer era, place them outside these frail shambles and watch as they sink their head

into their hands and de-mand to God how this could have happened.

Now standing over home plate, I’m at the core of a long-held desire by so many Tigers devotees who never got a chance to be where I am now.

How accessible it has become.

How depressing, really. Tiger Stadium used to

give Detroit a heartbeat; not that it doesn’t have one anymore but it’s faint now, muffled by the dis-graced and dejected cit-izens turning to crime as a desperate solution to a lack of industry; the in-evitable ignorance of their surroundings that comes with this, as they only see the Detroit of today and can’t fathom the Detroit of yesteryear. Sure, much of the city’s population can appreciate the undercur-rent of history that Detroit basks in but teetering on the brink of bankruptcy and waiting for someone, anyone, to throw this city a rescue buoy steers their focus away from nostal-gia; places like Tiger Sta-dium only a faded mem-ory.

As I make my way towards the corroded, paint-chipped gate, my feet still pressing into grass that had been run on, stomped on, slid on and spit on by the likes of Ted Williams, Lou Gehrig and Mickey Mantle, I pick up a piece of concrete.

“It’s part of the sta-dium,” I tell my boyfriend, as I turn the piece of jag-ged rock in my hand. “I think I’m going to keep it. You know, as a souvenir type-thing.”

As we pull onto the highway, the ashen sky-line of Detroit and silhou-ette of all that is, and all that once was, passes by in our rear window. Our car jerks along the rugged, unpaved asphalt, the jag-ged piece of history crum-bling apart on my back-seat with every bump in the road.

An implosion of history, a tsunami of memories

Morris Group staff member Caitie McRae took a lap of the bases of an old abandoned field that was, for nearly a cen-tury, Tiger Stadium in Detroit.

It was once one of baseball’s national treasures, but all that remains of Tiger Stadium is an abandoned field in Detroit and generations of memories.

A sports weekend road trip to Detroit for one of our staff members turns into a dis-covery of one of baseball’s lost and forgotten treasures, and a memory of a lifetime