Sports was the only topic my Uncle Kevin and I had really ever connected on – about once a year when he was in town visiting my mom, we’d sit up late at night and watch SportsCenter, and during our yearly call on Christmas Day, we’d chat a little about the Giants and the 49ers, but he was not otherwise a talkative fellow, unless you were a fellow Marine. I was not.
So when in September of 2016 he asked my mom if she thought I’d be interested in a season ticket for the Giants, it was both entirely out of the blue and not that surprising. She passed him on to me, and I asked the same question she had (“Season tickets?” Not just one ticket?”) and was assured that no, he meant a whole season.
When I mentioned that I thought maybe I would see if I could drum up some friends to throw in on another ticket so I’d always have someone to go with, he hastened to assure me that his offer was good for two seats, and when I asked him, somewhat tentatively, what the budget was, he spoke a sentence that no other human being has ever said to me and meant it: “Money is no object.”
A year later, when I took him to the Memorial Day game and pointed out the $35,000 seats in the second deck that I had passed up in favor of the right-field line arcade seats I eventually got, he was quiet for a moment and then said “The money would have been there, but I’m glad you didn’t do that.” At that same game when the woman who had the season ticket next to mine thanked him for his gift, saying I had been a fine companion that year, he said “Well, good. You’ll be seeing him again next year if he wants the seats.”
I wanted the seats. And I wanted them again the year after that, and when my mom, handling his estate after he died in 2018, asked if I wanted them again for the 2020 season, I did. She gave them to me on the condition that I started writing about the experience, as I had been saying I would since the beginning, and even though that plague season was cancelled and she died before I got back to the ballpark, this is where I am starting to fulfill that promise.
Sorry I’m late on this, mom, but you were used to that.
81 Dates 