Tall Tales of the Philadelphia Spectrum

I'm sitting here right now watching professional lacrosse for the first time probably about a decade. I feel like I should be watching much more of this, and it's amazing to look at this now and see what the sport has grown into. My father used to take my whole family to these games for six or seven years in a row, and we'd stay for hours as he'd go down and catch up with the players he used to coach as the five of us would run around the upper levels and get into trouble. The league was barely an organization back then, just four teams and one or two thousand fans a night. Thinking about it now, I think the national Softball league probably gets better numbers than that today. But we were a lacrosse family and had all been playing it on an organized level at that point, so that's where we ended up.
Like I said, It wasn't much to watch in those first few seasons. We'd sit there and try to analyze the game, which probably killed our fundamentals when playing field lacrosse (think of the differences between football and arena football) and ask our dad about the players. He'd answer with a typically critical eye of a coach, pointing out who doesn't pass well or who gets cocky when close to the crease. Of course, we wanted to know who was a nice guy and who we should avoid talking to after the game, but those details were lost on him during those games. There were plenty of those guys he had nothing but positive things to say about, but the only one he would refer to with a near sense of awe was John Grant.
This was in 1987, and Grant had been playing professional lacrosse since it's rocky first incarnation in the mid seventies. He was probably forty at the youngest and far from the fastest player on the field. We never understood how my dad could revere him so highly when such a dominant generation of players had come along since his heyday. But my dad would just shake his head and say that he was the best player that he had ever seen. and so we would shut up and stare out on the field and watch every move he made, hoping to gleam some of what could inspire such admiration.
and there was plenty there to gleam. He was older and slower and smaller, but he could just score with such a seeming lack of effort that it almost looked rigged. He would pass to corners of the field he couldn't possible have seen and be on his way back to play D before the ball was in the net from his assist. I don't even remember him being the best player on his team, but he was without question the one that they all looked up to.
And so did we. Little by little, a mythology of sorts developed around this man. He was this under sung maverick, a Native American from the wilds of Canada who was born with a lacrosse stick in his hand and had the sport taught to him from his elders. Obviously by this point my brothers had just started making shit up to feed me, and shit, I was nine. But it never diminished my perception of him years later when I figured out what was truth and what were legends that they'd borrowed from other sports. The man was a legend in my mind by then. Even more so when as I got older and began asking the other players on my own teams if they remembered John Grant, I'd get confused looks at best. His mythology grew even more as his legend confined itself to our family.

and so tonight I turn on the TV and there's a Philadelphia Wings game on. As my interest in lacrosse and organized sports waned, I'd sort of lost touch with that whole community and hadn't kept up with things. Professional lacrosse, as you can imagine, is a little hard to keep up with on a superficial level than say the NBA. And within 2 seconds I see a player for the Rochester Nighthawks named John Grant. I thought someone was fucking with me for a second, and then a few seconds later I learn from the announcers that this is John Grant, Jr. His son has been playing in the league for seven years and is a dominant player in the league. and this is where I picked up the phone and started calling my dad to ask him if he knew about this. It rang once before I realized what I was doing and hung up. A few minutes later I felt a tear on my nose and realized I was crying and it hit me: this is going to be what it's like form now on. I'm going to see these things, these things that my dad is the only person in the world I would even think to tell and I'm not going to be able to.
and I'm not even sad about it, really. Just curious more than anything how many more things like this there are. I'm sure I'll be 75 (who are we kidding) and I'll be picking up the phone when Pride of the Yankees is on TV. It's just funny to think about those little things, and of the galaxy of things that I could never remember until I'm staring them directly in the face. So I got that to look forward to. which actuallly is nice.

in other news, the currently titled Cape May Lighthouse project is underway. Expect completion in mid 2o13.

Also, you have to be fucking kidding me.