It’s about time
Tuesday, June 27th, 2006
Riding the elevator to the press box at Omaha’s Johnny Rosenblatt Stadium is an experience in time travel. Its passengers joke about how long it takes to ascend from ground level to the upper deck where reporters, ESPN commentators, NCAA staff, the stadium’s sound and video specialists and the occasional PR blogger reside during games. Like a snail, the elevator scales the exterior of the stadium that has stood as “Home of the NCAA Men’s College World Series” for 57 years, attracting more than six million fans and generations of student-athletes who have gone on to become household names in the major leagues. Some of them, like Dave Winfield, Lou Brock, and Will Clark occasionally return to Rosenblatt to sign autographs, relive their experiences before admiring fans and even ride the press box elevator for an occasional interview.
There’s no Muzak in the elevator to distract its handful of passengers from their thoughts, although if you listen carefully you might hear whispers from famous and fictional characters of the game. On this day, when the local newspaper has described Rosenblatt as Omaha’s “Field of Dreams,” it’s easy to imagine the eloquence of Terence Mann (James Earl Jones) as he observes, “America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It’s been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt, and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game, is a part of our past. It reminds us of all that once was good, and that could be again.”
Riding the Rosenblatt Express, it’s impossible to ignore the nostalgia surrounding the game. Few places can match the tradition and history of stadium, named for former Omaha Mayor Johnny Rosenblatt, who actually played professional ball before entering public service. In recent years, millions of dollars have been spent on new sound systems, LED video boards and countless renovation projects to keep the old ball park state of the art. There’s even talk of replacing the elevator some day with a turbocharged model capable of breaking the sound barrier. For the baseball purist, such an elevator seems out of place with the deliberate, methodical pace of “the American game” that Walt Whitman so aptly described when he wrote, “It will take our people out-of-doors, fill them with oxygen, give them a larger physical stoicism. Tend to relieve us from being a nervous, dyspeptic set. Repair these losses, and be a blessing to us.”
Finally, as the elevator completes its climb one occupant sighs, “It’s about time.” To which everyone replies, “Amen.”
There we are, minding our own business and preparing for this year’s Men’s College World Series to hit town, when this barrage of Omaha bashing comes out of nowhere. All of a sudden, Omaha was to blame for the 40 percent cut in anti-terror aid to the Big Apple. In its coverage of the story, New York Post described Omaha as:“The yawner city of 390,000 – home of the Florence Mill Historic Center, the birthplaces of Gerald Ford and Malcolm X and little else – got a staggering 62 percent increase in federal urban-security grants this year, from $5.1 million to $8.3 million. The increase in counter-terror funds in an area where cows outnumber people by a 4- 1 ratio, while grants for New York are being slashed by a drastic 40 percent, has raised eyebrows among counter-terrorism experts.”