There is one reason that Robert Blake’s murder trial will not become another O.J. Simpson affair, and that reason is as clear as the hand in front of your face.
Or should I say the skin on the hand in front of your face?
Get out of town. Change the scenery. Change the view. Go to Canada. Western Canada. Far western Canada. Anywhere but here, Detroit, Joe Louis Arena, where the only thing the Red Wings have is bad karma, two quixotic playoff losses, a memory reel of clanged posts, missed chances, intercepted passes, fluttering pucks and questions, questions, questions. How is this happening? Where is your goalie? Where is your power play? Vancouver again, 5-2? Who are these guys? Who are you guys?
Ageneral manager is not a player, nor a coach. He doesn’t skate or knock pucks away, he doesn’t blow a whistle.
What he does, in a front office sort of way, is paint. He paints a portrait of a team he wants, he paints faces over each roster spot, and finally, when all the trading and cutting and buying is over, he leans back to examine his canvas.
You couldn’t miss Bob. To begin with, he was too tall. I may be average height, but when we stood together, I felt Bob bent over me like a huge tree looking down at an acorn it had dropped.
Or maybe I was intimidated. Bob McGruder could do that to you — not because he spoke loudly, because he didn’t. And not because he was quick to anger, because he wasn’t. Not because he glared, stared, looked over you, through you, or dismissed you altogether as some bosses do.
Someone had to go, or no one was gonna come. That’s baseball in the Motor City in 2002. Fans don’t care. The seats are mostly empty. The saddest part of Phil Garner and Randy Smith’s getting the boot Monday wasn’t that two nice guys couldn’t get the job done.
The saddest part was that it took their firing to let most Detroiters know the season had started.
“Whenever you start off 0-6 it is not pleasant,” said Dave Dombrowski, the team president, in announcing the firing of his manager and general manager.
“I think we’re a better club than we’ve performed.”
Isn’t it a shame,” someone says, “that we only see each other on such sad occasions?”
It is the most common sentence at a funeral. You hear it from relatives, ex-neighbors, friends who moved out of state.
Only death, it seems, can make us slow down long enough to reunite. We hug. We kiss. We share a collective grief, until someone remembers a story that makes someone else smile. And in the end, we are reminded not only of how much we love the dearly departed but also how much we love the ones who are still around.
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