Murphy: For Utley, a nice place to visit
LONG BEFORE the bittersweet collision of what once was and what might have been, an old man walked past a wooden door and paused. This was early afternoon on a Tuesday, the middle of the season's penultimate month, six weeks to go, sun still high over the
LONG BEFORE the bittersweet collision of what once was and what might have been, an old man walked past a wooden door and paused. This was early afternoon on a Tuesday, the middle of the season's penultimate month, six weeks to go, sun still high over the upper bowl. The ensuing hours would bring with them a long parade of memories that would flicker in the thick evening air like the light from a distant storm: the crowd, the roar, the song, the pawing of the dirt; later, the snap of the wrists, the flash of the bat, the crack of the aforementioned collision, a streak of white rising like an apparition toward the wall in right-center. Once upon a time, all the days felt like this. Once upon a time, home was a slice of rubber surrounded by dirt. Once upon time, it was all that existed.
Now, home is a door. No visitors allowed. On Tuesday afternoon, Chase Utley walked past it at his usual time, along the same route he followed for 13 years, from the parking lot to the ramp to the concrete corridor. And then, for the first time in his life, he kept on walking.
"It's a little weird," he said later as he reflected on his trip to the visitors' clubhouse at Citizens Bank Park. "I don't think I spent more than 10 minutes on that side over the course of the years I was here."
Buildings are fascinating things. Mystical, almost. Life has a funny way of fooling us into thinking that we are the constant, that everything around us is an extension of our personal existence, like water for a fish. Perhaps we cannot fully understand the version of ourself that exists in a place until we remove ourself from it. Perhaps it is only through a prism of impermanence that we can see the reality of a place. There is brick, there is mortar, there is grass. And there is us, finite projections upon an unchanging backdrop.
For 10 minutes on Tuesday afternoon, Utley sat behind a microphone and talked about these things. He didn't always put them into words, but, then, some things don't change. His 13 seasons in Phillies red were a dichotomy of sorts. There was Utley the public figure: stern, unflinching, unresponsive to the near-pleading adulation that surrounded him each night. Guys like Jimmy Rollins, Ryan Howard, Brian Dawkins, Allen Iverson, you felt like you knew them, albeit to varying degrees. Not only did they appear to enjoy what they did for a living, they also appeared to enjoy doing it in front of other human beings, particularly the ones who lived in this city. It was a complex enjoyment, no doubt, but the same can be said of any genuine interpersonal relationship. There are a lot of layers to love, the most rewarding of which cannot exist without the most trying.
Utley was different. Behind closed doors, he was known for his dry wit and clubhouse pranks. His leadership style was more action than talk, but he knew when to pick his spots. He took younger players under his wing in a manner that earned him respect. Yet he rarely if ever opened that side of himself up to the public, to an extent that you sometimes wondered whether he would be just at home playing in an empty stadium as a park packed with 40,000-plus each night.
"I never really made it look easy out there," Utley said. "There are so many times I'd meet a father with his son or even a mother who would praise the way I played, and would tell me they want their son to play that way. To me, that's a true compliment."
When Utley and the Dodgers arrived at the park for the start of a three-game series, you might have been less curious about the fans' reaction to him than his reaction to them. It ended in a hurry late last August, days before the final trade deadline, Utley out of the lineup, the rumor mill churning. It seemed an appropriate exit for an athlete who had always shunned the spotlight. Turns out, Utley didn't see it that way.
"I didn't really have an opportunity to say goodbye," Utley said. "I think I said this to some of you guys in LA, if I were to write up a script it would have gone a bit differently."
So there he was, walking past that familiar door, in through a new one, onto a circle of dirt he'd pawed thousands of times before. All around him was a roar he'd spent a career ignoring. They stood for 90 seconds, holding signs, waving No. 26 jerseys, thinking about those bygone days. As the umpire and catcher shrank back from the box, Utley stepped outside the chalk and lifted his helmet. In a slow pirouette, he pointed to each section of the stadium, and when the roar continued, he stepped outside the box and did it again. He homered in the fifth. He hammered a grand slam in the seventh. After it was over, he climbed back behind the microphone and smiled.
"It was a little overwhelming," he said. "That first at-bat was probably the most nervous at-bat I've had at any level."
Maybe there is a level of absence that a man can not notice until his return, when the things around him exist not as they are but as he remembered them to be. Only then he can understand permanence. Only then can he see the things that always will be. Only then can he understand what it meant when he was one of those guys who walked through that door.