A night with Rip

Today is a special day for me. Because tonight, I'm going to see my childhood hero again, Mr. Cal Ripken Jr. Cal is speaking tonight at the Hershey Lodge in a benefit banquet for The Second Mile. Check out more on the organization and evening here. Hey look at that! I learned how to put links into these posts! Didn't think I'd ever figure that one out.

Anyway, my wife surprised me with two tickets to this event for my upcoming birthday (which is May 4 by the way, in case any of you want to send me cards with money in them. Lots of money). If any of you have read my columns in the Chronicle over the past four years, you probably have a pretty good idea how I feel about Cal. I grew up a short 30 minute drive from Memorial Stadium and Oriole Park, and in the 80s, 90s and early 2000s, there was no athlete I looked up to more than Rip. In fact, I implore you to find any Oriole fan under 35 who says that Rip wasn't their favorite player. Now, some of the older O's fans will argue to the death that Brooks Robinson was better than Cal – it's sort of an ongoing thing between the two generations. But every Orioles fan adores Ripken, and I'm no different. He's a homegrown boy who gave every thing he had to his hometown team and is now a hall of famer. There isn't many professional athletes today you could say that about.

My basement is filled with Ripken memorabilia. Framed jerseys, bobbleheads, autographed baseballs, Wheaties boxes, baseball cards, plaques, clocks, it's borderline insane actually. But there are two things there that I cherish in that room above all – a photo taken of me when I was 7-years-old with Cal at the Aberdeen, Md. Moose Lodge and a column I wrote in the Chronicle about Cal's Hall of Fame induction that he read and signed and mailed back to me. A man who works with my mom (to whom I mailed a copy of the column too, since she's just as big of a Cal fan as I am) told her that he knew Cal's PR person and that he was going to give him the column to give to Cal. Sure enough, he did, and Rip read it, signed it and mailed it back to me. You can imagine my shock when I saw that someone I looked up to so much took the time to read my little old column and sign it and send it back to me. It remains my biggest professional honor to date. That's the kind of guy Cal is. The kind of guy that poses for photos with nervous 7-year-olds and signs and mails columns to a small town newspaper guy 20 years later.

So you can see why I'm excited and how lucky I am to have such a wife to think of me and get me tickets for tonight. Cal's only the speaker, and I highly doubt I'll get to shake his hand or get a photo (although I'd love to get one and hang it next to the one I already have of the two of us...20 years later), but I'll still be in the same room as greatness. Just like I was in the same stadium as greatness all those hot days in the bleachers on 33rd Street and at Oriole Park in Baltimore when he was playing. Just like I was in the same grassy field as greatness the day my mom and I were in Cooperstown to see Cal get enshrined in the Hall of Fame.

Maybe I go overboard on this kind of stuff, maybe not. One thing's for sure though, today I feel just like I did when I was 7 and about to meet Cal for the first time. Like nervous little kid.

But it's not just about meeting Cal, it's about helping a fantastic organization like The Second Mile. After all, the real purpose of tonight is to help their cause. So really, it's going to be a great night all around.

You know, we all have this notion of what it would be like to be professional athletes. How we'd never turn down an autograph and how we'd be regular people and appreciate every game and blah, blah, blah. The truth is that most of us, unless Gene Garber happens to be reading this blog, have NO idea what being a pro athlete is like. Not to mention being a superstar. But Cal humanizes it for all of us. Sure he didn't sign every single autograph (it would be impossible), and it still irks me when I meet people who say they "hate" him because he turned down their autograph one time 15 years ago. I feel comfortable saying that there isn't a major league player who has spent more time signing autographs for FREE in the last 50 years that Rip. He cared about the fans of Baltimore and we cared about him. And on the night he broke Lou Gehrig's record, he connected with us. Not just in the lap he took around the field, but in the look in his eyes. Look at the photo above. He was touched by the outpouring and he knew that he meant something to us. And we meant something to him.

OK, enough of the mushy stuff.

Enjoy the weekend Elizabethtown.

Cheers.