I saw Messi and it was...
nice.
In the mid-1970s, when I was a child, I became obsessed with a baseball player named Rod Carew. He played for the Minnesota Twins and was eventually traded to a team not far from where I lived—the California Angels. With my parents, I had the chance to go see this legendary hitter in person, someone whose career I had been following closely. I remember bringing along my little Instamatic-style camera and taking a picture of Rod Carew as he walked toward the dugout.
I don’t have that picture anymore, but I’ve recreated a pretty good facsimile of it, and I’m going to show it to you here.
Curiously, something very similar happened decades later when I went to see another athlete I’d become fascinated with—Lionel Messi. Like Carew, I had followed Messi’s career closely. And when I saw him live in the stadium, I found myself—just like every other fan in the crowd—pulling out my phone and taking picture after picture of him. This is not a facsimile, but an unaltered picture I took of him that day.
The amazing thing is that, looking through those photos later, I realized that the best ones of Messi, as above, looked remarkably like that old picture I once took of Rod Carew nearly 50 years ago, or at least as I remember it. There’s something sweet about that—about not changing, about some thread from my childhood resonating all the way into the present.
I don’t remember whether I saw Rod Carew get a hit that day with the Angels. But I do know I saw Messi score a goal in a stadium in Minnesota—and I was lucky enough to be there because my friend Jim took me to the game.
Both players, I think, were past their peak when I saw them in person. That made the experience a little bittersweet, seeing them after their most brilliant moments had already passed. But it also felt like a kind of acknowledgment, a completion of something, to witness them with my own eyes. And for that, I’m grateful.
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