The Saturday Game
Eric Neel / ESPN.com
I played on my wedding day.
It was a closed game with friends who were in town for the festivities. We started at 8 in the morning, in a middle school gym in Kalona, Iowa. It was late June and steam-bath hot; guys were swigging Gatorade going up and down the floor, like runners hitting checkpoints in a marathon. I had a terrible day, short-arming everything on my way to an 0-for-8, I think, and was positively abused on the blocks by my old friend John. But still, it was beautiful. There was no place I’d rather have been. In fact, I was a little late to the ceremony after trying to squeeze in one more game that morning, and if you look closely, you can see I mucked up the pictures a bit with a fresh sweat line around my collar and a blotchy boiled pink in my cheeks.
This is the first thing I tell Dave, one of The Saturday Game originals, when we meet. The wedding day run is my most faithful gesture, my most devoted act. I offer it in tribute, and as a kind of shibboleth.
“Sounds like a near-perfect day to me,” he says. “If only you’d hit some shots …”
Dave knows a thing or two about faith and devotion. He’s 65 years old, New York born and bred, and he has been playing in The Saturday Game, in the same grade-school gymnasium in New Rochelle, N.Y., just north of New York City, for 35 years. The Saturday Game began in 1971, and it’s continued, from Labor Day to Memorial Day, every year since. Dozens of guys have played in that time, many for 20 years or more, and two of them for the entire run of the game.
