[新聞] Reader's Digest - A Winning Friendship

[minimalism (Minimal)]

十月的讀者文摘有一篇溫馨的文章，
是有關Williams, Rivera, Jeter和Posada四個老洋基的友情故事，
有興趣的就看看吧！=)


A Winning Friendship
Four teammates and the bond that helped make them champions
By Molly O'Neill
Reader's Digest October 2005 issue

圖片：http://0rz.net/d20Jd


Jorge Posada sat in the hallway of a Manhattan hospital in August 2000,
unaware of the usual hospital noises—the squeak of rubber-soled shoes
against the polished floors, the announcements and pages, the rattle of
gurneys being pushed into the pediatric surgery suite. His infant son had
craniosynostosis—a congenital birth defect in which the skull fails to
expand properly to accommodate a child's growing brain—and was about to
undergo a corrective surgery.

After the seven-month old was carried into the operating room by Posada's
wife, Laura, the ballplayer sat, elbows to thighs, head in hands, staring
down at his loafers in the terrible silence that occurs when your child's
life hangs in the balance and there is nothing you can do.

It was early morning, and the silence, said the 34-year-old Yankees
catcher, was unbearable. Only death could be this quiet, he thought.

But sometime after the surgery, on another day, he remembers sensing a
powerful, athletic body take the chair next to his, and like a shift in
the wind, the silence changed.

"Derek didn't say anything," said Posada of shortstop Derek Jeter, a
teammate he has known since 1992 when they played minor0leaguee ball in
Greensboro, North Carolina. "That's the way it is with us. When you're
in it together, you don't always need so many words."

In the five years since, young Jorge has undergone four additional
surgeries and is thriving. Posada spends hundreds of hours a year
raising money for the foundation he created for the research and
treatment of craniosynostosis. His closest teammates—Jeter, center
fielder Bernie Williams and pitcher Mariano Rivera—have donated money
and attended fund-raising events.

"My friends came together around little Jorge," said Posada. "I didn't
have to ask."

The four superstar athletes are the only players remaining since the
Yankees began their amazing ten-year run—seven wins in the American
League Division Series, six League Championships and four World Series
titles.

They have spent 2,200 days working together, playing some 1,500 games
and logging hundreds of thousands of miles on the team plane. As a group
or in pairs, they have shared thousands of restaurant meals, and shopped
together for clothes, cars, stainless steel barbeques and state-of-the-art
home theater systems. They've exchanged investment tips, supported one
another's charities, served in one another's weddings, made fun of one
another and sat in hospitals during family emergencies.

With trading rampant and team alliances constantly shifting, this sort of
continuity is unusual. In a deeply interdependent game, where a single
error can mean that every player loses his post-season bonus, the fact that
the friendship has survived each player's bobbles and slumps as well as the
glory days is remarkable.

The four-way friendship began in 1994 when Posada, Rivera, and Jeter were
playing for the club's triple-A team in Columbus, Ohio. There was,
initially, with Posada and Rivera, the natural connection that occurs
between a pitcher and his catcher. There was also a matter of the movies.

Posada, a family man, and Rivera, who is deeply religious, were not into
partying, and Jeter was too young to get into the bars, so they went to
the movies. "We've seen about a thousand movies together," said Jeter.
"You don't spend that long sitting in a dark place with anybody you don't
love."

By the 1995 post-season, "Jorgie," "Jeet" and "Mo" had been moved to the
Bronx. There, watching the playoff series from the dugout, the friendship,
said Jeter,"really jelled." Like soldiers after the war, the rookies
exhaled.

Eleven years later, they are four—they hooked up with Williams along the
way—and possibly facing their final year together, not that he'll be a
free agent at the end of this season.

Their accord is powerful, constant, palpable. Even as their clubhouse
filled with new additions at spring training this year, the four veterans
remained anchors of the locker room, communicating with one another with
just looks and nods. A glance from Jeter alerted Williams to the approach
of an unfriendly reporter. A look from Williams let the others know that
several well-owned old-timers had entered the room. And when Rivera returned
from the training room—his shoulder fat with ice packs and medical wraps
—a simple nod from Posada asked the pitcher about the state of his arm.

When asked about their friendship, the players exchanged looks of alarm,
followed by stares that dared the other to go first.

As effusive off the field as he is serious and contained on the mound,
Rivera is the eternal jokester in the foursome, the clown who wears his
feelings on his sleeve."I love these guys," he said, his eyes narrowing
slightly as they do in the moment before he releases his fastball. "They
touch my heart deep. They make me better than I am."

His catcher is more circumspect. "Not many people have shared this sort of
experience—the grit, the dream, the separateness," said Posada. "We spend
more time with each other than we do with our families. You almost become
close by default."

Neither this forced intimacy nor the bonds of accomplishment, wealth,
prestige and history fully explain their friendship. "They share a turn of
character that doesn't really have a name," said Joe Torre, the Yankees
manager. "It's the same thing that tells me whether a guy will survive in
New York City or crumble under the pressure."

Whatever that quality is, it yields big hearts and an awareness of one
another that is deeply moving—and highly effective.

Last year, during the first game of the American League Championship Series,
the guys rallied when Rivera returned to New York from the funeral of two
family members who drowned in a tragic accident at Rivera's home in Panama.
As soon as the pitcher appeared in the eighth inning, Jeter and Posada moved
to the mound. In one of the most tender moments in baseball, Jeter's arm
rested on the pitcher's shoulder. Posada gave him a gentle poke in the
stomach, and far away, in center field, Bernie took several steps toward the
infield.

The word real surfaces often, like a mantra, among these four friends. It
is their highest complement, and may be, said Williams, what keeps them
connected to one another in the rarefield world they inhabit. "Some people
get false with it," he said, opening his locker. "We stayed real."

A little later, Jeter watched Williams leave the clubhouse. Wearing a polo
shirt, and sliding his cell phone into his jeans, the tall center fielder
looked like just another guy at a suburban mall as he disappeared through
the door.

"That was one of the first things I noticed about him," said Jeter. "You
can tell by the way a guy carries himself if he is genuine or not." The
reality factor, said the shortstop, is what initially attracted him to
Posada and Rivera as well.


"Those first years are the loneliest," said Posada. "I came here from
Puerto Rico. I didn't know a soul. I'd go home by myself. Once you sign
up and go to the States, you are set apart from your friends at home.
You think you are going to get new friends, but you find out you are
competitors with your teammates and you don't know who to trust."

"I cried myself to sleep every night in the minor leagues," explained
Rivera, returning to his locker from the training room. "I was so lonely.
I couldn't even cry in English, man. Only Spanish."

Except for Jeter, who remains single, the four players all have
family-oriented lives. "Winning draws you together, too," said Williams.
And their multimillion-dollar contracts are another common ground.

"Once you sign a big deal, your family and friends start calling you for
money and stop talking to you about their lives," said Williams. "They
think they are protecting you, but it makes you feel like an outsider.
We turned to each other more and more."

Bernie Williams is the older brother of the group. He is quiet and
analytical. At spring training, straddling a chair in front of his locker,
he leaned forward to talk, intently and eye to eye. A sense of finality
lurks around the edges of his days. He is in the last year of a seven-year
contract, and at 37, he keeps returning to what connects him to the players
he is closest to, to the turn of character they share.

"So much of it has to do with fear and how you handle it," he said. "At
first you are scared about not making it. The fear is selfish, and you use
it to drive yourself. Then, after you make the club, you fear letting down
the team and you use it to keep alert.

"Some guys get big behind the fear; they make themselves out to be more
than they are. I've always stuck with the ones who know it's not them. We
all know who we are, and we all know we're lucky."

Then, as if describing the final fear, the one that, traditionally, has
bedeviled men, the fear of losing their purpose and their friends when they
retire, Williams blurted: "I have no idea what's going to happen after the
game. None. If I think about it, it takes my breath away."

As if sensing a shift in the emotional balance, Jeter glanced sideways
from his locker. Across the clubhouse, Rivera craned his neck, and then he
glanced at Posada. Posada shook his head.

Early in a player's career, fear is simply an energy, an itch. As a player
matures, fear becomes a vision, a picture of one's final game.

"We say we will always be close. But you always think that every moment is
always. An it never is,"said Posada the next day, as the clouds vied with
the sun to dominate the mid-morning light. He joined Williams, Jeter and
Rivera in front of the dugout for photographs, and continued. "I see how
it is, once a guy leaves the game. We're all happy when he comes back, and
there's a lot of catching up, and then there’s this moment when there is
nothing left to say."

A shadow passed over each of the four faces, and the camera began to click,
click, click.

"Hey man, we'll still be talking," said Rivera in his singsong English.
He was seated in the center, and in his excitement, he let loose his arms,
causing the players standing behind him to flinch and lose their
well-practiced smiles. In that instant, affection and habit outweighed
uncertainty. Click, click. The burst of laughter behind him was spontaneous,
contagious—and real.

Earlier in the day, Rivera tried to capture the essence of this friendship.
"I lost a lot when I got money," he said. "I lost a lot more when I got
fame. As time went on, I needed these guys more and more. Other than my
family and God, they are all I got that matters. The rest can go away in
a minute."

Friendship. It doesn't get any more real than that.



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推 CCLu:除非同名同姓，否則作者應該是 Paulie 的大姊。
推 noonecan:哈..蠻有趣的....
推 kennydeluxe:好長喔 >_______________<|||
推 noonecan:就當作高中閱讀測驗看吧...
推 timohu:看電影培養感情XD
推 Baudelaire:Paulie姊姊這麼感性～
→ yen6991:儼然是考驗閱讀能力...Orz..原諒我沒辦法看完Q_Q
推 entire:中文版的是一樣的嗎？
推 minimalism:應該是Paulie的姐姐沒錯，她好像是食物的專欄作家
→ minimalism:to entire, 我也不知道。不過這是最新一期的RD，
→ minimalism:我想就算中文版要翻譯，應該也沒那麼快吧？
推 lulu0408:四個人感情好好..感動!!!