9/17/2011 8:02:53 PM
FORT MYERS, Fla. - No morning post today because I was busy running back and forth between Terry Park and the Red Sox 5-Plex. No afternoon post because I was busy writing the stories I was after at Terry Park and the 5-Plex. No early evening post because ... I was looking for an angle and I thought I had found one.
It was a great day of baseball at the WWBA Florida Qualifer on Saturday. The weather was beautiful - sure it was hot, but there was never a threat of rain and quite tolerable all things considered. I put together stories about Palm Beach Select and SWFL 18u and, of course, both teams lost their games a couple of hours after I interviewed the head coaches. It's no "Sports Illustrated Cover Jinx" by any means, and both of the men I talked to were confident of their teams' chances at this tournament. A 1-1 record heading into the final day of pool-play on Sunday isn't a death knell.
There was one last game being played at Terry Park that started at 7 p.m. when I left just before 8 p.m. My mission was simple. I was in Florida with the biggest early season college football game of the year to be played between No. 1 Oklahoma and No. 5 Florida State scheduled to kickoff at 8 p.m. I raced back to my hotel and dumped my bags, and then made my way downstairs to Shoeless Joe's Sports Cafe, which is linked by the hip to the hotel lobby and is the hotel's official restaurant. I've spent many hours in Shoeless, and was quite aware they have a large, covered, open-air outdoor seating area with no less than eight outdoor television sets. The inside of the restaurant has dozens more TVs, and I was sure I would be sitting in a field of college football clover.
I arrived at the outdoor area, and much to my horror I discovered they had kareoke going on. One of the biggest football games in the country was on TV, I was in Florida where one of the teams involved in that game was located, and this "sports cafe" was offering kareoke. To be honest, I don't even know if I'm spelling that correctly, that's how far out of the loop I am. There wasn't a seat inside, so I jumped in my car and headed over to the old standby "Cheeseburger", just a couple of blocks on the other side of a huge mall.
You should know that it was not at all important for me to watch this game; I just thought it would be cool to be in Florida with rabid fans going nuts while I waited for the Navy Seals to show up and rescue the likes of the innocent bystanders, like myself. I once watched a college basketball game between Maryland and North Carolina in a Baltimore sports bar back in the early 90s and that's about what it came down to.
Anyway, Cheeseburger was cool for awhile, even though I was somewhat taken aback when all the help on both sides of the bar greeted me by my first name when I first walked in. It was all so casual: "How you doing, Jeff." "Where you've been keeping yourself, Jeff." All the usual stuff you would expect to hear from employees of an estalishment in the city in which you live. Never mind that I live 1,400 miles away from this particular place. I like to think the familiarity comes not from the frequency with which I have walked through the front door over the last 10 months, but with the fact that I'm an incredibly huge tipper. Perhaps not.
Anyway - and the rest of this I have written down on two bev-naps - about 6 minutes into the OU-FSU game, two guys with guitars started playing on a stage inside the joint that I had never noticed before. About the same time, a 20-something couple came in and sat down next to me, and when the guitar duo took a short break between "Horse With No Name" and "Sweet Home Alabama" - don't ask me how they made that musical transition so seamlessly - I asked the young man (who was wearing a Florida Gators jersey) where the folks in southwest Florida invest their loyalty.
"This is a place where college football isn't that big of deal," he said, obviously annoyed that I had distracted him from his very attractive date. "Here in Fort Myers, when it comes to football, it's all the (Tampa Bay) Bucs. Maybe a little bit of the (Miami) Dolphins."
I left him alone. On one of the nine TVs that circled the bar at Cheeseburger, the tender had on the Brewers-Reds baseball game. I was captivated.