Toughest fan you'll ever meet

[Posted by alaurie_97@yahoo.com]

Toughest fan you'll ever meet
By Rick Reilly
ESPN.com



Ask yourself whether you'd do this: Leave home. Walk 20 minutes to the
train station. Take a 70-minute train ride to Penn Station in New York
City. Weave for 10 minutes over to the subway station. Take a half-
hour D train ride to Yankee Stadium. Navigate the vendors and chaos to
get to your seat.

Now ask yourself: Would you do all that blind?

Jane Lang does it, accompanied at most games by only her Seeing Eye
golden retriever, Clipper. Thirty times a year. At 67 years old.

Which is why she was so gobsmacked Tuesday when she set out from her
home in Morris Plains, N.J., only to find Yankees manager Joe Girardi
and four current and former Yankees waiting on her doorstep.

They didn't have a limo. They didn't have a fleet of Suburbans. They
had only sneakers. They were going to make the journey with her.

"Oh my God!" Jane said.

"We think you're amazing," Girardi said.

"Follow me," Clipper seemed to say.

You have to understand what a two-hour, one-way journey to a baseball
game takes for somebody like Jane. She's been blind since birth, and
these trips have not always turned out well. Once, some kids decided
it would be fun to spin her around a few dozen times. Another time,
she fell onto the subway tracks and was nearly killed. But ever since
she got a guide dog, she's been intrepid.

The whole bizarre troupe: Jane, Clipper, the Yankees, their security
guys, the PR men and the media -- paraded past the florist, Tony's
pizza parlor and the little barbershop where one of the customers came
out to wave and holler at Jane with the apron still around his neck.

It's mind-melting to watch Jane and Clipper make their way down the
clogged streets of Manhattan -- Clipper, taking cues from Jane,
weaving her through a maze of street vendors, suits, iPhone zombies,
boxes, bums, secretaries and scaffolding.

Jane and Clipper walk at we-just-robbed-a-bank speed, which caused
current Yankees pitching star Joba Chamberlain to holler, "Hey! Slow
down!"

Soon Yankees fans figured out what was going on and joined in, along
with nearly everybody in town. By the time they reached the train
station, it looked as though Clipper was leading a marching band.

They crammed aboard the train, whereupon ex-Yankees star Tino Martinez
slumped into his seat. "I can't imagine doing this," he'd say.
Girardi, who was sitting next to Jane, said, "She's amazing. We
should've done this blindfolded to give us an even better idea of what
it's like."

Pah! You think this is hard? Wait 'til they'd see the next leg -- Penn
Station and the streets of Manhattan.

It's mind-melting to watch Jane and Clipper make their way down the
clogged streets of Manhattan -- Clipper, taking cues from Jane,
weaving her through a maze of street vendors, suits, iPhone zombies,
boxes, bums, secretaries and scaffolding.

"And we complain about a little traffic on the Deegan [Expressway],"
Girardi mused, shaking his head.

Usually, when Jane finally gets to the D train and takes her seat, she
feels for eight pieces of candy in her right pocket. Every time the
train stops, she transfers one piece into the opposite pocket. When
there's one piece of candy left, she knows the next stop is Yankee
Stadium. No need this time. The very people she was traveling to see
were telling her it was time to get off.

Once Jane and Clipper reached Gate 6 -- two-and-a-half hours from
start to finish -- Girardi and the players took over. They introduced
her to former Yankees star Paul O'Neill, who let her feel his face.
She touched it the way a sculptor would. They let her hold Babe Ruth's
bat, Joe DiMaggio's hat, the 2000 World Series trophy. She felt the
monuments. When she got to Mickey Mantle's face, she said, "He looks
tired."

You don't know the half of it, lady.

They introduced her to Mariano Rivera and Derek Jeter, who let her
feel his famous mug. And once, when there was finally nobody talking
to her, she crouched down and felt the infield grass as though it were
finely spun silk.

Imagine. She had learned the game as a girl, when her father had set
up a checkerboard like a baseball field and guided her hands over it.
She's been in love with baseball ever since. Now she was getting a
guided, one-woman tour of the very heart of it.
.
"I'm the luckiest person in the world," she purred. "I always have
known there were three different things I always wanted: a house with
a roof that didn't leak, someone to love me and kids. And now I got
this. It's the utmost frosting, you know what I mean? I'll never get
sick of this frosting!"

Tuesday was just one day of the Yankees' Hope Week, a genius idea
dreamed up by their public relations extraordinaire, Jason Zillo, who
seems to have an addiction to helping people in ways nobody has
thought of before. The Yankees gave $10,000 in Jane's honor to The
Seeing Eye Inc., a place in Morristown, N.J., that trains guide dogs.

Still, the day was Jane's, and strong, young millionaires kept coming
up to her, praising her guts, skills and moxie. To which Jane would
only shrug and say, "This is just my way of being free and living in
the world the way it is."

And as she stood there relishing the moment, it made a person think
that the world the way it is can be awfully sweet.

Special reporting by George Lenker.