[新聞] Yankees help with healing at Virginia Tech
http://tinyurl.com/3dd783
BLACKSBURG, Va. - The buses pulled up a little before 11:30 a.m., idling in
front of Burruss Hall. Normally, that is where organized campus tours of
Virginia Tech begin; yesterday, it was just the place where the healing
continued.
Yankees general manager Brian Cashman sat at the front of the first bus,
captain Derek Jeter at the front of the second. One by one, all of the
Yankees' traveling party stepped out and walked through the memorial
dedicated to the 32 people killed here last April when a gunman opened fire
in a dormitory and on classrooms. The memorial is 32 stones, arranged in a
horseshoe, with about 2 feet between them. One name on each, with one larger
stone in the middle. An Easter lily lay in the center of it all.
Jeter was near the front of the group. He moved slowly, peering at each
stone. Then he came upon the No. 2 jersey that had been placed next to a
stone near the end. "I just wanted him to see it," said Marcy Crevonis, a
19-year-old sophomore, who put the shirt beside the stone honoring her slain
fiance, Michael Pohle of New Jersey. Jeter saw it. Then he saw Crevonis
standing nearby. She was wearing a Yankees shirt with a picture of Pohle
screened on the back, and she turned around to show it to Jeter.
"Would you sign on his face?" she said, and he obliged. When she asked for a
picture, he agreed again, but said he would do it only if she smiled.
"And she did smile," he said later.
It was that sort of afternoon. Smiles and giddiness from the Virginia Tech
fans and players over the Yankees being here, sprinkled with moments or
memories that reminded everyone about what had brought them here in the first
place. Final scores never matter much in spring training anyway, and the 11-0
win for the Yanks mattered even less than usual.
"I think it was very important for us to be here, to be present," Alex Rod-
riguez said. "To come here to Virginia Tech, to unite with them for a day.
... This is the proudest I've ever been to wear a Yankee uniform."
Some of the Yankees, such as Jeter and Jorge Posada, have done this before,
have seen how baseball can somehow help after a tragedy. When the Yankees
visited with victims' families following 9/11, they weren't sure how they
helped, but they knew they did. People told them. It was the same here.
Standing on the field before the game, Theresa Walsh, who graduated from
Virginia Tech last year, said the Yankees' presence "gives people hope."
Walsh was in Norris Hall on the morning of April 16, and she heard the
clattering of gunshots from inside her classroom. She poked her head out the
door to see what was happening, and saw the shooter, senior Seung-Hui Cho,
down the hall. He turned and fired at her, bullets whizzing by her ear and
lodging in the wall. She dove back inside the classroom and locked the door,
praying Cho would not come in her direction.
"You don't want to dwell on it," she said quietly, standing behind home plate
as the Hokies took batting practice. Then she said, "It was surreal. It was
just very surreal."
During a pregame ceremony, Virginia Tech officials presented Yankees
officials - including general partner Hal Steinbrenner - with nameplates made
out of Hokie stone, a type of limestone that is used in buildings all over
campus. Then there was a moment of silence in memory of the victims, followed
by a 32-balloon release, the orange orbs floating softly into the breeze.
"It was one more way to say goodbye," said Sean O'Brien, the Hokies' senior
first baseman from Chappaqua.
O'Brien got to talk with most of the Yankees after they reached base, and
Jeter graciously gave him a pair of batting gloves as a gift. O'Brien said he
also enjoyed chatting with Johnny Damon after Damon led off the game with a
walk, though O'Brien admitted his focus wasn't what it should have been, and
Jeter's subsequent line drive got past him for an error.
It was O'Brien's first error of the season (A-Rod made one, too, an inning
later) and he's a ballplayer, so he was disappointed. Just not as much as he
would have been on any other day.
Everyone took away something different. For some Hokies, it was simply
getting the chance to be around major-leaguers. At one point during batting
practice, a slew of Hokies ran up to O'Brien, a team captain, with huge grins
on their faces, shrieking about how the Yankees had changed their plans and
were now going to stay in town for the evening. "Jeter said, 'So what are we
doing tonight?' " one of them said, and O'Brien could only stare in disbelief.
Jeter was, of course, just kidding, but the Hokies' giddiness looked real.
They just wanted to be near the Yankees; when the Yankees were doing their
pregame hitting, the Virginia Tech players stopped warming up and simply
stood around the batting cage, watching.
Manager Joe Girardi's most memorable moment came when he visited with
legendary Hokie football coach Frank Beamer in the middle of the game. Taking
a trip into the stands, Girardi sat with Beamer and talked about the recovery
process the campus is enduring.
"A young woman came up and told me that her brother had died, had been in the
shooting," Girardi said afterward, choking up slightly as he spoke. "Then she
said that her mother said 'Thank you' to us for coming."
It was an emotional moment for Girardi, and there were plenty others. The
deepest feeling among the Yankees, though, wasn't with Girardi or A-Rod or
even Jeter when he signed the back of Crevonis' shirt. It was with Brian
Brennan, a spring intern with the Yankees in Tampa who works as a clubhouse
attendant at Legends Field. He normally wouldn't have been on the trip at all,
but he asked for special permission to come along so he could see the stone
for his high school friend, Ross Alameddine, who died at age 20 only because
he happened to sign up for a particular French class that met in Norris Hall
on Monday mornings.
Sitting in the back of the locker room while the Yankees changed out of their
uniforms late yesterday afternoon, Brennan talked about the strangeness of
that realization, and how he and other friends spent last April 16 posting on
Alameddine's "wall" on Facebook as they watched the news unfold on television.
"Let us know you're OK," they wrote. "We haven't heard from you."
They never did. Brennan wasn't sure how it would feel to walk past his
friend's stone, and he said, "It was tough, really tough." Then he
straightened up. "But it's good that people can see it, that it's permanent
there," he said. "It will be there for everyone to see forever."
As much as anything, that is what this game was truly about. There was
healing. There was baseball. And 11 months after a day everyone will always
remember, the Yankees and Hokies had a day that none of them will ever forget.
其實滿感人的.....有小洋蔥 Q__Q
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