"C’mon now Kyle"

I want to tell you all a story. It was a June afternoon in the summer of 2005 and my buddy George was visiting me in Cincinnati. We’d spent the entire weekend drinking. I believe the night before we ended up getting lost several times in downtown Lexington, hopping from one strip club to the next. We had no business going to a baseball game that Sunday but we did. We were dutiful fans. I remember it as being a lot hotter then 71 degrees. Must have been the booze.

To top it all off, I think I was in the middle of a bloody and intense text message fight with my girlfriend. Things didn’t clear up until the 8th inning when Junior Griffey hit a home run to put the Reds ahead for good and Mr. Happy came back.

We were sitting in the front row that day, right on the Atlanta Braves dugout. Yes, this was the infamous day that Brian Jordan wanted to kick the living dog shit out of me.

As the game began, the Bravos started a young rookie righthander who was trying find his way. That young man was Kyle Davies. Braves fans were excited about the kid, and thought he had a bright future as a guy who’d be the next Smoltz, Maddux, and so on. They were wrong.

Davies gains significance because a heavy set man with a beard and southern accent was sitting behind us. The guy was decked out in Braves gear and a brand new Braves cap. He was a superfan. It became aparent to us that as this man lived and died with every pitch that Davies threw, that he was Kyle Davies’ dad.

He’d throw a strike. Davies’ dad: “You got eeem’ (rhymes with stream) now Kyle!”

Davies would throw a ball. Davies’ dad: “C’mon now Kyle”

Can’t hardly blame the guy. It was his son and he’d came a long way to see him get absolutely fucking bombed by the Reds. But we were in a rotten mood that day. We were up to absolutely no good. Soon we began to look down in the Braves dugout and we found a perfect target, Brian Jordan. Then we started heckling Terry Pendleton. Not really heckling him, in all fairness. We acted like big fans of his, calling out to him “TeePee!”. Pendleton knew though that we were not Braves fans. Then we saw long time base coach Pat Morales. We called out to him in our best mexican voice (sounding like Eddie Guerrero) “Pat Mo-ra-les!”. Morales looked up, threw his hands in the air and asked “What da hell is wrong wit you mang?”

We were still drunk. Refusing to pay the $5.50 for a bottled water which would have been the best thing for us, the dehydration started to set in on the brain. We were just going after anything that moved in the Braves dugout. And Kyle Davies’ dad noticed.

We caught Davies’ daddy staring at us out of the corner of his eye. Every time we looked back at him, he was looking right at us. One of those looks like he wanted to put us in a torture rack.

His boy Kyle went out and did his thing, and was yanked after 4 and 1/3 innings. With that, Davies’ dad packed up his shit, and got the fuck out of dodge. The most amazing thing to me of all. Guy sits there for half of a ballgame and won’t shut up after every pitch, but isn’t a good enough of a fan to try and see if his son’s team can pull out the victory? Well they didn’t. Lucky for Mr. Davies and his boy, we weren’t able to hang the loss on ol’ Kyle. But we’ll never forget Kyle’s daddy and his undying allegiance to his son and only his son. He could have cared less about the other Braves when his boy wasn’t on the mound.