[ifspuds]

The Story Will Never Finish
by Langford Thomason
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Walk through the Pirates clubhouse. The locker between Ben Trome and Terrell Phillips hasn't changed. The #8 jersey still hangs there. There's a battered black leather outfielder's glove, cleats, the usual paraphernalia of the ballplayer's clubhouse home. They wait for their owner to come back and don the tools of the trade, to flash them in the transcendent fashion they have come to expect over the long seasons.

There are few words I've had to write that are harder than these:

He will not be back.

Asa Booker is gone from us, from his teammates, his fans, his opponents, his family. That absent locker is an unmistakeable emblem of the hole the tragic, senseless accident of April 4th left in all of our lives.

The joy, so infectious and invigorating after the improbable march to the 1973 World Series championship, is utterly absent from this place. Conversations are quiet, when they occur. Most can't even look at the place where Asa Booker used to stand and provide his dry wit to his teammates before games, after wins and losses alike. "Book never raised his voice," says Ben Trome. "He never had to, you just found yourself wanting to listen. He could see right to the heart of something and deliver some comment that'd have you howling, laughing on the floor. Even if it was about you."

Trome sits at his own locker, rubbing the palm of his glove with a calloused right hand. "It rubs -- rubbed, I guess -- some guys wrong, first time they come in here. They want the same fire and passion he left on the field. That's just it though, he left it all on the field. Outside of playing baseball, he just wanted to be."

I think back to the jubilant celebration after the 1973 World Series, when Asa Booker told me that he couldn't wait for spring training to arrive. Like Trome said, when I first met Asa Booker I found him aloof, cold. As I came to understand him better, I knew better. Still, I had never seen such giddy glee in his eyes as I did that night. He told me he felt like he was 25 again, that he could play for 10 more years. I want to shake my fists at the sky and demand the universe explain itself, that it would rob us of one of the most electric, proudest, most brilliant players ever to grace this beautiful game.

Newly minted general manager Victor Boudet recalls the conversation he had with Booker before that fateful plane flight. "He didn't say much. He came in and said, 'Vic, I'd like to go home and help. Please.'" Boudet shakes his head, eyes down. "I offered to charter him a plane myself, but he wanted to take care of it. That's the way he was. He never wanted anyone to do anything for him that he could do just fine on his own. Maybe if I'd insisted, he'd still be here."

We're all -- everyone even peripherally associated with the Pirates franchise -- wondering if there was anything we could have done to prevent it. It's consumed the 25 men in the clubhouse since Opening Day, clearly the reason the team is sleepwalking through the early 1974 season.

"Me and Book had it all planned out," says Levi Sellers. "Another year, maybe two, when we're both retired, we're gonna spend a month sitting on a boat in the middle of some lake, middle of nowhere, and not say a damn thing. Just put a line in the water and let it all wash over us." Sellers shakes his head. "It's gonna be a long damn time before I can put that boat back in the water," he murmurs, and then face lights up. "Man, he could fish. You should have seen this time me and him..." The story never finishes.

The story of Asa Booker and what he gave to us all will never finish. I hope and pray that it's never forgotten.