Vision of Happiness

For years "Miriam from Forest Hills" has been one of the great hockey callers in New York sports-talk radio. "Ya gotta beat that goaltender top shelf!" she'd insist. "Why don't these guys know that?"

She lives for her New York Islanders, having missed only two of their radio broadcasts in the team's 30-year history. In her tiny apartment in the Forest Hills section of Queens, N.Y., score books and audiotapes of Islanders games are stacked floor to ceiling, so many that she has only half of her single bed to sleep in.

Yet she had never attended an Islanders game.

When the team's vice president of communications, Chris Botta, found that out not long ago, he vowed to get her to a game and offered up two guest passes, hers for the taking. There was one detail.

Miriam is blind -- has been since birth.

Living with her cat, Joey, and on a fixed income, Miriam had always thought that going to an Islanders game wasn't only too expensive, it was also inconceivable. This is a woman who waits for six-for-a-dollar sales on the spiral notebooks that she uses to keep score in Braille. This is a woman who sticks her radio between cans of chicken soup on the windowsill to get better reception.

"The Islanders are a way for me to talk to the sighted world," says Miriam, a 51-year-old native of Queens who has ruddy cheeks, short gray hair and gray eyes she doesn't hide behind sunglasses. "It's something safe [to talk about], you know?"

It's how she kids the cop on the corner. "What happened to your silly Rangers last night?" she'll chide him, as she crosses the street with her white cane. And he'll kid back, "Yeah? They'll still kill your Islanders next week!"

Sports gives her a family -- the radio audience of Joe Benigno's 1-to-5:30 a.m. show on WFAN. She calls in regularly to be with them. It's a family she knows like the floor plan of her apartment but has never seen: Doris from Rego Park (she's had some health problems) and Bruce from Bayside (he likes cats) and Short Al from Brooklyn (his wife passed away recently).

So that was enough for Miriam -- until Botta wouldn't take no for an answer. He offered to pick her up at her apartment and take her to Nassau Coliseum, home of the Islanders. Suddenly, Miriam was about to go to a place where she'd gone for 30 years but had never actually been to. "I think she was a little worried," Botta recalls. "For 30 years she's had this ideal of what it was. She was afraid that actually going there might ruin it for her."

Miriam swallowed hard and went.

As soon as Botta walked her up the steps into the arena, she started noticing all the things that don't get through the little speaker in her radio -- "the smell of the hot dogs and potato chips and coffee," she says. "And the fans chanting the same things I chant at home: 'Let's go, Islanders!' It was great to know there are people out there doing the same things I do at home."

She touched the arms of the men whose voices she'd spent thousands of nights with -- Howie Rose, the Islanders' TV voice, and John Wiedeman, the radio voice. She sat in the team's sky-high radio booth and tried to make herself believe she was really there. "It's so weird to hear the fans' voices beneath you," Miriam kept saying that night.

She hugged Islanders legend Clark Gilles. She held the hand of star center Michael Peca, never letting go through the whole conversation. She got to ask superstar scorer Alexei Yashin how to say, "Will you help me cross the street?" in Russian, a phrase that would come in handy in her heavily Russian neighborhood.

She was given an Islanders jersey, much too big, and she wears it almost every day, constantly feeling the embroidered logo with her right hand. She got an islanders media sticker to put on her ski jacket. Botta took her into the Nassau Coliseum club, got the crowd's attention and had the host of the postgame radio program introduce the famous "Miriam from Forest Hills, here for her first Islanders game ever!" The patrons gave her a standing O.

So who cared if the Islanders lost 3-2 that night?

Botta saved the best thing for last. He took her onto the ice, where her heroes have fought for 30 years. Miriam bent down and scooped up a handful of the ice shavings carved by the players' skates and brought it to her face.

We forget sometimes what sports mean in this country. We get lost in the players' salaries and the standings and who's going to pay for a new arena. But sometimes, for people like Miriam, the playing of the game is a joy in itself, win or lose. For them it's a place where a square peg can fit into a round-hole world.

After 30 years, somebody cared enough to look into a cramped little apartment and take her to a part of that world she never dreamed she'd reach -- let her smell it and hear it and touch it. And when the night was over, on the ride home, a giddy Miriam turned to Botta and said, "You know, everything was just like I pictured." Botta just grinned.

Some Christmas gifts you keep forever.

Issue date: December 30, 2002

Don't miss The Life of Reilly (Total/SPORTS ILLUSTRATED, $22.95) -- a best-of compilation of Rick Reilly's columns and features, with a foreword written by Charles Barkley, available online and at bookstores everywhere.

 

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