Give an inch

Here’s an amusing post-script to my post about the Heat parade.

At the front of our barricade, before everyone broke free and flooded the streets, we stood next to a rather humorless fellow wearing a Heat-decorated hard hat. He’s the guy on the right of this picture, standing next to my dad.

He seemed to be by himself, and barely said a word. But he clearly had a mission, and that was to get closer to the Heat -- inch by agonizing inch.

There was a cop keeping watch over our barricade, and every time the cop would turn away, the hardhat guy would scoot the barricade an inch or two forward. He eventually enlisted a woman on the opposite side of the barricade to help him, and so after he pushed it a bit on his side, she’d even it out. Then we front-row barricade people would step up an inch, and this incremental shift would ripple back through the hundreds or thousands of people who were behind us.

I don’t know what he thought he was accomplishing. Inches don’t matter -- and if he moved the barricade forward in any significant way, we’d all be in the middle of the street. Somehow, I think the cop would notice that.

My dad and I joked about him as we stood there, and I don’t know what happened to him after the crowd broke free. But three days later, I was flipping through the special Heat edition of Sports Illustrated and, on the top corner of page 12, in a spread introducing a story about Dwayne Wade, was a familiar face:

There he is -- that damn guy, still stone-faced and wearing his hardhat. His photo is an inch or two wide, and now, I admit, I envy that tiny amount of space.

Posted by Jason Feifer at June 27, 2006 08:12 AM