Unconscionable Ball-Breakers

Youth is sometimes defined by how much you can cram into a given Saturday. There was a time when you could try to attend the Mets home opener at Shea, have it rained out after a two-hour delay and some miserable beers in the Bullpen Lounge within Shea's ancient bowels, then take the pre-John Rocker-era 7 train to Times Square and watch a matinee screening of Anaconda, then catch a horribly unpopular New Jersey Transit bus at Port Authority to Giants Stadium to watch the MetroStars open another MLS season, also in the rain, only without the glamorous tandem of Jon Voight and Jennifer Lopez to keep things interesting.

That was an actual agenda one Saturday several years back, when the lure appeared to be a combination of free tickets, rigged press credentials and having to cross both the East River (which is really a sluice), the Hudson River and the Passaic River to have tickets torn by ushers and to smuggle beers into a pair of large stadia.

In Queens, Preston Wilson was supposed to make big noise that season for the Mets. The image of a nerdy Mets-fan couple standing in driving-force wind, their Dunkin' Donuts rain ponchos blowing straight out, hunched over a Shea parking-lot trash can as they tried to empty the remains of an ice cream sundae out of their souvenir Mets mini-helmet bowls-well, all that could be done was the singing of the Navy Hymn. Minutes later, soaked but warm inside the Loews Astor Place theater, Ice Cube delivered his immortal line, "They got snakes this big around here? I'm goin' back to L.A.!" And out in East Rutherford, ye olde AstroTurf at Giants Stadium was a virtual slip 'n' slide on which the Metros chased the gaudy sky-blue and grass-green striped MLS orb that carries no weight as an object of any importance in this particular sports market, despite the immigrant population wired with an almost-daily fix of soccer, both on the local scrimmage front and the satellite-tv party circuit.

They don't know what they're missing.

Mets home openers, Anaconda and any obscure MetroStars game in April will always be chain-linked in my particular sports pop culture time capsule.

Anaconda 2 came out at the wrong time this year, otherwise I would have timed another opening day round-up divided by precipitation and multiplied by a moving-picture show at a Times Square cinema, perhaps an entry from the action genre.

This weekend's flop: MetroStars vs. Kansas City at Giants Stadium. It's on Saturday night. Why not check your local listings and see how many rivers you can cross?