People ask me why I love Birmingham.
They ask me why to love Birmingham, the third-largest city in Alabama, now, a gritty place that has known violence its whole life, that has seen too much of it lately. It is a city that has lost people and luster, in the eyes of some.
But I do love this place. For moments that come, as they have done throughout my lifetime, as they did at Rickwood Field on Thursday night.
I’ve seen games. I have seen things that touched me in this town. But not quite like this.
I saw 81,000 people pour into Legion Field for an Olympic game in 1996. It was the sixth largest crowd to see a soccer game on U.S. soil at the time, and Claudio Reyna scored 28 seconds in to put the underdog U.S. men’s team on top of heavily favored Argentina. Argentina would come back to win, but it was magic. Until the shuttle system designed to transport fans to and from the stadium failed.
I saw Michael Jordan play baseball at the Hoover Met. A moment in time and culture. He struck out, but it didn’t matter. It is enough, sometimes, to stand in the presence of greatness.
I’ve seen 42,000 people show up at Legion Field for a high school game. I’ve seen the World Games and Olympic events and an NCAA Regional when an upstart UAB team made a miracle and knocked off Ralph Sampson’s UVA team to make the Elite Eight. I’ve seen Alabama and Auburn games and the return of UAB football. I’ve seen the PGA and minor league hockey and half a dozen upstart football leagues that brought me closer to my father and my kids and my city. They won more than they lost.
But I never saw a game like the one on Thursday night. Two days after the death of Fairfield’s own Willie Mays the world watched Birmingham host the San Francisco Giants and the St. Louis Cardinals to honor the Negro Leagues in the oldest ballpark in America.
It was fitting that it was the summer solstice, the longest day of the year, because it was the kind of day that ought not end.
It was a moment when visitors from California and Missouri talked of Birmingham as a pleasant surprise, when men and women from Hoover and Trussville and Mountain Brook spoke of being “from Birmingham,” when a place at times fragmented by geography and politics and race turned to goodwill to make itself whole again.
People of all description cheered the Birmingham Black Barons and the San Francisco Sea Lions and the legacy of players living and long gone. The 99-year-old Rev. Bill Greason, a former Negro Leagues player and the first Black pitcher for the St. Louis Cardinals, threw out the first pitch. It bounced at the plate, but it was beautiful.
And the crowd roared.
Perhaps this magic could only happen in a ballpark without luxury boxes, without flash or glitz or the comforts of today’s billion dollar stadiums. Barry Bonds and Derek Jeter and John Smoltz and Ken Griffey Jr. walked the Rickwood aisles, as if they were regular folk.
And Rickwood is a regular folk kind of place. Steel and wood and green paint and memory, where the lineups are still written in chalk for nostalgia’s sake and the origins of this town are in the air. It is easy, in such a place, to appreciate the brilliance of a setting sun in the skies over Fairfield, or the moon smiling broadly over downtown Birmingham.
People ask me what there is to love about this town, this place with a dirty face and a bit of a mean streak and a history baked in anger and injustice.
I tell them that they don’t understand.
For it is our grit that made us, the iron dust and the smoke and soot and pain. It was in the crucible of our racial strife that we were, in ways, smelted and melted and formed into something brand new. Not perfect. Not shiny. Not for everybody.
But not what we used to be.
We are smaller than we once were, less certain of ourselves, perhaps. But we are, in ways, more than we used to be.
In moments like this we see ourselves. Kindred. Connected. Together. On Thursday, the world saw it, too.
Oh. And the shuttles ran on time.
John Archibald is a two-time Pulitzer winner