Relay: What’s in a Game?
“You have to write the piece that goes with this rap: ‘No Conca, no movie theater, no diner, no Black Buoy. (Variety Store? You’re right, it’s still there.)’ ” This from a book editor quoting back to me my lament for the wreckage of Sag Harbor.
I’d emailed her in the fall, I forget why, maybe because she’s a parent too, and so seemed to agree that the emotional crater left behind by the disappeared Conca D’Oro pizza parlor was going to be particularly difficult to crawl out of — the kid hangout, the antithesis of Hamptons pretension, the throwback, if not exactly to a time of a gas station on every corner, at least to those days when from downtown you could make out the distant whine of engines up in the woods at the Bridgehampton Racetrack, a siren call to something, anything, happening out here.
The vacant Conca storefront may have been in the back of my mind as I crammed in the next best dinner I could think of on a Monday night, a couple of Pierson High booster club frankfurters in sweet white-bread buns, one French’s-only as a starter, another as the main course squirted with two different colorful streams of condiment for variety, the meal finished off with the butt end of my fourth-grade daughter’s leftover mess, all ingested in mere seconds as the Whalers and Bees warmed up in preparation for their recent tête-à-tête, and all three dogs for 4 bucks, the nice booster lady had informed me, math I’m still trying to figure out.
About the game, for you parental units out there skeptical of teens these days, let me put it this way: Effort was not an issue, was in fact in ferocious evidence, particularly on Pierson’s part, the boys hammering the boards and raining threes without the help of their thousand-point man, Will Martin. He was missed more in the bleachers, as he’s fun to watch, this baby-faced assassin who’ll smoke your ass flat-footed as he slashes to the hoop, then calmly floats back up the floor, blond head cocked to one side like he’s negotiating the inclined deck of Captain Havens’s whaling vessel in a heavy swell.
As for the Bees, they looked like a team not used to playing together, as my wife put it, incisively, I thought. Maybe next year.
Yet for all the shouting and high spirits, what ghost was that haunting the Sag Harbor gym? For the visitors too. I mean, Bridgehampton: What’s to become of you? How many more regular folks can you stand to lose to the saner economies of the Carolinas? How many more 19th-century houses have to come down?
And those kids sacrificing their bodies for the sake of a loose ball deserve a magical place of their own come summer, like the old drive-in movie theater. Is that maudlin to say? Or merely pointless. I’ll go ahead and add to the grievance list those two six-foot-tall fiberglass soft-serve cones Carvel wanted atop the shop but Southampton Town ordered mothballed decades ago. The supports are still there, if it’s not too late. God forbid there be a glimpse of joy intruding on that dreary suburban stretch of Montauk Highway.
It was noise complaints that did in the racetrack — the worst loss the South Fork has suffered, more than a few of us believe. And now the same judgment is being visited upon another large tract where interesting things happen, the East Hampton Airport. So here’s a modest proposal: Rather than silence surrounded by mostly empty second homes and an unchecked army of deer, how about doubling down and putting a luncheonette in the terminal? The kind of place you could get a tuna melt, fries on the side, chocolate malted with a coffee back. Sit under a lacquered wooden propeller mounted on the wall and watch the planes come and go. The occasional refueling. See who deplanes and treads across the tarmac to points unknown. Good for old people with nothing to do, good for kids.
I know, I know, don’t hold your breath. But we’ll always have the hardwood.
Baylis Greene, Bridgehampton High class of 1985, is an associate editor at The Star.