Man Sings For The Cycle While Fighting For His Life Seattle Man With Lou Gehrig’S Disease Delivers Message Of Hope To All 30 Major-League Ballparks
For once, the record-setter in the Los Angeles Dodgers outfield was the guy singing the national anthem.
And as the last word, “brave,” faded into the autumn air as it has thousands of times in North America this year, it meant something more.
Mark Reiman, who at 44 seems too young and full of life to be struck with incurable Lou Gehrig’s disease, set out from his home north of Seattle five months ago with a dream to sing the anthem in all 30 major-league baseball parks by season’s end.
In Dodger Stadium this week, he completed his quest.
Reiman walked off the field grinning and slowing shaking his head in a kind of wonder. “The end is kind of bittersweet,” he said. “Baseball season is ending, and I’m a baseball fan. But mostly, it’s been really sweet. I’ve lived a Reiman ‘Field of Dreams’ this season. I feel nothing but having been blessed and humbled.”
The journey hasn’t been about fame, though the national The ALS Association in Los Angeles will seek a notation in the Guinness Book of World Records to commemorate Reiman’s feat.
Rather, Reiman’s has been a quest to express, in the best way he has left, his respect and love for a game his father taught him to revere.
Each stop also has been a salute to Lou Gehrig, the legendary New York Yankee. After acknowledging he had ALS, or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, in 1939, Gehrig declared himself “the luckiest man on the face of the Earth.”
Reiman is determined to show the 30,000 people with ALS in the United States the same example of living in courage and in faith.
As such, the trek has been one of hope.
“Since I sing the anthem because of my illness, there is a very intimate and personal connection for many people who are watching from the stadium, and often those people come to find me.”
They shake his hand, tell him their stories, share hugs. Some are suffering from ALS; others aren’t.
“What was truly unexpected was the overwhelming response in all the cities,” said Michael Havlicek, president of The ALS Association.
“Adversity is a common human experience,” Reiman said. “People kind of feel encouraged and inspired to keep on going.”
It all started April 4, when Reiman and his wife, Julie, set out for Shea Stadium in New York City.
“We grinned and waved goodbye to our 17-year-old twins,” Reiman noted in a journal he began keeping. “Could this really be happening to us?”
It had been almost seven years since he first noticed a slight weakening in his thumb and spasms in his left arm. ALS is a neurological disease that eventually destroys all the body’s voluntary muscles.
Since that day in 1991, one physical skill after another has vanished: the strength to run and bicycle, the dexterity to play the piano and the guitar. Even the coordination to perform such mundane tasks as lifting grocery bags is gone.
His college wrestler’s physique has wasted away until his wife now helps him with his socks and cuts up his spaghetti.
“I was scared and unsure of what it all meant, and later I was angry. And I cried. In fact, sometimes I still do. It took six months to figure out how to start fighting,” Reiman wrote in a manuscript, “Through the Perilous Fight.”
“I want my body back the way it was,” he wrote at one point.
But at Shea, the meaning of his long journey through grief and sadness to acceptance and finally to appreciation crystallized in the faces of “a lovable old man in a wheelchair” and of a mother and son each with the disease.
“It is my job to be their voice and presence to a nation for the next six months, to tell their stories and compel a nation of people to listen, care and respond. A great honor. A wonderful and great responsibility,” Reiman wrote then.
Again he was reassured that his response to the disease meant something, and that by fighting and living with it each day he was receiving more than he had lost.
“If I had to give back everything that’s happened to me just to give the ALS back, I wouldn’t do it,” he said.
He paused, reflecting.
“I would never go backwards. I prefer the gifts, the spiritual ones, that I have now. The rest is temporal. It’s passing.”
Reiman’s chronicle of the tour, or “Season For Hope,” is a cross between the dreams of a wide-eyed kid in a baseball field and a mature man’s reflections on life.
At the Kingdome in Seattle, where 300 friends and family members heard him sing early in the tour, he got to sit in the dugout.
“The dugout!! Me, sit in the actual Mariners’ dugout … next to the bats? For probably the millionth time in three weeks, I said softly, ‘Oh wow!”’
Kansas City tested his humor. Given the honor of throwing out the first pitch, he hit the photographer.
“Luckily, I can’t throw faster than a 5-year-old on a good day, and he was wearing a long, flowing raincoat. No harm done, except to my ego.”
On the tour, Gehrig was always in his thoughts.
At Boston’s Fenway Park, he sat in the visitors dugout where Gehrig would have sat as he played in one of his 2,130 consecutive games.
“For me, it was like flying to the moon, stepping out onto that alien surface and putting your own feet in Neil Armstrong’s dusty boot prints. He had been here.”
At Camden Yards, Baltimore Oriole third baseman Cal Ripken, who shattered Gehrig’s consecutive-game record, said he would be honored if Reiman would wear his jersey while he sang the anthem.
“I was nearly overwhelmed with emotion and thoughts raced through my head. He’s honored if I wear his jersey? No, no, that’s backwards. I’m the one who’s honored. This is too much. Tears began to well up under my eyes as I clutched the black and orange number eight to my chest,” he wrote.
The cathedral in Reiman’s pilgrimage was Yankee Stadium earlier this month.
He asked to be taken out to Monument Park behind center field, where the old, bronze plaques of Yankee legends stand immortal, the “icons of the saints.”
Gehrig’s marker is among three that stand alone.