COMMENTARY

Rangers fans hit with Newtown honor

— One night this past week about 200 people jammed a north Arlington bar, all of them devout Texas Rangers fans, all of them, however, with something else on their minds beyond the slow-go of the team’s off-season.

As it turned out, remarkable stuff happened in that bar.

“It was an outpouring of love, and, yes, money, like none of us expected to see,” said local ESPN Sports talk show host Ben Rogers, who emceed the Wednesday night event.

“You sit around all week, wondering, ‘What can I do?,’ and you don’t know what to do, but in a small way, a bunch of baseball fans did something.”

That’s a familiar feeling. What do you do?

A week ago Friday morning, I had my head buried in a Dell, banging away at a Sunday column on the Dallas Cowboys, when out of nowhere came a jolt involving real world news.

Something terrible was unfolding in a town in Connecticut. A shooter with an assault rifle. In a kindergarten classroom. Many dead.

From 9/11 to Aurora, those were horrific events that tattoo your brain, but this one, this one in Newtown, with the 20 first-graders (as we later learned) and the six educators, all slaughtered, this one takes another kind of emotional toll. The very lowest kind, because of the kids. The first-graders. And their teachers.

What the heck do you do? Write your rep in congress? He cares, I’m sure, but not the way I want him to care because my views won’t be the district’s majority views, certainly not in Tarrant County, so why write him?

Jamey Newberg is a lawyer in Dallas who for years has done a Rangers blog. Jamey thought he knew what he had to do, and that was cancel his annual “Newberg Report” book-signing event at the bar Wednesday night because Newtown haunted him.

But then came a different idea. Keep the event, but transform it into something to honor one of the firstgraders murdered at Sandy Hook, 6-year old Emilie Parker.

Why Emilie?

Her father, Robbie, had Arlington roots as a youngster, and grew up a Rangers fan. Upon his relocation to Connecticut, he still carried his fandom to Boston Red Sox and New York Yankees territory.

A picture was on local websites this week of Robbie, in his Rangers cap, with Emilie at Fenway Park when the Rangers were in Boston. Emilie as it turned out, had a baseball from that game, a prized possession from a David Murphy batting practice home run.

Within 48 hours after Newberg had all but canceled his event, the show did go on, built around a fundraiser for the Emilie Parker Fund.

Rangers memorabilia came pouring in from the team for live and silent auctions with proceeds going to the fund. Players donated. The front office donated.

General Manager Jon Daniels, I heard, basically emptied his office of keepsakes, and donated them to the auction.

And the baseball fans came out, jamming the bar, and because of word of mouth, people were also driving by, handing off money out front to go in the donation jar. And the raffle tickets sold well, and the auctions went great, and by the end of the evening, they counted up the money.

Two days earlier there wasn’t going to be an event.

When the evening was over, $16,600 was raised.

As someone who has been directly involved in a charity event through the years, I can testify that is a staggering amount of money from a small group of baseball fans.

And on Thursday, the money kept coming in.

The total went over $19,000, with donations still arriving.

Emilie’s uncle, a school teacher who lives locally, was overwhelmed.

He promised that the money raised would be spread among the families of all the children who died a week ago.

“I think I can speak for everybody and say we all felt better as the night ended,” said Rogers. “Not knowing what to do, at least everybody wanted to do something, in a small way. It was a way of saying we really, really hurt for those families.”

Newtown is what, like 1,600 miles away?

But on Wednesday night in north Arlington, Sandy Hook Elementary School might as well have been a couple of blocks down Collins Street.

A collection of Rangers fans — not rich guys, or corporations, just fans — opened their hearts and their hip pockets.

They did something in a time when most of us don’t know what to do. Good for them.

Sports, Pages 26 on 12/23/2012

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