Oh – oh, Alyson … I know this team is killing you
Our love was like the water
That splashes on a stone
Our love is like our music
Its here, and then its gone
Most of us have, buried somewhere deep in our memory, a certain someone from our past. Someone who stands out, above all the others. Someone who got past the outer defenses effortlessly way back when, and burrowed into the deepest part of us, probably forever. This someone might have many different names, depending on who one is talking to. We’ll just call her, ‘Her’.
Her. She was not quite like any other woman we’d ever known. She was, in fact, unlike any other woman we’d ever known, present company not excepted. She was beautiful, of course – that was the first thing we noticed. She had all the good girly-girl qualities one could want. So, up to that point, she was, well … not a dime a dozen, for sure. But, praise Allah, there are a lot of beautiful girls out there. What made Her different is something else she had going on … a certain ‘buddy’ quality … not a ‘manly’ quality, really; but an ability and inclination to wade into some normally masculine areas of behavior with us – heavy drinking, hunting, fishing, etc. – and do it well and still remain beautiful and 1000% woman/girl.
A girl like Her, well, she was special, and she might only come around once in a lifetime. We will keep Her in our hearts and minds longer than any of the other girls who passed through our lives along the way. But we could not keep Her. She is, practically by definition, long gone from us. Long, long gone.
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It is hard to remember exactly when Alyson Footer first appeared on the scene, and burrowed her way into our collective consciousness. I guess I could look it up, but being precise about it really doesn’t matter. Just that a decade or so ago, the most concise, no-bullshit reporter to cover the Astros in the modern era showed up from out of nowhere, with an understanding of the game and the often subtle ways things work in baseball. Your big deal national reporters (and a lot of celebrated local ones) like to draw things in broad and bold strokes, because they are fucking lazy, mostly. They don’t have the time to sit and watch and wait for some understanding. Alyson Footer knows how to do that instinctively and, seemingly, she did from Day One.
Of course, the first thing a lot of us noticed – because we are mostly hard-heads – was that Alyson Footer was slim and attractive and had all that awesome red hair. And that impression lasted a little while. She was and is a beautiful girl. But, you know, for most of us this sexist objectifying fell away pretty quickly; because it did not take long to realize this was not just another pretty face, a ‘reporter’ hired more for looks than brains or skill. This was a beat reporter who got it right the first time more often than not; and in the mostly vast wasteland that is Houston sports reporting – particularly baseball reporting, particularly reporting on the Astros – something like that grabs the attention right away. Once we have honest respect for a person and the job they do and the way they do it, most semi-evolved males – which is to say most some of us – can no longer maintain the objectifying. Like the relatively few brave and knowledgeable females who regularly participate at SnS, we soon realized Alyson Footer was one of us, and we began to think of her as an equal, or more.
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The Catch-22 of meeting and being with that awesome girl who looked like Heather Locklear and could drink like Tommy Lee was that, well … she was in high demand, naturally enough. Sooner or later some dickhead with better bullshit than ours would come along and sweep her off her feet, and then she’d be only a memory. It was a relief to lose her, in a way. We didn’t have to worry about losing her anymore. But later on we would think back, and be kind of tormented that we did not do more to try and hold on. Even if, by all objective accounts, she ended up with a better guy. Well, you know what? Fuck him.
Among the many highlights of the Footer Years were her subtle calling out of Richard “Pinwheel” Justice and his bullshit reporting at the Chron on a regular basis; her brief foray into the TZ 2-3 years ago, which some of us have not quite recovered from yet (especially her self-disclosure of perhaps the most wonderful nickname in the history of nicknames); and her good-natured if sometimes pointed verbal jousting matches with erstwhile Astros ace/ace whiner Roy Oswalt. We will remember those moments fondly, and so many more. And we will remain grateful to her for years and years of professional, above board reporting on baseball, and the Astros.
As Noe said the other day, it is not like Alyson Footer died or anything. She will still be around, in Houston, in fact. Her excellent reporting will still be readily available to us. It won’t be about the Astros specifically, but then, after this year the Astros won’t be the Astros specifically, either. I plan to keep up (with Footer, if not the Astros.) And on behalf of all of us, I am sure, I wish her the best. She really did end up with a better guy. And you know what?
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