Else City Thorns
Many cities, especially nowadays, are to the extent that they have any kind of personality or uniqueness, tied to their sports teams. And surely Else City is no different. In Else City, the schools close on Opening Day, when the Else City Thorns take their laps around the infield at Fallingwater Park. The retail outlets run special one-day sales on licensed memorabilia, Else City Thorns menswear, special all-pork thorn dogs, and beer dyed red.
In her memoirs Thorny Times, Thorns owner Odelle Hollyboot describes her childhood and the series of events that resulted in her purchase of the team. She recalls the hushed, reverent tones her friends used to describe the Thorns, “adrip with the promise that this year would be THE year… [the] effused prayerful dialogs, almost Socratic in nature, as the eldest and wisest of us pronounced grandly and prophesied madly, streak upon streak, victory upon victory, until the pennant was hung from Gate AA in Fallingwater, where it belonged. Balance would be restored to the universe that summer, and all the world would sing with rightness.”
Hyperbole aside, no credible scholar denies that Hollyboot’s school years coincided with the longest sustained period of greatness in Thorns history. Though the team never won their divisional pennant, in the Years Four, Six, and Nine of the Reverence they came close, making it to the semifinals twice and the finals once. By the time Hollyboot came into her inheritance (Year One of the Blink), however, the team’s fortunes had declined such that they were considered out of contention by the end of June, and it was widely known that the Gamboling Crime Families were looking for a buyer.
How the heir to the Hollyboot fortunes came to tie her wagon to the Thorns is a tale that takes up most of Thorny Times, and it is an exceedingly boring book. To compress such a text to a single sentence is no mean task, but in brief the memory of Hamish Fine seduced Hollyboot; by enriching the life of all Thorns fans, she sought to make the world first and foremost no dimmer a place. Given that the Hollyboot fortune was built on the backs of slaughtered laborers and bleeding prisoners, there may well have been a dollop of liberal guilt added to the mix.
The last twenty-six years have, for the Else City Thorns, been an era of wealth if not victory, comfortable middle-ranks if not excellence, and the exciting if irregular squeeze play. The finest players on the continent are courted by Hollyboot’s coterie of managers, team doctors, coaches, translators, and sycophants. The sweetest wine flows down the pipes in Fallingwater Park, and every winter a chorale of sportswriters, commentators, and enthusiasts announces that this coming summer will be the one, the year the Thorns win the pennant, and by autumn there will be no reason for anything to ever need to exist or do anything ever again. In the sky above, the stars themselves will dance at the glory that is the summation of history, and then one by one they will extinguish themselves, even as we lay ourselves down to a satisfied well-earned Thorns-fan sleep, from whence we need never wake.