Long before any trip to Iraq, back at the ticket agency where I worked, for more than 11 years we've saved a yellow sales invoice, an office copy, with the ink transferred from the original that was shipped to the customer with the tickets they had purchased.
The handwritten invoice has faded and crinkled over the years, the credit card receipt unreadable, but it still lists the order taken for a Boston Red Sox game on Sept. 22, 2001, against the Detroit Tigers.
John Michael Pocher, a 36-year-old bond trader for Cantor Fitzgerald, had bought two field box seats – five rows off the field, right behind home plate. Field Box 42-E. He paid $150 each - a hefty premium, but the going rate even back then, years before the championships.
The tickets had been bought on September 7, were then shipped to the 104th floor of the World Trade Center’s North Tower, and arrived via Federal Express, Monday morning, September 10.
I imagine the tickets were in his desk on September 11, high atop the city. His profile, published in The New York Times “Portraits of Grief” series, said he “didn’t want to leave anything to chance.” The profile said he was the type to plan trips; to make sure things were organized.
I think he was the kind of guy who would have made the trip to Boston with the tickets in his own pocket, trusting only himself not to lose them, to stand on Yawkey Way, and carefully dole them out to his friends. Pocher was the Ticket Agency’s only customer from the World Trade Center. Most New York City ticket buyers did their business with New York-based ticket brokers, and didn’t really shop around.
The New York broker would merely middle a deal between their customers and us, buying our seats and profiting from a cushion in the middle. Pocher must have done his research and correctly knew he’d save some money, dealing with a business more local to the Red Sox.
Selling tickets was a simple job, one without consequence or worry; the day’s ups and downs were governed by the performance of others, on the stage, on the field. Their effort drove the prices up, their failures sent them down.
Mohamed Atta, the chief hijacker and last pilot of AA 11, drove a rented car from Boston to Portland on Monday afternoon, September 10. The next morning he flew from Portland, back to Boston. He must have driven on I-95, which passes over the Spaulding Turnpike in Portsmouth, N.H., not even a half-mile away from our office, where we sat, eating junk food, talking sports and answering the phone.
The office was open on Tuesday morning. Phones had just started to ring, and we sold our tickets to sports events and concerts; a few hours, we told customers, of memories to last a lifetime. What else is money for?
Pocher’s tickets were somewhere in New York. His invoice and his name remained in a plastic bin.
I went to Fenway Park on Sept. 18, 2001, their first game at home after 9/11. The team was falling apart, managed by the out-of-his-depth Joe Kerrigan. With the combination of a bad team, and nobody wanting to spend money or leave their house in 9/11's aftermath, we couldn't give the tickets away. Four of us sat in the front row, right on the Sox on-deck circle. The Sox won, 7-2, but nobody cared. Instead of game highlights, the inning breaks featured news alerts on the centerfield scoreboard, and people actually paid attention.
Before the game, public address announcer Ed Brickley gave his customary greeting to the fans. I don't think his voice broke with emotion, or anything like that. But the tone of his voice was different, weighted down and sad, because he must have known what we all knew, that he was reading from a script that didn't mean the same thing anymore.
John Pocher had no doubt heard Brickley's opening line before, and would have heard it again on Sept. 22, to see the Red Sox lose 4-3. Derek Lowe, a playoff hero three years later, got the start, but a no-decision. But who knows what Pocher would have seen. That's the score of the history that we lived, not the history of the day he bought the tickets.
History's often wrong. In a story published Sept. 20, 2001 in the Newark Star-Ledger, there's a reference to a trip to see the Red Sox he had planned for "last weekend," apparently meaning Sept. 15 or 16 - but the Sox would have been out of town. The game was for the next weekend - Saturday, the 22nd. Anyway, it doesn't matter. It's just details, and trying to remember.
On Feb. 10, 2001, I saw John Pocher on Panel N-41 at the 9/11 Memorial, with a good view of the rising One World Trade Center straight ahead.
His seats for September 22rd, 2001, were in Field Box 42, Row E.
Ed Brickley retired in 2002. The words remain the same.
"Ladies and Gentlemen, Boys and Girls, Welcome, to Friendly Fenway Park."
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