Nick Christakis leans against a concrete wall at Frontier
Field and surveys the action. It’s a slow night tonight — the Rochester Red
Wings will lose to the Ottawa Lynx in extra innings, and the threat of
thunderstorms apparently has kept many people away from the park — but
Christakis is still smiling from ear to ear. He’s doing what he loves to do.
Christakis has been an usher at Frontier Field since 1999,
when he retired after 33 years as a customer service rep at Kodak. Now he
passes his summers by finding baseball fans their seats and maybe chatting them up about any number of topics — including,
of course, baseball.
Not that Christakis could always talk baseball. In the ’60s
he immigrated to the US from
his native Greece (Sparta, to be precise),
where everyone plays only one sport. “Before I came to the United States,”
he says, “I only knew about soccer.”
But by the time he started working at Frontier Field, he had
picked up the game of baseball. Now, he says, “My first No. 1 sport is soccer,
but I love baseball, because they have nice fans. They’re all friendly and
nice. It’s a family sport.”
Christakis works Section 120 pretty much every time the
Wings take the field. He delights in helping people find their seats, and when
he sees a season ticket-holder, his face lights up beneath wire-rim glasses and
thick salt-and-pepper moustache. He greets them with a wide smile and offers a
warm handshake before wiping off their seats and getting them settled in. If
the ticket-holder has any soul at all, they offer him a couple bucks as a tip.
Christakis lowers his head humbly, puts his hand on their shoulder and says,
“Thank you, my friend.”
“I love the people,” he says on this night. As he talks, a
bat cracks and a pop fly soars into the outfield. Christakis follows the ball’s
arc up into the sky and then down into the leftfielder’s glove. “It’s one of
the best sections,” he says of 120. “I love them, and they love me.”
The fans of Section 120 will attest to that. “He’s jovial,
fun-loving, caring, funny,” says season ticket-holder Ken Weiner, “and he’s a helluva nice guy.”
Bill and Bernie Hollenbeck have had Wings season tickets
every year the team has been at Frontier Field. As a result, they and
Christakis go way back. “He is positively the nicest person I’ve ever met,”
Bernie says. “He’s just a really special guy. It’s so nice to see his smiling
face when we come in every week.”
Both Weiner and the Hollenbecks
point to Christakis’s constant concern for the safety
of young fans — whenever a kid runs to the front of the section and leans
over the wall hoping to catch a foul ball, Christakis warns them away. “I don’t
think he’s very popular with the kids,” Bernie Hollenbeck says, “but it makes
us feel good because he’s doing his job.”
Christakis’s assimilation into
American society through baseball perhaps reflects the sport’s universality and
its power in our culture. As every wave of immigrant flowed into this country
— Irish, Italians, Poles, Latinos, Asians — every one of them absorbed baseball
into their native culture and, in many ways, made it their own. Every ethnicity
in America
follows and plays baseball, and baseball has spread across the globe.
And Christakis is living proof of that. While he also serves
as an usher for various sports at Blue Cross Arena and now PAETECPark,
his heart now belongs to the Wings and Frontier Field.
After every baseball season, Christakis flies to Greece to spend
a couple months in his homeland. But, he says as he gazes across the diamond
and waves his hand over the crowd, “I spend my summers here.”
As for the Red Wings
themselves, they’ve spent the summer coping with numerous call-ups to Minnesota that have turned the Rochester roster into one big revolving door.
It also didn’t help that the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre
Red Barons were a team on fire for much of the summer
As a result, the Red Barons overtook the Wings in the
International League’s North Division late last month, and the Wings have spent
the month of August struggling to keep pace. As of Monday morning, Rochester trailed SWB by
a game, but on the brighter side, the Wings still led the race for the IL’s
lone wild-card playoff berth.
With less than two weeks left in the regular season, the
Wings will need to scrap to stay in contention. After a 5-0 win over Syracuse
last week, Wings manager Stan Cliburn said the team needs to show the hustle
and execution that has brought it this far. “If not,” he said, “we’re going to
fall short against good teams.”
This article appears in Aug 23-29, 2006.
