This past week was the best one ever in Kansas City, Missouri. It was just damn magical. I don’t even know how else to describe it. In case you’ve been living under a sportsless rock, the Kansas City Royals won the World Series on Nov. 1, 2015. For the first time in 30 years. I was watching more Sesame Street than baseball the last time it happened. We made it to the World Series and barely lost in Game 7 last year, but everyone thought that was a fluke. As first baseman Eric Hosmer pointed out, this team is not a fluke.
Now, I often think sports are terribly over-rated. Players are overpaid, they distract us from news of what’s really important in the world and they make heroes out of people who are anything but. But with this, I admit the power sports have. For Kansas City, it was like a bomb of civic awesomeness dropped. And KC showed the country, maybe even the world, how wonderful our city is. The night the Royals won the World Series, there wasn’t a single arrest related to the celebration. I hear things haven’t gone like that in other cities.
Then two days later, the most epic thing (and I know “epic” gets tossed around a lot by the kids lately, but I mean it here in a completely literal and non-hyperbolic way) took place: the World Series victory parade in downtown Kansas City. The City estimated that 800,000 people came. To put this in perspective, the entire population of KCMO proper is about 470,000, of which I am one. The five-county metro area clocks in at about 2.3 million. So like almost twice the actual population of Kansas City showed up for this thing. All area school districts closed. So did a lot of companies. I’ve never seen anything like it. I was happy to go to work that day because I work for law enforcement, and I knew we’d be needed. And also my office was in the middle of it, and my parking spot was reserved (because I pay $70 a month - but this kind of made it all worth it), so I didn’t have to abandon my car on the interstate like some did or wait for a bus for hours in the suburbs. Officer friends got me right in the front of the parade crowd, and I watched all the Royals’ players go by. They are all stars. That’s kind of the beauty of this team. There’s no big stand-out. Although Salvador Perez won World Series MVP, and everyone in Kansas City wants to hug him, even if we don’t understand what he’s saying most of the time.
But this celebration - I just can’t. Even. Jimmy Fallon said on The Tonight Show that it “looked like the Pope came.” The state’s governor declared it the biggest celebration ever in the state of Missouri. And the most amazing part? How civil and polite everyone was. There were 800,000 people there, and police only arrested three people. They had been crammed together and waiting around for hours, but everyone was still nice to each other. A lady asked me if there was a lost and found because she’d lost the camera that had all their family pictures on it, and she was due to have a new baby very soon, and she wanted it for that. I said I had no idea. Then she got back to me the next day and said her husband went to where they’d been in the parade the day before, and the camera was still there. Someone had set it on a newspaper box. Like a digital camera that was worth a lot of money, and no one took it. That is the kind of town I live in, folks, and it is what we are about here in the Midwest.
I’ve been on both coasts, and I wasn’t impressed - not by the housing costs or the friendliness of people I encountered. On social media, I saw a guy this week say that when he moved to Kansas City from the east coast, he was weirded out by everyone here saying “good morning” to him. Then there’s this awesome letter to the editor from last year’s World Series run. It’s like Canada-level nice here in KC in a much nicer climate. And I have a 2,400 square-foot house at the cost of maybe a third of a studio apartment in Manhattan or San Francisco. Seriously, why doesn’t everyone live here?
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