Take a Hike

There’s a commercial from a health-insurance company that really bugs me.  It features a couple, obviously on the far side of 65, doing some sort of training regimen heavy on stairs and love.  Up and down, hug.  Up and down, smile.  Then, it’s off to the stadium so they can climb all the way up to what must be their season’s tickets in the upper deck.  Apparently, love and good legs will get you far in life.  If and when they come up short, you can fall back on that insurance policy.

My thing is that nobody should have to hike through the Alps to get to their seats.  I distinctly remember taking my parents to a White Sox game in 1990, which was the last season for Comiskey Park; that summer, Ed and Mary Ann both turned 77.  I parked the car in the lot across the street; we walked over and into the park; climbed something like five—not seven or eight—stairs to get to an aisle in the lower deck; followed the aisle and then walked down maybe fifteen steps to our seats.  Try that in Guaranteed Rate Whatever.

If I were to try the same thing today, we’d have to take escalators to the main concourse and then walk down forever to reach our seats; there are no circulating aisles as in Comiskey.  I couldn’t tell you what it’s like in the upper deck because I refuse to step foot in it.  But I do know this.

When they were building the monstrosity, Tom Paciorek—Hawk Harrelson’s longtime sidekick—did construction updates.  One time, fearless Tom ventured into the stratosphere and joked about how high up he was, only the joke turned out to be on the White Sox.  Fans hate(d) the upper deck to the extent that in 2004 the top eight rows (some 6600 seats) were torn out and a pretend roof added to make the thing at least look a little like a real ballpark.     

In the make-believe world of affordable health insurance, that’s some gift to an elderly couple—eight less rows to climb.  But Guaranteed Rate still sucks.