Eight years ago today, Brian O'Neill missed the implosion from my office

Oops! Another photo op bites the dust

By Brian O'Neill
Thursday, February 15, 2001

Take an intelligent woman and a reasonably intelligent man, marry them, and you have the dumbest person on Earth.

That's my experience anyway. Take this past Implosion Sunday. A friend of mine has an office in the Trimont. (I'll pause here while you say "Well, lah-dee-dah.") He was nice enough to invite my whole family up to see Three Rivers Stadium go down.

So my wife and I were up at 6 a.m. and had the girls in the station wagon by 6:50 a.m. We took the back way up Mount Washington from the West End and drove past thousands of hardy souls lining Grandview Avenue, desperately looking for a perch, any perch, from which to see the big boom.

The poor cold saps, I thought, as I beeped the horn at the Trimont garage to open the doors for me and mine. Heh, heh.

I didn't know anyone at this party besides our host, but everyone was nice, the coffee was hot, and they had my favorite breakfast pastries: free. I went out on a balcony off the kitchen to take pictures of Three Stadiums River in the last moments we could still call it that. Then I came back inside and planted my freeloading butt in a warm conference room with more than 1,000 square feet of windows facing Downtown.

I was justifiably proud. After many e-mails back and forth, here I was, in the perfect location for the memory of a lifetime.

Then, with about five minutes to go before the blast, my wife asked where she should be if she was to photograph this thing. I'd asked that she bring her camera, for reasons that escape me now. At this point, I'd rather see a proctologist than another implosion photo.

Anyway, she said she needed to be outside if we wanted to get a good shot. That sounded right, but I said we should all stick together. So we went to find what our host had done with our coats. I tracked those down and then came the customary struggle of getting them on the 16-month-old and the nearly 3-year-old. That done, we started carrying them toward this overlook outside the kitchen.

That's when the implosion began. In an office where there were 30 windows, eight rooms and three balconies facing Downtown, we were somehow near none of them.

When we got to the balcony, we saw smoke. We saw what appeared to be a stadium under that smoke. But we missed the quintessential moment when Three Rivers made its cataclysmic shrug.

"All this hoopla for 18 seconds," some woman said.

What was she talking about? As a man, that makes perfect sense to me.

I stood in the cold and watched the enormous cloud of concrete dust blow across the people in Point State Park, but even that didn't cheer me up. Why couldn't we have left well enough alone?

We screwed up because we're married with small children. We're so busy presenting a united front we don't notice or care that we're making less sense than Dr. Seuss. If either one of us had been alone, or even alone with the children, we wouldn't have missed the implosion, because we would have realized how dumb it would be to move from a perfectly good spot. But together, we managed to reassure ourselves into idiocy.

My wife went out later that afternoon to the video store to feed our older child's Disney addiction. She also rented, at my request, "The Bridge on the River Kwai." She'd never seen it, so we sat down to watch it Sunday night after putting the kids to bed.

I thought it would be nice way to wind down from the day, watching a bridge blow up and a train fall into the river as a bunch of soldiers shot at each other. But we never made it to the end of the movie. I guess we're just not the imploding kind.