Rozner: When sports can be the greatest gift

It's remarkable, really, what sports can do for people.

We talk all the time about the pure entertainment, the distraction, the simple escape.

Too often the charm is extracted, too seriously on occasion it is taken. I can attest, given some response encountered over three decades, part and parcel to the job, which requires most days a thought or two.

But I found again how sports and even a few minutes' diversion can be a blessing, as I wandered the halls of a hospice floor the last several days.

Only weeks after my father's passing, my brother, Jay, fell gravely ill, his lungs failed and he quickly went from a 9-1-1 call to a pair of surgeries and the determination that he would never leave the hospital alive.

My brother died Sunday afternoon at the age of 61 in Southern Florida.

I'll not ask you to endure another story about my family, though if you'll allow I'll note that my brother was a pretty good hockey player and being much older was the reason I took up the game so young.

He was also an exceptional horn player who spent a lot of time at the Kingston Mines, and traveled the country with the likes of Lefty Dizz and Koko Taylor, among other blues legends.

There was also a story about the Stones stopping in at a Park West blues party in 1981. Shame on me for not being a better brother, for not remembering the details.

But, as usual, I digress.

If you've ever spent time in a hospice wing, I can't tell you anything you don't already know. For those who haven't, the minutes turn agonizingly slow to hours, and the hours somehow turn to days.

Time is irrelevant. Day or night is indeterminate. Sleep is impossible. Food is not a consideration. Family members wander the halls like zombies.

But you meet strangers and have exhaustive, surreal conversations.

About 2 a.m. on a day I couldn't identify, maybe Thursday or Friday, I was in a small room getting coffee when I met a young black man, a junior linebacker from Deerfield Beach High School, and with us was the 25-year-old son of Cuban immigrants.

We laughed, we cried, we told stories and, of course, we talked sports. For hours, we talked sports.

You're all there for the same reason. It's an intimate club, however temporary. New people join every few hours. The fortunate ones move on quickly. But you all know why you're there.

When someone departs, you're relieved for them. You hug and cry and they offer hope that you won't have to stay much longer.

Some people have a crowded room. That makes you cry. Some patients are completely alone. That makes you cry. You talk about how grateful you are for your wife and girls. That makes you cry.

Everything makes you cry.

You flip through 78 TV channels like it's a slot machine, finding nothing of interest, though there's a moment with “Family Guy” and a bullfrog that makes you laugh very hard for at least a minute.

Thank you, Seth MacFarlane.

I told my brother about it, choosing to believe he could hear me through the morphine and Ativan.

The Golf Channel gave me the European Tour live, which was a bonus in the wee hours, and that led to a conversation with a 30-something woman who insisted I tell her everything I knew about Tiger Woods' comeback.

She had seen the TV from the hallway and I saw her peek into our room. She just needed something to do, other than sit.

Think I didn't enjoy talking about Tiger for two hours at 4 a.m.? It was a godsend.

It's a truly bizarre exercise, the way you try to pass the time, the way you try to trick your mind.

I mostly wanted to write this — hey, we're finally getting to a point here, how fortunate for you — to thank the nurses I've seen work over the last few months with my dad and brother, especially those in surgical intensive care and the hospice units.

What these angels withstand is beyond words, and yet they do it over and over again with such compassion and care for patients and family.

No, they don't play cards all day. In fact, they rarely sit down.

And I have met so many kind people along the way — ticket agents, flight attendants, cops, custodians, doctors, cab drivers — through all these trips to Florida and back.

It's funny how quickly someone can recognize your pain, and how interested they are in trying to make your day just fractionally better.

So many different kinds of people, from so many different kinds of places, who do so many different kinds of jobs, can be so nice to one another.

Stunning, right? It seems unusual, people being decent in 2019, and you're very grateful, naturally, but it's more than that. You instantly recognize the humanity that we don't expect to see anymore.

But on this hospice floor, no one spoke of politics or what made us all different. It was mostly about what brought us all there. Death brought us together and made us all the same.

And for brief moments, we had sports to allow a respite, a chance to stop grinding on an outcome we couldn't change, to set aside momentarily the inescapable pain and guilt.

Soon enough, we would have to deal with all of it.

Anyway, you were asking about being in Cleveland for Game 7 of the World Series.

So, yeah, the Cubs blow a big lead late and here comes the tarp out onto the field …