Peter King sponges a ride home

The businessman picked up the tab for the final part of the ride. No indication whether King and the businessman split the rest of the journey.

But King got a freebie, and he hasn't been this happy since getting a foul ball in the Cactus League.

Good MMQB Samaritan of the Year: Chris Bierly, Newton, Mass.

I stood in Penn Station in Manhattan Wednesday at 11:50 a.m. with a friend, Alex Stern of the Elias Sports Bureau. He was going south on the Amtrak Acela for the Thursday night game in Philadelphia. I was going north, home to Boston, after the Sports Illustrated Sportsman of the Year event Tuesday night. And we discovered trains were frozen in the northeast in a heavy rainstorm due to a downed wire in Newark. So we waited. And waited. Finally, around 1:45, in a packed train station, with no end to the delay in sight, I got on the phone to my travel agent and asked her to look for a car-rental place anywhere near Penn Station. Much to my chagrin, because I wanted to work on the way home, now I'd have to slog five or six hours through the nor'easter to get home.

"Want a ride?'' a complete stranger to my right said.

I looked at him, wondering if I should know him. "I recognized you and heard you on the phone, trying to get a car,'' Chris Bierly, a businessman from suburban Boston, said. "I just got one. I'm going home to Boston. You can come if you'd like.''

"Wow,'' I said. "Thanks. I'm in.''

So we sat in the back of a Town Car, Chris on the left, me on the right, and we chatted for a few minutes, then settled in to work/call/write, thanks to the wireless DSL devices we both had. Ryan Clark of the Steelers called, and I made a couple of calls on a story I'm working on for the magazine. I napped for 20 minutes. All in all, a great trip. When we were close to his home in Newton, I asked him if I could pay the driver to take me the final 15 minutes home to downtown Boston. "It's all taken care of,'' he said. "He'll take you there.''

That, ladies and gentlemen, is one class guy. Just when you think they don't exist anymore, here comes a gem of one.


Read more: http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2010/writers/peter_king/12/05/monday-morning-qb-week-13/4.html#ixzz17NTBxCB8/i]

 

I had a similar incident happen to another writer and me when we were stranded at the airport because of weather delays. A guy who I had sat next to on the flight to the game had a rental car and was going where we were going and offered us a ride. Since the choices were that or try to find a hotel room as the entire airport was scrambling to get one, we took the guy up on the ride. He wouldn't take our money. We bought him dinner and then as a thank you we got him tickets to a game (we paid for them, but they were tickets we got through the team) that he said he hadn't been able to get tickets to.

Sometimes when you're traveling, you just want to get home and I will never bash someone for doing what it takes to get home.

 

Name-dropping, accepting free shit, bitching about shit common folk endure everyday. Yup. That's PK, neatly self-summarized in six graphs.

Was I the only one hoping this would turn into The Hitcher? (Ha, just remembered my side saddle starred in the remake. Good times)

 

Would King do the same?

Just asking.

 

I just like how it reads how he accepts the free shit - the ride from NY, the extra ride to his home in downtown Boston - like he was a homeless guy accepting a free meal.

Maybe in fact he threw the driver a tip, or split the cost, or better yet, paid for it.... but it doesn't read that way.

Awesome.

 

HE WAS WILLING TO PAY THE DRIVER FOR A 15-MINUTE RIDE TO BOSTON! FUCK! WHAT ELSE DO YOU WANT FROM THE GUY?!

 

That, ladies and gentlemen, is one class guy. Just when you think they don't exist anymore, here comes a gem of one.

Class guy = guy who gives me free shit

 

Was his name Del Griffith ;-)

 

'[whispering into phone] Hey, can you hear me, it's Chris, I can't talk loud...in the back of my Town Car with Peter King...what? Yeah, the football guy...no, he's a lot thinner than I thought, didn't recognize him until I heard him screaming into the phone, I AM PETER KING! YOU KNOW ME! So we're in the car, and the dude falls asleep! Snoring like an elephant with a busted trunk! And talking in his sleep, on and on and on about 'should have been Kurt Warner'...so anyway, got some hysterical pictures of the guy while he's passed out, remember that night when we did that thing to that guy, with the cigarette and the lipstick and...right, yeah, I know, so brutal, but the guy falls asleep, and has some deadly gas....anyway, great pictures, putting them on my Facebook when I get home....'

 

I just re-read this.

What did Alex Stern of the Alias Sports Bureau have to do with the story, except to provide another name to drop?

 

One long ago hockey trip, I got separated from the team and had to fly on my own and get to the hotel in Long Island on my own. On the flight into New York (forgot which airport), the guy I was sitting next to on the plane offered me a ride to Long Island. I accepted, save me a bunch of money.


A trip to Houston for an NCAA basketball game, I was on the same plane with two guys who were friends of the coach of the team I covered. We sat together and it was back in the days when Southwest had free booze. We did several Jack Daniels shooters and another guy sitting by us joined in. You can't make this shit up, the guy was a traveling salesman for a beef jerky company. I asked the two guys if they wanted to share a cab since it was a long distance from Hobby airport to where we were staying. The beef jerky guy says he has a car and will take us. So we join him. He said he needed to make one stop. Turned out he had a girlfriend he was meeting. We got stuck at another hotel for a while, but he finally took us to our hotel. And a couple of weeks later, got a FedEx delivery at home of a bunch of packages of beef jerky.