It's impossible to shake off the memories

AMERICA AT LARGE/George Kimball: As the rumble reverberated across the stadium, the stands began to shake. My initial supposition was that it was the result of 60,000 pairs of feet stomping in unison. Then I realised nobody was stamping their feet.

"I think," I said to my colleague Stephen Harris, seated next to me, "this might be an earthquake."

"Naw," said Steve, who kept hammering away at his laptop.

"Oh, yeah?" I pointed to the glass-fronted press box, which swayed against the sky above the stands along the third base-line at Candlestick Park, while all around the ballpark, towering light stanchions wobbled. "Look at that."

"Jesus," he said.

The quake lasted no more than half a minute, and as it subsided the stands, packed with hip Californians who like to show how inured to these matters they have become, erupted in defiant applause, as if to say: "Okay Mother Nature. We've taken your best shot! Now let's play some baseball."

Within moments the cheering had subsided. Terrified San Francisco Giants and Oakland Athletics alike had emerged from their respective clubhouses and roamed into the seats, fetching their wives and children.

In short order, the ballplayers and their families had assembled, en masse, in the infield. Only then did the public address announcer suggest that the fans might wish to evacuate their seats, like, uh, quickly . . .

All of this happened 13 years ago this week, but as the World Series returned to San Francisco for the first time since, it all came rushing back like a bad acid flashback the other night. It had been four minutes past five, Pacific Time, when the quake struck.

Game three of the 1989 World Series was less than half an hour away from its first pitch. The telecast, which was already in progress, was immediately knocked off the air, leaving the nation in suspense.

In these days before the widespread currency of mobile phones, those of us who were on the scene were even more in the dark. We had lost power in the auxiliary press section, but a few colleagues had brought along battery-powered portable televisions. Local stations, some no doubt operating on emergency generators, began to piece together the horrible details of what had happened in that 30 seconds.

The Oakland Bay Bridge had literally come apart at the seams. Sections of the span had dropped right into San Francisco Bay, followed in short order by a few speeding cars who were unable to halt their progress before they tumbled into the void and plunged into the sea below.

It occurred to me that less than 24 hours earlier I had driven across that bridge, taking my wife and two small children to the airport.

Portions of the Nimitz Freeway running through downtown Oakland had collapsed, the upper deck landing on the lower, trapping hundreds of cars beneath thousands of tons of concrete. The quake, which had registered 7.1 on the Richter Scale, had also started fires in the picturesque Marina District of San Francisco. They would burn for days. Electricity had been disrupted on both sides of San Francisco Bay.

Along with several other scribes, I moved to a makeshift workroom beneath the stands and began to bat out a first-hand account, reporting the facts as best I knew them, but we were shortly interrupted by stadium security personnel bearing orders to evacuate immediately.

There were vague suggestions that major structural damage had occurred to the stadium, and that Candlestick might fall down about us at any moment.

My column unfinished, I raced to my rental car in the parking lot. My old college friend Mike Finnigan, the keyboardist for Crosby, Stills and Nash, had flown up with his young son from Los Angeles for the Series. They were bunking with me across the Bay in Berkeley, and were already waiting in the car.

When we eventually escaped the traffic jam at Candlestick, we drove south along the darkened freeway until we began to see lights. I found a Chinese restaurant in San Mateo with both electricity and an operative telephone, and finished and filed my story from there. We also managed to notify my family and Mike's of our safety.

I drove south for another 25 miles before I could find an open bridge to the East Bay. We crossed in the darkness and then found a circuitous route that would bypass Oakland. It was nearly midnight by the time we reached the hotel in Berkeley. Fortunately, the bar was still open.

The 1989 World Series ("our modest little sporting event", as Baseball Commissioner Fay Vincent labelled it at a memorable candlelight press conference announcing the postponement) would not resume for 12 days.

Since the runways at both the Oakland and San Francisco airports had been damaged by the quake, several days would elapse until the paper could dispatch cityside reporters to the West Coast, so Harris, Joe Giuliotti, and I were deputised for earthquake duty.

My initial beat became the East Bay. The morning after the quake I was wandering behind police lines at the collapsed Nimitz Freeway when I encountered a grimy-faced volunteer who had been working the rescue effort all night. He held in his hand a child's second-grade homework he'd found in an automobile which had been instantly compacted by a falling slab.

I asked him if there were any chance its owner had survived the tragedy.

"Are you kidding?" he replied. "This car was one foot high."

For the better part of two weeks we sportswriters lived like war correspondents, chronicling the residue of the quake by day, and spending most of our nights in the company of Mike McCourt, the legendary Limerick-born philosopher-cum-San Francisco barman whose older brother, Frank, would later write a book called Angela's Ashes.

Although Vincent, after consultation with the San Francisco and Oakland mayors, believed that concluding the games would expedite the healing process, there were players on both teams who questioned the wisdom of playing at all.

"People are still dead," pointed out Giants' rightfielder Pat Sheridan. "Their families aren't going to enjoy watching the World Series, I guarantee you that."

When the Series finally did resume, Oakland, who had won the first two games on their own turf, mercifully closed the Giants out by winning the next two. Despite the 4-0 result in games, it remains, from start to finish, the longest World Series ever played.

Thirteen years would elapse before San Francisco would stage another, and ironically, the Giants-Angels match-up which resumes at Pac Bell Park tonight is the first all-California Series since.