(Re-posted from  Opinion of Kingman’s Performance – January 2011)

My employment in Law Enforcement periodically sends me abroad to conduct training clinics to foreign members of the International Law Enforcement community.  Back in May, 2010, I was assigned to go to the Afghanistan/Tajikistan border and give a class to Tajik officials for a week.

Now this place is about as far away from California that you can get on the planet – exactly 12 time zones on the opposite side of the globe (something that made it easy to calculate what time it was back home).

Dushanbe, Tajikistan

When I first arrived, they gave us a few days to adjust to the time change so we stayed at the Hyatt Regency in Dushanbe.  While there and with Wi-Fi access (at a substantial cost), I was able to watch Dodger baseball from 8,511 miles away on the MLB internet feed.  So while preparing my lesson plan in a hotel room on the opposite side of the globe at 7:30 am, I watched the Dodgers live as Kershaw defeated the Padres 4-1 on May 20, 2010. I have also had the opportunity to follow the Dodgers from afar in Costa Rica, Argentina and Peru.  The internet has made this all possible.  It wasn’t that way in 1980-82 when I was away in Argentina on a foreign assignment.

Port of Callao, Lima Peru, with Peruvian Customs Inspectors

Baseball was alien to that country back then and pretty much still is today.  I knew that the Dodgers had made it into the 1981 World Series because my brother wrote me and gave me this great news.  But it would take two weeks to get his letters.  So I found out about the ’81 World Championship about a week after it was over, and not from snail mail from home. I was so impatient and eager to receive some Dodger news that I took a two hour train ride to Buenos Aires on my first day off with the expressed purpose of finding out who won the World Series rather than waiting another week for the letter from my brother.

I’ll never forget it.  The only place where I knew I could certainly find North Americans was at the Sheraton Hotel.  At the time, there was nearly palpable anti-U.S. sentiment in the country.  Much had to do with a 4-year uneasy relationship between a rigid and now infamous Argentine military regime and the Carter administration.  During those four years U.S. based businesses were, for the most part, absent from the scene.  You would be hard pressed to find U.S. hotel chains, restaurants, and even newspapers and magazines.  There was one newspaper there that was for the British expat community, but the sports news was mainly European soccer.  The only baseball news would be final scores.  I couldn’t bare reading Dodger World Series results from a one-line no narrative flash.

Sheraton, Buenos Aires, Argentina

So I entered the Sheraton and headed for the news stand.  No New York Times was to be found.  Not even a Time magazine.  I stepped outside and saw a 50-something business man conversing in good old North American English to a bellhop. “Who won the World Series?” I asked him.  He turned, looked a bit surprised and said, “Why it was the Dodgers… they came back from being down 0-2 and won four straight.”  My traveling partner proceeded to slap me a high five and we started for the door without even thanking the man.  He said, “I take it that you’re happy about that.”  I turned and nodded, he then said something about being a Pirates fan and that they’ll get ‘em next year.

So that was how I experienced the 1981 World Series – isolated from my beloved Dodgers, in a remote area of a foreign land that knew next to nothing about baseball.  The internet hadn’t been invented yet, there was no access to phones and print media from the states was difficult to find.

Now, as I travel the globe, in an instant I am connected with all the news I desire.  With Skype I can instantly converse with my wife, kids and grandkids from anywhere – at least I thought that until the Tajikistan trip in May of 2010.

With Tajik Customs official who confided in me that he has 4 wives and 28 children

On this assignment I was transported to the Afghan border for 5 days of teaching a course in one of the most remote regions of the world.  While there at the border there was no internet, no indoor plumbing, dust storms, no air conditioning, 100+ degree heat, mosquito infested humidity on the Pyanj River.  I’m not stealing a line from Kenny Powers, I say the honest truth when I say that we were fed by local villagers hired to bring in meals for us.  It was very isolated.

On day one I laid awake in the early morning hours, trying to sleep in the abandoned quarters of a Tajik border guard.  The insects were eating me alive; the unbearable stench of my adjoining bathroom with no running water was obviously close.  It was so dark in my room  that I couldn’t see my hand directly in front of my face.  I felt an uncomfortable uneasiness that the insects that were feasting on my body were inflicting me with some type of incurable exotic disease unknown to man.

In my panic, I fumbled through my backpack and pulled out my blackberry.  It lit up the dark room like a lighthouse beacon that shocked my eyes.  Amazingly, I had reception.  On the display it said “Afghanistan” which proved that its GPS was off kilter by about half a kilometer since I was still in Tajik territory.  As I scrolled through the display there it was, “Bottom of the 5th, Tigers 3, Dodgers 2, Xavier Paul drives in two runs with an RBI single.”

“Come on blue,” I thought to myself. “We can take this one!”

What mosquitoes?  For a few moments my mind was back at Chavez Ravine.