Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, September 8, 1993 TAG: 9309080032
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ED SHAMY
DATELINE: DURHAM, N.C. LENGTH: Medium
Her green T-shirt showed splotches of sweat, her hair hung stringy as moist pasta.
Hers was not a glamorous job.
"I am the Bull Lady," she stated plainly.
She operated the plywood bull high over the right field grass at the Durham stadium that is - was - home to the Carolina League's Durham Bulls.
The bull was built as a prop for "Bull Durham," a 1987 motion picture that starred Kevin Costner, Susan Sarandon and minor league baseball.
The stadium was already 48 years old by then, but we're a trigger-happy lot when it comes to anointing our pop-culture heroes. The bull was quickly designated a landmark, an emblem of all that is good and funky and historic about baseball.
In truth, and at the risk of committing a national-pastime sacrilege, the bull is not all that big, not all that old and - as truly funky things go - not all that funky.
Still, the old ballpark closes this season; and when the Durham team opens next year in a shiny new stadium, the Bull Durham bull will not be there with the Durham Bulls. Like some aging middle manager, it'll probably be replaced by something snazzier, if at all.
Somewhere it is written in our cultural playbook that when an old baseball park closes down, we're supposed to get all choked up. The bull enjoyed special treatment thanks to our heritage of clinging mindlessly to things decrepit.
And so it was that Cathy Sokol was a bit player in a baseball drama as the Carolina League ended its season.
Behind the bull, facing the home-run balls that sat on the 2-by-4 ledges of the bull superstructure, taking deep swallows from a giant bottle of warm Quibell, Sokol furiously worked the overheated light switch that turns the bull's red eyes on and off. She frenziedly pulled the Rube Goldberg rope, hooked to pulleys, to wag the tail. Hurriedly, she reached for the valve to release steamy carbon dioxide blasts from the billboard's nostrils.
Her every move was being recorded for the ages.
Network television crews, disappointed by Hurricane Emily's failure to devastate the North Carolina coast, had been dispatched to Durham to chronicle the Bulls', and the bull's, last homestand.
Newspapers from around the country sent their finest writers to wax nostalgic about the passing of yet another crumbling ballpark.
Many wanted to pass an inning or so with Cathy Sokol behind the not-very-historic bull.
She invited each of them onto her perch, as she simultaneously watched the game for cues to activate the bull and the sky for cues to bail out.
"When I see lightning come, I get out real fast," she said. "I see it before the umps do from up here. I get paid to do this, but not that much."
Landscape architect, daughter of Champaign, Ill., diehard Cub fan, Sokol's path to the backside of the bull was hardly direct.
From this point on, too, it seems uncertain. She hopes to inherit the bull she operated for 3 1/2 seasons, to put it out to pasture in her yard and to plant daisies, sunflowers and tobacco at its base. She hopes to be the bull lady behind a new bull at the new park.
As Thursday night's ballgame drew deep into the ninth inning, Sokol took a long draw on her Quibell and peeked past the bull at the stands.
The game had been a sellout and then some, nearly 10,000 people packed in the tiny stadium to see a meaningless Carolina League game between a losing team (Durham) and a winning team (Kinston).
But by the seventh inning, when Durham's Don Robinson drilled a homer that careened off the bull's ribeye and the Bulls led by seven runs, one-third of the crowd had left.
By the last out of the game, fully half were already gone.
So much for baseball nostalgia. Better to get a jump on traffic.
by CNB