Missing a friend, in the time of the Tour

I think about my friend on the “official” days of his life, the dates and anniversaries that we mark in the absence of the man himself.

I think of him at odd times, too, and one of them is now.

The guy was into the Tour. He knew the courses, the athletes, the equipment they used. He could talk about the strategies, the gamesmanship, the rivalries.

He had opinions – definite and well-spoken – about the bullshit, the finger-pointing, the backbiting, the ass-covering that we seem to know more about now than ever.

But finally, it always came down to the race, the individual battles and the greater war, the grinding and the graceful and the long-distant goal.

It wouldn’t be a stretch to suppose I was writing in the paragraphs above about golf and the people who play it at its highest level, the PGA Tour, over the course of a long season.

Pat Purcell knew little and cared less about golf.

The Tour he cared about is going on right now, across the Atlantic, and today was Stage 7.

If average U.S. sports fans know anything about the Tour de France, they know it’s being contested this year by a bunch of foreign guys not named Lance Armstrong.

Armstrong is as conspicuous by his absence as T. Woods will be at next week’s Open Championship at Royal St George’s.

Armstrong didn’t win the Tour last year, his final year in the race before re-retiring to return full-time to defending his reputation (see the fourth paragraph above, re: ass, covering of).

Name the guy who did win last year. Yeah. Me, neither.

Pat could have, and he would have offered a thorough accounting of the how and why plus a thoughtful analysis of the state of cycling post-Lance.

He might or might not have noticed my eyes glazing over.

He played golf, to be companionable. He wasn’t good at it, and didn’t care if he was. His equipment was terrible … some of it, nonetheless, lives now in my golf bag.

This time of year, spring and early summer, I wouldn’t have been able to get him on a golf course anyway. He would have been too busy training for another cycling event that happens right about now – the STP, the 200-mile Seattle-to- Portland Classic – which this year starts tomorrow.

Pat rode at least a dozen STPs before he learned, in 2005, that he had a brain tumor. He died in January 2009.

I’m not a guy who’ll ever say my friend is looking on from some ethereal vantage point, keeping track of the Tour de France. I just notice, this time of year, that he’s gone. Conspicuously so.