On Frozen Blog

(continued from Thursday, 3 May, 2007)

April 7: At the Blogger’s End of Season Soiree at Clyde’s all four of us meet James Mirtle of the Toronto Globe and Mail. Before we can finish shaking hands with him he asks us about “this Moscow gig . . . is this really happening?” We’re stunned, as collectively we’ve mentioned it only to family and close friends. Then James goes on to explain his meeting with Mr. Leonsis at the Sabres’ game that afternoon. We put two and two together. And we promise to keep James apprised of the developments. Mirtle, who has his own exemplary blog, sure seems interested in writing about our trip.
April 10: This fantasy trip carries one principal administrative headache for me: I’m without a passport, and I have less than 30 days ’til travel. My real job involves a good bit of interaction with Capitol Hill staffers, and recognizing the novelty of my circumstances, and vaguely aware of “pull” that can come from people in privileged places, I share my challenge with a lawyer chum in a United States Senate office. We’ll call her Lucky Charm.
Expedited passports, she informs me, are back to being processed in about two weeks, so she wants me to initiate my request through the normal procedures. A couple of days later, I’ll present myself at a Maryland passport office and cough up a lot of dough to expedite. I’m told there that I can follow the progress of my application on line at the State Department’s web site. Still, I’m terribly nervous about placing my faith in the federal government within this constricted timeframe. Lucky Charm is excited for me, and I like having her in the know in case things with State get bogged down. She asks me to keep her informed of the progress.
April 12: The OFB comrades get out of our respective offices early and travel to the Caps’ Ballston offices for a 4:00 meeting with Kurt Kehl, Mike Vogel, and Spike Parker. The first formal Moscow Meeting. The meeting agenda is basic and general — storyboard the coverage in Moscow, and present to Mr. Leonsis a workplan, which Vogel will construct, for the owner to approve. After all, he’s making an enormous investment with this gig, so he has a right to understand and approve the products we’ll be delivering.
The meeting in Kurt’s office is informal and cordial and chock full of nerves-calming cheerful banter. OrderedChaos and Spike are the room’s twin techies, conversing much of the time in computer geek-speak about the World Championship Tournament page the Caps will devise. Vogel, seated next to me, directs a few “They’re speaking Russian to me” raised-eyebrow glances my way. The geeks lose me after the words “World Championship.”
We discuss travel and lodging, and Kurt reminds us that one of the team’s Russian scouts, “Gleb,” will be with us virtually all along, guiding us through the foreign currency and culture. Vogel chimes in about specific pieces we’ll be constructing, first and foremost a tournament preview. I offer the view that any workplan for Mr. Leonsis should acknowledge that perhaps as much as a quarter of our ultimate product will arrive from unplanned and unforeseeable comings and goings and encounters in Moscow. It’s good to have a guiding script of course, but we do ourselves — and especially our readers — a disservice, I suggest, if we fail to embrace the novelty of this gig and “allow stories to write themselves.”
The meeting, which lasted nearly two hours (altogether pleasant and too fast), adjourns, and before OrderedChaos and I can convene our own strategy session at Bailey’s across the street (the “meeting” being euphemism for “this is really happening and we’re drinking tall drafts to celebrate it”), I ask Vogel to lead my bloggermate on a tour of the new offices as he did for me the previous Friday.

April 14: It’s passport application day. At the Aspen Hill, Md., passport office the line is 40-deep fully 30 minutes before opening at 9:30. Two-and-a-half hours later, I’m liberated, armed with stamped certification of my perseverance. I’m relieved, mildly, but hardly convinced that I can rest easy the next three weeks and trust that the federal government will ensure my authorized arrival in Russia.
April 23: Kurt Kehl emails us and informs us that all four of us Russia-bounds are receiving press credentials today from the IIHF. The team really needed that OK from IIHF to move forward with travel arrangements. Spike Parker is all over the arrangements.
We are a go.
April 24: I run over to the Caps’ offices to retrieve some certification on team letterhead of our involvement with the organization in Moscow. It’s material we likely won’t need, but I am enlisting some help from a U.S. Senate office in potentially extra-expediting my passport, and this kind of written attestation is nice to have in the event somebody from the State Department digs a little deep into the circumstances of my hasty departure.
I also email Lucky Charm to inform her that it’s been ten days since I submitted my passport request, and that on the State Department’s web page, the application status tool shows no record of my request even being entered into the passport mill. I’m feeling very much in need of a power favor.
When I get back from Ballston, I find out very swiftly that the attestation is very much needed — Lucky Charm tells me to fax it to her pronto.
April 26: Here’s an interesting development: tomorrow, Friday the 27th, inaugurates the Russian May Day holiday. Word is quickly e-traveling between the Caps and the traveling OFBers that the Russian Embassy, from which we need four tourist visas, will be closed pretty much all of the next five days. May Day is a pretty big event for Russians, apparently. We travel seven days from now.
Earlier in the afternoon I again checked the status of my passport, and once again there is no status. Near 8:00 I receive a call in the office from OrderedChaos, who’s in Spike Parker’s office at Ballston.
“We need to be at the travel agency first thing in the morning with everybody’s passport, so we can get our visa requests in before the Embassy shuts down for nearly a week,” my bloggermate tells me.
No problem. After all, I’ve got about 10 hours to somehow let the State Department know that the passport request it has no record of ever receiving needs to be processed, and the document in my hands, more or less by sunrise.
8:15 p.m.: Email subject line to Lucky Charm: “I think I’m screwed”
I decide to dial the State Department’s help line for very needy travelers. I get a live voice reasonably fast (less than 30 minutes of on-hold elevator music). “I have extraordinary circumstances,” I begin, “and I’m looking for guidance.” Note the absence of any demand; I thought it best, in my vulnerable state, to do all I could to endear myself to the nameless, faceless bureaucrat on the other end of the line. He’s alert and polite, and immediately he conveys to me an eagerness to do whatever he can to lessen my anxiety. He takes my social security number and within seconds sings a song of optimism.
“John, we processed your passport on Tuesday . . . then shipped it out FedEx.”
Meaning, Lucky Charm indeed moved the Blue Ridge Mountains for me. She got my faxed materials, relayed them to her contact at State, expressed the hard deadline of Friday, and that contact got my file unearthed, processed, and into a FedEx truck. All of this occurred on Tuesday. Now all I needed was the passport itself.
10:15 p.m.: Slipped under my home’s front door, without the requisite signature, is the passport. More good luck seemingly engineered by Lucky Charm. The party’s on.
April 27: This is the last weekend before the trip, and I’m spending it precisely as I want to — in the company of my family on the Eastern Shore. I spend Friday’s final hour in the office today printing out the highlights of the past month’s electronic exchanges I’ve had with the Caps, the press, my bloggermates. I want to bring my father a dossier that captures the magic of this dream project. I can’t imagine I’ll ever see an April the likes of this one again, or any other month for that matter, and so this dossier will serve as a bit of a family keepsake.
May 2: We are learning that there is a bit of flexibility required of the sports outsider when collaborating with the sports insider; such as, the day before a scheduled overseas trip, understand that there might not be any travel at all.
Apparently, our four requests for media credentials were wrongly issued as “guest passes.” The Caps learn of this this morning. In email Vogel rightly points out that without access to any of the players, our lofty story ideas are basically worthless. Here’s where he leaves our status at 6:00 p.m.: it’s 50-50 whether we go or not.
OrderedChaos and I begin an exchange of oath-laden email that would make George Carlin blush.
Vogel and Parker keep us constantly updated. Kurt Kehl is doing everything he can behind the scenes to get things straightened out.
I’m imagining all manner of nefarious scenarios as our undoing. Some WaPost editor with a mischievous streak and a brother-in-law working credentials for the IIHF. That kinda conspiracy theory stuff. Vogel emails again and reports that Kurt Kehl is working on the credentials, but he doesn’t sound optimistic.
I leave the office at 5:30, saying goodbye to my colleagues but with a dread in my heart that I’ll be seeing them again the next morning.
Forty minutes later I arrive home and immediately check my email for a progress report. There’s email from Vogel and Parker. Which to open first?
I opt for my brother in long prose, Vogs. He sounds an optimistic note, but there’s nothing substantial in the way of progress. Spike, however, earns the trip’s first beer:

Guys, Here is the plan. I am stopping by the ‘plex in the a.m. to pick up checks in each of our names. We should all meet up at the Verizon Center around 11 a.m. and we can metro from there after cashing our checks at the Chevy Chase branch directly across from the F street entrance. We still need to keep receipts even though we have a per diem. Our CFO also suggests a combination of travelers cheques and cash. Nate has reached out to a friend of his over at the IIHF and hopefully that will help us out with the credentials. Right now we plan on getting on the flight to NYC unless we receive a phone call. We have a contact in Moscow, Dmitry, who will meet us at the hotel and help us through the accreditation process in Moscow.

see you in the a.m.
-S