You know, sometimes you just stumble across a story that really makes you pause. I wasn’t looking for anything profound, just doing my usual scroll through the internet, probably trying to avoid doing something actually productive. And then this headline about an umpire, John Tumpane, saving a life just sort of jumped out at me. An umpire? Seemed an odd profession for that kind of headline, if I’m being honest. Usually, it’s firefighters, police, you know the drill.
So, naturally, I had to click. Curiosity got the better of me, as it often does. I started reading about it, and then found a couple of news clips. It wasn’t some quick, vague report; there were details. This wasn’t just a “pulled someone from a burning car” kind of thing, which is heroic enough, don’t get me wrong. This was different. This was John Tumpane, on the Roberto Clemente Bridge in Pittsburgh, seeing a woman climb over the railing. Just like that. Broad daylight, on his way to work a baseball game, I think.
And this is the part that really got me, the part I kept mulling over. He didn’t just call 911 and wait, or worse, just walk on by. He went to her. He talked to her. He hooked his arm with hers, from what I gathered, and just held on, kept her talking. He didn’t know her from Adam. He just saw a human being in a terrible, terrible spot and decided he had to do something. He wasn’t a trained psychologist, not a social worker. He’s a baseball umpire. His job is calling balls and strikes, dealing with angry managers. But in that moment, none of that mattered.
I spent a good while that day just thinking about it. Reading the accounts, how he stayed with her, kept a dialogue going, even as she was saying some pretty final things. He just held on, physically and, it sounds like, emotionally too, until more help could get there. It’s easy to sit back and say, “Oh, I’d do that,” but would you? Really? When faced with that raw desperation? It takes a certain kind of courage, a deep-down human decency, to step into a situation like that, with no script, no training, just your own instinct.
It made me reflect on how often we, or at least I, can get cynical about things. You see so much self-interest, so much looking the other way. And then you hear about someone like John Tumpane. It’s not like he was looking for accolades or for his name to be in the papers for this. He was just a guy, in the right place at the wrong time, or maybe the right place at the right time for that woman. And he did the right thing. A profoundly human thing.
That story, that “practice” of digging into what happened, it stuck with me. It wasn’t some grand, complex theory or a new tech gadget I was exploring. It was just a raw piece of human experience that I bumped into. It’s a stark reminder that heroes don’t always wear capes, or even uniforms designed for rescue. Sometimes, they wear an umpire’s gear. And sometimes, the biggest plays happen far away from any field.
