by Linda Holmes
On June 17, 2000, struggling Yankees second baseman Chuck Knoblauch tried to make a throw to first. Instead, he threw the ball into the stands and hit Keith Olbermann’s mother. If it were possible to take everything currently known about the yips and reduce it until only its very essence remained, the result might be Knoblauch in this moment, unable to manage a throw he’d been executing for many years.
Twitchy golfers, tennis players who suddenly can’t serve, aces who lose their touch at darts and cricket, basketball players who go up on their toes and freeze, unable to complete a free throw: they can all have the yips. Coinage of the term is most commonly credited to golfer Tommy Armour, who came down with the condition in the 1920s.
For a long time, in baseball, they called it Steve Blass Disease, after a pitcher for the Pirates who lost all ability to throw accurately after the 1972 season. He later wrote a book called A Pirate for Life. “It got to the point where I didn’t want to go to the grocery store, didn’t want to go out, because I was so humiliated,” he wrote. There was a time when they called it Steve Sax Syndrome, after the 1982 Rookie of the Year—a second baseman, like Knoblauch—who also lost his throw to first. At least in baseball, whoever had it last gets to carry the yips as his personal codenamed whammy. Mets catcher Mackey Sasser lost the ability to throw back to the pitcher, so for a while, they called it Sasseritis. And now, they called it Dean Tenney Disease.
A 2014 New Yorker article by David Owen rounded up the latest research in the field of head-case-ology, which holds that the yips are a complex soup of psychological and neurological ingredients. Maybe anxiety, maybe something physical, maybe more like an injury than a curse. But you’d be hard-pressed to watch somebody with the yips and not think the most likely explanation is that he once annoyed a vengeful demon, who then pointed a long, bony finger and said, “You.”
Evvie watched Mackey Sasser on YouTube as he triple-pumped trying to throw back to the pitcher. She watched throws from Sax and Knoblauch pull first basemen off the bag, force them to leap, or sail right past them, a foot or ten feet out of reach. She watched Knoblauch hit Olbermann’s mother.
And then, for the first time, she watched Dean Tenney pitch in a professional baseball game, in a low-quality bootleg video, where he threw two wild pitches and walked three batters in an inning against the White Sox. Caught in close-up, he clenched and unclenched his jaw. She noted in passing that he’d had a bit of a scruffy beard at the time and that she was against it. The announcers pitied him openly, and one speculated that maybe it was this rumored romance with this Hollywood actress—he wasn’t saying she was a jinx, he was only saying this was the kind of situation where fans often said she might be a jinx.
“Sexist asshole,” Evvie muttered.
She stopped the video. She found another that was called “Tenney Strikes Out the Side.” Pitching against the Orioles before his troubles started, Dean mystified, puzzled, and confused three batters in a row. The first swung wickedly at two pitches and let two go by, and then it was like he was in slow motion as he watched the next pitch thunk into the catcher’s mitt, and he knew instantly that he had made a terrible mistake, even before the umpire threw his arm and bellowed. The next batter struck out after gamely trying to put his bat on a pitch that dropped like it had been suspended over a dunk tank. The last guy hung in for a while, but then Dean stretched, wound himself up like a spring, and hurled the ball. There was a swing like the guy wanted to hit it all the way to Philadelphia—a swing so hard he almost knocked himself over. And then there was just Dean, walking to the dugout, wearing exactly one-third of a smile.
THE NEXT AFTERNOON, EVVIE HEARD someone pull into the driveway and cut the engine. She went to the window and saw a low-slung black Miata, from which a woman in khaki pants and a green sweater-coat was coming into view. Evvie waited, and sure enough, there were five quick knocks on the door, which Evvie’s ear heard as I-don’t-have-all-day.
But when she opened the door, the woman was smiling rather warmly, clutching a leather notebook in one hand. “Can I help you?” Evvie asked her, suddenly feeling stumpy and lumpy and like she wished she’d thought to pull her hair back.
“I’m Ellen Boyd. I’m with Beat Sports.”
It didn’t mean a lot to Evvie, but she’d seen the name. She knew enough. “Can I help you?” she repeated.
“I’m looking for Dean Tenney. I understand he lives with you.”
It wasn’t a secret that Dean was renting here; he’d been in town long enough to be greeted at the gas station and the grocery store, and he had a flock of admirers among the girls who sat around the coffee shop all day, drinking sugar bombs with whipped cream and never seeming to gain an ounce. A few people had even gotten up the nerve to tell him how much they’d liked watching him pitch. When she’d seen it happen, he’d smiled and said thank you and followed with, “What do you do?” or “What are you shopping for?” or “Do you think it’s going to rain?” Or, if he got desperate, there was always, “What’s your favorite way to cook a lobster?”
But it wasn’t a secret. He lived there. So she said it: “Yes, he does.” But almost immediately, she rewound the question and her answer in her head. “Well, I mean, yes, he lives in the house. He doesn’t live with me. Like, he doesn’t live with me, we don’t live together. There’s an apartment in back.”
“Is he at home?” Ellen Boyd with the leather notebook wanted to know, even though Evvie suspected she’d waited until his truck wasn’t here to show up.
“He’s not, no. I can take your business card if you like, and I can ask him to call you.” This was what Andy had done for Evvie when a couple of reporters came around knocking, asking about Tim’s accident. She still had the cards in an envelope; she’d never looked at any of them.
“Could I ask you a few questions?”
“Oh. No, I can’t be helpful. You should talk to Dean.”
“Would you happen to know if he’s been drinking since he’s been here?”
Evvie’s hand tightened on the doorknob. “I’m sorry, what?”
“I’m curious about how he’s doing. Has he been drinking since he’s been here?”
“I don’t know what you’re asking, but I’d like you to go, I don’t have anything else to say.” She started to close the door, but Ellen put her hand on it to keep it open.
“Totally understand, but you’ll be helping him if you answer a question or two, because then I really can go. If it’s no, say no, but if it’s yes, you can get it over with and I won’t be back, okay? Do you know whether he’s having issues with his mental health?”
Evvie paused. She pulled the door back open and stepped into the doorway. “You should get off my porch.”
“Did you and Dean know each other while your husband was alive, or did you get together more recently, or…?”
Evvie’s head felt light. “Listen,” she said, making every syllable the precise equivalent of every other, “you’re standing on a porch my father rebuilt when it was ninety-five degrees outside. I grew up here and I know everyone, and nothing will happen to me if I kick you down those steps with your notebook and your shit shovel.”
“So you don’t want to get into how the two of you got involved.”
Evvie grabbed the notebook out of Ellen’s hand and threw it. It landed with a thump in the grass. “You dropped something.” Evvie nodded toward it and pushed the door shut.
Once it was latched, she leaned back against the door. “Oh shit, oh shit,” she whispered to herself, letting out a hoarse, nervous chuckle. She spun around and peeked out the window. She wondered whether Ellen Boyd would be out there, calling the police, reporting that Evvie Drake had destroyed her property and needed to be arrested. She half expected to see cop cars wailing up her driveway with their lights and sirens going. What she saw was Ellen brushing dirt off the book, talking on her phone, and laughing as she walked to her
car.
Forty-five minutes. That’s how long it took for Ellen Boyd to file her story, get a photo of Dean added, and throw it on the Beat Sports blog that went by the name “Off the Field.” And an hour after that, Evvie got the link from her cousin Steve, and thirty seconds after that, there it was on her own screen.
When Dean Tenney vanished from New York in September after choking as spectacularly as any pitcher in memory, rumors swirled that he was on drugs, was depressed, or might have a gambling problem. More adventurous folks suspected it might be personal. Maybe a woman whose situation was complicated. Maybe a relationship in trouble. Maybe with a man, even.
Evvie was willing to bet Ellen had started these rumors herself, assuming they existed at all.
But a month or so ago, he turned up in Calcasset, Maine, which most assumed he’d chosen because it was the hometown of longtime pal Andrew Buck, and a place where the locals probably don’t even have cellphones or high-speed Internet, let alone spend time on Twitter.
Uch. #condescendingNewYorkdouchebags.
Shortly after he got there, though, Tenney moved in with a young widow named Eveleth Drake. Drake’s husband, a beloved local doctor his patients called Doc, had died in a single-car accident less than a year before.
Evvie realized it was awfully petty that out of this scurrilous pile of crap, the word that was sticking in her craw was “beloved.” And didn’t patients call every doctor Doc?
Drake answered the door at her house (a great big but still cozy property that looks like something out of a movie) earlier today, but when I asked, she claimed Tenney wasn’t around. After admitting they were living together, she refused to answer questions about whether he’d been drinking and insisted she didn’t know anything about any mental problems he might be having.
But how did a widow from Maine wind up living with a guy who was a New York Yankee two years ago? Could this all have really come about just in the time since Doc died?
Whatever the answers to these questions, when she was asked whether she was involved with Tenney prior to her husband’s death, the former Mrs. Drake ended the interview and threw in a threat of violence.
“I didn’t threaten violence,” Evvie muttered. “Or I threatened very little violence, anyway.” She had to give it to Boyd: the reporter had made all she could out of nothing. And even though it was innocent, it didn’t look innocent. And everybody she knew would read it. Her father would read it, Tim’s parents would read it, everybody who already thought she was a bad wife would read it. And, of course, Dean would read it. Why hadn’t she closed the door?
* * *
—
Evvie was watching TV on the couch when she heard his key in the door. Dean came to the living room doorway and stood there for a minute. Finally, he raised his phone in one hand. “Saw it,” he said.
She put her hands over her face. “I’m so sorry,” she said into her fingers. “I’m so sorry.”
He came over and sat next to her on the couch. “What? You’re sorry for what?”
Evvie took her hands away and looked at him. “Oh, for making it sound like we were sleeping together. I’m sure that’s not exactly what your public image needs right now.”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I think it reflects pretty well on me. I don’t know about you. Besides, my favorite sports site recently voted me First Athlete We’d Throw into an Active Volcano, so I don’t think my public image can really be hurt.”
“I also might have threatened the reporter, which I’m sure isn’t exactly what I’m supposed to do. I’m guessing your people will not like that.”
He narrowed his eyes a little. “What people are those?”
“Don’t you have…I don’t know. People? Lawyers or agents or, like, PR people?” She waved a hand by her ear. “People with little headsets who run around barking about whether the limo is going to be on time and whether everyone is in position?”
“That sounds…like a maître d’. Or a wedding planner,” he said. “I don’t have a wedding planner.”
“You know what I’m talking about.”
“I used to have a lot of people.” He nodded. “But now I have a lot fewer people, and I don’t talk to them as much. And when I do, I don’t pay attention to anything they say. What I was going to tell you when I sat down was that I’m sorry a reporter came to your door and started badgering you about your life and your husband, since I doubt that’s a lot of fun for you.”
“It’s not fun,” she agreed. “I still shouldn’t have threatened her.”
“What did you say?” he asked with a grin.
She put her hands back over her face. “I said if she didn’t get off the porch, I was going to push her off.”
Dean offered a broad display of shock. “You did threaten her!”
“Well, I told her that I was going to kick her down the stairs with her notebook and her…shit shovel.”
At this, he bark-laughed. “Did you really?” She nodded miserably, and he pulled her hands down from her face. “Stop pretending that’s not awesome. That is awesome. You know it is. That’s a fucking enforcer is what that is. I’m going to call you Bruiser.”
She made a drawn-out, miserable moaning sound.
“Look, fifteen months ago, they burned me in effigy at a bar I co-owned. They shot out the windows of my next-door neighbor’s apartment with a BB gun because either they can’t count windows or they can’t tell the difference between 816 and 818.”
“Plus, active volcano,” Evvie said quietly.
“Plus active volcano, yes,” he said. “So trust me, the people I have left are not going to get all upset because you yelled at a reporter. And I appreciate what you did.”
She smiled, just a little bit, just until her shoulders relaxed. He raised his hand and said, “Up top.” She didn’t respond. “Come on, Eveleth. Up top.” She reached up and slapped his hand with her own. As he walked back toward the apartment, she heard him say, “Shit shovel. I’m stealing that. That’s mine now.”
DEAN WAS ANSWERING AN EMAIL from one of his brothers the next morning when he heard Evvie’s distinctive double-knock. When he opened the apartment door, she was standing with a gray-haired guy in a Calcasset High School warm-up jacket. “Hey,” Evvie said. “Dean, you have a visitor. This is Ted Finch. He coaches football over at the high school. And he won’t tell you this, but his son Jake is also our star…running back, right?”
“Running back,” Finch said. “Yes.”
“Hey, Coach.” They shook hands a little awkwardly.
“I have to tell you,” Coach Finch said, “I watched you pitch on television quite a lot. It’s a pleasure.”
“Oh, thank you.”
Evvie nodded at them. “Maybe you guys can come in here and talk at the table? I have to go upstairs and get some work done. Good to see you, Ted.”
“You, too, Eveleth,” he said.
Dean watched Evvie disappear up the stairs, patting him on the elbow as she passed. “So,” he said to the coach.
“So. How’s the town treating you so far?”
“Great, great. Everyone’s been great. Good to be out of the city, you know.”
“I can imagine.” Finch smiled at him. “I was sorry to hear how things turned out in New York.”
Dean nodded. “Yeah, thank you.” He gave the silence a few seconds to settle. “So, what can I do for you?”
“Uh, well,” Finch said, “I came to ask you a favor. I’ve got a football team that’s most of the way through a pretty strong season. I’ve got young men who are working very hard, they’re a little beat up by now, and I’m always tryin’ to think of ways to get them motivated. Keep them from gettin’ lazy. Sometimes I bring in different men to talk to them, give some advice about football. Or generally. Just general advice.”
Dean began to see the cloudy outlines of this v
isit sharpen. “Okay,” he said, affecting the noncommittal eyebrow wrinkle of a man who didn’t get it. Maybe Ted wouldn’t be able to bring himself to explain it. Maybe Dean wouldn’t have to say no.
“Well, you’re a pro. You’ve worked with the best, you’ve handled pressure. It’s not baseball, but I’m pretty sure it would kinda translate. I was hoping you’d maybe be willing—”
“Oh.” Dean looked at him even more quizzically. “Coach, you know that I washed out of professional sports, right? That’s pretty much what I’m known for.”
Finch shrugged his big shoulders. “Yuh. I know about all that.” He rattled what sounded like a big set of keys, school keys, coach keys, in his pocket. “I don’t much go in for all this ‘head case’ stuff. Every guy wakes up one day, finds out he’s done. Coaches, too.”
Dean paused, waiting to find the argument ridiculous, something a small-town coach would say because he didn’t understand big-time sports. But he found himself giving a nod of grudging acknowledgment instead. “I guess you’re right about that.”
“Nobody’s ready. Doesn’t always happen when they’re in the middle of a game, I give you that. Doesn’t always happen on television. Doesn’t always make the news. More often it’s the foot speed or they’re hurt all the time. Sometimes they wear out. But they all wake up done. You might have woke up done, but you’re still the best these boys are ever going to meet, chances are. I think it’d be good for them, knowing that life’s not all one thing, as far as win and lose.”
Dean had to admit there was some sense in it. He could at least explain what it took to get him where he’d been, even if he didn’t know a damn thing about how to stay there. Maybe he could even do them some good. He could at least tell them not to give their money to quacks in the event they did become professional athletes and did make a lot of money and then did spectacularly implode.