Mom would have been a perfect politician's wife. She was fastidious about remembering names and writing thank-you notes. She had great posture (her college yearbook declared that her favorite sport was "standing erect") and the best penmanship of anyone I have ever known. She could not afford luxury items, but she always insisted on quality. That went for us, too, when it came to buying shoes or sports coats. We didn't have many extras, but the stuff we had was top shelf. For all of her hard work—chores that made her hands rougher than she would have liked—Mom was something of a diva. No housecoats or curlers in her hair when she went out of the house. On beach outings, when it was time to leave, she made us fetch pails of water so she could wash the sand off her feet before putting on her shoes. The one-time Miss Silver Laker was ever dolled up, even when doing housework. She lived to be 81 years old, and not once did I ever see her with her hair wet or unkempt. Needless to say, I never saw her run, either.
Groton in the 1950s was something right out of a Ron Howard movie. The first play I saw in high school was Thornton Wilder's Our Town, and it struck me as totally boring and unremarkable because it depicted conversations and situations I heard and saw every day. Nothing special about that, right? Ours was a town of Yankee farmers who said little and wanted no one to know how much money and land they had. We never locked our doors and dialed only five numbers to make phone calls. Everyone knew everyone else's business, even when the days of the telephone party lines ended. My wife, Marilou, a native of Detroit, would be perplexed and charmed by this when she made her first trip to Groton in 1980. We stopped at Forcino's Market to pick up some groceries to bring home to my mother. As Leo Forcino was ringing up our purchases in his bloodstained apron (Leo was also the butcher, of course), he stopped, held aloft a half gallon of ice cream, and said, "Dan, you might not want this because your mother was in this morning and picked up some ice cream."
"Chocolate chip?" I asked.
"Yeah, chocolate chip, Dan," said Leo.
A half mile down the road, closer to home, we stopped at the town hardware store because Marilou needed double-A batteries for the flash on her camera. I stayed in the car and told her to ask for either of the Sargent brothers. My old schoolmates, Dana and Rickey Sargent, ran the store. She picked up a four-pack of Duracells and as Rickey was ringing up the purchase, she made an offhand remark about how wasteful it was to have to buy four batteries when you need only two. Invariably, the other two batteries get lost and go to waste. Hearing this, old Rick ripped open the package and sold her two of the batteries for half of the sticker price. Marilou was slapping her forehead and laughing when she got back to the car.
"What's up with this place?" she asked before relaying the story. Stuff like that never happened in Detroit.
For many years, there were no stoplights in Groton (one was grudgingly installed for the new millennium). It was a town of 4,000 in the 1950s, and I went to school with kids who lived on apple, dairy, and produce farms. Houses were far apart and we rode our bikes everywhere, sometimes lining our wheel spokes with baseball cards because we liked the way it sounded. An odd little man named Bravel Goulart cut our hair and would give me a nickel to go next door to Bruce Pharmacy and fetch a newspaper. Old school. Bravel cut our hair the way our dads and moms wanted it cut, even after the Beatles splashed ashore in 1964.
In this vast space of small-town serenity, it was baseball that filled the long summer days. And it was major league baseball that made us feel connected to something bigger than Groton. The Boston Red Sox weren't very good for most of the 1950s and '60s, but they always had a lot of home run hitters and every now and then someone would pitch a no-hitter. A huge relief pitcher named Dick Radatz entertained us by raising his arms over his head when he walked off the hill after fanning the great Mickey Mantle. We got to listen to the greatest announcer of them all, Curt Gowdy, and most of the weekend games were on TV. The Sox were the big league team in the big city. They were ours, even if they stunk. (Nobody ever said "sucks" in the 1960s, at least not without punishment. "Sucks" is, in fact, the new "stinks.") They lost more than they won, but we followed them anyway.
My first trip to a Red Sox game was in 1961, a weeknight win over the Orioles. Today, I silently curse my deceased parents for not getting to Fenway one year earlier. Ted Williams retired in 1960 and I never saw him play. His was a magical name in every New England home when I was a kid, but my folks did not think to get Danny to Fenway before Ted hung 'em up. So I went in 1961, in the second grade, and I remember that famous first glimpse of the Fenway green when I walked up the ramp with my dad and brother. Fenway was grainy, small, and gray on the tiny black-and-white Philco at home. Like most people my age, when I finally walked into that ancient yard for the first time, I was awed, overwhelmed, and tangled up in green. Unfortunately, I was not struck by the sight of Ted Williams taking batting practice, so I settled for a rookie leftfielder named Carl Yastrzemski. The Red Sox beat the Orioles that night, and I fell asleep in the back seat on the ride home. I was still one year removed from a lifetime's immersion in baseball.
It happened in the summer of 1962. Something just clicked. My older brother, Bill, was a local teen baseball sensation by the time I was 8, and no doubt this had much to do with my sudden fascination for all things baseball. I knew every player on every major league team. I collected baseball cards and baseball coins and watched every game that was on television. The '62 Sox were dreadful, but that hardly mattered. My world was baseball, and I would play imaginary games with a rubber ball and my S & H Greenstamp/Tito Francona–model glove. We got our mail at the post office, and I faithfully stalked the brick building when my monthly Sport magazine was due. Sport featured a few too many stories about Mantle and Whitey Ford for my liking, but it didn't really matter much as long as it was baseball. The town librarian learned to set aside any new young-reader baseball novels. I'd inhale the cliche-laden texts and return them in a matter of days. I invented a baseball dice game and played an entire 162-game season with my imaginary teams. I wallpapered my bedroom with baseball photographs and played some form of baseball—often by myself—from the time I woke up until the sun went down, unless of course there was school or a family function. My sisters still laugh recalling my narration of imaginary games with a rubber ball at the back porch steps. They would chuckle while they dried dishes at the kitchen sink. Joan, who is ten years older than me, claims I would sometimes work myself into a fit of tears while playing one-on-one with myself. "Why didn't you just let yourself win?" she would later ask.
It was not that simple, of course, but how could anyone else understand the game inside my head? I was an 8-year-old baseball Rain Man.
In Billy Crystal's City Slickers, a female character teases three 40-year-old guys regarding their lack of intellectual curiosity contrasted with their remembrance of everything having to do with baseball. When she says, "I don't remember who played third base for Pittsburgh in 1960," all three simultaneously say, "Don Hoak."
Alone in the theater, I, too, stared at the screen and said, "Don Hoak."
I remember my uncle Chappy looking at the scorebook I kept while watching the 1964 World Series on television (Cardinals over the Yankees, 4–3) and telling me, "This is good. You should keep doing this. You might be able to do something with it."
Uncle Chappy was probably into his third whiskey by then. I'm sure he never remembered the conversation. But I did. And he was right.
As a professional baseball writer for more than thirty years, I've learned that many of the best big league players know little about players who came before them. It seems that the gifted ones are rarely devoted fans of the game. They're just really good at it. Nomar Garciaparra didn't waste any time memorizing the lineup of the 1982 California Angels. He was busy playing soccer and baseball better than the rest of his friends. In my experience, people who love baseball the most are often one step removed from the dugouts and bullpens. Fans, writers, broadcasters, and professional baseball exec
utives get into the game because they love baseball. A lot of players get into it because they are good at it and it pays well. In the spring of 2006, Red Sox reliever Keith Foulke, the man who closed out the first Red Sox World Championship in eighty-six years, a pitcher making more than $7 million annually, admitted, "I'll never be channeled toward baseball. I'm not a baseball fan. I actually find baseball kind of boring. It's not my life. I can't sit around and watch nine innings of a baseball game."
My playing career was fun but unspectacular. Brother Bill was my first obstacle. When I was a kid, my big brother seemed to be better at baseball than just about anybody who ever played in Groton. They put him on the high school varsity as a starting rightfielder when he was in the seventh grade. By the time he was a sophomore, he was hitting home runs and winning a league championship as a pitcher. Bill is six years older than I am, and I'm convinced that I learned to report on sports by going to his games, then coming home and telling my parents and sisters what had happened.
Going to Fenway was not common. It was a once-a-year event, like Christmas and my birthday, and usually timed to soften the blow of my annual visit to the Lahey Clinic, where I was treated for asthma. Groton is only forty miles from Boston, but we didn't make many long drives when I was a kid, and a trip to the Hub was treated like a trip to Europe. We usually had to stop at the Howard Johnson's in Concord to mark the midpoint of our long journey. This made faraway Fenway even more fascinating. Thinking back, I remember a couple of times when my annual game was rained out, and to this day I deal poorly with unexpected disappointment. It reminds me of a rainout for that summer day I looked forward to the most.
Want more childhood trauma? Try this: I was traded in Little League. In the fourth grade I started out as a member of the Dodgers, but Groton's in-town Little League Dodgers and Yankees were too strong and the Giants and Braves too weak, so they put my name into a lottery for a dispersal draft to break up the superpowers. Probably because my brother was so good, the Braves assumed I would be good and took me for their roster. Sort of the Dominic DiMaggio effect. My Dodger coach, Andre Van Hoogen, called me before school one morning to break the news. I was crushed.
I loved Mr. Van Hoogen. He was the father of a raft of talented sons and daughters, and he'd come to our town from Chicago, where he'd coached Bryant and Greg Gumbel. Mr. Van Hoogen had had a childhood bout with polio that rendered his right arm useless. Still, he managed to hit us fungoes with his good arm—smoking a cigarette at the same time. It was impressive. He also was some kind of engineering genius and used a lot of big words. When we started calling a familiar umpire by his nickname, "Jake," Mr. Van Hoogen told us to knock it off. Said it sounded like we were in "cahoots" with Jake. Cahoots. I had to look that one up. Mr. Van Hoogen had a Fort Devens sticker on his car, which meant he could drive onto the army base in nearby Ayer and shop at the PX, where everything cost less. There were a lot of great men like Mr. Van Hoogen when I was a kid—men who'd served in World War II and come home never to speak of it again. Mr. Kopec, dad of my Little League teammate Woody, had fought on the beach in Normandy.
Then there was Mr. Zeamer, whose house was on Old Ayer Road. My friends and I knew it as the hallowed home of the great-looking Zeamer girls. My sister Ann was friendly with the bubbly Jackie Zeamer, and when my dad and I went to pick up Ann after a slumber party, Dad mentioned that Mr. Zeamer had been awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for his bravery in World War II. None of the Zeamer girls ever mentioned this, and neither did their dad.
Tom Brokaw would later call them "the Greatest Generation," but we just knew these remarkable men as solid citizens who seemed to love the pace and beauty of small-town life. When I started behind the counter at the ice cream joint, the owner, Norm Johnson, told me the most important thing was serving customers quickly. He reminded me many of his customers had waited in lines during their hitch in the service, and they didn't ever want to wait in line again.
No doubt there are psychologists who'd enjoy getting inside the head of a little boy who was traded in Little League then grew up to be a wisecracking sports columnist, but we will have none of that here. Getting traded turned out to be okay, because I got two hats and a small trophy when the Dodgers won it all that year. I guess it was my World Series share for spending a portion of the season with the champs.
The real highlight of my baseball playing career came when I was 12 and led the league in home runs, hitting six in nine games. That first homer was the best. If you love playing baseball, hitting your first home run over a fence is easily a bigger deal than your first day of school, first kiss, first day on the job, or any of that other stuff. My first homer came on my first swing of the 1966 season off Yankee righty, Buzzy Lanni. Big Buzz threw hard and straight and I got him with the thirty-inch Al Kaline Louisville Slugger I'd purchased from Moisen's Hardware (later owned by the battery-bartering Sargent brothers) for six bucks. It was a beautiful, tapered, light bat with wide grain and perfect polish—like those shiny wooden checkerboards on the shelves of the souvenir shops at Hampton Beach. It even smelled good. It was my Wonderboy.
Standing on the mound on that perfect May Sunday, big Buzz held a right-out-of-the-box baseball that was as white as a Chiclet. That's how you knew the game was for real. In all forms of practice or backyard baseball, we'd use scuffed balls, taped balls, tennis balls, rubber balls, pimple balls, half-balls, anything. Not this time. Not on opening day. Hitting this ball would be like making the first sled marks on a hill of fresh snow. My heart beat fast as I stepped into the righthanded batter's box. This never changed. There was always an element of fright and anticipation whenever I went up to hit. Now I get that feeling when Sam is hitting. I suspect it's the same for all ballplayers and all parents.
Old Buzz's first pitch was a knee-high fastball, right where I like 'em. I did not put anything extra into the swing. I simply did what I'd done before thousands of times in my backyard. I followed the flight of the pitch, opened my hips, swung at the ball, and heard a click. The great Yaz once talked about that perfect hitter's moment when you take a big swing, connect with the sweet spot of the baseball, and feel absolutely nothing as your bat whooshes through the hitting zone. The hardball takes off like a Titleist struck by a two-iron. I experienced this only once.
There were no over-the-fence homers for me after that final Little League season. I was a scrawny second baseman/outfielder with little power. I played three years of varsity baseball at Groton High, but our teams were terrible and I was lucky to hit .250. We had more fun in the summertime, playing Babe Ruth games and commuting to surrounding towns in the flatbed of Mr. Friedrich's green truck. He would carry the whole team, ten to twelve guys, in the back of the rusty old Chevy. His son, Albane, painted a "chartered" sign and taped it across the front of the truck. We would rumble across the bumpy, winding roads of Ayer, Pepperell, Shirley, and Lancaster, drinking Coca Cola from those 6½-ounce green bottles and singing songs we'd heard on F Troop. Then we would harass the other team's players ("This kid's got nothing! He's throwing junk!"), bash our way to victory, hop on the flatbed, and chug back to Groton. We might even stop for ice cream if old man Friedrich had a spare ten dollars. None of it would work today. You couldn't put kids in the back of a truck and you certainly could not hurl insults at the other team. Not now. Parents and officials would get in the way of the fun.
When I first touched down on Holy Cross's campus in September 1971, I went out for fall baseball for about a week. Once a national power, winning the NCAA Championship at Omaha in 1952, Holy Cross's baseball program was struggling by the time I arrived. I had brought my spikes and glove to school and went to a few captain's practices. I remember doing pretty well in batting practice at Fitton Field and getting the attention of the senior captain who was running the workout. But I knew the time demand would be large and the reward small. A plodding, .250 hitter from the Wachusett League wasn't good enough for Division I college baseball.
This was the prover
bial fork in the road. In high school I had been class president, played three sports, worked twenty-five hours a week, wrote for the town newspaper, and even served as an audio-visual aide (the ultimate in dorkdom). I had promised myself to commit to only one extracurricular activity in college. It would not be baseball. I would write for the weekly student newspaper.
My first assignment for the vaunted Crusader was covering the freshman football team. In my first story, I wrote that the freshman football team was in a "rebuilding year." And I wasn't even kidding.
Sports writing worked out pretty well in college. I was sports editor four weeks into sophomore year and soon realized that it would be prudent to spend more time on the school paper than on my studies. I nagged the Boston Globe editors and writers constantly for work, and after my junior year the Globe sports editor Dave Smith asked me if I would like to cover the Boston Neighborhood Basketball League during the summer. I would have walked on my lips through busted glass for any opportunity to get bylines in the Globe. It was then the paper of Peter Gammons (also a Grotonian), Ray Fitzgerald, Leigh Montville, Bud Collins, Will McDonough, Fran Rosa, and Bob Ryan. A tour through the Globe sports department was a walk through the clouds, and I spent the next three summers driving Globe cars in and out of sixteen different Boston neighborhoods, watching teenagers play summer basketball outdoors. It was the best training I could have had. I learned the city from Savin Hill to Mattapan, from Charlestown to Brighton. Due to forced school busing, the Hub was immersed in racial tension during those years, but my game knew no colors and no political points of view. I was a sportswriter for the Boston Globe. I covered and befriended men named Kevin Mackey, Leo Papile, and Jim Calhoun, guys who made it big in later years. But in those years, we were all just part of the Hub's hoop culture, sweating nightly and wondering when the city would ever cool down.
Senior Year Page 2