Senior Year

by Dan Shaughnessy

  Sam got a letter from the St. Louis Cardinals. "Congratulations on being identified as a future prospect by the St. Louis Cardinals!" wrote a New Jersey scout named Koby Perez. There was a lengthy questionnaire, and the scout's letter said Sam should fill it out and "consider this a job application for your dream career." Sam asked me what he should answer in the portion that inquired about his signability in the event he was drafted by the Cardinals. We both knew this wasn't going to be a problem, but it was fun talking about it anyway.

  In lieu of basketball and track, he was going to the gym regularly and the baseball players were gathering informally for indoor captain's practices three times a week. Along with his pal Mike Huberman, he was also coaching a team of seventh-grade basketball players at the Boys Club. They called it "working with the little people."

  At Sam's urging, I went to one of the games and watched the boys coach the little people. It was odd to see young parents talking to my son about their children. Sam and Mike had a young girl on their team. They also had a player named Elvis. "Pretty sure that's his real name," said Sam.

  It pleased me that I didn't have to tell Sam to make sure the less-talented kids got a lot of playing time. A lifetime of playing ball teaches you the need for democracy at the lower levels. There'll be time for winning later on. You could tell that Sam and Mike really enjoyed delivering instructions and making substitutions. They even had a sense of humor about it. When Elvis gave Mike some lip at halftime, Mike laughed, pointed to the door, and said, "Elvis, leave the building."

  I have always found people who volunteer to coach kids to be among the best of our society. Sure, there's the occasional blow-hard who's just there to advance the greatness of his own child, but for the most part these men and women are selfless and sincere. They donate time in an age when minutes and hours are precious and few. These coaches drive around with the bats, balls, and batting helmets rattling in their trunks. They leave work early and stay late to work with our kids. They make fifteen phone calls anytime it rains. They endure obnoxious players and parents. And they do it for the doughnut. It is an avocation that seems to attract a lot of cops and firefighters. Teachers, too, of course. These volunteer coaches can make a lasting impression on our sons and daughters. Forty years removed from the Groton town field, I still remember a lean man with a withered right arm who managed to hit one-armed fungoes while smoking a cigarette and expanding our vocabularies. All at the same time.

  February

  It seemed to me that life was too easy for Sam. These were I the final months of his high school career, and I worried he wasn't prepared for college and life thereafter. He seemed spoiled and apparently stress-free, and his routine was outrageously easy. He would get up at 7 A.M., less concerned about parking spots than he'd been in September, cruise to school, collect his B's without much effort, and sleep a good part of most afternoons. It had been seven months since he last played on a team. He managed to work out regularly at the local YMCA and ran regularly at the captain's practices. He coached the little people on Saturdays. But there was too much downtime, sitting at the computer on the second floor or slouching on the couch watching Seinfeld reruns and SportsCenter. And all the while, thin, smart girls with shiny hair continued to drift in and out of our home, watching TV and making brownies with him. Nice life. No worries about money, grades, zits, datelessness, athletic performance, or where he would be matriculating next year. No apparent edge or conflict. Could this be a good thing? Were we looking at a future business leader or had we created a lazy, selfish monster who would be incapable of sticking things out when life wasn't so easy someday?

  I was ridiculously busy in my final months of high school in 1971. There was the stress of where I'd be going to college and how we were going to pay for it. I was writing a weekly sports column for the local newspaper, working twenty to twenty-five hours a week at the ice cream stand, playing varsity basketball and baseball, serving as class president, applying for scholarship aid, shoveling snow and mowing the lawn, and constantly worrying about getting rejected when I found the courage to ask someone to dance (as a result of this experience, Shaughnessy girls were mandated to say yes to any boy who asked at a high school dance. Give the guy a break and dance with him one time—unless he made the mistake of starting off with a slow dance).

  Looking back at my diaries, I am stunned at the immaturity on those pages. At the same time, I'm amazed at the responsibility I was given. Norm Johnson, the owner and CEO of Johnson's Drive-In and a father of four children, trusted me to shut down and lock up his ice cream and hamburger establishment on slow weeknights in the fall and spring. This entailed snuffing out deep-fat fryers that could have exploded and burned the joint down if not done properly. It also meant locking all the doors and carrying the cash drawer up the hill to Mr. Johnson's porch, where I would place it in the dark breezeway. I was 16 years old, and this man put his entire life's work in my trembling hands on a regular basis. Would anybody dare do that today?

  My chosen profession introduces me to a lot of successful people who worked hard (okay, probably not Manny Ramirez) to earn their place in the world, and it made me wonder about the SS Cruise Ship gliding through senior year with Sam on board.

  Steve Burton is a talented, fortyish television sportscaster in Boston. He's one of five children of the late Ron Burton, a saint of a man who played professional football then dedicated his life to helping underprivileged young people from the city. Steve is handsome, athletic, and charming. As a high schooler, Steve was thrown out of St. Mark's, one of the more prestigious private schools in greater Boston. He got a letter from the headmaster informing him of his dismissal and had to take the embarrassing missive to his parents, who immediately directed him to the local public high school, Framingham North. There, Steve rallied and put together a resumé that led to his acceptance at Northwestern University. Today, he's a locally famous television personality with a wife and four children.

  A few years ago, Steve was asked to a make an appearance at the school that bounced him all those years earlier, and he gladly returned to the scene of his humiliation. (It reminded me a little of when I was asked to return to Groton to speak to the National Honor Society—a club that rightfully denied me membership back in the day.) After speaking to the St. Mark's students, Burton was pulled aside by a schoolteacher who told him something he had never known.

  "It turned out my dad had asked them to throw me out of the school," said Burton. "It was his wake-up call to me. He'd requested that they send me the letter, and he knew I'd have to take it to him. And he never told me. Not even twenty years later. It turned out that it was the best thing that ever happened to me. It forced me to get my act together. It was tough love."

  Indeed. Could I do that? Probably not. I worry too much about my kids' happiness. As a result, they've rarely waited for things and suffered little. As far as a dad can tell, anyway. Like I said—too easy.

  At Super Bowl XL in Detroit, I interviewed Isaiah Kacyvenski, a 28-year-old Seattle Seahawks linebacker. Nothing easy about this young man's life. He grew up in Endicott, New York, the youngest of five children. His mom was raised in an orphanage, and his dad was an alcoholic who beat the kids and failed to support the family. Kacyvenski remembered living in a tent in somebody else's backyard. He remembered combing through Dumpsters for food, and the embarrassment of watching his mom ridiculed for pushing food stamps across the counter at the local market. He got free lunches at school and that, too, was embarrassing. His dad would pummel him for no reason at all. When he was 9, Isaiah listened to the 1986 Super Bowl on the radio and made up his mind that he was going to be a football player. He set his sights on Notre Dame and became one of the best high school players in America. But Notre Dame never called. When he was a senior in high school, on the morning of a state tournament football game, he got the news that his mother was killed in a car crash. Kacyvenski was set to accept a scholarship to the University of Connecticut when Harvard coach Tim Mu
rphy called. It seemed like a stretch, but Kacyvenski had a 98.6 grade point average, and Murphy convinced him that Harvard would change his life. And so he went. And he graduated cum laude. Meanwhile, his dad went on the wagon and Isaiah made him apologize for what he'd done to their family. Then he sent his father to Harvard to wear his cap and gown and accept his diploma while Isaiah went through the paces of mini-camp with the Seahawks. Six years later, Dave Kacyvenski sat in the stands at Ford Field and watched his Harvard grad son play in the Super Bowl.

  Now that is a high school athlete who's got a story with some edge.

  There is guilt in taking care of your kids too well. Making it too easy. My father endured long, uncomfortable commutes on streetcars from Cambridge to Boston College High School. He mastered Latin and somehow paid his way though Boston College with Depression dollars. He worked ... and waited. No entitlements. No instant handouts from Mom and Dad. And let's not forget Marilou's dad, who was on a boat somewhere in the Panama Canal waiting to invade Japan when he was 19 years old in 1945.

  When I got back from the Super Bowl in early February, I sat down with Sam and asked him what he was stressed about. He said he couldn't think of anything except baseball. We both knew there wasn't much pressure to perform in this final season, because his college situation was set. He wouldn't be worrying about impressing coaches and scouts every time he walked to the plate. By my math, that would make him stress-free for another twelve to fourteen months. And it bothered me. But I figured maybe it was my problem.

  And then came an awakening. In February. During school vacation.

  I was in Florida with the Red Sox—the twenty-seventh spring training of my writing career. Sam had made the trip with me in the previous three years. During one of the quiet Fort Myers mornings, before any players arrived, he'd gotten batting tips from Sox coach Ron Jackson—the same man who worked magic with David Ortiz and Manny Ramirez. "Papa Jack" became Sam's hitting guru, and any time Sam needed a pep talk I'd take him to Fenway to listen to the master. But there was no spring training in Florida for Sam in 2006. He was draft-eligible, committed to Boston College, and it would be risky for the Red Sox and for BC if word leaked that a high school senior was practicing at the big league facility. At this hour, we all knew Sam wasn't any kind of a professional prospect, but he'd risk losing his college eligibility if he spent any time in the Sox cages during senior year.

  I'd been in Florida for a couple of days when Marilou called on a Tuesday morning to tell me things I never knew about my son. Sam had come home, drunk—in a taxi—at 3 A.M. The vodka he'd guzzled proved to be sodium pentothal, and from 3 A.M. to 5 A.M., Sam poured himself out as he sat in our cold, dark kitchen.

  A line of new truths, one after another.

  He'd been at a party and gotten into a fight with one of his best friends ... They'd avoided another party at a "trouble" house where the cops regularly visited ... Just about all the kids had fake IDs and everybody could buy alcohol ... He'd first smoked weed in the seventh grade ... He always kept cab money in his pocket when he went to parties ... He didn't know where his car keys were, but the car was still parked outside the home of the girl who had the party ... He'd had his heart broken by his junior prom date, but they'd managed to become friends and she'd helped him through difficult times ... Some of his friends thought he was bipolar and in need of medication ... He'd suffered what he considered deep depression in the spring of his junior year when he slumped at the plate and worried he was overrated ... He still had fits of crying ... He wondered if drinking was hereditary—his roommate at Notre Dame told him he did not drink because his dad was an alcoholic ... He worried about letting his teammates down when he underperformed ... He would always love Manny, the Legion coach who stuck by him when he was 15 years old, trying to keep up with college kids ... He loved baseball bats as much as his mom loved books ... Buddhist teachings were helping him cope.

  Sam went to bed at 5 A.M. Marilou heard him throwing up a few hours later. She got him some aspirin and a cold washcloth, then let him sleep it off. Late in the afternoon, they went to get the car and he kept a sweatshirt hood over his head during the silent drive. He still didn't know where his keys were. Someone might have taken them from him as a safety measure. He was allowed to go to the North-South basketball game that night. He was hoping somebody would return his keys.

  I spent the day in Florida writing about Manny Ramirez and wondering how I could be so clueless about my own son. I was the champion of telling everyone that we never really know what our teenagers are doing, and yet I'd been blind-sided by Sam's admissions. Teenagers smoking pot and getting drunk hardly qualifies as breaking news, but I'd duped myself into thinking that Sam steered clear of it all because he was so committed to baseball. Turns out nobody steers clear of it all, not at a suburban high school of 2,200 students. Not now. Not in 1971 either, come to think of it.

  All this stuff went on when I was in high school, but I pretty much missed the whole thing. The permissive era of Sex, Drugs, and Rock 'n' Roll went on without me. No beers. Not one. A little vodka with Heather Stoddart, but not enough to put my head into a toilet bowl. No drugs. Not even a joint. Fear of parents and police, I guess. I was so clean, the bad guys used to ask me to ride shotgun just in case they got pulled over by the cops. Like some force field of innocence, my mere presence in an automobile would make the rest of the kids in the car above suspicion. It was the same at school. I could walk the corridors without a hallway pass and never be challenged. When I dropped out of an advanced math class, the principal called me into the office to find out what was wrong with the teacher.

  Unfortunately, the young women of my day had the same sense of my Opie wholesomeness. Too safe. High school girls love bad boys, which meant that none of them loved me. The moms loved me, and we all know what an aphrodisiac that is for a 16-year-old girl. I was a complete nonthreat. Kathy Sullivan's mom sent us off on our date telling me it didn't matter what time I got Kathy home because I'd been such a cute baby. If I'd been dating the moms of Groton in 1971, I could have been Warren Beatty, but this got me nowhere with the cheerleaders and field hockey players of my dreams.

  When I was a senior in high school, arriving home drunk and carless at 3 A.M. would have triggered the end of life as I knew it. (Let's not even talk about the taxicab—to my knowledge there has never been a taxi on the streets of Groton.) Grounded? Try house arrest. Hard labor. Shame, shame, and more shame. Now here we were, thirty-five years later, handing Sam some Tylenol, letting him out again the next night, and patting him on the back because he'd taken a taxi instead of driving. It was a decidedly new-school response. Sure, we were planning on meting out some punishment, but the first reaction was relief. He wasn't in a serious car accident. He wasn't arrested. He hadn't been kicked off the baseball team. He hadn't lost his partial scholarship. Baby boomer parents of this century tend to go light on the tough love. We are reminded that we might lose our connection with our kids altogether if we come down too hard. And so we cave in.

  Suddenly, we had a new goal for our last child: see him through senior year without any catastrophe. Get across the finish line without scandal or disgrace.

  Do the math. Three kids. Thirteen years of public schools per child. This was our thirty-ninth and final year in the Newton school system. There were four months to go.

  I didn't talk to Sam the day after his barf bag bacchanal. I figured I'd wait until I got back from Florida. It was a little awkward because I'd scored some serious lumber for him at the Red Sox camp. Friends in the Sox clubhouse set aside some of the bats left behind by players who'd been traded, released, or had left via free agency. I had maple models once used by Doug Mirabelli, Edgar Renteria, Bill Mueller, Kevin Millar, and John Olerud.

  The Bay State League, one of the better baseball conferences in Massachusetts, uses wood bats because Wellesley lefty Billy Hughto was almost killed by a line drive hit off an aluminum bat in the 1990s. Hughto was on the mound when a shot back
to the hill smashed his skull and bounded to the outfield. He was helicoptered to a hospital in Boston, where doctors successfully relieved the pressure on his brain and saved his life. A couple of years later, the Bay State League switched to wood and hitters soon learned they had to do things the hard way. Old school.

  It seemed indulgent and inappropriate to come home with big league wood bats in the wake of Sam's vacation behavior, but I was feeling a little guilty myself. It was unfair for me to have assumed that he was stress-free.

  Now all this. Drugs. Alcohol. Bad judgments. Sam was going to be told that some friends and their homes would be off-limits. And the drinking simply had to stop. A year earlier, Newton's best hitter forfeited his senior season because of two alcohol violations.

  Eligibility and scandal aside, I was disappointed that we hadn't been able to talk about the drinking thing. And like a lot of parents, I knew I'd been a poor role model. He'd seen too much drinking in our home. Too many parties with adults getting too woozy. How could kids not notice? Now my son was asking if alcoholism could be inherited. Not good.

  It was also shocking to hear that Sam had girl trouble. Again, I'd missed the signs of stress and assumed that relationships were easy for him. I'd joked about his being an International Man of Mystery. I'd read my pathetic diary entries and discovered a lonely loser, unlucky at love. Turned out Sam had heartbreak of his own. Turned out 18 is 18. Some things are universal, no matter what it looks like from the sidelines.

  I flew home from Florida on a Friday night for the final weekend of February, the final weekend of Sam's vacation. He was awake when I came in the front door after midnight, and he didn't groan when I told him to take my heavy bag to my second-floor office. I'd managed to fit eight bats into the suitcase, wrapping them in a towel in an effort to prevent pine tar from staining my clothes. We still weren't talking about his risky business from earlier in the week, but I had made it a condition that he clean his room before he got a look at the bats. Leverage can be a wonderful thing. By Sam's standards, his room looked okay when I inspected it, and so he was allowed to harvest the Wonderboy wood in my American Tourister. Looking like the wine connoisseur Paul Giamatti played in Sideways, he removed the bats one by one, holding each one aloft to inspect the model numbers and wood grain. The Renteria bat was last, and we both laughed when it came out of the bag with a pair of my white briefs clinging to the sticky handle like a shredded sail on a broken mast. "This would be a tough one to explain," Sam said as he held the bat by the barrel and unsuccessfully attempted to shake off the stubborn underwear.