Seeing Newton North at the Boston Garden three and a half decades later reminded me just how special such an experience would have been in my Public Spirit world. This time around, of course, I could have been the doofus dad with the mini-cam, capturing the moment of Sam doing lay-up drills on the Garden floor, vicariously experiencing what I'd missed in 1970. Instead, it was our fourth kid—Alexis—who got into the game and drained another three pointer. Anthony scored twenty-four. I remembered the days when these kids were playing pickup in our driveway. I could post-up little Anthony when he was 10. Not now.
Reinforced by books and cinema, the image of fathers and sons "having a catch" stands as the traditional American parent-child sports connection. In my world, it's one-on-one basketball. My one-on-one basketball games against Sam have been the best barometer of my ever-fading place in the competitive sports. It's probably the same when you teach your son to play golf or tennis. In the early years, you do as you please and emphasize instruction. You win anytime you want and occasionally let the little guy get close to boost his spirit. Then your child grows, becomes more competent and competitive, and the games are suddenly contested. You still prevail, but every year you're getting older and slower and your son is getting bigger and better. Finally, sadly, like lines intersecting on a graph, your son beats you at your own game and you know it's only going to get worse. It's ascent versus descent and the trend is irreversible. Sam beat me in the driveway for the first time when he was about 15. I know now I'll never beat him again. Anthony probably shot past me by the time he was 12.
On the night that North won at the Garden, all but twelve points were scored by members of the class of 2006. There was no way our coach was going to replace this senior class. Seven seniors played on North's history-making squad and four of them had been part of the football team that made it to the Eastern Massachusetts Super Bowl. These characters were creating quite a legacy for themselves. We could only hope their heads wouldn't get too big and they wouldn't do anything stupid before graduation.
I took Sam out to dinner at the Stockyard the night after the Garden game and used the opportunity to cover a number of subjects. I asked him about the two warnings he'd gotten from school (extending his four-year streak). The missive from his creative writing teacher read, "Quality of work is inconsistent, more effort needed, needs to bring materials to class." (Kate wondered, "Materials? For writing class? Would that be a pen?") Sam said there was no problem. He said there would be no C's on his transcript come graduation. Satisfied with that, I asked about a story in the paper that recounted the arrests of two of his classmates, twin brothers, who'd been caught making fake IDs (reminding me of the famed Savage brothers in Mystic River). Sam said the going rate for the phony driver's licenses was $120, but he'd rejected the opportunity to purchase one. I told him it seemed like a lot of dough, but he explained that the twins incurred considerable start-up costs, including a high-quality printer, a laminator, and special paper. The boys were arrested while dumping their equipment. A local police officer told the newspaper, "It's the same penalty if you make fake IDs or you own one. It's a five-year felony ... as prom and graduation season approaches, Newton and surrounding towns don't need kids to be involved in this."
After a long pause, I asked Sam if—now that he'd seen his friends win at the Boston Garden again—he had any regrets about not being part of the basketball magic. He was shaking his head no before I finished the question.
After that, he took the opportunity to ask me how the book was coming. Sam knew about this project—I'd shown him the introduction before school started in September. We had a deal that he would not get to look at any of the material while the book was being written. I didn't want the book to influence his behavior in any way, and it appeared I'd succeeded in that department. But I knew he was probably worrying about disclosure of the night he "went a little overboard" during February vacation.
Changing the subject, I mentioned some unsettling neighborhood news. Mack, the beloved Australian shepherd owned by the Inskeep family across the street from our house, had been put down in the middle of March. No small episode in our cloistered corner of town, people brought food to the Inskeep home during their time of grief.
I've never been a guy for pets. My parents wouldn't let us have a dog or a cat, and I knew it was a waste of time to ask. Not surprisingly, as an adult I have the same attitude. It's simple: a person who grows up without pets doesn't want pets. And so it was easy to dismiss the request when our children were young. "Why do you need a dog?" I'd ask my little daughters. "You've got a little brother. Play with him. Sam will fetch."
My Fido frost melted quickly when Kate was diagnosed with leukemia. Who could say no to a brave little girl who wore a chemo backpack to school during her days of twenty-four-hour infusions? Kate didn't complain about ridiculously painful bone marrow tests or spinal taps. She played softball despite her skeletal frame. She turned baldness into an asset when she went out on Halloween as Charlie Brown. She bit her lip and stayed strong when we went to the funerals of little friends who didn't survive.
And I was going to say no when she asked for a dog?
Luke, a golden retriever puppy delivered from central casting, came into our home in 1994 when Kate was in the throes of treatment. I assumed Kate named him "Luke" because of leukemia, but it turned out she just liked the name. Sam was only 7 when we got the dog. He got a kick out of throwing tennis balls down our dead-end street and watching Luke do what came naturally: run like hell, scoop the ball with his mouth, then return with the slimed, fuzzy Wilson wedged between his teeth.
In Shaughnessy family folklore, it is an article of faith that Dad Dan will be on a work-related road trip whenever something bad happens. Cars break down, basements flood, toilets explode, kids get the mumps, teen son gets drunk and takes a cab home ... Dad invariably is in some Marriott in Houston, Chicago, or New York. So naturally I was in New York City in September 2001 when Luke died.
It was an unspeakable ending. Due probably to lack of exercise (lack of retrieving, would that be ironic?), Luke got too heavy and morphed into a mule by the time he turned 7, when Sam was 13. On an otherwise routine Saturday afternoon, Luke had trouble breathing and needed medical attention. Marilou hoisted him into the rear compartment of our eggplant-colored Dodge minivan and drove to the veterinarian's office. Sam rode in the back with Luke. When she arrived at the vet's, she was told that they were not seeing emergency patients on the weekend and was referred to another animal hospital. She explained that our dog was in distress, but the young vet shrugged and said, "Sorry, that's our policy."
Marilou got back in the car and drove frantically toward Angell Memorial Hospital. Cradling Luke's head in the back of the van, Sam couldn't tell if his dog was breathing. He asked his mom to turn off the air conditioner so he could hear better. By then, Luke had stopped breathing. He died in Sam's arms.
I'd often wondered what that was like for Sam. He eventually told us in the form of an assignment for his creative writing teacher ("quality of work is inconsistent"). Sam wrote a story that concluded with a passage describing a young man holding his fiancée after she'd been mortally wounded by a random shot while riding the New York subway. "Steve laid with Jessica as she slowly died," Sam wrote. "As Steve could feel her breathing start to slow up, he ... told her he would always love her. Moments later, Jessica died."
One thing high school authors are not ... is subtle. If you don't believe me, I still have a longhand copy of Throw Up for Glory.
The Newton North boys' basketball team won its second straight state championship on Saturday, March 18, beating Holy Name of Worcester 67–58. Anthony scored twenty-seven points in his final high school game, and North finished 27-0, with thirty-two consecutive wins and a two-year record of 53-1. North became the first Division One state champ to run the table in seventeen years. Sam and his friends made the drive to Worcester for the final, which was somewhat anticlimactic after the Eastern Mass. fin
al at the Garden.
The game in Worcester was a true community event. Captains from the class of 2005 came back and participated in a pre-game ceremony to accept a state sportsmanship award at center court. Little kids asked the ballplayers for autographs. Most of the fans in the stands had watched these boys grow up and pass through the school system. Many were carpoolers and coaches at one time or another. When it was over, outgoing principal Jennifer Huntington hung medals around the neck of each player.
"I'll never forget this, not twenty years from now," Anthony told the Globe.
But there was some bad news in our house because Alexis didn't get off the bench for more than a minute of that final game, and his mom said she couldn't get him out of bed the next morning. He'd been humiliated in front of his family and friends.
Two days after basketball season ended, indoor baseball try-outs were held on the first day of spring, a day when the greater Boston temperatures topped out at 38 degrees. Sam and fellow captains, J. T. Ross and James Greeley, had been holding informal, indoor practices for baseball players for more than a month, and they had a pretty good idea how the team was going to look. North had gone 12-8 in each of the prior two seasons, winning one game in the state tourney before shutting down for the summer. There was every reason to believe they'd make the tournament again, although they were unlikely to match the levels of success attained by the football and basketball teams.
Newton's head coach, Joe Siciliano, was observing his twentieth season as varsity baseball coach. An engaging math teacher and one-time ballplayer, nobody loved baseball more than the bespectacled Sis. He'd raised a gang of kids with his wife, Sandy, and their youngest son, Mark, was Sam's Legion teammate before going off to play college ball at Babson. Sis also served as longtime coach of the junior varsity basketball team, which meant Sam Shaughnessy was getting ready to play his sixth season under the man. Had to be a record. Thank God we all liked him.
I had a soft spot for Sis. It helped that we'd spent time together in the bleachers as parents when Mark Siciliano and Sam were Legion teammates. At those games, I'd learned how much the man loved baseball and how much he knew about the game. Sis was one of those guys you'd see raking the infield dirt at ten in the morning on a game day. And if it rained, he'd stand in the middle of the diamond like Charlie Brown, ignoring the deluge around him and saying, "Let's play two!" This was a 60-year-old man who wore a full uniform and batting gloves on game days. Like all the good high school coaches, he was also a keen student of the teenage mind. He knew how to discipline and he knew how to reward. You want to send a message to a good ballplayer? Take away his playing time. Bench him. That kid will remember not to swear or throw his helmet next time. Sam Shaughnessy was that kid more than once, and Sis put the hammer down by putting Sam's ass on the bench for the rest of the day. But our baseball coach could also be a softie. When his seniors played the last game of their baseball careers (for many if would be their last organized game ever), he made sure they all got in the game. Alexis Mongo would not have been paralyzed in bed, ashamed to come out of his room, the day after winning a state championship if he'd been a senior ballplayer playing for Joe Siciliano.
I made it home for a couple of days in late March, after the basketball team had won. It was a tense time at North. College envelopes were in the mail and kids were comparing stories. On a Friday night, Sam and I watched Boston College's basketball team lose to Villanova in the Sweet Sixteen. A ridiculous loss. We both knew BC should have won. Better than an intense parent-child conference, or a not-so-subtle dinner summit at the Golden Star, we covered a lot of stuff during the two-hour broadcast. During one of the timeouts, Sam asked me if there had been any envelope from Boston College in the daily mail. No.
I remembered three years earlier when Sarah was waiting for letters from Brown and Harvard, and how much that had dominated my thoughts and dreams. This was nothing like that. Sam was going to Boston College. It was a bag job. He'd signed the letter of intent. Marilou had wanted him to apply to the University of Connecticut as a backup, but Michael LaVigne reminded us that the letter of intent was a legally binding agreement and told her to save the $70 and take us all out for dinner. Good advice.
The next day, a few minutes after Sam left the house for a Saturday morning scrimmage, a packet from Boston College was pushed through the front door slot and landed with a thud on the floor of the breezeway. I'd planned to watch the scrimmage, and when I pulled into third lot just before noon, I had the BC package riding shotgun. I made my way to the aluminum bleachers adjacent to the visiting bench on the third base side.
Sitting in my usual spot, I noticed Dan Duquette walking behind the visitors' bench. Duquette had been general manager of the Red Sox during the 1990s and early 2000s. One of the architects of the Sox 2004 Championship team, he was the man who brought Pedro Martinez, Manny Ramirez, Jason Varitek, and Derek Lowe to the Red Sox. Duquette and I had been adversaries. I'd praised him occasionally but hammered him regularly, and now he was out of major league baseball, replaced by Theo Epstein.
Seeing Dan at the North ball field was weird. Our work had put us in high-profile conflict for almost a decade, but on this chilly Saturday we were just a couple of middle-aged dads, watching our sons play a meaningless scrimmage. Late in the game, Daniel Duquette was on the mound when Sam Shaughnessy came to bat. Young Duquette had retired all seven Newton batters he'd faced. Standing next to the former Sox GM, as the count ran to 1-1, I could no longer ignore the obvious and said, "Okay, Dan, here's the Duquette-Shaughnessy matchup. Gotta be stakes. What you do say—a lobster roll at the Stockyard?"
"Let's make it lunch at the Stockyard," said Duquette.
Just as those words left his mouth, young Daniel hung a curveball and Sam smacked a single into right-center field.
There was a pretty young girl in the stands, Emily. She'd been Sam's junior prom date, the second baseman/knockout who got all the attention whenever anybody looked at Sam's prom pictures. In the photo, Sam was wearing a newly minted Joseph Abboud suit, but photo viewers could not get past the stunning young girl in the black sequined prom dress. Emily and I chatted in the cold bleachers. She said BC was one of her top choices. She asked if Sam had heard anything and, slightly guiltily, I held up the envelope.
This was a classic example of over-parenting in this century. It was not my place to spread Sam's good news, and he should have been the one—not his dad—to deal with the delicate situation of telling Emily that he'd been accepted while she was still waiting. I still feel bad about it. (Emily wound up going to Wisconsin, a hot school for kids from Newton in 2006.)
Sam was lifted from the lineup in the late innings and I approached him while he worked alone in the batting cage down the right field line. Had this been a real game, such intervention would have been a clear-cut violation of parent-child game comportment. You never interact with your kid in the middle of a game. Never. Not even if the child is lying on the turf, holding a broken leg or a severed Achilles tendon. It just looks bad. It embarrasses your son or daughter and it's disrespectful to the coach. But this was a scrimmage and nobody was paying much attention and I had Sam's future under my armpit. Plus, it seemed fitting for Sam to tear open this envelope while his cleated feet were standing on the lawn where he'd earned his admission to this college.
He smiled and sighed when I gave him the envelope. Then he walked back toward the bench. He wanted to be with his teammates when he tore it open. A couple of minutes later, he sauntered back my way, gave me a thumbs-up signal, then stuffed the ripped envelope and its contents into my hand. He went back to the bench. I walked to my car and took a peek:
"Dear Mr. Shaughnessy: I am delighted to offer you admission to the Carroll School of Management at Boston College. From over 26,500 applicants you have been chosen to join the 2,250 students entering the class of 2010." At the bottom of the letter, next to the signature of Danielle S. Wells, assistant director of BC admissions, she'd written, "Congratulation
s, Sam ... looking forward to seeing you out on the diamond."
Alexis got dropped off at North later that day and I drove him to our house. We talked about coach dissing him in the state final in Worcester. He said he'd been unable to enjoy the state championship celebration. We talked about college. He was still waiting to hear from his first choice, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Finances were going to be a problem, and he was probably going to have to take out some loans. I could see that the process was wearing him out.
I flew to California the next day, my last big trip before the start of Sam's baseball season. I'd told my boss that I wanted to take a lot of vacation time in April, May, and June. This was the last high school go-around for our last ballplayer and I didn't want to miss a moment. In California, I was housed at the Doubletree Suites in Santa Monica and my room looked out on the Santa Monica High School baseball field. I was in foul territory, about four hundred feet from home plate outside the right field line. A virtual high school baseball luxury box. Rick Monday, the first player selected in the first baseball draft of 1965, had been a lefty slugger at Santa Monica, and he could easily have put a ball through my window at the Doubletree. Looking out that window, day after day, I saw tall, rangy Californians sweating on the diamond and I thought about our boys back in Newton, wearing hooded sweatshirts in 40-degree temperatures.
The Samohi (Santa Monica High) Vikings played a home game against Hawthorne on the afternoon of my last full day in California. Wearing sunglasses, a gray T-shirt, and a black sports jacket, I strolled over to the field and set up behind the backstop. It was nice to be able to watch from so close, a luxury I never had at home. Setting up behind the backstop when your son is playing baseball is another rules violation for player parents. It's a particularly bad idea for a dad who's easily identified by local sports fans. The last thing Sam needed was players and coaches on other teams thinking that his father is some kind of stage dad, browbeating the kid into playing baseball. Remember Fear Strikes Out, starring Anthony Perkins as real-life ballplayer Jimmy Piersall? A centerfielder with the Red Sox, Piersall was pressured nonstop by his father and wound up in a mental institution.
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