Thank God, none of the USC guys sustained permanent injuries from Dinesh or Rinku. I just wish I could say the same about Deepesh, who one evening made the big mistake of agreeing to help the guys practice their curveballs out in our backyard by playing catcher.
Because Tom told them to keep the curve down, they had to mix them up with fastballs, just like in a game situation. Rinku and Dinesh were using hand signs to signal what pitch they were going to throw to Deepesh, armed not with a catcher’s mitt but just Dinesh’s regular glove. Naturally, they got their wires crossed at some point, and so when Deepesh was expecting Rinku to drop in a curveball, he confronted a fastball in the high 80s—breaking his middle finger.
Deepesh’s was the ultimate act of generosity, but so many people extended themselves to Rinku and Dinesh during their time in America. Barry Bonds became part of this camp when he invited us all over to his house to review the footage I had started to amass of Rinku’s and Dinesh’s training.
The experience of going to Barry’s house, a 17,100-square-foot Tuscan villa in the extremely exclusive and secluded gated community of Beverly Park, was overwhelming for the boys, needless to say. The private neighborhood high above the hills boasts mansions worth tens of millions of dollars, which are owned by some of the richest and most famous LA residents, including Eddie Murphy, Denzel Washington, Samuel L. Jackson, Michael Eisner, Sylvester Stallone, and Wayne Gretzky.
When we drove through Barry’s massive front gate and around the circular motor court with a water fountain in the middle, Rinku’s take on the scene was to ask, “Sir, Barry Bonds living in hotel?”
Standing under the soaring thirty-foot ceilings of the formal entryway, decorated with columns of Venetian plaster and hand-painted trompe l’oeil murals, I couldn’t fault the guy for making that mistake.
“No,” I said. “This is Barry’s house.”
“Come on, sir,” he said. “This not house.”
“This is a house, bro.”
Barry welcomed us in and began the boys’ tour by taking us down a long hallway where he displayed a lot of his sports memorabilia. Mounted on the walls were the many, many tangible symbols of his success as an athlete. His seven National League Most Valuable Player awards, twelve Silver Sluggers, eight Gold Gloves (for best offensive and defensive player at his position, respectively), and more were illuminated under tasteful spot lighting. Also mounted behind Plexiglas was a wall of uniforms and gear from all of his favorite athletes, including Muhammad Ali’s vintage gloves and fight trunks.
From there we walked through a portico that could have been imported from a medieval Italian cloister. It led to Barry’s commercial-quality spa and gym. While strolling through the steam sauna and massage rooms, the boys whispered to me, “Sir, we still in Barry Bonds’s house?” I replied that we were indeed still in his house.
At some point during the tour, Barry asked, “You guys got a girlfriend?” in a friendly, offhanded way.
Rinku and Dinesh blushed deeply and shook their heads. Theirs was an extremely modest culture. When I had treated them to a massage to work out some of their sore muscles from Tom’s training regimen, they insisted on being worked on by male massage therapists. And when I pointed out a pretty girl passing by in the food court, Rinku scolded me, saying, “This is not good, sir.” Even when I took them to get their hair cut at the local Supercuts, they cringed at the fact that the staff was made up exclusively of women.
After passing the hydrotherapy Jacuzzi, Rinku informed Barry that in India thirty-five is usually considered a good age to get married and start a family.
“I didn’t say anything about having kids. I asked about girls.”
“Oh, sir, no, no, no,” he said. “This is not done.”
Barry just smiled and shook his head as he escorted us to the gym, with treadmills, flat screens, and weight training machines. There was also a mirrored wall that opened up to reveal more trophies. A lot more.
Barry’s mansion had all the trimmings you would expect from the home of the world’s greatest baseball player. In addition to the twelve-seat indoor theater, there was a “backyard” with a pool, 2,100-square-foot sports court, an olive tree grove, and an outdoor kitchen with a professional-grade pizza oven and a deep fryer—as well as a two-floor guesthouse that’s bigger than most people’s regular houses.
Standing by the fully stocked outdoor wet bar, Rinku turned to me and insisted, “Now, we’re in hotel?”
“No,” I said. “This is still his house.”
“We just left his house.”
“Still his house.”
The tour ended in Barry’s walnut-paneled office with leather wall upholstery—the perfect vision of a CEO’s lair—where his personal chef, Keith, brought a tray of healthy foods such as smoothies, salads, and homemade bread. While the boys loaded up on the delicious, fresh food, Barry popped in one of the DVDs I had brought, and a mirror transformed into a flat-screen TV once he pressed Play.
“Magic television!” Dinesh exclaimed, pointing at the TV.
For the next three hours, Barry went through all their performances, pitch by pitch. Pausing the DVD to point out small details, he told Dinesh and Rinku the many ways to read a batter. The direction a hitter’s toe is pointing in, the bend of an elbow, the placement of the knee—these are all tells that give away his plan. Barry explained to Rinku and Dinesh that if they understand the signs, then they can adjust their pitches to combat their opponent.
At the end of his tutorial, Barry caught sight of a batter crowding the plate on Rinku.
“If a batter crowds the plate, that means he’s trying to force you to pitch him outside,” Barry said. “It also means that he doesn’t respect the pitcher.”
Barry launched into a little pep talk. “You’re the pitcher. That’s your plate. You can’t let a guy get comfortable. If a guy digs in too much, throw it right at him. If a guy’s going to try to take control of the plate, you have to let him know that you’re not afraid to hit him. Just throw at him and let him go to first base. Or at least brush the guy back. The next time, he’ll back off.”
Rinku and Dinesh looked a little fearful at his advice. They were trying not to hit batters. Now the world’s greatest offensive player was telling them to deliberately send opponents ducking for cover. Was this such a good idea?
Even though they were new to the sport, they were receiving the baseball education of a lifetime and knew that if Barry was telling them something, they ought to listen. Just being in his house was an amazing honor for an aspiring player, but, on top of that, to have him sit for three hours and impart knowledge was like having Ernest Hemingway give notes on a writer’s manuscript, or running lines with Robert Redford. There’s not a pitcher alive who wouldn’t have benefited from hearing Barry’s insights into how batters approach hitting. It wasn’t just that he’s a baseball expert; it’s like having an enemy soldier reveal the other side’s plan of attack in advance.
* * *
If all went according to plan, less than a year after they arrived in America, Rinku and Dinesh would be expected to compete at the same level as a bunch of kids who were drafted by major-league teams. I was hard on them because I wanted them to be prepared for the difficult road ahead of them if they made it. There were going to be coaches who focused relentlessly on the negative. If they went out on the field and got three strikeouts but gave up a walk, they weren’t going to hear about the strikeouts when they returned to the dugout. Coaches were going to be looking for perfection. When you play pro sports, you don’t get a pat on the back for doing something right. That’s what they’re paying you for.
But maybe I was pushing the boys too hard. Ever since landing in America, Rinku and Dinesh had been barraged by new ideas and new problems on a daily basis. The confusion of having Barry Bonds tell them that they should sometimes aim at their opponents was compounded by the incomprehensible luxury he exposed them to. At other times, though, Rinku and Dinesh were overloaded by t
he constant bombardment of instruction and frustration—both on the field and off.
Even their language, the basic mode of communication, presented a challenge. Although they had Deepesh for help, he couldn’t be with them all the time. They were determined in everything they did—including learning English. But they both found speaking and understanding it an uphill climb. It didn’t help that half the guys around them mumbled or spoke in idioms that made absolutely no sense when translated directly. And nobody was stopping practice to explain “smoke ’em” or “dead duck.” Sometimes Rinku, who didn’t like living in the murky zone of misunderstanding, threw his English dictionary in the garbage out of anger. He always retrieved it, but it took a couple of hours of cooling off for him to fish it out.
It was a million little things, all the time. Needing to ask for help to do just the basic things wore on them. They were frustrated by not knowing what to order in a restaurant, how to mail a package home, or how to operate the satellite TV.
Dinesh had the added stress of feeling that he was being an irresponsible son by chasing this dream in the United States. Dinesh was always worried about who would be providing for and helping his parents in his absence. Rinku had already won enough money on the TV show to set up his family for life—although it didn’t seem to make anything easier on him during his time in the States, as far as I could tell. Dinesh had earned about $5,000 for coming in second on Million Dollar Arm, but his family, thousands of miles away, still had it tough. The mental burden that he was off in America, playing a game that no one he knew had ever heard of, while they struggled weighed heavily on him.
I don’t know if that was on his mind when Dinesh came to blows with one of the USC kids. The baseball player had been goofing on him about all the usual stuff that makes guys angry, when, out of the blue, Dinesh popped him one. When he and Rinku returned from practice, Rinku said, “Sir, Dinesh getting in fight today.”
That was the last thing I expected from either of them, but in that moment, I realized how hard all of this was. It wasn’t just a fairy tale, a Cinderella story; these two teenagers were risking massive failure.
“Did you hit him with your pitching hand?” I asked Dinesh.
“No, sir,” he replied.
I didn’t make a big deal out of it; he had enough on his plate. Shake it off, move on.
Rinku and Dinesh were pretty good at looking out for each other. They were already friends, but if you had put two young Americans in this same situation, training together every day, eating every meal together, and so on, I am not so sure the friendship would have stood up as well. There was always a chance that one of them would become successful in baseball and the other wouldn’t. Ultimately, they were competing against each other for one of the very limited number of jobs in organized baseball.
In pro sports, it’s very rare for guys to root for one another. There is simply too much money on the line. The cutthroat mentality is so strong that if a teammate does well, it’s usually perceived as a threat—even if he plays a different position. That kind of attitude was as foreign to Rinku and Dinesh as baseball itself. Rather than becoming rivals, they both looked for ways to support each other, sharing tips, congratulating, and consoling each other.
I admired them for that and much more, but being good guys was not going to land them a place in MLB. Their pitching was all over the place, and they continued to struggle. During an outing in mid-July when Rinku managed to hit five batters in one inning, I hit my wall.
No matter what we did—training, diet, mental conditioning—nothing seemed to help. Watching Rinku lope off the mound, I couldn’t help but admit my worst fear to myself: after two months I was beginning to think Rinku’s and Dinesh’s baseball careers were nonstarters. I was officially feeling desperate.
On the ride home from Dedeaux Field, nobody talked. We were all sick of it: they were weary of the work and frustration, and I was tired of the responsibility. I had never even wanted a girlfriend, let alone a family, and now I was saddled with a ready-made Indian one. These two nineteen-year-olds, who were as defenseless here as newborns, were my charge. Yes, I had cooked up this scheme, but I had been thinking only of the sport, not of all the other things surrounding it. This involved too much stuff that I just wasn’t good at.
We got a hostile dinner at the USC food court, sitting at a table together. For me, a rare steak from the Korean BBQ place that I could tell the boys found repugnant, and it had nothing to do with the shoe leather they’d eaten at Denny’s; for them, saag paneer from the Indian place, which looked equally disgusting to me, like seaweed and cottage cheese that someone had thrown up. Afterward, the boys watched Rambo (their favorite), and I went back to work. But when my cell rang and I saw that it was Ash, I screened the call. I didn’t feel like taking Will and Ash along for this emotional roller-coaster ride. I wasn’t going to lie to them, just evade.
That night, I sat up in my room with ESPN’s SportsCenter on in the background, calculating how much money I could save Will if I pulled the plug now. I knew it was a negative way of doing business. How could I factor in all the time and energy that had gone into every sweaty, crazy, difficult moment up until this point? But if the tryout for the pros was going to be as terrible as I anticipated, then wouldn’t it be better to cut our losses before Rinku and Dinesh were humiliated and Will hemorrhaged more cash? We had successfully pulled off the contest in India. That was something, wasn’t it? We had found a couple of guys, brought them over, and gotten them on a training regimen. No one else had done that, had they?
Maybe that was as much as we were going to accomplish with Million Dollar Arm. It was a nice try, but maybe that’s all it was.
CHAPTER 7
I carried my piece of plywood out of the clubhouse where I’d stashed it and laid it across a bleacher chair. The California sun was strong, even for a September morning. Luckily, I don’t burn easily, since I planned to sit out here for most of the day. A bigger problem was the glare on my computer that I set atop the plywood. I shifted the laptop around until I could see the email replies to the messages I had sent out in the middle of the night.
From my outdoor office setup, I saw Dinesh and Rinku warming up, throwing back and forth to each other, nice and easy. For a few months now, I had been working at my makeshift desk as much as I could so that the guys would know I was around.
After Dinesh threw the punch at a USC kid, it was clear that the boys were starting to crack from all the pressure. Coach House gave me a wake-up call. “You aren’t supporting them enough,” he said. With his gentle but serious tone, he got the point across. “You need to spend more time with Rinku and Dinesh to counteract their homesickness and mental fatigue.”
More time together? I felt like I spent every waking moment with these guys. But I knew Tom was really good about diagnosing that kind of stuff. He did have a PhD in sports psychology, after all. Having told the guys they had to do whatever they needed to in order to realize their goals, I couldn’t be a hypocrite. I owed it to them, and myself, to be every ounce as committed.
That’s when I realized that I needed to be on-site as often as possible—and that meant setting up my agency on the side of Dedeaux Field. Even on days when I could not work from the stands, I would try to swing by the field even if just for an hour. There was power in my bearing witness to their training. All it took was a quick exchange of glances after a particularly bad pitch for their shoulders to lift again and for them to stand straight on the mound. I wanted them to see me there, to know that I was behind them no matter what. They didn’t want to let me down even more than they wanted to succeed for themselves.
I didn’t need to sit on the sidelines to know how hard Rinku and Dinesh were working. The two of them were the epitome of diligence and perseverance. When they first arrived in America, I gave them a framework in which to think about their training.
“There is a good chance you aren’t going to make it into the major leagues,” I said. “After
all, most guys don’t, and that includes all those guys who have been playing ball since birth. You can’t control whether or not you make it. You can only control how hard you work trying to make it.
“Most of the American kids you are competing against have at least fifteen years of baseball on you,” I continued. “You have to use every available moment to try to catch up. Whatever everyone else is doing, you have to do even more. And that’s not because you actually can catch up. You can’t. But you will regret it if you don’t try your hardest. If you go back to India and know deep down that there were sacrifices you could have made, extra time you could have spent at the gym, or ways you could have had a stricter diet, then you’re going to beat yourself up. These thoughts will haunt you for the rest of your lives.
“You’re only nineteen years old. That’s a long time to live with that kind of regret.”
Rinku and Dinesh took my guilt spiel—like everything else I told them—utterly and completely to heart. But I don’t kid myself that it was my speech that spurred their unparalleled work ethic during the next six months; that was something ingrained in them long before they ever threw their first ball for Million Dollar Arm. As Tom put it more than once, “These kids are machines.”
If Coach told them to be at practice at seven in the morning, they were there at six to make sure they were ready when he arrived. When it was time for the team to run, Dinesh and Rinku set the pace for all the other players. And when the running was done, and the other players had collapsed on the grass, they were still standing, waiting for more. This was a direct inheritance from their parents, who had instilled in the boys a strong sense of responsibility and mental toughness.
Million Dollar Arm Page 10