Then a woman turned to me and said, “Oh, this is you.”
It was Patti Smith. “I bought this,” she said, looking up at my image.
We chatted for quite a while, and I found this iconic singer-songwriter-poet sweet and charming. Then I found Annie Leibovitz and had the chance to thank her. I want people to know how gracious she is. I still shake my head and say to myself, How in the heck can I ever repay her? Does she know how much that night meant to me?
On New Year’s Day the University of Wisconsin Badgers won the Rose Bowl for the second year in a row. I took that as a good omen for the season to come, yet something was off. I had worked hard last summer in Madison, just not quite as intensely as I used to. Baseball was all I had ever known and wanted, but the stress of having to prove myself game by game, season by season, had worn me down. The game was no longer fun.
I thought of my encounter last season with Janice and her Boston terrier and all the other chances for affection and companionship I’d passed up for the baseball life. I was tired of hiding who I was. In Los Angeles, I was learning, there were plenty of opportunities to meet women at athletic events around town. I started to date discreetly, edging out of the closet with tentative steps. Dating made me see that I had given up Ila Borders, the person, to be Ila Borders, baseball pitcher. Somehow I was not able be both at the same time. Somewhere along the line, others—my parents, Annie Leibovitz, Kelly Deutsch, and sportswriters and fans—remained more excited about my dream of making it in Organized Baseball than I now was.
There was also the issue of finances. When I heard about people being at their wits’ end from being broke, I got it. It kills your self-esteem and spirit. I was weary of living as a vagabond—staying in Connie Rudolph’s basement in St. Paul, sleeping in the Madison Black Wolf clubhouse, and now bunking in with Kelly in Hollywood. Mom had made a home for us kids when I was growing up. I hadn’t had a home base since I was seventeen, and I missed it.
Dad continued to seek out major league teams about my going to spring training to try out for a spot on the roster. One day he sat me down. No one in MLB was going to invite me to spring training, he explained. It was feared I would be a distraction, and they just didn’t want the hype that followed me. It was suggested that I try out for a professional team in Japan and then return to try out—it would be a smoother transition. Akiko Agishi, who was working for Creative Enterprises International, in Hollywood, thought she could find me a spot on a Japanese team. On February 8, 2000, I sent her a letter of intent stating my interest in playing ball in Japan, which led to a tryout in Yuma, Arizona, where I was told they were looking for pitchers who could throw ninety miles per hour. So that wasn’t going to happen either. With that, Dad and I looked at each other, knowing that our dream had died. I was not going to get my chance in Organized Baseball. Coming off the best year I’d had professionally, I sensed that next season in Madison was going to be my last.
May 2000. When I arrived in Madison for spring training, I scrabbled around for some sense of joy in the game. I was reverting to the stone-faced introvert of old and forgetting how to reach out for help. I couldn’t go to my parents, who were now fighting all the time. My teammates, competing for their own spot on the roster, didn’t seem likely confidants for a gay female athlete. And reporters’ scrutiny of my off-the-field life—well, I couldn’t see confiding my own true story to one of them. I began to see what my closeted life had cost me. I gave in to a major pity party for myself, disliking my own company.
Workouts became a chore, and it showed. I always believed I would make it to an affiliate organization if I just proved myself. Well, I had proved that I could endure the baseball life over and over, and last season I had put up the numbers to back it up, but the determination and drive that helped me to succeed had faded. I could see that other guys in spring training camp wanted to make the Black Wolf more than I did. I never had a bad preseason or intersquad game, but there was nothing great either. Coming off last season, I had expected to be more dominant, but I was plain outplayed. I was not progressing. I didn’t know what else to do, so I kept on doing the only thing I knew—playing ball.
I did not make the roster. But Dirty Al and Bronson Heflin knew what I could do, and the general manager told me to stick around for a week or two in case someone went down with an injury. I should have stayed and would have if I had been in a better place—I could have contributed to the Black Wolf, as I had last year. Instead my pride and emotions got the better of me. I left for Los Angeles. I wish I hadn’t—I should’ve stuck it out. It remains a big regret.
Back in California, I sat on Kelly Deutsch’s couch, uncertain of what was to come next. Phone calls came in from concerned family members, college friends, and the media, asking where I was. I had no good answer. About a week later, a scout whose name I cannot recall called and asked me to meet him in Las Vegas. With nothing else going on, I roused myself off Kelly’s couch and met him on June 1 at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, for a tryout. I was the lone prospect. I headed over to the bullpen, and he tossed me a ball to throw. The scout liked what he saw. When it was over he signed me to play for the Zion Pioneerzz of the Western (Independent) Baseball League. The club, based in St. George, Utah, was in the second of what would be its three-year lifespan in a league that was farther removed from Organized Baseball than was the Northern League. I’d be playing for Mike Littlewood, who had played baseball at Brigham Young University, in a new ballpark, Bruce Hurst Field, named for the former major league pitcher who had grown up in St. George.
There was no time to return to California for my clothes—off I went to St. George. The club put me up about forty miles away in the Oasis Casino and Resort in Mesquite, Nevada. My first reaction was, I’m in nowhereland. My hotel room had lights all around the ceiling, mirrors everywhere, and decor from the 1980s. I would drive Interstate 15 across the northwestern tip of Arizona to get to St. George, the landscape about as dry and barren as the place where my joy for baseball used to be.
June, St. George, Utah. The town of St. George looked like a true Western town—people wore cowboy hats, Wranglers, and cowboy boots. The people were mainly white, though slightly older than average. I saw few people of color. It seemed that nobody smoked, and the grocery stores sold only 3.2 percent alcohol beer. (For anything stronger you went to the state package liquor store). Nightlife was hard to find, and even restaurants like Pancho and Lefty’s for Mexican food and the Gun Barrel Steakhouse closed at eleven o’clock on Saturday nights. The women, primarily dressed in long skirts, all seemed to be with their kids. The locals looked at me like I was from Mars. One day I went to the movie theater to see Shaft, with Samuel L. Jackson. It was R-rated, but much of the dialogue was bleeped out—what the frick? I thought. I looked around: I was the only person in the theater.
The sense of difference continued. I saw that the ballplayers on the team were all white and young. When I went upstairs and met my new teammates, they were polite, as if my presence there was no big deal. Out in the bullpen I asked one of my teammates why everyone was young, white, and married. His face showed his disbelief. Didn’t I know they were mostly Mormon?
“Okay, what does that mean?” I asked. You’d think that coming from Southern California College, I would have known about the religion, but I did not. We had discussed Buddhism, Judaism, Hinduism—I had done a report on them—but not Mormons. I wished I had studied it more.
He explained his religion, its background and its views, much like the people who knock on your door and pitch their beliefs to you. I smiled at him, and said, “I am a Christian and set in my beliefs.”
After that, none of my teammates mentioned Mormonism to me. I couldn’t get over that they married so young and that the women were so subservient, but they were clean and friendly and giving. Still, I could tell they hung out with their own. Talk about going somewhere I would never fit in! If anything, I was going backward. And yet the Pioneerzz had been willing to take a cha
nce on me, so I practiced gratitude and tried to blend in. I bought a pair of cowboy boots.
When my brother, Randall, visited, we explored Bryce Canyon and hiked through the narrows at Zion National Park on my off days. The red-rock landscape attracted me, and I realized that I’d rather be exploring these trails than playing ball. On the field I could not shake feeling like an outcast. Pitching in St. George and driving back to sleep at the Oasis Hotel in Mesquite, Nevada, brought no joy. I also heard from friends that my first love, Shelley, was getting married and was in her second year of teaching. Other friends who had graduated were into their careers now. I looked at myself in my mirrored bedroom and saw “loser.” The game had changed for me. Baseball had always been my outlet to freedom, peace, fun, and a release of aggression. That outlet no longer worked. Prior to my fifth outing, in a game that we were behind by several runs, I saw the coach come out to the mound, pull the pitcher, and signal for me. I wondered why he was bringing me in when the game was so out of reach. Then I remembered the type of player they brought in to finish these throwaway games, and my athlete’s ego saw myself as beyond that level. Instead of fighting through my embarrassment, I asked myself what I was doing here. I grabbed the ball and threw my warmup pitches. Every pitch I threw got smashed. I tried throwing sidearm and still got shelled. By the time I walked off the mound, my ERA had shot up to 8.31. I went upstairs into the empty press box, where I found manager Mike Littlewood, the team owner, and the scout who had signed me. “I’ve had enough,” I blurted out. “I want to retire.”
They tried to talk me out of it, saying that it was just one bad game, they had seen what I could do, and my place on the team was secure for the rest of the season. The Pioneerzz were playing well—they would win the Western Baseball League championship that year—but the gleam of another ring or even another day on the mound was lost on me. Feeling like a quitter, something I never thought I’d be, I said, “My mind’s just not in it—I just want to go home.”
I had always said I wanted to go as far as my abilities could take me. Well, the end of the road turned out to be St. George, Utah. I was twenty-five years old. As the Los Angeles Times headlined it, “Ila Borders Gives Herself the Hook, Retires.” In the article, Mike Littlewood said, “Ila Borders was one of the most courageous people I’ve ever met or seen play the game.”
But I headed home with my head down, knowing I had let down the decent people who had hired me.
I realized I had made the mistake of finding my self-worth in what I did for a living, instead of who I was. So much of my energy had gone into baseball—and about trying to promote the image of me as a red-blooded heterosexual American girl with a perfect family. I could not or would not say I came from a family that was breaking down, that Dad was cheating on Mom, that he was alcoholic. Nor was I the kind of sweet, shy person I labored to present to the public. I was more of an adrenaline junkie, genetically driven to pop wheelies on a motorcycle and take up Krav Maga (Hebrew for “contact combat,” a self-defense system that came out of the Israeli military). But for all my daredevilishness, I had always been afraid to say that it was nobody’s business who I dated. This, I began to realize, was my greatest regret about my baseball playing days: it wasn’t not making it into Organized Baseball; it was living the Great Lie of who I was. If I had been honest, I most likely would have lost my job earlier, but I would not have lived a lie. Quitting baseball now would let a lot of people down, and that weighed heavily on me. But I called Kelly and said, “I’m done. I’m coming home.”
“Okay,” she said. “The door’s open.”
8
Out of the Game
What do you do after everything you’ve ever known and worked for is gone? Even though I had a college degree, baseball had been the focus of my life since age ten. I pondered my list of achievements in baseball. It was a thin résumé for the rest of my life. ESPN invited me to Connecticut to train as a sports commentator, but the idea of being close to the all-seeing eye of the camera, of entering the media, put me off. Mike Veeck asked me to come back to St. Paul and be the pitching coach. But I was not thinking right and turned down his offer.
I headed for the couch in Kelly Deutsch’s Hollywood apartment. I rarely showered and ate little. I read books and prayed to God to help me find a way out of the bleakness I had fallen into. Finally Kelly came home from work one day and sat down beside me. She put her hand on my back and, in the most loving, nonthreatening way, kicked my ass off the couch.
“Okay,” she said. “Start asking yourself some questions. And go do what you like best, ride your bike.”
I started biking the hills of Hollywood. I’d ride through Griffith Park and into funky Topanga Canyon. I biked to the wild reaches of Point Mugu in Malibu, exploring its trails and beaches. My view of Southern California had come from the standpoint of its baseball fields, those small, grassy parks that dotted the sprawling cities. Now I was discovering its fuller landscape, and it began to bring me peace. I would bike until exhaustion, then sit down and reflect. For the first time, I let it all sink in: my fricked-up family life, covering up my gayness, and along with that, my anxiety over being scrutinized by the media. I thought about the emotional parts of myself I had neglected in my single-minded pursuit of playing baseball. Now I wanted to live a fully authentic life, but what did that mean? Who was I and what did I want? Three things came to mind:
Whoever I was, I was no longer a baseball player.
I had to break the cycle of lies I had been living.
And I wanted to date women and do it openly.
Kelly encouraged me to eat more—no, “encouraged” isn’t the right word. She pretty much forced me to, saying, “If you don’t go out to dinner with me, you can’t stay here anymore.”
Thank God she had given me these past few weeks to begin to heal. Now she started to push me, asking, “What do you like to do—I mean, things, not a job in particular. What are you good at? How do you want to be remembered?”
I made a list:
Physical activity. Definitely not working behind a desk all day.
Good at math and mechanics. Like to build and repair things.
Make a positive impact on people’s lives and be proud of the work I do.
Be challenged every day.
What was I good at? I am direct, work hard, and don’t make excuses.
Quick learner and good common sense. Love sports!
Don’t need a lot of money. Would sacrifice that for more time with family and friends.
It seemed important to be clear on what I should avoid, as in my weaknesses and dislikes: they included the computer and technology, English and the use of words, traveling a lot and being in the spotlight, and emotional drama.
Then Kelly and I made a list of possible careers: firefighter, forest ranger, architect, teacher, golf pro, FBI agent, coach. That fall, I applied for a coaching job at Glendale Community College. But they wanted to know how I planned to raise funds for uniforms. From my history with Dad, I knew that asking for money was not a well-developed skill. Park rangers, I feared, were subject to layoffs due to budgetary cuts. I wanted a career that was more secure. I had worked as a personal trainer but wanted something steadier. I was not aware that I could have approached Nike, in Beaverton, Oregon, to work with them to test baseball equipment, or Columbia Outdoor Clothing for a similar job. So it came down to the FBI or firefighter. But did the FBI accept gay people? I wasn’t sure. Firefighting paid good wages and offered job stability. Firefighters were respected, the people you called when you needed help fast—I remembered their presence when my grandmother drowned. What better way to honor her than to become a firefighter? In September 2001, I enrolled in the Fire Technology Department at Santa Ana Community College, in Orange County, California. A few days later the tragedy of September 11 underscored the importance of the career I had started.
I felt right at home in the academy, as firefighters and ballplayers have much in common: you have to be a
team player but act individually, think fast and adapt, be physically fit, and have common sense. At the academy, the guys joke around with you, but if you cannot take the heat, usually they stop—fear of lawsuits now. Baseball was harsher. If you could not take your teammates’ kidding, you became an outcast and they would keep it up until you broke. No mercy! There was more crude behavior in baseball where they didn’t care if I was a girl (which I preferred), whereas in firefighting some were more careful around me. Some firefighters did treat me like one of the guys, and they were the ones I gravitated to. My paramedic preceptor, James Nelson, liked to chase me around the station with a hockey stick and once body slammed me. Loved that guy.
The culture of firefighting agreed with me. I came to understand that I was most comfortable in the company of men, active men. I’d always known I wasn’t a traditional girl; now I could see that I wasn’t a traditional gay woman who was more at ease in a woman’s world—I preferred hanging with the guys. So this was what it was like to be comfortable in my skin. Kelly was happy to see that I was eating and showering regularly. So was I—I started to like who I was again. At the academy I was still in the closet—I was tentative about it getting around that I was gay and how that might be used as a reason to not hire me.
In my private life I had been dating women of all sorts since leaving baseball in 2000. Romantically I was like a caged bird set free. And then I met a woman named Karen at the academy. It was my first big relationship, and she showed me how much I had to learn. Any time we had a conflict, she’d raise her voice, and I’d flash back to Dad’s anger and shut down. She called me on it, but eventually it broke us up. Karen was a good person and more mature than I was; I really blew it. I had to learn to stick around and work things out.
Learning to date women and making my way through the academy, I thought I had left baseball in my past. But every once in a while, I could see that baseball wasn’t done with me. The game’s historians and chroniclers continued to take an interest in what I had done. In July 2003 I was inducted into the Baseball Reliquary’s Shrine of the Eternals. The Reliquary’s Shrine is not the obscure Left Coast religious cult you might think but a sort of populist hall of fame that founder and executive director Terry Cannon hosts annually in Pasadena, California. It is a striking contrast to the more mainstream National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York. The museum in Cooperstown had my college and professional memorabilia on display, but here, today, the Shrine wanted to present my whole person. As I listened to the words of the other inductees, Jim Abbott, the one-handed pitcher who threw a no-hitter for the New York Yankees, and Marvin Miller, whose work for the Major League Baseball Players Union began to change the financial fortunes of ballplayers, I realized that I was in good company as one of the game’s outliers. The Shrine inducts people not likely to ever get into the Cooperstown Hall of Fame, like Lester Rodney, a former Communist who was an early white advocate for the integration of MLB. At the induction, Jean Ardell introduced me, explaining that my career illustrated that “women have remained the game’s last outpost regarding discrimination.” She pointed out that a story like mine “embodies the classic theme of literature: Somebody wants something that is denied them and they set out to find a way to get it.”
Making My Pitch Page 22