Not all my potential recruits followed my advice, though. Wade Boggs, for instance, opted to go straight to the minors out of high school. He spent eighteen seasons in the majors, had a .328 lifetime batting average, and was voted into the Hall of Fame the first year he was eligible.
I shared a table with Wade at a banquet in the early ’90s, after he had left the Red Sox and signed a three-year contract with the Yankees.
“Do you really think you made the right decision about not playing for me?” I asked him.
Wade laughed. “Let me think for a minute. I just signed an eleven-million-dollar contract. Yeah, I think I did.”
As good as those South Carolina teams were, I can’t help but think of the players who could have made them even better. Among the recruits I was unable to convince to come to South Carolina were future major leaguers Willie Mays Aikens and Tino Martinez. To me, Tino looked the way I always pictured Lou Gehrig would have looked in person.
One of the best I did recruit wasn’t a player. I was able to bring in Johnny Hunton as an assistant coach. Johnny was the older, more mature player who had taken me under his wing with the Binghamton Triplets in 1954 and had set the example for me of how to live a genuine Christian life in baseball.
I thoroughly enjoyed being back in a dugout with Johnny. He was one of the many people I would miss when I left coaching at South Carolina for, of all reasons, a chance to enter the crazy world of politics.
Chapter 16
A Different Type of Run
How could I tell the president of the United States, “No thanks, I’ll pass”?
Even though I had no political experience or aspirations, President Gerald Ford asked me to run for the United States House of Representatives in 1976.
I had met my share of politicians through the years and had even been invited by President Richard Nixon to speak at a Sunday morning service in the White House. My sister Ann’s husband, Art Beckstrom, who had flown over the Bay of Pigs, was commended for his service posthumously during our White House visit. We were able to take longtime friends Buck and Jenny Jackson with us on our trip to Washington. (Buck was the friend who had driven my family from Sumter to New Jersey each season after school let out.) At that time, of course, we had no idea that the president was in the middle of a scandal that would soon go public and become known as Watergate.
Despite my opportunities to meet with politicians, I had never given much thought to becoming one until President Ford asked me to run for office.
I knew President Ford through Billy Zeoli, a friend of his who also served as a kind of information spiritual adviser at the White House. Billy was a close friend of mine, too, and my son Robby would work for a number of years with him at Gospel Films. Billy had introduced me to President Ford, and I’d visited him several times in his home city of Grand Rapids, Michigan, and at the White House.
The president encouraged me to run for the House of Representatives seat from the Fifth Congressional District, but Harry S. Dent played the largest role in convincing me to make that move. Dent was a political strategist from South Carolina who had been a top advisor to President Nixon and had helped him win over traditionally Democratic voters in the South when Nixon defeated Hubert Humphrey in the 1968 presidential election. More recently he had become a Christian. Dent told me that Congress needed more conservatives and that he thought I could help my state and the nation in Washington, DC. I prayed and felt that I should make a bid for Congress.
Betsy wasn’t as excited about my decision to run, but that changed when we received a letter from Walt and Lois Zigrang. They were missionaries in Africa whom we had met in a young couples’ Sunday school class, starting a special friendship of more than fifty-five years. The Zigrangs did not know of my political plans. Their letter included a reference to Psalm 71:16: “I will go in the strength of the Lord GOD: I will make mention of thy righteousness, even of thine only.” When Betsy read that verse, she suddenly felt peace about my running for office because she believed it would provide me with more opportunities to share my faith.
I ran against Democratic incumbent Ken Holland. Our part of South Carolina leaned so heavily toward Democrats at the time that there were longtime friends who told me, “I love you like a brother, but I’ve gotta vote straight Democrat all the way through.” One lady in the lobby of a bank told me, “I’d die before I’d vote for a Republican.”
It was shaping up to be a close race, and I was leading in the polls until right before Election Day, when presidential candidate Jimmy Carter made a swing through South Carolina in support of Democratic candidates. Still, I thought I would win up until the night of the election, when television broadcasts began projecting my opponent as the winner.
I lost the election by 3.2 percent—4,007 votes.
I have to tell you, that loss stung. I’m a competitor, whether I am in a pennant race, a political race, or a round of miniature golf with Betsy. And I really don’t like to lose. In the long run, though, losing that election was probably one of the best things that ever happened to me.
Now I am thrilled that I did not win. I think my life would have turned out pretty awful if I had gone to Washington, DC. On one visit there, Betsy and I had been given tickets to a State of the Union address. The traffic was terrible, and I wound up giving away our tickets so I could stay at the hotel and watch the championship game of a big college basketball tournament. Sports was more for me than politics was.
Since that lost election, I haven’t given serious thought to running for any other office. I did head up a South Carolina effort to vote in Ronald Reagan as president. I was able to meet Mr. Reagan, and we discussed his years in radio when he broadcast Chicago Cubs games using telegraph accounts of their games as they happened. I felt like a kid again that day as we talked.
After Reagan won the election, he wrote me a letter expressing his appreciation for my help, and he later asked me to speak at National Day of Prayer events.
I still keep up with politics and speak at political prayer breakfasts because I am concerned about the direction our nation is headed. I’m dismayed that we have taken prayer and the Ten Commandments out of our public schools. When I speak in political settings, I like to remind the listeners of 2 Chronicles 7:14: “If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.”
So I stay active in politics, but don’t expect to see my name in any elections. I almost moved to Washington, DC, once, and I don’t think I could have lasted up there.
After my political loss, one habit from my baseball days helped me move on quickly. In baseball, players can’t afford to dwell on losses. We played just about every day during the season, so losses had to be put behind us right away.
Every night I would go home or back to my hotel room and review that day’s game. I would replay it in my head: In the third inning I did such-and-such. I could recall every moment. But after replaying that game in my mind, I knew it was time to move on to the next day’s game. So-and-so is pitching against us tomorrow, and we’ll pick it up there and see how we go. Or, We’re two games out of first, and we need to make sure we win three out of four in this series.
That’s basically what I did after the election. I put the election loss behind me and set my sights on what was next. That same week I drove down to Florida for a Superstars competition.
No Superstar
Young readers might not know much about the Superstars shows on television that year. (I don’t use computers, but my children have introduced me to this Google word that lets people learn about things on the Internet. If you’re not familiar with the Superstars, you can “Google it,” as my kids say.) ABC televised these shows, in which athletes and celebrities competed against each other in a variety of athletic events.
Whatever humiliation I felt after the election was nothing compared to what I
felt after my performance on Superstars. Robby went with me to Florida, where the show was being filmed, and chose the events he thought I’d have the best chance to do well in. I hate to think what would have happened if I’d taken part in the events he didn’t think I’d do well in.
Robby had joked about signing me up for bowling and tennis because he didn’t think I’d hurt myself in those competitions, and he was right. But he also entered me in cycling, and when I got off the bike, my legs were so sore I could barely walk.
In weight lifting I went up against Floyd Little, the great Denver Broncos’ running back who had retired only the year before. Unlike today, when I was playing baseball, we were discouraged from lifting weights because it was thought that adding muscle would make us too tight and rob us of flexibility. So I had never lifted weights in my life. I started the competition lifting 150 pounds. Little—and his last name didn’t fit him—started at 250 pounds. I was beaten before I had even grasped the bar.
In the hundred-yard dash, I competed against Jim Ryun, who had held the world record in the mile run. No contest there, either.
The only event I won was tennis, against former Boston Celtics star K. C. Jones.
The final event of each Superstars episode was the obstacle course, which included challenges such as a wall climb, a horizontal water jump, a high bar, a tube to run through, and a blocking sled. At the high bar, I jumped and hit the bar, knocked it off its base, and tumbled onto the padded mat. That brought me a penalty of ten extra seconds added to my time—as if my time weren’t slow enough already!
That was one of the most embarrassing times in my life. I think I was even more humbled by the Superstars competition than by the Congressional election.
Back to School
Because my bid for Congress had been such a public loss, it was known that I had free time on my hands. So the headmaster of Ben Lippen School in Asheville, North Carolina (now in Columbia, South Carolina), mailed me a letter saying that the school had been praying to find the right person to fill an ambassador-type role, that he knew I had lost the election (thanks!), and that he wanted me to consider working with them.
Robby and Ron had both attended Ben Lippen—Robby and our daughter Christie wound up graduating from there—so I had an experiential knowledge of the school’s mission and principles. I knew it would be an easy and rewarding assignment to share the school’s virtues with others, so I said yes to the offer.
I worked with the school for two years. As a bonus to a role I thoroughly enjoyed, I was able to coach both my daughters on the school’s basketball team and help out the baseball coach by pitching to the players during batting practice. Betsy was able to take on a kind of substitute-mother role with missionaries’ children who boarded there.
Ben Lippen School had been founded by Columbia Bible College (now Columbia International University). The college did not actively seek donations, though it certainly accepted them. But my job as the school’s representative, much to my relief, did not mean going out on the road to make sales pitches.
One of my visits on behalf of the school was with Anthony Rossi, the founder of Tropicana Products. Mr. Rossi was a wonderful and charitable Christian man who had supported the school and supplied orange juice to Ben Lippen and Columbia Bible College.
I was sitting in Mr. Rossi’s office in Florida, updating him on what had been taking place at the school and college, when he said, “Tell me about the needs of the school.”
I ran through the list of current pressing needs.
“What does that come to?” he asked.
I gave him a six-figure total.
“Well,” Mr. Rossi said, “let me write you a check.”
“No, no, no!” I said. “I didn’t come down here for money. I just wanted to tell you what’s happening at the school. Certainly you can pray about whether you want to be a part of it, but I’m not here to get a check from you.”
“Okay,” he said. I left his office that day without a check that would have covered all the needs on our list.
After about a week, however, a check for that full amount arrived from Mr. Rossi.
Mr. Rossi later asked me to move to Florida and be a part of his Aurora Foundation, which he had created to help fund Christian schools and missions. So Betsy and I lived in Bradenton for a while and then were able to move back to Sumter while I continued working for the foundation.
Although I very much appreciated the opportunity to be involved with the foundation, I had the sense that my calling was still in sports.
Gene Anderson was a good friend who owned one of my favorite restaurants, Aunt Maude’s Country Kitchen in Myrtle Beach. Gene had been a professor at Coastal Carolina University, and he called and asked if I would be interested in coaching the school’s baseball team. I visited with the chancellor and accepted his offer to become baseball coach and athletic director.
We had good teams at Coastal Carolina, but my stay with the Chanticleers didn’t last long. Wearing pin-striped uniforms, our 1985 team finished 30–19, and the ’86 team went 31–19 and won the conference championship. Despite our success in those two seasons, I wasn’t a good fit with the school. There was a problem with drugs and alcohol on campus, and I never had the school’s support in addressing those concerns and handling discipline matters with athletes.
During my second year at Coastal Carolina, I had lunch with Jerry Falwell, who was visiting our area. Dr. Falwell was the founder and chancellor of Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia. When I expressed my frustrations with my job, he said, “Come up to my school. You won’t have that problem.”
I did, taking the head baseball coach’s position at Liberty. In a sense, I replaced Al Worthington, who had started Liberty’s baseball program in 1974. Al had planned all along to get the program going, then become athletic director only. That’s what he did when the job was offered to me. But Al remained with the program by working with me as the Flames’ pitching coach.
Al had pitched in the majors at the same time I played, and his son, Little Al, had played second base for me at South Carolina. Back when Al and I were playing ball, most Christian players did not go public with their faith. Al was one who did. I had always admired him for that, and it was a true joy to work alongside him at Liberty and to get to know him and his wife, Shirley, well. They’d been among the dedicated staff that had helped establish Liberty and make it successful—and not just in baseball.
Good-Bye to a Friend
Early in my first season at Liberty, 1987, I received a phone call from Dick Howser. I had played against Dick when he was with Kansas City and Cleveland, and he had played for the Yankees after I retired. After his playing days, he had been a coach and a manager for the Yankees, and I had gotten to know Dick when I returned to New York to take part in Old Timers’ Games.
After Dick left the Yankees, he moved over to the Kansas City Royals and led them to a World Series championship. He managed the American League team in the 1986 All-Star Game, but during the game he had trouble giving proper signals to the field. After the game he admitted that he’d felt ill. Doctors diagnosed him with a brain tumor.
That was the last game Dick managed before he began treatment. He tried to make a comeback during spring training of ’87, but he just wasn’t in the condition to do so. I had followed Dick’s situation in the newspapers, so when he called me that spring, I was aware that he’d been given only a few months to live.
“I’m really discouraged,” Dick told me over the phone that day. “Can you encourage me from the Scriptures?”
Philippians 4:4-7 from the Phillips translation immediately came to mind, so I read it to him:
Delight yourselves in God, yes, find your joy in him at all times. Have a reputation for gentleness, and never forget the nearness of your Lord. Don’t worry over anything whatever; tell God every detail of your needs in earnest and thankful prayer, and the peace of God which transcends human understanding, will keep constant guard over you
r hearts and minds as they rest in Christ Jesus.
“That’s just what I needed,” Dick said, sounding as though he were ending the conversation.
“Wait. Don’t hang up.”
I told Dick about a friend of mine named Harold Morris who had been through a battle with cancer and had written a book called Beyond the Barriers: Overcoming Hard Times Through Tough Faith.
“Can I send you a copy?” I asked Dick.
After Dick read the book, he didn’t call me—he called Harold Morris directly to thank him. That’s just the kind of guy Dick was. He was also a radiant Christian who had shared his testimony on national television through ESPN and had spoken at a Billy Graham Crusade even after his diagnosis.
When Dick passed away that June, his wife, Nancy, called. “Dick has written out everything he wants for his memorial service,” she told me. “So many of his friends don’t know Christ. He wants you to come and present the gospel in clarity.”
Dick’s memorial service in Tallahassee, Florida, drew about four hundred people, including many, many friends from his lifetime in baseball. It was my honor to stand before those friends and not only talk about the quality of life Dick had led but, at his request, share with them the gospel message that he had embraced and lived out.
Home for Good
The late 1980s was a down period in the Liberty program, and in my four seasons as coach, we recorded only one winning season. However, we did have three players drafted off our 1989 team, and at the time that was the most ever selected from one Liberty team.
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