Little League, Big Dreams

by Charles Euchner

  And when Jackie and Donnie had kids, they taught them the Christian values they learned through their study groups. And when Johnny became part of the Rancho Buena Vista all-stars, the youngster brought prayer to the playing field—an easy sell, since five of the team’s twelve players already attended the same church, the North Coast Church in Vista.

  A prototypical megachurch, North Church attracts 6,300 parishioners with a choice of service styles. Sermons get piped into different rooms to accommodate overflow crowds and different tastes—one room with electric guitars, another with Starbucks coffee in a café atmosphere, a third with country music, a fourth with an old-fashioned chapel setting and traditional hymns. But besides catering to the congregation’s consumer tastes, the service also provides programming for kids of all ages.

  “The church is very accepting of all people, and there’s a real commitment to serving God,” Travis Sybert, a youth minister, told me. “Once you’re here, hopefully we’re modeling good behavior, so you say, ‘Dang, I want to know more about who He is.’ … Living for Jesus Christ can be a lot of fun. We can do a lot of sports and still be serving God. Especially with the guys, through physical sports.”

  Sybert leads 300 junior high students in a variety of activities. He says two R.B.V. players, Johnny Dee and Royce Copeland, have established themselves as leaders.

  “The R.B.V. team was outspoken,” Sybert says. “It helps when you’re not alone. It gave them more confidence, the sense that they also have support. They feel like they know other Christians at school, and we’re supporting them. That’s all they need, a little bit of confidence. They’re drawn by who’s cool. They can stand up to pressures. It was a team effort in that realm too.

  “Johnny and Royce fit our connected kids. Spiritually they are totally seeking and growing, they are challenging themselves and asking questions. And you can see with their demeanor [that] they are accepting of others. They have more of a gentle spirit, and are less likely to judge others.”

  R.B.V.’s overt embrace of faith—praying before games, praying on the field, thanking God for this and that after wins—started in the District 28 tournament. The manager and coaches walked to the plate for a pregame meeting with their counterparts and the umpires—leaving the players on the bench to wait. The team’s star pitchers, Kalen Pimentel and Nathan Lewis, turned to Johnny Dee.

  “Would you mind praying for us?” Pimentel asked. Dee said a simple prayer, thanking God for the opportunity to play and wishing that no one get hurt in the game.

  The players on the team had talked about faith before. When one of their former teammates was stricken with a brain tumor, the parents rallied to raise money to send him to specialists out of state. Seeing their friend unable to play brought home the message that they were lucky just to play. During their long run to Williamsport, that former player, Ian Kane, was one of the team’s top supporters. As the other kids continued to develop physically, Ian’s growth was stunted by two rounds of surgery and treatment. When the team started traveling away from home, Kane couldn’t watch anymore because he cannot travel long distances in a car. But he saw the games on TV, followed the team’s exploits on the Internet, and sent his friends emails and letters. He was also the keeper of the team’s scrapbook.

  California’s manager, Marty Miller, comforts Reeds Reznicek after a difficult outing on the mound.

  The California team had other struggles along the way, and the R.B.V. faith community helped to carry the whole team forward.

  One of the team’s players, Danny Vivier, battled Tourette’s Syndrome as the team advanced to Williamsport. The ailment was seriously disrupting his life a year before. Whenever Vivier experiences extreme emotions—positive or negative—he goes through bouts of constant ticking, murmuring, and hiccuping and suffers from intense headaches. His parents took Danny to a number of specialists before getting the diagnosis. Medications have helped to control the problem.

  Tourette’s creates a divided self. “Any disease introduces a doubleness into life—an ‘it,’ with its own needs, demands, limitations,” writes the medical essayist Oliver Sachs. “With Tourette’s, the ‘it’ takes the form of…a multitude of explicit impulsions and compulsions: one is driven to do this, do that, against one’s own will, or in deference to the alien will of the ‘it.’”

  Being part of an intense activity with a larger community of support can help to limit the damaging effects of Tourette’s. Tourette’s sufferers often perform well at actions requiring extreme concentration like sports. With an activity that concentrates the mind, Tourette’s sufferers can strengthen the self in its battle with the alien “it.”

  Faith has been a critical part of the Viviers’ coping with Tourette’s. “Our learning and development during this thing comes out of our faith,” says Dave Vivier, Danny’s father. “Every parent has to work something like this through. Danny struggles with his faith but it’s been a big help to him dealing with Tourette’s. It’s important for him to have something to believe in.” Donnie Dee, the FCA activist, has been a major part of his faith. “Donnie is like a second dad,” Dave Vivier says.

  Faith guided the father of another player during a life-and-death struggle just as the R.B.V. all-stars began practices.

  Don Copeland was diagnosed with colon cancer when his son Royce was selected for the R.B.V. all-stars. After spending five days in the hospital, Copeland went straight to the team’s practice field. And all summer long, he gave himself the assignment of scouting other teams that R.B.V. might play in tournaments leading to Williamsport. He’d get in a car and drive around southern California—down near San Diego, up toward Los Angeles, out in Orange County—and keep himself busy. Copeland says he never really feared for his life, but the team gave him something constructive to do as he went through rounds of chemotherapy.

  And the families on the team prayed for him every day. Other parents volunteered to take Royce to practice and back. They made him meals twice a week to take some of the burden off his wife Lorelei. And they followed his lead, taking an upbeat attitude toward a disease that could have frightened his two kids.

  In fact, Copeland didn’t tell his kids he had cancer. He told them he was having problems with his stomach and doctors had the matter under control. Royce Copeland didn’t learn his father had cancer until he was watching an ESPN broadcast during the regional tournament in San Bernardino.

  Through it all, other families on the team helped out by not only dropping four-course dinners off at his house, but also by calling to see if he wanted a visitor or needed someone to run an errand. “They’re always taking care of you,” he says. “It’s a big support group. ‘Hey, Don, you want us to bring Royce to practice?’ and ‘We’re going to have a prayer group for you.’ They’re always there, thank God.”

  A longhaired kid from Hawaii named Vonn Fe’ao became one of the most memorable sights in Williamsport. As he approached home plate after a home run, Fe’ao pointed to the sky and made the sign of the cross. Sometimes he looked close to tears as he crossed the plate.

  Yes, Fe’ao was imitating the brash big leaguers with the gesture. It’s show biz. But Fe’ao also had a look of shyness and vulnerability on his face when he approached the plate and looked skyward.

  “He really believes that his uncles up there are helping him out,” his mother, Heather Fe’ao, says.

  Over the summer, Fe’ao made a journey from anger and fear to acceptance and confidence. Part of that journey was about leaving his mother behind in the islands.

  During the Little League tournaments back in Hawaii—the district, sectional, and state competitions—Fe’ao struggled as his mother Heather shouted encouragements from the sidelines. Fe’ao tightened up when he heard her. Heather stayed behind when the Hawaii team went to San Bernardino for the Northwest regional tournament. She had seven other kids to look after, and school was starting. With her out of earshot, he relaxed and hit the ball hard every day. And he kept hitting and pitching ha
rd in Williamsport.

  Fans of the team from Rancho Buena Vista Little League showed their support by facepainting handlebar mustaches like that of Marty Miller.

  Every day, he talked with his mom on the phone and cried. It was the first time he had ever spent so much time away from her.

  At twelve years, Vonn Fe’ao is still just a boy, but he’s not so fragile and innocent anymore. He has some of the toughness and inner drive—and anger—of a grown man. View Vonn Fe’ao from some angles and he looks delicate and vulnerable. View him from other angles and he looks ferocious.

  In the last year, he put on twenty pounds, mostly muscle. Fe’ao now stands five feet, seven inches and weighs 160 pounds. In the Northwest regional tournament, he was nicknamed Danny Almonte because no one could believe that he was still twelve years old. But the other players in the tournament fell in love with him, and followed him like an idol or an older brother. When Hawaii beat Oregon in the title game, the Oregon players insisted on being photographed with Vonn Fe’ao. There he stands in the middle of the picture, surrounded by eager Oregonians. They’re so proud to be with Fe’ao, they could be members of the Red Hat Society posing with Angela Lansbury.

  Fe’ao is a power hitter and a power pitcher. Unlike most Little League power hitters, he does not loop a long swing with the hope of connecting. He has the most compact, and most wicked, swing in town. His eyes burn. He’s learning how to control his emotions. After some swinging strikes, you can see him refocus, channeling Deepak Chopra. Other times, he gets angry, squeezes the bat, and swings harder, channeling Ron Artest.

  What he’s trying to do is concentrate on the task at hand—pushing aside any thoughts that would interfere with his performance. Darryl Stevenson, his football coach, says he was struck by Fe’ao’s look at the plate when a pitch came close to hitting him. “When the kid threw the ball too close to him, I saw Vonn’s eyes. He just focused in and hung in there, and he thought, ‘Now, how can I beat this person? What’s the one thing I can do to beat this person?’ I’ve seen that look a lot of times. It’s what some call The Glare. But it’s just Vonn trying to figure out how to control himself and do his job.”

  But the emotion is undeniable.

  In the dugout, he barks. It actually sounds like a roar as he paces back and forth. When he does something big on the field, he talks smack to the other side. He uses Hawaiian slang to put down the other side without their knowing it. But he also has his gentle side. When he broke Ryan Hartley’s finger with a pitch in Hawaii’s game against Pennsylvania, he walked to first base to say he was sorry.

  Always in the center of Fe’ao’s consciousness is the man he was named for, his father’s brother. The older Vonn Fe’ao spent time with a bad crowd in Oakland.

  “Vonn Senior played every sport but never had talent,” Heather Fe’ao remembers. “He played track, football, baseball.”

  On one awful night in Oakland, Vonn Senior got in a fight in a bar and was shot to death. Heather gave birth to Vonn a couple months later.

  Sese and Heather Fe’ao talk often with Vonn about his dead uncle, who has become a mythical figure—flawed, foolish, inadequate in so many ways, but basically good. Vonn Senior was running with a bad crowd and it cost him his life. The lesson is that bad things can happen to good people. If you don’t watch out, you can become part of something ugly and hateful and deadly.

  “Vonn’s constantly asking about his uncle,” Heather says. “He knows that he died when he was just twenty-one. He wants to know what his uncle was like.”

  Sese Fe’ao, Vonn’s father, moved to Hawaii from Tonga when he was fifteen. He played rugby but quit when he broke his ribs. Sese is as blocky and strong as a bank safe. Sese met Heather in California, where she grew up. But after the older Vonn’s murder, they decided to leave the mainland. “We wanted a fresh start,” Sese tells me. He’s standing nearby, wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt, as Heather and I talk. “I used to work one or two months in Hawaii and go back and forth. But we finally decided to move everyone here.”

  Raising eight children—now aged from eight to twenty-three—has not been easy on a mechanic’s wages. But the Fe’aos survive. When Hawaii advanced to Williamsport, Sese couldn’t afford a plane ticket. One of Sese’s brothers offered to pay gas and tolls and the two drove his truck from California. They wanted to surprise Vonn, but he suspected they were coming.

  Vonn Fe’ao was a sickly baby, so Heather spent more time caring for him than her other seven kids. He still stays close to her, asks her wideeyed questions that he can’t ask of anyone else.

  “He was a child that had problems,” Heather says. “When he was born he was six pounds, and the other kids were eight pounds. He stayed behind in the hospital. He had an irregular heartbeat. The first year of his life, my life was nothing but catering to him. I had to watch to make sure he didn’t get overexcited. So you could say Vonn’s a mama’s boy.”

  Just last year he lost another uncle, a man named Sitini Suguturange, who succumbed to a brain tumor. Uncle Sitini rooted for Vonn when he played baseball and football. When Sese and Heather Fe’ao couldn’t afford uniforms or equipment, Uncle Sitini paid for them. He was one of the fundraisers for Vonn’s teams, and he always told Vonn to keep working.

  Fe’ao’s teammates—Mike Memea, Ty Tirpak, Alaka’i Aglipay, Kini Enos—all say that he is the most religious player on a team full of believers. “When we pray before going to sleep, he’s the last one up off his knees,” says Tirpak. “Everyone else has gotten under the covers and he’s still there, praying.”

  Playing in the Little League World Series changed him. He used to get angry at school and get in fights. By his own admission, he was quick to fight when he got into disputes. But he’s calmer now. “Now I can just walk away,” he says. His celebrity has changed the way his former tormenters treat him. “They’re my friends now.”

  The fame of the Little League World Series offers new opportunities. High school coaches watched Fe’ao on TV and say they want him to play football or baseball for them. The Fe’aos are interested in Vonn going to Saint Louis High or Punahou, golf phenom Michelle Wie’s school. But there are no guarantees. His grades have to be better. The clock on new opportunities could tick away before long.

  “Of the two of us, I’m the pusher,” Heather Fe’ao says. Sese, standing by, smiles broadly and nods. “It’s because I see potential. God doesn’t give everyone athletic talent. My son was blessed to be given that kind of talent. I want him to take it as far as he can.”

  The fates tested another member of Hawaii’s family with cancer right before the team made its long journey to the promised land of Williamsport. Clint Tirpak, the father of Ty and one of the architects of the West Oahu Little League’s all-stars, got diagnosed with cancer on December 2, 2004. During lunch that day, he experienced a sharp pain that made it difficult for him to get through the day, so he went to the hospital for tests.

  Surgery to remove a testicle was moved up two days when Tirpak collapsed in church. The surgery at the Straub Clinic and Hospital was successful and doctors monitored his blood for four months. Everything looked good until the final test in April 2005, as Little League’s regular season got into full swing.

  “They said, ‘I see something on the CAT scan, we need to do chemo,’” Tirpak said later. Doctors found a tumor on his lower abdomen.

  Because Tirpak wanted to be part of the team’s run to the Little League World Series, he decided to take the most aggressive chemotherapy schedule and to isolate himself at home to avoid any infection. “The whole immune system was shot,” he says. “No one was allowed in the house and I didn’t want to go out because my goal was to get back. I kept telling the doctor that I had to get back for the state tournament.”

  That kind of isolation meant no possibility of participating in family activities—his forty-first birthday, his wedding anniversary, Memorial Day weekend, and other red-letter days.

  Chemo took three months. Each intravenous tre
atment lasted eight hours. Treatments took place for four weeks, five days one week, two the next.

  After a long struggle with testicular cancer, Clint Tirpak was able to join the team from the state tournament through the championship celebration.

  When he wasn’t getting chemo, Tirpak stayed home, sealed off in his bedroom, sleeping and following the progress of the Little Leaguers via telephone and videos. Andy Kam delivered a play-by-play account of games on his cell phone and Jesse Aglipay taped the team’s games.

  Tirpak’s eighty-year-old father-in-law, John Van Valkenburg, stayed with the Tirpaks to help with his windows business and haul pitching machines and other equipment to the baseball fields. He stayed until Tirpak was healthy enough to rejoin the team at the state tournament in Hilo. Zachary Rosete’s father Jerry took over his coaching duties. He stepped away when Tirpak was healthy enough to rejoin the team.

  Baseball provided a welcome distraction for Ty. Teammates and coaches say the skinny, angular kid was constantly worried by his father’s cancer. He couldn’t get it off his mind, except for the moments his mind was in the game. Having an outside goal was an essential distraction from his father’s ordeal with cancer.

  Clint Tirpak felt strong enough to watch the final two games of the district tournament from his truck, parked beyond the outfield fence at the field in Ewa Beach. “It was good to see the game live,” he says. “I watched it with binoculars. The kids came by the truck to say hi.”

  It wasn’t until after the district tournament, around the Fourth of July, that Tirpak got the final word from doctors that he was clean. Then he emerged from his isolation and joined the team. Still, he tired easily. After games in Hilo, he went to the hotel to sleep. He lost twenty-five pounds during the ordeal and went bald. Usually a vigorous man, he was gaunt.