It’s not as though all my shenanigans went unpunished. In the arts and sometimes in sports, it is said that a person should be judged by their “body of work.” Unfortunately, that’s what happened to me. I was about to learn a valuable lesson. If you act like a jerk, the people you have offended will eventually get an opportunity to nail you—and often when it hurts the most.
In my junior year, I achieved what at the time seemed like the most important achievement in a person’s life: recognition by high school classmates. The juniors, showing great insight, voted me the Most Athletic boy. I had officially arrived. In my own mind, in three years I was transformed from a slow-footed nonathletic little boy to a real “hoss.” This analysis was now shared by the ultimate arbiter—my fellow classmates of Lawrence County High School.
However, unbeknownst to me, several of the teachers got together soon after the election and decided that—election or not—no one with my academic and deportment record should be allowed to be a Superlative at Lawrence County High School. They decreed that I should be stripped of my honor and a new election held. Even worse, the teachers were being led by Mrs. Eleanor Buckner, mother of one of my high school buddies. Of course, I was outraged. I wanted to know, “What does athletics have to do with school and good conduct, for Pete’s sake?” With this kind of thinking I was ahead of my time. “What about the election? What about just making up new rules to get the results they want? Who do they think they are, the Supreme Court?” I would even have thrown in a “due process” argument if I had ever heard of it. However, it never occurred to me that I had any real recourse. Those were the days before students and their parents filed lawsuits against schools for violation of constitutional or other rights. Besides, I wanted to keep my parents out of it. They knew me better than anybody, and I knew they would be on the teachers’ side. As Mom said, “If you had behaved yourself, this wouldn’t have happened.” I had to consider seriously whether behaving myself would have been worth it. A heavy price to pay, it seemed to me.
Ironically, it was a teacher who showed me mercy when I needed it the most. Mrs. Little was the mother of another one of my football teammates. Unfortunately for her, she was also my French teacher my senior year. Toward the end of the year, I began to realize that my grade situation was worse than I thought. In fact, I needed to pass French in order to graduate, and in order to get a passing grade, I had to pass my final French exam. There was only one problem. I hardly knew any French at all. Unlike Latin, French wasn’t a dead language, but it might as well have been, as far as I was concerned. I did think that the French accent of some of those guys in the movies was pretty cool, but that was about the extent of my association with the language. To my great surprise, my survival instincts and natural adaptability failed me, and I failed my final French exam.
Now things were really getting serious. For the first time in my life, my sense of humor and well-honed “cool kid” nonchalance could do nothing for me. No clever response or prank could get me out of the hole I had dug for myself. The possibility of failing high school had never occurred to me. I had figured that getting a gentleman’s C with no work made a lot more sense than an A or B with a lot of work. Unfortunately, an occasional D or F would rear its ugly head, obviously more times than I had realized. I was distraught.
One day, as the semester was drawing to a close, Mrs. Little asked to see me. She asked if she gave me my French test over again, or a test similar to it, did I think I could pass it. “Absolutely,” I said. She gave me a couple of days to prepare, and I hit the books with a newfound sense of desperation. This was that second chance that the screwups are always saying they deserve. I knew that there wouldn’t be a third chance. So I passed the test. I never knew why Mrs. Little reached out to me like that. She had never been especially friendly to me before. Maybe she saw some potential in me. Maybe she felt sorry for me. Or maybe, in fact most likely of all, she was dreading the prospect of having me in her class again the following year.
I was grateful for being given a second chance. But mostly I was relieved—that Mom and Dad would not have to face the shame of seeing their oldest boy fail to accomplish what for them would have been a first: having at least one of us graduate from high school. As with so many things in life, between children and parents, I never really knew how important my graduating from high school was to them until many years later, when my dad went back and earned his own high school equivalency certificate.
In the end, I managed to graduate from high school with barely enough credits. In our school annual that year, everyone was given a saying or a motto under their photograph. Under mine were the words “The less I do today, the more I plan to do tomorrow.”
WHAT CAUSES a man to dream about the one that got away in high school almost fifty years ago? You look back and right before you is the most beautiful thing you ever saw in your life. It just wasn’t meant to be. You let what should have been slip right through your fingers. You’d give anything for another chance. This was not a girl. It was the most perfectly thrown football I had ever seen, and it was coming right at me as I stood in the end zone.
Sports metaphors and life lessons learned from sports could fill (and have filled) innumerable books. Usually they have to do with such things as the importance of teamwork and not being deterred by temporary setbacks. Retired sports celebrities receive large fees for reminding companies’ employees that it takes an entire organization “working together” to build a good hedge-trimming machine.
For the true sports fan, the game need serve no higher purpose than the game itself. And games need to be played. Every little boy knows instinctively that the ball needs to be thrown, kicked, or hit. Then the transition begins. Having been taught all our young lives to share and be mindful of the feelings of others, we are introduced to the joys of sticking it to our best friends. We graduate from the joyous mayhem of the backyard to the school yard to the adult-supervised contests. And we learn as we grow older that behind every potbellied know-it-all fan and every pencil-necked sports-writer probably lies a bittersweet tale of unrequited love. Once upon a time, if only for a little while, they too were the boys of summer. They were going to be able to run faster, grow bigger, and do all the things that their college and professional heroes did. Then they had their first experience with their dreams not working out.
For most kids who are moderately interested in sports, reality sets in at an early age. It’s when Dad pitches them “batting practice” (underhanded) for the first time and after forty or so pitches there is no contact between bat and ball. Junior begins to get the picture, his interest with regard to that particular sport becomes somewhat aligned with his ability, and he moves on to other sports or other pursuits.
However, an intense interest in sports is hardwired into some kids. They may have a bit more ability than the average kid, but that really doesn’t matter so much in terms of their passion. They choose their teams, worship their heroes, and most of all they want to play. They cling to the notion that someday they’ll be good enough not only to play but to play out their fantasies, too.
Little League baseball is most boys’ introduction to competitive, organized sports. It is here, among the team selections, intense drills and practices, and tension-filled games, that we learn the true meaning of “the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat.”
Many timid young boys think that baseball would be a wonderful game if you didn’t have to bat. Ironically, it was probably the greatest left-handed hitter of all time, Ted Williams, who gave voice to every little boy’s anxiety who had to come in from right field and bat: “They give us a round bat to hit a round ball. And then tell us to hit it squarely.” It’s not that deep down I didn’t want to bat, I just didn’t care to display my skills in front of all those people watching, since my success rate in making contact with the ball was not very high. For me, the world looked pretty great from right field.
It is on these miniature baseball fields that some of us
experienced the greatest exhilaration in our young lives (as well as some of our greatest embarrassments). Seeing my buddy Wayne hit a grounder back to the pitcher and make a beeline for third base instead of first base, as everybody looked on in amazement and then fell into convulsive laughter, was an all-time winner for me, and it is still the standard by which I measure embarrassing moments.
It is here that we discover that good guys don’t always finish last—or first, either. Being a good guy simply has nothing to do with it. We learn that “winning is not the most important thing, it’s the only thing,” and other foolish sayings. The discerning parent looks on somewhat sadly and is reminded that God seems to distribute talent, oftentimes, to the most undeserving—meaning anybody’s kid but yours. As we play the game and watch the pros, a lot of it just doesn’t make any sense. Often a skinny little guy can throw the ball harder than the bigger, more muscular guy. Baseball reminds me of those mysterious ancient monuments that we see on the Discovery Channel that are perfectly aligned with heavenly bodies so as to produce sundials and perfect patterns that can only be seen from great heights, fostering speculation that the world was visited many years ago by aliens from another planet. In baseball, the bases are spaced so that countless plays involving runners of different speeds are decided by a fraction of a second.
A batter can hit the ball hard—in fact, perfectly—but right at a fielder, making an out. Another batter can hit a weak pop-up, but perfectly placed by accident, and gets a hit, raising his all-important batting average. We assume that the gods of baseball have it all worked out and that there’s a rough justice to it all that we aren’t meant to understand. So, on second thought, in many respects the metaphor-mongers are right: Baseball is a lot like life.
The photographs in the weekly Democrat Union, Lawrenceburg’s only newspaper, displayed the first organized Little League baseball teams to ever take the field in Lawrenceburg. There I was, a proud, somewhat chubby, twelve-year-old member of the Lions in my own ill-fitting uniform. The “Roaring Lions” we were christened by “The Baldheaded Brothers,” the photography shop in town. (Talk about marketing savvy. I still remember what they called themselves over fifty years later. Somewhat wasted, I suppose, since as I said, they were the only photographers in town.) The Roaring Lions roared to victory twice that season. Weak at the plate, we offset it by total incompetence in the field. Not exactly deep in talent to begin with, we lost our best player by far early in the year. After our tryouts for team selection, it seemed that our manager had used most of his allotted points on “draft day” on a real potential all-star named Everette, leaving him with fewer points to select the rest of the team. But Everette, perhaps the best hitter in the league and one of the best pitchers, could do it all. However, the coach, having put all his eggs in one basket, ran afoul of a common country code. You don’t fuss on another man’s kid—especially in public, which is what our manager did one night when Everette made a baserunning error and was called out. I suppose the manager was especially disappointed because he realized that Everette was probably the only kid on the team who had a real chance of getting on base. The criticism wasn’t really a big deal except to Everette’s family. Everette’s dad came out onto the field, got his boy, and left, leaving us to stew in our own mediocrity. The result: two wins, and many, many more losses.
The manager assigned me to third base—for no apparent reason, I suppose, other than I probably looked like I could throw the ball across the diamond to first base. The coach was partially correct. I could throw the ball in the general direction of first base. Just about any position would have been fine with me; I’d gotten over my disappointment of missing out on my first choice of position. At the tryouts, when the guy in charge hollered at all of us to identify ourselves by position, he started out by saying, “All right, how many pitchers do we have here?” Of the sixty to seventy boys present, probably fifty of us raised our hand. My choice didn’t survive the first tryout.
The sad fact is that after Everette left, very few of us could—as Dad delicately put it one time when describing a ballplayer—hit a bull in the butt with a bass fiddle (sometimes I envisioned that description right after I struck out).
However, I had already established myself as a “glove man.” It was opening night. I got dressed in my uniform about four hours before the game. When we got there, it was midway through the first game and there was what looked like a big crowd and it was under the lights. It was wonderful. I remember it all very clearly. In the first inning, a batter popped up to me at third base. Gosh, he hit it high. The noise of the crowd, the pressure—I moved around, trying to get under it. It must have been in the air for five minutes as I stumbled around. Then, miraculously, the ball made contact with my glove. I had actually caught it! The exhilaration was indescribable. It was my first big test in organized athletics, and I had passed. That catch saw me through numerous errors and losses that year. No matter. Whatever else happened, I’d always have “the catch.”
My passion for baseball had been solidified at the age of twelve. It was 1954, the year that the Cleveland Indians won the American League pennant. They were my favorite team throughout my boyhood. How did a kid from rural Tennessee become a rabid fan of the Cleveland Indians? Most baseball loyalties are born in traditional ways—a kid’s hometown or regional team, your dad’s team, or the team of your favorite player that you saw on TV. But we had no teams in the South and no baseball on television. This gaping hole was filled for me by the fact that my aunt Juanita, my mother’s sister, lived in Cleveland with her husband. That summer, Ma and Pa Bradley, Mom, and I drove to visit Juanita and her family. But it wasn’t as uncomplicated as it sounds.
First of all, the trip was in part a reconnaissance mission. Juanita had been acting strangely. At least, that’s the way she seemed on the phone and in her letters. She had married a Yankee from Cleveland. Worse than that, a Yankee from Czechoslovakia and we couldn’t pronounce his last name. He was a perfectly nice fellow, but he had two strikes against him, and Juanita was acting like she was perfectly happy to live in Cleveland, Ohio, with this Czechoslovakian Yankee. Clearly, something was amiss, so we headed north.
After the long, un-air-conditioned drive, we approached Cleveland much as American troops probably approached the Anbar Province. When we arrived, without incurring enemy fire, we learned that the living quarters situation was less than ideal for company. In fact, looking back on it, I’m not sure my folks told Juanita that we were even coming. Juanita and her husband, Frank, had just opened a little diner with three rooms. The part of the diner that was open had just one little row of stools with a countertop across a grill. Frank had two grown sons, who were fixing up an adjoining room for the diner, and the family was living in another room. We stayed at a motel.
Of course, with Frank trying to start his own business, it was the worst possible time for his in-laws to descend on him. Hot dogs and ice cream were about all that was served, and I thought I’d died and gone to heaven as I sat there on the stool every day deciding whether I wanted another hot dog, and helping eat away at what little profits they were earning at the time.
In addition to his tolerance, Frank did something else that left a lasting impression on me. He took our family to two Cleveland Indians night games. This was before the day when a man had to take out a second mortgage if he wanted to treat his family to a major-league baseball game. I think each of our tickets was about $1.25, but it still must have been a bit of a sacrifice. I wonder if a guy like Frank could spring for the ticket prices today, plus food and drinks. Even accounting for inflation, I suspect that a lot of little boys like me are not making it to the park these days. However, other boys were the last thing on my mind that first night.
The Indians were playing the Boston Red Sox at Cleveland’s old Municipal Stadium. We entered the ballpark and walked through the crowded, somewhat dark passageway around to the entrance leading to our seats. Then we walked out into the brightly lit, vast expan
se of openness. There was a beautifully manicured green field below us and people in unending rows of seats, billboards and music surrounding us. It took my breath away. I absorbed every sight, sound, and smell that was there that night. I sometimes have trouble remembering my telephone number, but I still remember the starting lineup of the 1954 Indians.
As I often tried to explain in my youth, it wasn’t as if I wasn’t learning. I was just learning different stuff. Anyway, Lawrenceburg, Tennessee, had at least one Cleveland Indians fan, and I suffered the true sports fan’s exhilaration and heartache when they won the American League pennant that year but lost the World Series in four straight to the New York Giants. Pinch hitter Dusty Rhodes (in those days, everyone named Rhodes was called “Dusty”) killed us with two home runs.
I watched the World Series that year for the first time on television at my grandma Thompson’s house, since she and Pa Thompson sprung for a TV before Dad and Mom did. Ma Thompson’s primary interest in buying a TV was because of Wrestling from Hollywood. I am not kidding. When one of the heroes like Freddie Blassie would throttle one of the villains like Gorgeous George, then put a triple dropkick on him, she would jump up and exclaim along with the announcer, “Whoa, Nellie!” She especially loved the midget Indian wrestlers when they would come out in their headgear doing war whoops. At Ma Thompson’s, I never worried about being exposed to Masterpiece Theater or its equivalent, and that suited me fine. For Ma Thompson and me, it was either midget wrestlers or something involving a ball.
This was during the time when an important social issue was beginning to be reflected on the sports field. By 1954, Larry Doby, the first black player in the American League, was playing center field for the Cleveland Indians. Therefore, he became one of my favorites. However, that was not enough to raise my social consciousness with regard to my own world. Playing Little League, for example, it never did occur to us that we didn’t have any black players on our team, or any of the opposing teams, for that matter.
Teaching the Pig to Dance Page 8