Imperfect: An Improbable Life

by Jim Abbott

  Mr. Clarkson was a tall man with big hands. We sat across from each other, knees to knees. He untied his shoe and mine. It took him longer to untie mine. He then clenched his right hand into a fist, nearly mimicking mine, pinned the right lace to his shin with his right hand and nodded for me to do the same. With the right lace taut, he curled the left lace with his left hand around the right lace and looked at me. I was following. By looping it under and through, it made a loose knot. His did. Mine sort of did.

  He repeated the process, this time with loops. With his left hand he pulled at the right lace, then slackened it, allowing the bottom of the lace to fall into a circle. That, then, he held against his leg while he drew a second loop through the first. With a little tugging, it all became a knot. He looked at me and smiled. His shoe was tied. Mine could have passed for the nest of a small sparrow. He laughed and we started over again. After a couple days, I could tie my shoes.

  This certainly wasn’t brushing my teeth with my feet. My victories were so much smaller than that. But, they were mine, just as the insecurities were. I’d left Mary Free Bed in Grand Rapids and within days was in elementary school down the block. Had I been capable of broader perspective, I might have wondered why I could find my way in both places, but felt I belonged in neither.

  My place seemed to be in the desperation to stand alongside everybody else, in that area in boys’ brains where we kept score, and in that corner of our hearts where we knew when we were being tested. Because of that, for a long time, maybe forever, I would view myself through the things I didn’t want to be.

  I didn’t want to be that kid.

  I didn’t want to be different.

  I didn’t want to be pretty good, you know, considering.

  I didn’t want anyone feeling sorry for me, or treating me special, or looking past me.

  And I didn’t want to wear that thing on my arm.

  So, I stayed at it, whatever it was. That was my whole plan—to show up. Nearing the end of elementary school, I’d undergone surgeries that were supposed to expand the range of motion in my right arm but didn’t. And I’d fought the morning battle with my parents over whether I’d really have to wear that arm again, when all the other kids were calling me “Captain Hook.” We’d moved more times, my young parents seeking their footing, better neighborhoods and school systems, and for a time settled into the end unit of a townhouse. Outside, a brick wall wrapped around the bottom floor. There, out of sight, away from the world, I was free to dream. With no one staring or judging, I’d stand in front of the brick wall, a rubber-coated ball in my left hand, my Dusty Baker glove hooded over my right wrist, and I’d throw, and catch, and chase, and switch the glove back and forth. The yard was quiet except for the thump against the wall and my footfalls and thick breaths that followed, all in pursuit of the baseball. When the glove transition grew more comfortable and I became better at it, I’d move closer to the wall, throw the ball harder, test myself. Then I’d retrace the chalk rectangle on the bricks, step off the distance to a pitcher’s mound, and throw at that.

  Inside the house, Mom was becoming a lawyer, working through her studies to the tune of the thump-thump-thump from behind the far wall. From down the block, Dad would drive up in the Volkswagen van, his workday done. Chad and I would play our games, our backyard baseball and football, and I’d keep throwing. It felt right, even in the dark, even in the cold, even when Mom had already announced dinner, twice, and then Dad had to stick his head out of the door.

  They were encouraging and instinctual as parents. They never pushed, but they never said, “Don’t, that’s not a good idea.” There was never any dissuasion. Mom was an optimist. She sort of had this “Well, if that doesn’t work we’ll do this” attitude. Dad was a why-not guy. He sometimes didn’t see the consequences of things. Where I was a worrier, he’d buy the rubber boat with the motor next to the side of the road and say, “Let’s put it on the beach, it’ll be great.” And I’d say, “Dad, where are we going to store it? What are we going to do with it?” He’d look at me and say, “Why not?”

  Dad loved Al McGuire, then the Marquette basketball coach and one of the great personalities of the sport. Well, McGuire told this story on TV one time about going to Marquette’s basketball practices, day in and day out, for more than a decade. And every day, when he came to an intersection near campus, he would turn right. Left was a part of town he’d never seen, because he always went right. The basketball court was right. One day, out of curiosity and restlessness, McGuire went left. His quote, according to Dad, was, “Sometimes you gotta take a left.” Dad sort of lived by that. Dad went left quite a bit.

  By the time I was nearing high school, Dad worked for an Anheuser-Busch beer distributorship. He was in sales and drove a route. He was an on-premise manager, meaning he was in the bars, slapping hands, making sure everybody had what they wanted and making sure Budweiser was well-placed.

  Mom had gone through University of Michigan–Flint, then to law school at Cooley College in East Lansing. Many nights I went to bed listening to her tap at a manual typewriter and awoke to the same sound. She commuted one hundred miles a day, earned her law degree, and became a civil counsel for the City of Flint. She also was in private practice.

  While they worked, Chad and I became independent. I’d come home from school to an empty house, make myself some lunch, and then go back to practice for whatever sport was in season.

  Our folks, meanwhile, weathered the storm that many do not. They went through what people go through when they marry at eighteen, not really having the chance to experience their own adolescence. They lived apart for short periods, never more than a month or two. We’d live with Mom. And there was always reconciliation, happily.

  Dad was a free spirit, but there were times when he was the most responsible person I knew. He instilled solid values; made clear the family was important. In words, he never confused his priorities. But sometimes, he did like to get out and see the world. He is, as I remember him saying a million times, someone who burned the candle at both ends. Maybe it goes back to his dad dying. He’s always had a hunger to see the world, to be a part of it, a part of what’s going on. My mom was almost the complete opposite of that. She was a homebody, very quiet. So there was always that clash.

  And then, more often than not, they’d come see my games.

  I was no prodigy. I was cut from the freshman basketball team at Flint Central High School. I made the freshman baseball team, but didn’t get a hit the whole season. It was a long time before I separated myself from boys my age on athletic fields, beyond the occasional softball throw. Partly as a result, those early teenage years were perhaps my most difficult in terms of accepting my disability. Yet even then using it as an explanation for failure held only fleeting respite. Mostly, any thoughts about my hand were private, and when I brought them up it was more often to hide some other pain or anxiety—the typical pains and anxieties of a teenager—and so even then it seemed dishonest.

  Meantime, I remember points along the way. I remember the faces, the events, the casual observations of classmates. I remember the long stares. And being glad my jeans had pockets. I remember the kids who took one look at me and said, “Your hand looks like a foot,” observations that amused them to no end and yet for me had become part of the routine. And I remember baseball coming to find me, pulling me along.

  My parents were supportive and challenged me and allowed me to bruise, if that’s where the day was headed. Dad sent Chad and me off to school every morning with some variation of the same message: “You’re the best,” he’d say. Or, “Be a leader.” Or, “Don’t let anybody get you down.” Something that would make me feel loved and safe no matter what I was headed out into.

  Sometimes, the real tests came in the places where there was not a single spectator. Places like Whittier Middle School came alive many winter nights in a city where basketball—not baseball—was the one and only game.

  In my early teens the g
uys from the neighborhood—Mark “Shark” Conover, Danny Nathan, David “Crame” Cramer, Alex Green—would bang on the front door just after dinner. They’d stand there in their heavy coats, sweat pants, and wool caps, their cheeks already red from the walk down the hill, laughing and pushy to get going. I’d grab my winter gear, leave behind the aroma of one of Mom’s specialties—pork chops, stuffed peppers, cube steak—and the dirty dishes, for the junior high gym. The walk was about a half mile, a lot of it along Burroughs Creek, which ran through a park that separated the black and white neighborhoods on Flint’s east side.

  Dozens of us would wait in the parking lot, often enough breathing steam and bouncing lightly on our toes against the cold, for the community school director to unlock the door from the inside. The games were exactly what you’d expect. All over Flint, city leaders opened gyms in hopes that basketball would be the alternative to all the other nighttime options. The lights were dim and the balls, slick and swollen from use, were dark leather. The courts were dusty except on the edges, where they were damp from slushy footsteps. My first job was pushing a broom from end to end on those courts and collecting one-dollar bills from the folks who came to watch the adult leagues, but what I preferred to do was play. So, we played. Depending on the turnout, we’d go five-on-five or three-on-three, full- or half-court. This was pure pickup ball, rough and loud and sometimes intimidating. Some of the best players in the city showed up at these gyms and, until I was cut from my ninth-grade team, I thought of myself as a decent player who could hang with them. Granted, I had a hard time going right, and everybody knew it, and there wasn’t a kid on that floor who wouldn’t overplay my left side. Oh, I’d fake an unsure dribble or two with my right hand, try to give the impression I’d go right if I had to, but without fail I’d end up on the left side of the floor looking for a teammate or a shot.

  The games were unforgiving. If I hadn’t already figured it out, nobody was going to feel sorry for me. More likely, they were going to force me right, and that was true in basketball and in life.

  While I’d always felt different and knew I’d have to live with it, I began to stand up to those feelings in high school, sometimes in those gyms, but mostly on the baseball field. I was never completely comfortable or free of uncertainty, but I had my protected place. When I was unsure, baseball would tell me I was all right, that I’d done something well. It was my self-image. Hey, I’d been in the newspaper. I’d been on TV. The doubt would come and go, but I could lean on my parents, all they’d instilled in me, and I could lean on the game, and what it meant for me. There was always another issue, it seemed, no matter how I tried to outrun it. But I’d done stuff on the field, been better at something.

  And I’d won my share, no matter what my hand looked like.

  CHAPTER 6

  By the time he was done, Jim Thome would be one of the great home-run hitters in baseball history, right there with Mickey Mantle and Reggie Jackson and Frank Robinson, pushing 600 home runs for his career.

  On September 4, 1993, he had five.

  In 285 at-bats, he had struck out 64 times. He had turned twenty-three eight days before, and at that age was what you’d call a swing-hard-in-case-you-hit-it guy. It wouldn’t be long before he swung hard and hit it a lot, but for the moment he was a young man with a puncher’s chance of completely ruining an otherwise promising afternoon.

  Thome was a big, strong hitter who had a long swing from the left side, meaning my cutter—if I wasn’t careful—was generally running into the path of all that barrel. The strategy was to throw the cutter at his right hip and maybe have it catch the inside corner, then go away with the cutter off the plate. Even at that age Thome could keep the inside fastball fair, so if I missed, I wanted to miss in on his hands.

  Yankee Stadium was a wonderful ballpark, particularly for a left-handed pitcher. Guys like Thome, however, made that right-field fence feel very close.

  On a bit of an uppercut swing, he flied to Bernie Williams in center field.

  From one hitter to the next, you couldn’t get much more extreme than Thome to Junior Ortiz, the Indians’ catcher who, in thirteen big-league seasons, would hit five home runs. In fact, by the time I saw him, he hadn’t hit one in four years and wouldn’t ever hit another—that fact alone was reason enough to pitch around Thome if it came to it. Ortiz was smallish, right-handed, and could be pesky, in that way where you didn’t want the number 9 hitter extending an inning, getting on base for the top of the Indians’ order or making you work any harder than you had to.

  He grounded out to second baseman Mike Gallego.

  So, I was through the order once. I’d walked a couple, struck out a couple, and generally stuck to the plan—Nokes’s, pitching coach Tony Cloninger’s, bullpen coach Mark Connor’s, mine. It wasn’t spectacular—we weren’t even winning yet—but the ball was coming out of my hand pretty well. I’d given myself over to Nokes and our plan entirely, throwing what we wanted, hopefully in the area we wanted. His intentions were exactly mine, so I almost could see his fingers call for pitches before they uncurled from his fist.

  By comparison, at this point six days before in Cleveland—two out in the third inning—against a similar batting order, I’d already given up nine hits and seven runs. The only difference for the day game after the night game was that Indians manager Mike Hargrove had subbed out Sorrento, Espinoza, and Alomar Jr.

  Maybe I’d worked the Indians’ lineup to overconfidence.

  I finished the third inning by getting another ground ball, this time pitching more aggressively to Lofton, this time trusting my cutter and Nokes’s feel for it. I followed the ball to Gallego and then to Don Mattingly, and made my way to the dugout, by then allowing myself the notion that this would, indeed, maybe, quite possibly be a better day.

  CHAPTER 7

  The brick, mortar, and soaring gloom of Central Community High School stood four stories above Crapo Street in Flint’s East Village, commanding the sort of stern consideration a medieval fortress would against its sprawling fiefdom. The campus covered forty-three acres, spanning at least four blocks on each border. Better known as Flint Central or simply Central, the school opened in 1923, twenty years after Buick Motor Company began building engines in a single-story plant in town and nineteen years after William Crapo Durant took control of Buick.

  Bookended by a public library to the north and Whittier Middle School to the south, Central was distinguishable for its capital E structural design, bell tower, solemn architectural details, and stately carriage. The place had heft, as though it had risen from the earth of its own diligence. Sixty years after its first graduating class, there was little one would consider fanciful about the place; not the low ceilings, not the broad concrete steps at the main entrance, not the tall windows painted shut, not the people in its locker-lined hallways, and not the neighborhood it dominated.

  Once, as many as two thousand students over three classes—tenth through twelfth—walked over the lawns, along the cement sidewalks and past the flagpole into its classrooms each morning. By the time it closed in 2009 from neglect and economic circumstance, the school’s population was closer to one thousand over four classes. People were leaving Flint and taking their kids with them.

  I arrived in the fall of 1981, having graduated from across the parking lot at Whittier and now just another of the faceless hundreds endeavoring toward something like adulthood. My family lived by then in a house on Burroughs Park, a tree-lined meadow that broadened as it curled north and west over three hundred or so yards toward the middle and high schools. Gilkey Creek skirted one side of the park, which served many purposes for the boys who lived on its perimeter. Depending on the season, the park was a football field, a hockey rink, a baseball diamond, a snowball battleground, a wrestling mat, a cover for a few secret minutes of a budding romance, and a place to kill time before the sun went down. Every summer night, clumps of dirt and smears of grass from the park went home on the knees and elbows of every kid w
ho ran it, no exceptions—not the middle-class white kids from the east border or the lower-income black kids from its west side. The distinctions in our park were not drawn from race, however, but from the final scores of the games we played, and from the courage shown in those knockdown-drag-outs, and from the hospitality of moms who poured Kool-Aid from the porches closest to the park. This is where we scored the first significant touchdowns of our lives, and learned to drag the bat head to go the other way. We practiced our hockey stops on the frozen creek until our knees and elbows were raw. It’s where we threw and took our first punches, leaving us breathless and sad.

  Some of the early founders of Flint once lived along Burroughs Park, but, like so much in Flint, things weren’t what they once were.

  After a lot of bouncing around, settling in neighborhoods and then—for one reason or another, often because of the schools—moving on, the Abbotts and their two boys moved into the middle of three houses at the end of a short road overlooking the park. By then, some of those big, beautiful homes were showing their age. The lives of many of the breadwinners in the cul-de-sacs and verdant streets near Burroughs Park would change in the 1980s, just as they would all over Flint, when General Motors began boarding up its manufacturing plants. For decades a man in Flint could chart his course from the playground to high school to an assembly line or management job at GM, the path their fathers and grandfathers had taken to middle-class stability. When the jobs disappeared, so too did Flint’s hope, and the street corners that had been edgy in my father’s youth became strictly off-limits in mine.