Starting and Closing

by John Smoltz

  In 2007, I was scheduled to speak at one of Zig Ziglar’s “Seize the Day!” motivational seminars. Zig’s folks had contacted me an entire year before the event and asked me to participate. I remember looking at the date, then twelve months away, and thinking, Yeah, that should be fine. There was no way of knowing it then, but I had just scheduled a big-time speech during what would be one of the worst times of my life.

  Mere days before the seminar, I had found out that my marriage was probably over. In those first few days as I adjusted to the news, it was like I was going through life in somewhat of a daze. I remember going to an all-day Christian school-board retreat and sitting through the meetings; I was going through the motions on the outside, but on the inside I was absolutely devastated. Nobody knew what was going on yet and we still had our four kids to tell. I really didn’t think matters could get any worse until my agent, Lonnie Cooper, called me on the way home.

  “Hey John,” he said, “just wanted to give you a call and make sure you were all set for your speech tomorrow.”

  I’m like, “Lonnie, what are you talking about? What speech?”

  I was so numb and entrenched in the upheaval of my entire life that I had completely forgotten all about my commitment. Just the thought of giving a speech the next day made my head ache, and the more I thought about it, the more I was filled with absolute dread. How was I going to give any speech, let alone a motivational speech, in the state I was in? I suppose I could have called and asked to be excused, given the circumstances, but I wasn’t comfortable even asking the question, as much as I might have wanted to. As much as I wanted to just crawl under the covers of my bed and escape everything at the moment, I’m too principled to do it. When I say I’m going to do something, I’m going to do something.

  So I showed up the next day and I can still remember sitting in the green room outside the auditorium and feeling so overwhelmed and so consumed by what was going on in my life that I just couldn’t see how I was going to get through it. In a few moments I was supposed to walk out on this stage and speak to twenty-two thousand people, and I literally had nothing to say. On top of that, the organizers had just told me I had exactly twenty-five minutes to speak, not one second less or more. I hadn’t realized this before, but they had an extremely tight schedule and lots of speakers to accommodate in one day. I had never even timed one of my speeches. How I could possibly pull this off was beyond me. I finally just ended up praying. I said, “Lord, I can’t do this, but I know You can and I need help.”

  I remember walking out into the center of this boxing ring and standing there for a moment, staring at the clock and watching it tick. I remember telling myself, Don’t look at the clock or you’re never going to get through it, and then I just started talking. It’s hard to describe what happened next, but it was really like this sort out-of-body experience. It was my voice, it was my words, it was my stories, but it felt like I was on autopilot. I wasn’t the one pulling the strings. The only thing I was really doing was standing there and letting it happen. To me, it was the most amazing thing ever.

  Somehow, what came out of me was flawless: I never stumbled over my words or found myself wandering off on tangents. I ended right on time and got a standing ovation. I walked off the stage and it was like I didn’t even know what had just happened. I felt light. Numb, even. It was as if God had literally picked me up and carried me through it.

  The next day I had to get up and speak at a church, and I tell you the same thing happened. These were two distinct moments in my life where I didn’t have either the energy or the desire to accomplish the things I ended up accomplishing. I didn’t even have anything I wanted to talk about, yet somehow, someway, He brought me through it.

  Getting out of my comfort zone, pushing myself through adversity, and dealing with failure have been critical to my journey. But on the flip side of these truths, I think my attitude toward success, and what it means to me to be successful, have been just as important. To put it simply, I have tried never to let myself get too carried away with either one.

  While I undeniably found a measure of success on the baseball field and certainly feel a sense of both pride and accomplishment for the things I was able to do in my playing career, these things do not define me, in my own mind, as a successful person. It would be disappointing to me if when I leave this earth, I am remembered only as a good pitcher, because to me there’s a whole lot more to my story.

  My ability to throw a baseball has given me an enormous opportunity in life. Baseball has given me a platform that I have tried to use to make a positive difference in the world around me. As I have grown up and come to understand my place in life, I don’t see it as my duty or responsibility to do these things. I look at it instead as “I get to do these things.”

  From the beginning of my career, I have made time to support and be a part of things that I am genuinely passionate about. And what I have come to realize is that the satisfaction you get when you know you’ve made a difference, a true life-changing difference, far outweighs the excitement of throwing a baseball.

  The credit for this attitude must go to my parents. My parents are incredibly down-to-earth and not materialistic at all. We were never rich, by any means, maybe middle class at best, but we always felt like we were rich. And my parents instilled in all of us a feeling of respect for what we had. As I moved up in the tax brackets throughout my career, I tried to remain as grounded as my parents had always raised me to be. I remember telling my best friend, Chuck Cascarilla, a long time ago, when I signed my first big contract in baseball, “If I ever change, hit me over the head with a shovel. I’m serious.” And to this day, I try to live with an attitude of service rather than a feeling of entitlement.

  When I look back on my life and the various things that I have accomplished, it’s safe to say that some of the things I am the most proud of have nothing to do with baseball. It was always my intention to live with this attitude of service, but along the way I realized that God had bigger plans for me than I could ever have imagined. Along the way I have learned that when you get that nudge, when you feel God is asking you to do something far greater than you could do by yourself—that’s something worth following and doing. I learned this lesson for the first time in 2000.

  Back then one of my neighbors was Jeff Foxworthy. I had met Jeff a long time before, but it wasn’t until this year, when our kids were all going to the same Christian school, that we really became good friends. Jeff was serving on the school’s board of directors and the minister wanted me to be part of the board as well. When Jeff asked me about it, I really felt inclined to take a pass. With my baseball schedule, I just didn’t see how I could possibly fit in board meetings and actually serve in person and not just in name. I don’t know what came over me, but for some reason I ended up saying yes.

  The next thing you know, a couple weeks after I leave for spring training, I end up having Tommy John surgery. I soon found myself at home with nothing but time. Since I had accepted the school-board position, I now felt obligated to do my part. I didn’t know what a baseball player could possibly contribute, but I started showing up to these meetings and God started showing me. I would soon find myself in the most faith-challenging situation I’ve ever been in in my life.

  I became a regular attendee at three-hour board meetings focused on the church’s plans to build a new high school. I knew nothing about school boards or policies or even meeting etiquette, but even I could tell from the very first meeting that things weren’t exactly right. There seemed to be a lot of tension in the room at all these meetings and I was trying to understand why.

  I sat through months and months of board meetings focused on building this new high school and I finally started to piece things together. There were legitimate questions that were not being addressed—things that just could not be ignored. The entire board was struggling to get to the bottom of it, but we needed some answers from the leadership and we weren’t getting any.<
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  To be blunt, the minister had grown used to controlling and manipulating the board members. He had worked himself up into such a position that he was deemed to be beyond reproach—until I came along, that is. I was fresh, new, abrasive, and unafraid; challenging this minister was not going to be an issue for me. So one day I did. I stood up in the middle of this board meeting and confronted the minister with the truth.

  It did not go over well, to say the least, but I don’t think I or any of the other board members had any idea what events would transpire in the next few weeks. We were called before the church’s charge conference and all promptly removed from our positions. Here we had been hired by the church to help them build a school, and in the very next moment we had all been fired. The charge conference never talked to us, or engaged us to find out what had really happened. We could only assume that the minister had basically lobbied for our removal because we weren’t willing to simply agree and conform to his ways.

  This ignited a firestorm on the church board. Jeff was so distraught that he took his kids out of the school, which eventually led to most of us taking our kids elsewhere as well. As things were unfolding, you can imagine all the rumors and speculations that were flying around about what happened, but there was not a lot of truth in any of them, and I felt a genuine desire to set the record straight. I just wanted the chance to explain what had really happened, so I got the bright idea of holding a meeting.

  Jeff thought I was crazy. In some ways I had to agree with him, because frankly, I didn’t know the first thing about running a meeting, but there I was renting a venue and making sure there were at least twenty chairs available—I didn’t have high expectations for a big crowd.

  Well, it turned out to be a standing-room-only affair. There must have been 150 to 200 people jam-packed into this room: parents, teachers, administrators, and board members. The minister sent a representative with a camcorder and a message: He was going to sue us if we did anything damaging to his reputation. The stage was thus set for a good, old-fashioned spectacle.

  The goal for the meeting was just to tell the interested parents what had really happened and what it meant for the education of their children. Things started off civilly enough, but soon there were some tempers flaring and things were starting to get a little out of hand. It was right about this time that a woman walked in the room and the entire crowd literally gasped.

  At the time, I had no idea who this lady was, but as it turns out, she had been one of the very first teachers at this school when it first opened. Years ago, the minister had accused her of doing things she didn’t do, but she never stood up for herself and was eventually fired. It was a real sour deal and she ended up moving out of the neighborhood because of it. Those who knew her story assumed that she had come to the meeting in order to finally spill the beans on the minister—but she didn’t.

  She stood and delivered a message that still gives me chills when I think about it today. She simply said, “A long time ago, I didn’t listen to God and it cost me dearly. This afternoon, I was sitting on my porch and I knew this meeting was happening. The first time I felt a nudge to go, I just picked up my paper and started reading it. The second time I had this incredible nudge to go, I pulled my paper even closer to my eyes and was determined not to go. The third time I finally put the paper down, and here I am. I am here to deliver a message. I want to tell all of you that when God speaks, listen.”

  By the time she was finished, the hair on the back of my neck was standing up. Her message was obviously meant for everyone, but her words pierced my heart like an arrow. What started out as this worldly “I’ll show you” moment instantaneously transformed into something higher, a moment when God told me, “No, I’ll show you.” In that moment it just hit me. I suddenly knew what I was supposed to do. I was supposed to start a Christian school.

  It was the first time in my life that I felt God using me in such a way that I didn’t even know what I was saying at the time. Unlike what I said during the Zig Ziglar speech, the words I was about to speak were not my own. I found myself telling this crowd, “Look, this group is going to go on and build their school the way they want, and I’m sure they’ll be fine. Let’s go build our own school somewhere else.” I somehow persuaded people with my passion and desire to build a new school of our own, and I asked them to join me. I didn’t know what I was going to do, how I was going to do it, or who I was going to do it with, but I was filled with ambition and good intentions. And for some reason, I was sure I would find my way.

  The ultracondensed version of the rest of the story is that we founded a board called the Advancement for Christian Education with thirteen brave people. Nothing went as planned, nothing was easy, we ended up in court fighting to build a school on property we had bought, but we persevered through it at all. We went from humble beginnings in a refurbished Bruno’s Grocery Store (not kidding, the meat department was our school’s cafeteria) to a seventy-acre campus at the corner of Bethany Bend and Cogburn Road in Alpharetta; this campus is now called King’s Ridge Christian School. Today, we have more than 700 kids from kindergarten up to high school and we are about to embark upon another project to build a separate facility on the campus for grades nine through twelve.

  Almost every free moment that I had that year, I spent working on the school, and the work has continued since. I served on the board for ten years and was chairman for five of them. I was always able to devote more of my time and attention during the off-season, but when baseball season rolled around, we found a way to make it work, scheduling the weekly board meetings around days I pitched and road trips. Some years, I think I spent more time at the school than my own kids, who are now enrolled there, did. I recently rotated off the board and have taken a bit of a backseat in the day-to-day running of the school, but you can rest assured, this school will be something that I will look after for the rest of my life.

  I could never have known that the thing I dreaded the most, baseballwise—Tommy John surgery—would lead to one of the most unbelievable appointments of my life. Building a Christian school was unlike any other challenge I’ve ever faced in my life. It was a painstaking process and one that I never imagined I would engage in. There were so many roadblocks and so many challenges, but I learned that when you do something that is not of yourself, you will have the desire to see it through.

  Beyond the school, I have been involved in many different charitable causes, but there are two that I have been fortunate enough to be involved with for really the better part of my life: Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta and the Atlanta Community Food Bank. I have been fortunate in not having a major disease or chronic illness touch my family, so I have never really had much of a deeply personal cause to fight for in that sense. Fighting hunger just seemed like a logical place to start. Without food, you can’t even attack diabetes or cancer or other chronic diseases that affect a lot of people.

  I was introduced to food banks in my hometown of Lansing, where I got involved in the annual Lansing Can-A-Thon. When I got traded to Atlanta, of all things, a guy I had worked with at the Greater Lansing Food Bank ended up transferring to the Atlanta Community Food Bank. It was crazy how it worked out, but it was really a seamless transition from a food bank in one community to a food bank in another. I’ve participated in countless events to raise funds, solicit food donations, and bring awareness to the issue of hunger in our community. The Atlanta Community Food Bank is a phenomenal organization and I have been proud to lend my name and efforts to its causes for many, many years.

  My relationship with Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, and most specifically, Children’s at Scottish Rite, was actually inspired by an experience I had during a winter caravan for the Atlanta Braves.

  Back then in my earliest years of pro ball, winter caravans were pretty extensive affairs. We would drive to all these cities in a big bus, meeting with fans and signing autographs. It was something of an exhausting process, as we’d literally hit fif
teen cities in about five days, drumming up support for the team. One thing we always did was visit the hospitals, and I’ve just got to be honest here, I didn’t like it. I didn’t like it because it made me uncomfortable; I saw things as a young player that I wasn’t prepared to see. I’ll never forget the first time I saw a child who was so stricken by cancer that you couldn’t tell if it was a boy or a girl. Memories like that stick with you.

  Once I opened my eyes and stopped focusing on myself, I saw the joy we were giving these kids and their families, who were basically living at these hospitals struggling to fight these chronic diseases. I knew then that visiting a hospital was something I needed to make time to do. It was the least I could do for these kids and their families.

  So when I got to Atlanta, I got hooked up with Scottish Rite Children’s Medical Center, which later merged with Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta to became Children’s at Scottish Rite, and I began a relationship with them. I tried to make it part of my routine to stop by the hospital whenever I could. Sometimes I would bring in a bunch of toys; other times I’d just go hang out and talk with the kids and their parents.

  I remember one time I had gotten home at 4 A.M. from a road trip and had gone straight to bed. A few hours later, my wife came in and woke me up. I knew it had to be important and she just handed me the phone. It was the hospital. They were calling me to see if I could come right away to visit a kid named Andrew McLeroy. He was suffering from a brain tumor and I was his favorite player. His parents were hoping I could see him before he had to undergo major surgery. Of course, this was an easy decision to make. I got up and I got in the car.

  I remember not knowing what to be prepared for on the ride over, but when I saw a priest standing outside the room, I knew it must not be looking good for the poor kid.

  I spoke with the parents first. This was always tough because you never knew exactly what to say or what to expect; sometimes the parents were angry, bitter, and mad—and understandably so. Andrew’s parents were unbelievable. I remember talking to them, trying to give some hope when I didn’t know if there was any. Then I went in and talked to Andrew, and he was just a normal kid with a terrible disease. We talked baseball and he told me he was hoping to get back out and play again after surgery. I was there to inspire Andrew, but it was Andrew who inspired me.