After all the commotion, when my father finally got to the mound, he fired his words through gritted teeth: “If we lose this game…” he began. He didn’t finish his sentence because he didn’t have to. We both knew what he meant.
With two strikes, two outs, and two men in scoring position, my next pitch broke so much it hit the dirt as the batter swung and missed. Strike three! But when the ball hits the ground, it only counts as an out if the catcher gets the ball and tags the batter, or throws him out at first base.
Our catcher caught the ball and tagged the batter. The umpire made the call: “Out!” Game over!
We were the Little League champs of our small town, but we felt like we’d won the World Series! We poured 7-Up over each other, including Dad, who seemed as happy as I’d ever seen him. He looked over at me and smiled at his oldest son, who’d just won the deciding game. Perhaps I’d been forgiven.
After the game I sat in the car with him.
“How do you feel about your performance?” he asked. I knew he was referring to my behavior as much as my pitching.
“Dad, I’m sorry I almost lost us the game,” I said. That was what he wanted to hear. And at the time it seemed like it might be enough to satisfy him. We drove off to meet the players and parents celebrating at the best pizza joint in town. I was having such a great time with the team that, as my father got up to leave, I asked if I could stay with my friends and walk home later.
My dad actually agreed, so my buddies and I ate more pizza and then went to Rick’s house, where we tossed a football around for an hour or so. It was probably the best day of my life—up to that point.
At about ten I left Rick’s house and got a ride home. When we pulled up in front of our house I could see my father waiting in the kitchen. When I walked in he didn’t seem angry but just gazed at me calmly.
“John, you helped win a championship,” he said, “so I’ve got an idea for next season. Instead of playing third base when you’re not pitching, I’d like you to play catcher. You’ve got a strong arm, and you could throw out runners trying to steal second,” something few Little Leaguers could do.
When I wasn’t pitching I liked playing third, not catcher, but I was too tired to argue. It had been a great day, he hadn’t brought up my hot-dogging, and I felt no need to push it. I mumbled my agreement, then headed for bed.
“Hold on,” he said. “Let’s toss the ball some before you go to bed.”
At that hour, already tuckered out, that was the last thing I wanted to do, but I couldn’t refuse him. We headed out into the backyard, lit by a single bulb attached to the house. I reached for my glove.
“You won’t need that,” my dad said.
He started out by lobbing the ball to me, soft enough for me to catch it barehanded. After a few throws, he paused, the ball gripped between his fingers. His expression turned cold, and he started throwing harder and harder. I caught every toss barehanded.
I knew he wanted me to quit, but my pride wouldn’t let me. Seeing that I was not backing down, he hauled back and threw it with everything he had. My dad was in his midthirties, still in good shape, and he could whip it. I was sure my bare hands would shatter. But I caught each burning pitch, tossing the ball back to him and opening my hands for another.
Unsatisfied with my stoic response, he started pitching the ball so it dropped a foot or so in front of me. I couldn’t catch these pitches even if I had a glove. The first few I fought off with my hands, which started to sting. My knuckles began to swell and bleed, but I was determined not to give in. My father then went to a full wind-up but kept bouncing his pitches off the ground, which hit me in my cheek, my nose, my throat. I took them all.
Finally I stood up from my crouching catcher’s position to leave. I’d made my point. I was tough, but I’d had enough.
He just stared at me. I knew from his glare that if I left, he’d follow me into my bedroom, close the door, and I’d be in for another beating. So I crouched back down to field more pitches, pitches that felt like punches. I could no longer catch any of them, but I was able to take most of them off my chest and keep them in front of me, like you’re supposed to, until one pitch bounced up off my hand and then hit me square in the mouth. I started bleeding.
We kept going. Finally, after a half-hour of “practice,” he was satisfied that he had broken my spirit and called it quits.
When we walked back into the house I didn’t dare say a word, but he did. “You’ll think twice,” he said, “about ever showing me up again.”
When I woke up the next morning my pillow was covered in dried blood. I went to the bathroom to look in the mirror. My eye was swollen shut, and my mouth looked like I’d gone fifteen rounds with Muhammad Ali.
When my brother walked past the open bathroom door he saw me, stopped, and asked, “What happened?”
At this age I still didn’t want to paint our father as a bad guy, so I lied. “Rick and I were tossing the football around. One of his passes went through my hands and hit me.”
I washed up as well as I could and went to the kitchen to have some cereal. My mom was sipping coffee at the table, but she stopped cold when she saw me. I could see the shock on her face, but she didn’t say a word. She knew better, too.
When my father appeared, he laughed. “What’s the matter with you?”
I didn’t answer him. I didn’t even look at him. I returned to my room, closed the door, and started to cry. My dad had turned the best day of my life into one of the worst. After a few minutes my mother knocked on the door, came in, and sat on the bed.
“John, do you know why your father hits you?” she asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “’Cause I’m a big mouth who doesn’t know how to be a good son.”
She shook her head. “It’s because his father used to do it to him.” She told me his father used to knock him down, then kick him in the ribs with his steel-toed work boots.
This didn’t help me understand my dad any better or forgive myself, either, as perhaps she’d intended. No, my first thought was this: I will never have any children. Because if there was even the slightest possibility that I was going to do to my children what my father did to me, and his father had done to him, I could never live with myself.
If someone was going to break the cycle, it was going to be me.
CHAPTER 4
He Ain’t Heavy
BERNIE HAS ALWAYS BEEN MY BEST FRIEND AND MOST trusted ally, but he still did whatever he could to antagonize me, like little brothers do. Then I naturally responded like big brothers do. I’ve always been thicker than Bernie, who’s always been lean like our dad, so he’d call me fat or simply go into my room and toss my stuff all over the place. I would respond by beating him up, while he’d try to run away.
One day we were sitting at the kitchen table slurping Kool-Aid when I accidentally spilled some on Bernie. He acted like he was going to toss his Kool-Aid on me. I dared him to do it—and that’s all he needed to hear. A split-second later he splashed his Kool-Aid all over my shirt. Before it made its way to the floor, I jumped up, and he took off, bursting out of the house.
He was a much faster runner than I was, but I had greater stamina. I chased him half a mile before I caught the back of his T-shirt and beat him up pretty good. I felt I needed to remind him who was boss, falling into the same violent patterns as my father.
Before we became teammates on the local travel hockey team, the Chateauguay Bantams, we played on rival teams when we were twelve and eleven. Every time our teams faced each other we ended up having a fight. After that season the league drafted a policy—still in effect all these years later—specifying that brothers had to play on the same team. Now there’s a legacy we can be proud of.
My rule for Bernie was simple: if he was asking for it, I could pound him, but I wouldn’t let anyone else touch him. This principle was put to the test the day Bernie, about fourteen at the time, came home bleeding badly from his nose and mouth. When I asked hi
m what had happened, he said one of our French neighbors had beaten him up. When I asked why, Bernie replied, “For nothing. I didn’t do anything.”
Now, I knew better. Bernie was in the habit of starting things and then taking off. But even if he’d started it, my rule still held: no one else laid a hand on my brother.
My mother called the police, who drove us around the neighborhood in a cruiser, looking for the guy who had bloodied Bernie. I secretly hoped the officer wouldn’t find him because I wanted to hand out my own brand of justice. When the police took us home, empty-handed, they told me if I found the guy I should call them instead of starting another fight. I agreed, but I had no intention of following their orders.
As soon as the police drove off I set up shop on our side porch because I knew this guy would have to pass me on his way home. At fifteen I was probably six feet tall and 180 pounds—not someone to mess with. I had another advantage: I was willing to wait all night. Sooner or later the guy had to come home.
Sure enough, about an hour later this guy cruised by on his bicycle. He was a tall, thin kid with black hair almost down to his shoulders, just like his mother’s. I immediately ran to the street to cut off his path, and I didn’t waste any time with words. I dragged him off his bike and started beating the hell out of him. I ground his face into the pavement and scraped it back and forth while punching him with all I had. It was less a fight than a thrashing.
Suddenly his parents arrived on the scene and began cursing me in French. My hockey teammates had already taught me all the bad French words, so I got the gist of it: his father was threatening to do the same to me if I didn’t let his son go.
With that I realized I’d done enough damage to make my point. I let go of the kid’s shirt and stood up—but I wasn’t finished. I stepped toward his father and told him if he didn’t want some of what I had justly given to his son, he had better take his family home, and they had better not speak one word to any member of my family again.
“If you see any of us,” I said, “you better cross the street, or there’ll be more of the same.”
The kid looked at me, and then his parents—but he kept his mouth shut, his dad didn’t say anything, either, and they all walked home. They only lived a few houses down the street, but they never talked to us again.
In the process I learned how much I loved my brother, but I also learned I had more of my dad in me than I realized—or wanted. The violence shot up inside me with such speed and power, like a volcano erupting, that it alarmed me. With that much anger inside me I knew my fears of repeating my father’s mistakes were justified.
But for the time being, the attack served its purpose. Word got around pretty quickly: even with Mr. Saunders gone, you’d better not mess with the Saunders boys.
CHAPTER 5
The Salvation of Sports
BY THE TIME I REACHED MY TEENS I HAD BECOME PRETTY skilled at living this double life. At school, in church, and in front of adults I almost always did the right thing and seemed confident, stable, and reliable. In private I was pretty much the opposite. This dual personality helped me survive some rough years, but it came with a price.
With each passing year my counterculture habits took deeper root. With our visits to our grandparents increasingly rare and our father spending more time in Ohio, I was free to indulge my growing interest in music. I graduated from the Monkees to psychedelic bands like Led Zeppelin, Iron Butterfly, and my favorite, Jimi Hendrix. I even wore a big afro with a headband like Jimi’s.
In that era a passion for “Purple Haze” often meant embracing the drug culture too. My friends had older siblings who talked constantly about the joys of marijuana and often offered me drugs, but I didn’t indulge for one reason: I shared my father’s belief that I had a future as an athlete.
After we moved away from my grandparents my favorite sanctuaries were hockey rinks, baseball parks, and football fields. At their best, sports can provide a rational and sane universe: Do right, get rewarded. Do wrong, get punished. The scoreboard is blind to race, religion, and everything else but your performance. Sports also offered my best chance to get my dad’s approval, but even when I didn’t, I seemed to get everyone else’s.
Hockey has always been my favorite sport, as it is for most Canadians, but especially for me because my father knew nothing about it. He couldn’t coach me, so he couldn’t correct my every mistake, the way he would when we drove home from baseball or football games. All he knew was that I was usually the best player on the ice, and there was currency in that.
I remember one game, when I was thirteen, I started with the puck behind our net, then faked my way through the entire opposing team, finished with a move that left their goaltender floundering, and tossed the puck into the open net. On the bench one of my teammates asked, “How did you do that?”
I thought for a few seconds, then said, “I don’t know.” It just came naturally.
Even when Dad acted unimpressed with my performance, if I scored a hat trick, those small triumphs temporarily blocked his ability to put me down. And if he didn’t always reward me for doing well, others would.
When Bernie and I were on the same Pee Wee all-star team, we played in a big tournament in Hull, Quebec, just across the provincial border from Ottawa, Ontario. There must have been five thousand or so people packing the stands. When I skated around the ice for warmups it felt like I’d just entered another world. I played great that weekend. By the end of the tournament it seemed like everyone was cheering for me. When people think you’re special, especially when you don’t often think you are, it’s a very powerful drug. Sports can do that for you.
When parents tell their children they’re special and they’re loved, those children tend to grow up feeling good about themselves and usually don’t have a burning need to gain the approval of the rest of the world. But if you don’t grow up with that sense of security, then the next-best thing is to get it from thousands of strangers cheering for you.
I don’t think I would have pursued sports as a career if I wasn’t searching for something I couldn’t get at home. Unlike some of my colleagues at ESPN, I didn’t get into this field because sports consumed me. Most of the guys I work with worship the legends we grew up watching, and they dreamed of doing what we do now. When my good friend Chris Berman was a kid he was so taken by the idea of becoming a sportscaster that he used to play “Sports Announcer” in his backyard, using a pencil for a microphone.
That wasn’t me. Obviously I love sports, but probably not as much as many of our viewers. I don’t watch every game, I can’t recall every pitch, and I can’t recite statistics from the fifties. Growing up, sports provided a way for me to get noticed and, I hoped, a chance to make big money in the pros.
The appeal of this dream went beyond a need for acceptance. Whatever money Dad was making in Ohio, he wasn’t sharing much of it with us. Whenever our phone rang I assumed it was a bill collector. To this day I have a Pavlovian reaction that a ringing phone means bad news. A bailiff occasionally visited us at our door with legal judgments against our father for failing to pay outstanding bills. By the time I was eleven I had already learned that if I didn’t touch the summons, it could not be served.
And yet in the midst of this struggle our parents always produced great Christmas mornings. Dozens of great gifts—hockey skates, baseball gloves, Gibson guitars—propped up our tree as if we were rich. But a few months later we would inevitably have to pawn our new presents to pay the rent.
As my father’s visits dwindled, he’d call my mother and say that he had wired money for us and that we could pick it up at the Western Union office in Montreal in a few hours, or sometimes in a few days. We’d receive this as great news. We’re saved! We’d pile into the car and drive to the Western Union office downtown. For our first few trips our mother, Bernie, and Gail waited in the car while I headed inside. I took a deep breath and straightened my shoulders. I quickly got this routine down. When I got to the fro
nt of the line I’d ask, “Is there a money transfer for Saunders from Bernie Saunders?
The clerk had his routine down too. “No. Nothing yet.”
The cashiers felt sorry for me, the boy whose deadbeat dad told us he’d sent the money and who couldn’t figure out why it hadn’t arrived. Thinking that Dad’s wire would come any minute, sometimes we waited until Western Union closed. Then we drove home, dejected, just to return the following morning, full of foolish hope. Once in a great while there would actually be a wire waiting for us, which was just enough to keep us coming back for more. Usually I walked out empty-handed. That brought us to the last act of this tired play: the silent, sullen car ride home.
I grew weary of this pretty quickly and started ducking out of these all-too-predictable trips by staying at a friend’s house. That forced Bernie to take over my role, with the same demoralizing results.
Over time I learned to field just about everything my father could throw at me, including his fists. But I never could understand why he left us hungry. I resented every night we sat at the kitchen table peeling potatoes, one of the few foods we could afford, even though our mom turned these into delicious potato pancakes.
But while peeling those potatoes I told myself that, whatever I did for a living, I’d be able to buy all the things I dreamed of having as a kid. And not just food but a nice, big home, a reliable car, and new clothes. You can get those things by being a doctor or lawyer, of course, but money alone wasn’t enough for me. Being a nobody at home fueled my ambition to be somebody, to be recognized and respected. So I dreamed of being an actor or a rock-and-roll legend or a hockey star. It might have been a misguided ambition—what were the odds?—but it drove me. I was determined never to be a nobody again.
But even hearing five thousand fans cheering for you at a Pee Wee hockey tournament in Hull, Quebec, was no substitute for my father’s approval. In the middle of this tournament, during one of the best weekends of my life, I remember looking up in the stands and wishing my dad had been there to see me score and hear all the people cheering for me. I fantasized that he would be there and finally tell me I had impressed him.
Playing Hurt Page 4