The Best American Sports Writing 2018

by Glenn Stout

  “Because I had just seen him in Alabama the week before and saw him pitch 94–96, and I thought I’d seen him throw about as good as a high school prospect can throw a baseball, and my director went in and saw him throw better. We don’t get many of those nights.”

  That kind of night became routine for Everett in his senior year. He went 9-1, 0.94 that season with a PlayStation-like 125 strikeouts to eight walks in 67 innings. He won the Gatorade Player of the Year Award in the state of Tennessee. Hetland still has that see-through trophy sitting on the upper-most shelf in the corner of his office.

  In truth, Everett’s entire high school career was video game–like. He came to school as a precociously strong, physically mature freshman—some opposing coaches joked he looked more like a junior. The right-hander pitched in the upper 80s then, but he quickly earned the trust of his coaching staff, starting on the mound against rival Rossview High as a freshman—the most important game of the season. Hetland remembers Everett starting in the first game of the district tournament later that year and—unbeknownst to him—Everett played with the flu. He threw five no-hit innings, then hit an inside-the-park home run off the top of the center-field wall in the bottom of the fifth, crossed home plate, ran behind the dugout, and vomited. Everett sat out the rest of the tournament, and Hetland made the rest of his players all get flu shots.

  Over the next few years, Everett’s stuff progressively ticked up. He worked in the low 90s his sophomore year, routinely touched 95-plus as a junior, and flirted with triple digits as a senior. His breaking ball began to show flashes of becoming an effective pitch that senior year. His command improved, as well.

  The Wildcats lost only two games Everett started his junior and senior year—both 1–0 games. One loss came in extra innings, in the other, the lone run scored on a balk.

  “You get so many players who give you one inning here or one inning there. What I loved about Donny is he never gave you one inning—he gave you everything he had,” said a national cross-checker whose club had significant interest in Everett. “It doesn’t mean he was good every time. It doesn’t mean he was the best. It doesn’t mean he dominated for seven innings. I think it probably spoke to what was going on in the inside that he wanted to give you six or seven innings. He never took the ball thinking, ‘I’m just going to go out for one inning and go home.’

  “He went out there for his team and he gave it to you . . . There was no pitch count. He just said, ‘It’s my time to pitch, and I’m going to give it to you.’ And I loved that about him.”

  “Donny, I can help you,” Mr. Forney told the 11-year-old golden-haired boy in his backyard, after Abbott had watched him throw for a few minutes.

  Even at Donny’s young age, Mr. Forney could see the quickness of his arm and the untapped potential in his highly projectable body. He had a future, although he had no way of knowing just how bright.

  “If your goal is to be a major league ballplayer, you have to do everything we tell you to do,” Mr. Forney told Donny. “And this is going to be a six-day affair. You’ve gotta work out six days a week, and one day you have to take off because that’s how God made our bodies to work.

  “If you understand that, we can keep going.”

  Donny nodded his head.

  “The other thing you have to do is your dad has to agree to be with you until you get into college,” Mr. Forney continued. “Somebody has to be with you to help you with this stuff, because it’s a lot of movement and a lot of different things that’s going to accumulate and allow you to be a major league ballplayer.

  “Are you sure your dad’s going to be with you every day?”

  “Yes, Mr. Forney.”

  “Now then there’s one more thing to this equation,” Mr. Forney said, “and that’s your mother.”

  “My mother?”

  “Yes. She’s got to agree to cook everything you eat from now until you graduate high school. If she don’t agree to cook and feed you what you need to eat, then you’re not going to be able to do what you want to do, so all of this is off.”

  Donny didn’t hesitate.

  “My mother will do that.”

  Susan met Teddy in a public park in Clarksville in 1987.

  Growing up with a father in the military, Susan had spent most of her life in Clarksville, near Fort Campbell. Teddy was born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky, but after joining the Army, he was initially stationed at Fort Campbell too.

  After that first meeting in the park, Susan and Teddy dated for three years, married in July of 1990, and have been together ever since. Teddy Everett was a sergeant, a crew chief on a CH-47 helicopter—a large copter with tandem rotors. He spent 10 years in the military, serving in Korea, Desert Storm, Desert Shield, and more. At one point, he was stationed in Italy, where he and Susan lived together until they moved back to Clarksville in 1995.

  All the while, Susan and Teddy were trying to have a child. They tried for seven years. “We didn’t think we were going to have children, actually,” Teddy said. “We had pretty much given up.”

  Then, on April 16, 1997, Donny Everett came into the world—born into a home that couldn’t have possibly been more loving.

  “I was very, very excited,” Teddy said. “Very, very excited. I was.”

  Even as an infant, Donny rarely gave Susan or Teddy any problems. He’d sleep through the night without much of a stir. In high school, he’d still go to bed around 8 p.m. most nights and wake up at the crack of dawn.

  “We’d never have to go upstairs and be like, ‘Get up!’” said Susan, laughing.

  From a young age, Donny also displayed a clear affinity for sports.

  “Even from the time he was just a baby—couldn’t even walk yet—he’d throw a ball,” Teddy said. “I told Susan, ‘Well, he’s going to grow up and throw a ball. I don’t know what it’s going to be, but it’s going to be a ball of some sort.’

  “We would spend hours. I’d be on a chair, and he’d be on his knees and throw a ball to me, and I would just catch it and throw it back to him, and it would go forever and ever and ever, and then I would take it and chuck it through the house and he’d go crawling off and getting it and coming back, and then we’d go again. We’d do that for hours.”

  As he grew older, Donny channeled that love for throwing into a love for baseball. He’d spend many days over at Susan’s father’s house and help his grandparents with yardwork and various chores. He’d also watch Red Sox games with his grandpa. His grandpa explained to Donny the intricacies of the game.

  When Donny started playing organized baseball, he separated himself almost immediately. His Little League and middle school coach Rod Streeter remembers how ecstatic he felt when he had the opportunity to coach Donny. And that excitement was based solely on seeing Donny play in Pee Wee baseball as a seven-year-old.

  “It’s just something you feel about a certain kid,” Streeter said. “He was bigger than everybody for his age, but he was one of the youngest of his age group. And when I say ‘big,’ I mean tall. You look at a kid and you project what he’s going to look like in the future, that was one thing. And then as he got older, the work ethic he put into it. The wanting to stay longer after practice. The wanting to get there early.

  “Some days when you’re done with practice, you want to go home. When he got to be 11 or 12, he just had that motivation. You knew that he was going to work to get to where he wanted to be. To me, I could just tell that you weren’t going to stop him. He was going to get to where he wanted to go.”

  It was also around that age when Teddy realized Donny had advanced to a point where he couldn’t help him any more—at least, not with baseball.

  “I was like, ‘Rod, do you know anybody I can send Donny to work with?’” Teddy said.

  Streeter did know someone—the same man in Clarksville who had helped him more than 20 years prior, when he was a pitcher at Austin Peay, and the same man who had helped almost every aspiring young pitcher who came through
Clarksville.

  “Yeah,” Streeter replied. “This guy’s a little older—but he knows what he’s talking about.”

  June 8, 2015. Draft night at the Everett house.

  Teddy and Rod Streeter were sitting in the bonus room, back behind the couch, where Donny was sprawled. They were watching MLB Network, listening to the names called—Vanderbilt shortstop Dansby Swanson was the first player off the board that year. They knew that, at any point, one of the names out of MLB commissioner Rob Manfred’s mouth could be “Donny Everett.”

  Suddenly, Donny’s phone rang, and he stood up from the couch and left the room. He returned 30 minutes later.

  “Well,” Donny told them, almost matter-of-factly, “I just turned down $2.5 million.”

  Teddy and Rod exchange a glance, eyes wide.

  “It was like ‘wow,’” Rod remembered, nearly two years later. “This kid—it made me have even more respect for him . . . I just remember thinking, ‘Who would turn that down as an 18-year-old kid? And what parent would allow their kid to make that decision?’ I think a lot of parents would be like, ‘Take it, take it! Go!’

  “But they left that decision up to Donny, and I have so much respect, even more respect, that he wanted to go to school and get that college experience, and that money wasn’t everything.”

  Money was not everything. In fact, Donny’s very next move that night, mere minutes after turning down the offer, was to start playing games with Rod’s then-eight-year-old daughter Tessa.

  “He went from making that decision to, ‘Do you want to play foosball?’” Rod said, laughing.

  But that was Donny. And that was the Everett family. Donny always valued relationships over finances, the collective over the individual, and Teddy and Susan valued their son’s independence. Certainly, both of them weighed in and were heavily involved throughout the draft process; they wanted nothing but the best for their son. But they left the final decision—the most important decision of Donny’s young life—up to the person who’d have to live with it.

  Scouts in the area said that even during in-home visits, Donny would do the majority of the talking—he’d run the show—while his parents played a more complementary role. Usually it’s the other way around. Donny’s ability to handle himself, his maturity, garnered him even more respect among the scouting community. His makeup might’ve ultimately graded higher than his fastball. The club that offered him $2.5 million on draft day (the club wished to remain anonymous out of respect for the family) took that gamble, in part, because of its faith in Donny’s mettle.

  Had he accepted, Donny would’ve been drafted in the latter half of the first round. But Donny had a number in his head going into draft day, and the $2.5 figure fell just short. He slid, instead, to the 29th round to the Brewers. But he wasn’t going to sign.

  “He finally said, ‘I made a commitment, and I want to keep it,’” Susan said.

  Added Teddy: “A big thing he always harped on was players not wanting to make a commitment, and he always felt like he wanted to do that.”

  That commitment was to Vanderbilt, a school about 45 minutes down I-24 East.

  Donny fell in love with the program when he was 10 years old, playing in the same youth tournament as future Commodores ace and Dodgers draftee Jordan Sheffield. Commodores head coach Tim Corbin made a speech at that tournament, and when Donny heard it, he told his parents right then and there, “I’d really like to go to Vanderbilt.”

  Vanderbilt fell in love with Donny a few years later, when the Commodores hosted the Kansas City Royals Scout Team for a game at Hawkins Field. Then–recruiting coordinator Travis Jewett was sitting in his office at the ballpark when he saw a kid larger than any other on the mound. When he heard the ear-shattering pop of the catcher’s mitt, Jewett knew he needed to act. Fast.

  “They FBI’d us in the back parking lot,” Teddy said, laughing. “Donny was driving and he went to put it in reverse and a black SUV pulls up and all four doors open up, and all these people were getting out, and we’re like, ‘What in the world is going on?’ It was all the coaching staff here at Vanderbilt.”

  Thus began Vanderbilt’s recruiting of Donny Everett—not that it was a tough sell. Donny wore a Vandy sweatshirt on his first official visit.

  Still, the admiration was mutual. Both Jewett and Corbin could see quickly that Donny had the kind of character they look for in recruits. He didn’t just fit the VandyBoy mold—he was the embodiment of it.

  “I think those people who are inside the walls, they understand what a VandyBoy is,” said Jewett, now in his first year as Tulane’s head coach. “People who have that kind of character—people who are selfless, serving others, good teammates, humble. This kid was a heck of a good competitor, but even at a young age, you could see him fitting in.

  “Everyone liked him. He had an infectious smile. Obviously, he was big and strong and all of those things, but yet soft and nurtured in terms of who he was as a person.”

  Added Corbin: “He was just a real, in my opinion, Midwestern, American kid with tremendous values but happy-go-lucky and just went through life as if it was a game and he was having fun with it.”

  Donny had this joyful, carefree aura about him; he was brimming with life. He collected nicknames like baseball cards: The Don, Big Bird, Sweaty Goat (he earned that one in middle school, when he had the dual habit of sweating profusely on the mound, while also chewing peanuts with the shell intact). Donny could take a ribbing in good humor, but he could also dish it out, with his trademark dry one-liners. He wasn’t afraid to be self-deprecating. The two teeth inside his eyeteeth never came in; he had to wear a retainer, with two false teeth, until he was old enough to get dental implants. He’d always play around with people when he first met them, especially during meals. He’d pop out his teeth at the restaurant and place them right on the table—often to the surprise of his eating companions.

  Donny paired his jovial nature with a voracious work ethic. He was blue-collar in his love for hard labor; for creating things with his own hands. He was never the type to lose days in front of the TV. One of Donny’s favorite hobbies was building model trains. In fact, the Everetts turned the spare bedroom of their house into a display room for those trains; the homemade platform fills the room. Donny would spend entire winters—when he had to take a break from throwing—in that room, constructing and tinkering; sometimes his parents wouldn’t see him for hours.

  When Donny was 14, he convinced his father to restore a 1979 Ford F-100 truck that Teddy had purchased for $150 from a coworker—solely for the engine. Teddy and Donny worked on that truck for nearly a year, refurbishing it from a junkyard shell into a mint-green beauty. Donny cherished that truck like it was his offspring. He always hated to see his classmates get new cars, only to mistreat them.

  Donny had an appreciation for the intricacies of life, for the effort behind the results, for his roots. Even when he went to Vanderbilt, Donny never lost sight of where he came from.

  Streeter remembers a day in late May of Donny’s freshman year at Vandy—May 28 to be exact—when Donny and Teddy came over to visit. His son Ryan, one of Donny’s best friends, was home too. The day before, Vanderbilt had been eliminated from the Southeastern Conference tournament in Hoover, Alabama. Now, together, the Streeters and the Everetts watched the remaining SEC tournament games on TV.

  All of a sudden, while watching the games, Streeter’s youngest daughter, Tessa, walked into the living room and said, “Hey, who wants to play catch with me?”

  “I’m sitting there, I don’t get up, my son doesn’t get up, but Donny gets up,” Streeter said. “He doesn’t say a word and goes out and plays catch with her out in the front yard. And it’s getting dark. And I’m thinking, ‘This kid just got done pitching in the SEC tournament, and he’s out front playing catch with a nine-year-old girl who doesn’t play softball, who doesn’t catch very well, but he’s out there, and he doesn’t have to be here doing that.”

  Donny
had pitched in the SEC tournament four days prior, a scoreless ninth inning against Missouri to close out a 7–0 win. The final pitch of that game was the last pitch Donny Everett would ever throw. On the Hoover Metropolitan Stadium scoreboard, the radar reading flashed three digits:

  One. Zero. One.

  A tobacco barn, a woodstove, a cow mat with a strike zone painted on it, a makeshift mound constructed out of plywood—this was Donny’s and Mr. Forney’s playground, their weight room, their boxing ring.

  Mr. Forney had warned the boy that this was going to be hard, that this would be grueling, that it would be six days of sheer, brutal, sweat-drenched intensity every week. He wasn’t lying. Mr. Forney made Donny agree that he couldn’t change a single part of the routine—unless Mr. Forney, Teddy, and Susan all agreed on it.

  “When we get started, everybody’s gonna want to change you,” Mr. Forney told Donny that very first day in his yard. “But we can’t let that happen. You have to continue on the course we start on because you can’t deviate from this or you’re not going to do what you want to do.

  “You’re going to lose a lot of friends.”

  “I don’t want to lose any friends,” 11-year-old Donny replied. “But if that’s what I gotta do, that’s what we’ll do.”

  Mr. Forney’s teachings were less about angles and hand placement and more about feeling, more about getting the ball to where Donny wanted it to go—not just in the strike zone, but in a precise location within the zone. Mr. Forney designed drills to build up Donny’s body, particularly his lower body, to catch up with the strength of his arm. He prescribed him a very specific diet too, to facilitate growth—which was where Susan came in. She’d make Donny a high-protein breakfast every morning before school, scrambled eggs with spinach, bacon, ham. Sometimes even salmon.

  Donny would take a shake to school, mixed with vegetables and protein powder (100 percent protein. Mr. Forney was very particular about that). He kept a giant jar of peanut butter by his bed (creamy, he liked it creamy) and he’d eat it nightly by the spoonful. For good measure, Mr. Forney insisted Susan cook all of Donny’s meals with coconut oil. That diet, combined with Donny’s hard labor, began to yield results.