* * *
*
A large white P sits on Mount Mitchell overlooking the town of San Marcos, the letter built with small rocks laid out by students in 1950 to represent their school, Palomar College. It’s a fitting symbol for the booming town that has quickly become the educational epicenter of northern San Diego County, home to both Palomar and California State University–San Marcos. New housing developments and twenty-two parks now dot the oak-covered hills and valleys where nineteenth-century Spanish ranchers once grazed their sheep and cattle and where a trove of gold is said to be buried in a horsehair blanket.
The P could also stand for Padres, as in San Diego Padres, for San Marcos is now home to Tempy, one of the most iconic Padres of all time.
As I approach San Marcos, I think back to that 1981 incident with Whitey Herzog. I know that it came to define Tempy, that even though he went on to a long and distinguished career in San Diego, he never quite recovered the form he flashed so early on. On the surface, it seems simple—he reacted to hecklers and paid the price. But did he deserve that price?
Controversy seemed to follow Tempy everywhere he went, but how much of that was Tempy, and how much of it was the bias and baggage of the culture he was surrounded by? There’s a lot of misinformation out there. For example, baseball lore has it that when he was named a reserve (rather than being voted a starter by the fans) for the 1979 All-Star Game, he said, “If I ain’t startin’, I ain’t departin’.” But dig a little and you’ll see that interviewer Jack Buck actually coined this phrase based on Tempy’s answer to one of his questions.
For the first time on my journey, I’m about to encounter a player who reached true superstar status, albeit briefly. While Rance and Boomer were always role players, Tempy was the BMOC in St. Louis in the mid-1970s. Nothing in our brief interactions (a phone call and a few emails) indicates that he’s going to “big league” me, but my expectations are guarded—he was often described in the media as “moody” and “grumpy,” and when Jeff Pearlman of Sports Illustrated interviewed him in 2000 and asked about the Whitey Herzog incident, Tempy was tight-lipped, saying simply, “That was a long time ago. The past is the past.”2
That past is about to be my present. I’m nervous: not only do I plan to pick that scab, I also want to ask if he had a child out of wedlock. In all of the official media guides and press accounts about his career, three kids with his wife, Glenda, are listed: Garry II, Gerome, and Genae. But buried in one 1982 article from the now-defunct Inside Sports there’s a passing reference to another child born much earlier. When negotiating his signing bonus for the 1974 draft, Tempy said, “My parents don’t have anything and I have a little baby to support.”3 From there, all references to the child vanish.
I’ve arranged to meet Tempy for dinner at San Marcos Brewery and Grill but have a few hours to kill. The greater San Diego area is like a Bangles music video: satisfying, attractive, and meaningless. Too laid-back for LA, too conservative for San Francisco, it’s a two-and-a-half-star movie. It’s not Rocky or Creed, it’s Rocky II.
It’s also always sunny, and today is no exception, topping out at seventy-nine degrees. Given that I am self-financing this quest, I am acutely aware of how much debt I am racking up, which I try to mitigate through cheap hotels and McDonald’s breakfasts. I cruise the main drag, San Marcos Boulevard, past tidy, spacious homes with rust-colored Spanish-tile roofs, past a sign for the Ramos Brothers Circus, looking for lodging. I find the Marriott and Hampton Inn way too pricey and settle on a Ramada Limited, its two stories of maroon mediocrity calling me home.
I find a frail, pasty man at the front desk, his blond hairline in retreat, his beady eyes fixed on me like two cloudy gray marbles. His grin reveals a set of top dentures with black nubs below.
We go through the paperwork ritual, and he cheerily swipes my credit card.
“Have you ever heard of Garry Templeton?” I ask, curious how far Tempy’s celebrity extends. His name is Eric. He’s probably in his forties.
He flashes a set of dark gums, lips spread wide.
“Baseball player for the Cardinals and Padres? No, never heard of him,” he replies.
“Where are you from?” I ask.
“A small town in the Ozarks called Cabool. They just got electricity last week.”
Energized by his audience, Eric’s standup routine continues.
“I should be nervous. The doctor who delivered me was named Dr. Coffee,” he says, handing me my room key, still beaming.
I stop in at the San Marcos Chamber of Commerce, where I chat with Tracy, a fortyish blond woman who used to work in marketing for Upper Deck, Topps’s rival company, which is based in nearby Carlsbad. It turns out that not only does she know Tempy, but he was the keynote speaker for the chamber’s installation luncheon last year.
“People have Garry sightings around town,” her colleague Hal tells me.
Apparently, Tempy is still the BMOC.
* * *
*
“Whitey stabbed me in the fucking back,” Tempy snaps, taking a sip of raspberry iced tea (just like Boomer, he quit drinking alcohol the year after his career ended). Seated across from me, the fifty-nine-year-old is dressed down in a pair of sweats and a plain black T-shirt. He slouches with purpose, still projecting that smooth swagger. His head is completely shaved, not a trace of stubble, and he has a carefully trimmed, thin goatee. He’s got a Bluetooth device attached to his right ear and a pair of Prada glasses, giving him a modern, hip look that subtracts years. Even when he’s agitated, the cadence of his voice is slow and almost sultry.
Like so many others throughout Tempy’s life, Whitey had singled out Tempy for being too honest, too raw, too black. But before I press on about that fateful game in 1981, we retrace Tempy’s early childhood.
Moving to Santa Ana in California’s Orange County when he was in second grade was a welcome change, as he was just another part of the mix of white, black, Hispanic, Samoan, and Japanese, radically different from the town of Odessa, in West Texas, where he was born.
“You had one side of town that was black and the other side of town that was white, and you didn’t cross them railroad tracks unless you had permission,” he says about Odessa.
But even once he got to progressive Southern California, racism was still prevalent.
“I read somewhere, when you were in high school, did you get in trouble for being in some kind of fight?” I ask.
He nods. “Yeah, that was back when, you’re probably too young to remember a lot of that, but you know there was still a lot of racist stuff going on back then in those days. We were fighting Mexicans at the school, and like an idiot I jumped in and started fighting,” he replies.
“Was there a lot of tension between the Mexican kids and the black kids?”
“Nah, it was just an incident that happened and broke out. There wasn’t tension. We had a bunch of those fights at our high school. And I think that was when they labeled me a militant or something.” He giggles. “I used to laugh about that, because over half my friends were white or Mexican,” he adds.
Our server, a tall, thin twentysomething woman, comes by offering refills.
“Do you have a straw, sweetheart?” Tempy asks her. “Let me have the crispy chicken salad,” he adds.
The “militant” label stuck with him throughout his career.
“When I got to the big leagues, I heard scouts talking about it. You’ve got to understand, back then, in the seventies, you had a bunch of old scouts, and if you didn’t do things or speak or walk the way they wanted you to, they labeled you. I wasn’t a militant, I just said what was on my mind. I didn’t hold back. I wasn’t that black guy that just kept his mouth shut.”
He giggles again, amused, maybe even proud, of his audacity as a youth.
When Tempy came into the league, African Americans were much more highly represented than they are in today’s game. In his rookie year, 1976, 18 percent of players were black; now, that
number has dipped to 7.2 percent. His black teammates were impressed by his willingness to speak out but weren’t quick to join him.
“Back then, most black guys didn’t speak up, cuz they wanted their job, and they didn’t want to get labeled. So best to keep your mouth shut.”
In 1974, Tempy’s senior year of high school, he hit .437. A dozen scouts came to watch every game, salivating at the chance to sign him. The best athletes on a team generally play shortstop, which was Tempy’s position. And baseball wasn’t even his favorite sport. That was track. He was also a standout in football, playing tight end, punter, placekicker, and safety.
“What schools offered you football scholarships?” I ask.
“Every school in the United States,” he replies, completely serious.
“I don’t know if that’s true, Garry,” I say. Athletes are prone to exaggeration.
“I mean Division I. I would say I got scholarships from just about every Division I school,” he says, then proceeds to rattle off a list that ranges from the Big Ten to the Ivy League.
But baseball came so easy to him, was less dangerous, and offered the instant gratification of a sizable signing bonus. He was going to go in the first round of the draft; the only question was how high.
With one week left in the season, he made a decision with enormous consequences, one that says a lot about his priorities as a person, not just a player: he skipped his team’s track meet, opting to go to his senior prom instead. At the prom, he sat at a table with six or seven of his football teammates, who were all smoking, against school rules. The quarterback passed him a cigarette, and he lit up. When he got to school the following Monday, he was called into the office and was told he was suspended.
“I asked them, ‘Why didn’t you guys call in anyone else?’ And they said, ‘We only saw you.’ I said, ‘How could you only see me when the guy sitting next to me was smoking?’ I was singled out.”
“Why do you think you got singled out?” I ask.
“I think I got singled out because I didn’t go to the track meet.”
Following school policy, the suspension triggered a two-week suspension from all sports, meaning Tempy was benched for the last two games of the baseball season. Disgusted by his antics, his coach, a drill sergeant named Hersh Musick, refused to nominate him for any postseason honors such as All-County, which may have cost him in the draft. Three shortstops—Bill Almon, Mike Miley, and Dennis Sherrill—were taken ahead of him in the first round; Tempy ended up being the thirteenth pick overall in the 1974 draft.
“I feel bad about that,” Musick, now eighty-two, told me earlier in the day when I stopped at his house in Santa Ana. Dressed in a white short-sleeved shirt with a set of index cards and pen neatly tucked in the pocket, Musick purged his forty-one-year-old guilt as he combed through his massive archive of coaching files.
“I feel bad about it because he should have made All-County, but I pulled his name. I really wish I hadn’t done that,” he said.
But when I relay this to Tempy, he takes his old coach’s remorse in stride, just like he does everything else. He’s unfiltered yet settled, shooting off like the long, violent cast of a fisherman’s rod but just as quickly reeling it back in, the line’s wake converging back to stillness. He just giggles again.
Dropping lower in the draft may have cost Tempy some money, but he still did well, negotiating a $44,500 signing bonus. He went out and bought a white Cadillac and gave the rest to his parents.
“Are you married to the girl you took to the prom?” I ask.
“Yeah. Thirty-seven years, and been together forty-one,” he replies proudly.
Our server brings out my Cajun pasta and Tempy’s crispy chicken salad, giving me the moment of distraction I need to steel myself for what I’m about to ask next. I look up at Tempy as he stabs a big leaf of lettuce with his fork.
“I read somewhere that as you were negotiating your bonus you told the team you had a baby to support,” I say, letting it fly.
“Well . . . ,” he replies, his voice trailing off as he chews. “I don’t know if I said that. I don’t remember saying that.”
“Or there was a baby there, and you told them you needed to support that baby,” I suggest.
“No. I don’t remember saying that. It may have just been someone writing something because that baby was there.”
It’s not a denial of having a baby, just a denial of what he said. I decide to give him an out.
“So you didn’t have any kids at that time, right?”
Tempy may be opinionated, he may be outspoken at times. But he is no liar.
“Um . . . ,” he begins. “April. April of ’74 I had a daughter.”
“What’s her name?” I ask.
“Sharmaine.”
“Was this with your wife?”
“Uh-uh. Some other girl,” he says quickly, matter-of-fact.
As far as I can tell, this is the first time he’s ever shared this publicly.
“So it was an accident?”
“Yup. We had been broken up for a few months, and the next thing you know, she said she was pregnant. You’re the daddy,” he says.
Shortly after he signed with the Cardinals, he shipped off to Sarasota, Florida, to start his Minor League career, and when he came back in the off-season, his ex had left with Sharmaine.
“She didn’t tell me where she went or nothing. And then all of a sudden, three years later I get this call from the DA’s office in Milwaukee. When she found out that I was playing at the Major League level, she went after me for back child support. I didn’t care about paying the money, just the way she went about doing it.”
He paid the child support and ended up getting full custody of Sharmaine during her high school years when she moved to San Diego and lived with the rest of the Templeton kids.
Dusk begins its descent on the brown hills of San Marcos as I pivot back toward that late August afternoon in 1981 when Whitey stabbed him in the fucking back. We know what was reported in the papers following the incident, how he was suspended and hospitalized, but what really happened?
“I was in the on-deck circle, and three white boys came down and started calling me all kinds of racial names, and that’s when I grabbed my crotch. I told them, shit, ya know, ‘Suck my dick.’ And Whitey was right there on the top rail [of the dugout] listening to them. He couldn’t have been no more from there to the door from them,” he says, gesturing forcefully, his voice rising with frustration.
“So he knew what was being said,” I say.
“He knew what was being said,” he repeats, slowing his cadence by a third to emphasize each word.
“Do you remember what they were calling you?”
“Yeah, but I ain’t gonna repeat it,” he says firmly.
“That bad?”
“Yeah.” He takes a beat and exhales, his shoulders lowering by half an inch. When he speaks again, his voice has lost its ferocity, replaced by a steady calm.
“There were some players that heard it too, but they weren’t players that had my back, so they ain’t never gonna say nuthin. But there are guys that saw everything that happened, ya know? Best thing that ever happened to me was coming to San Diego, except I tore my knee up.
“[After the incident] they sent me straight to the hospital,” he says. “They put me in the psych ward. They gave me this plush room. All I did was go in there and play ping pong!” he says.
Whitey doubled down, burying him in the papers.
“Garry’s been lackadaisical all year, playing at 60 percent like he doesn’t give a damn,” he told the Washington Post two days later.4
The reporting around the incident continued to be sloppy, perpetuating the narrative of Tempy as a ne’er-do-well. A careful read of well-respected papers like the Post reveals some of these biases: on September 23, an article by John Feinstein reported that when Tempy was growing up, his “family lived on welfare” (ignoring his mom’s work in the factory and the family
car-washing business) and said he was thrown off the baseball team for smoking a cigarette (he was suspended, not thrown off).5
According to the New York Times, Tempy publicly apologized for his actions at a press conference on September 14 and announced that he had been suffering from depression for three years. The article reports him saying he had met with a psychiatrist in the hospital, had been prescribed medication, and felt better than he had in years.6 When I ask him about this, I’m shocked by his response.
“I didn’t see no psychiatrist,” he says. “They just had to show something for me not going cross-country to play baseball.”
I push back: “Garry, they must have evaluated you. Someone must have come in and talked to you.”
“I didn’t talk to no one,” he says, defiant.
“So what they said in the papers, it was all made up?”
He takes a moment to consider this, thinking back, realizing he doesn’t want to be inaccurate.
“I talked to the Cardinals doctor,” he begins thoughtfully. “I don’t remember talking to any doctors in that damn hospital.” Pause. “Maybe I did talk to a doctor, because they did bring me some medicine in a cup. I flushed it down the toilet. I didn’t need it!”
But it was 1981. The team had to explain why its star player had acted out, and depression made for a convenient fit. Tempy bowed his head and toed the line—yes, I am depressed, yes, this medicine will help me behave, no, I won’t do it again. He swallowed his tongue, because even “militants” could only protest so much in 1981. Instead, he did his talking on the field, lashing four hits in his first game back on September 16, a defiant gesture of will and skill, the militant marching to war.
* * *
*
The Santa Fe Hills neighborhood, ensconced in the gentle undulations of San Marcos, is quiet on a Thursday morning. The two-level stucco houses with Spanish-tile roofs are packed close together, a complex of wide streets and dry air that has retained its shine. Behind the garage door Tempy’s 1983 Porsche awaits, with those blue old-school California plates (“Tempy” they read), waiting for its owner, who rarely takes it out anymore—it’s just too hard to bend down that low with that goddamned left knee.
The Wax Pack Page 6