Fathers & Sons & Sports (6 page)

t was getting dark and I was standing in the parking lot beyond the rightfield fence at the high school baseball field. The kids call it “third lot.” It once provided parking for Newton North High School students, but that was before too many kids got cars, so now it’s reserved during school hours for faculty and seniors. At this moment, third lot was two-thirds empty, and the only remaining cars belonged to the players on the baseball team, plus a handful of parents and friends.

I had my keys in my hand. I’d already said good-bye to my old high school coach, who’d made the drive down from New Hampshire to sit with me and watch my son play. It was a cold New England May day and the game was running long and I had to get going. I was due at a wake for the 21-year-old son of my cousin. The wake was taking place in the small town where I was born, an hour’s drive to the west, and the notice in the newspaper said visiting hours would be over at 7 p.m.

It had been an emotional day, sitting on the cold metal slats, watching Sam hit, catching up with my old coach, and thinking about what my cousin Mickey was going through. I hadn’t seen Mickey in over a year. We were never especially close. That happens when you have fifty-one first cousins and move away after college. But it was easy to remember everything I admired about Mickey. He was a terrific high school athlete, only two years older than I. He seemed to be better than everyone else at everything. Football. Basketball. Skiing. He was strong, tough, skilled, and movie-star handsome. He had his own rock ’n roll band. Chicks dug him and guys wanted to be him. It would have been easy to hate the guy, but he was generous and caring, and when I would see him years later he was always humble about his high school greatness. He’d made a fine life for himself, working for the gas company and raising two kids with his wife. Now he was getting ready to bury his son, young Michael, who had died at home in bed, another victim of the national scourge of Oxycontin. Michael had been a high school football stud, just
like his father. He had been good enough to win a scholarship to Wagner College, and there had been a picture in the local newspaper of Michael signing his letter of intent. Now, just a couple of years later, his picture was in the paper again, accompanied by one of those impossibly sad stories about a promising life that ended too soon.

So I was feeling a little guilty as I stood in third lot, jangling my keys and watching the high school baseball game groan into extra innings. I didn’t want to miss the wake, but I remembered that earlier in the day Mickey’s brother had told me, “We’ll be there long after seven.” Besides, Sam was scheduled to lead off the bottom of the tenth, and he was due. He had been hitting the ball hard all day, but he was sitting on an 0-4 and I knew his small world would tumble into chaos and panic if he went hitless for the day. Such is the fragility and self-absorption of the high school mind.

I was wondering about my own mind too. I am a professional sportswriter, specializing in baseball. I’ve been a columnist for
The Boston Globe
for more than 15 years, covering Olympics, Super Bowls, World Series, Stanley Cup Finals, NBA Championships, and Ryder Cups. I traveled with the Baltimore Orioles, Boston Celtics, and Red Sox back in the days when writers really traveled and lived with the ballplayers. I’ve written 10 books, seven on baseball. I can go to any game, anytime I want. And yet I find myself fixated on the successes and failures of Newton North High School and Sam Shaughnessy, my only
son and the youngest of three ballplaying children. Sam’s sisters had fun and fulfilling seasons in high school volleyball, field hockey, and softball, and I was amazed at how following their games connected me to their school and our community while kindling so many thoughts of my own high school days thirty years earlier. Probably that’s why I found myself suddenly skipping Red Sox road trips and canceling TV appearances because of weather-forced changes in the high school baseball season. Random Sox fans wanted to ask me about Curt Schilling and Jonathan Papelbon. I’d rather talk about Newton North lefthander J.T. Ross.

The score was still tied when Sam walked to the plate to open up the bottom of the tenth, and we were definitely losing the light, making it even tougher to hit. The Braintree coach went out to talk to his pitcher. I looked at the sky. I looked at my watch. This was it. I’d stare through the chain link for one more at-bat, then get in the car. Darkness was going to make this the last inning, even if the score was still tied after ten.

And then, in an instant, the baseball was screeching over the first baseman’s head, over the rightfielder’s head, over the chain link, and onto the trunk of the 1998 Toyota Corolla that Sam had driven to school that day. It rolled across the lot and came to rest under a tree. I retrieved the ball while he circled the bases.

There was no such thing as a “walk-off” home run when I went to high school. We had read the stories about Bobby Thomson’s Shot Heard Round the World, and all my friends
and I knew that Pirates second baseman Bill Mazeroski had won the 1960 World Series with a homer in the bottom of the ninth … but nobody talked about walk-offs until Kirk Gibson dropped one on Dennis Eckersley in the 1988 World Series. Eck popularized the term, and now there are walk-off homers, walk-off doubles, walk-off walks, even an occasional walk-off balk.

In any event, Sam Shaughnessy had his first high school walk-off homer (a drive-off walk-off, given the dent in the Toyota) and knew enough to take his helmet off after rounding third base. He had seen Red Sox slugger David Ortiz do this a lot. A helmetless head is less likely to be pounded by your teammates.

I walked in from rightfield and delivered the baseball to my smiling son. I told him not to worry about the dent on the roof of the trunk (not sure my dad would have been so casual about the damage done). Then I got in my car and drove to the wake.

The country roads took me back. They took me to the place where I grew up, the place where I experienced all the highs and lows that were now happening to Sam. I remembered how it felt to have a moment like he had today and I knew he would hold it in his heart for the rest of his life. Sports have a way of defining our lives, particularly teenage lives. The local high school basketball games were a big deal in my hometown when I was growing up. Most of our parents came to the games and sat in the back row of the small gym. The successes and failures of our team
made for conversation around the post office and drugstore in the center of town. We connected through sports.

Two decades later, when my classmates filled out a reunion form, there was a question regarding your favorite high school memory. I was struck by how many answered “Dances after the Friday night basketball games.” These were not just the ballplayers and cheerleaders. These were kids who had never played on the team, but as grown-ups they had fond memories of cold nights in a warm gym, when a sporting event was the center of our tiny universe.

The trick is to keep moving forward and not let the glory days of high school become the highlight of your life.

When I wheeled into the funeral home a few minutes after seven, there was a line the length of a football field waiting to pay respects to Michael. Inside, I joined my sisters, cousins, aunts, and uncles and waited for the line to dwindle. In my mind, I pledged not to speak of why I was late or of how the game had ended.

A couple of hours later, the line completely exhausted, I knelt before young Michael and said a prayer. Inside the open casket, there was a photo of Michael celebrating a high school football victory with his teammates. When I stood up, cousin Mickey was there, sobbing, spent, but still strong enough to hug me with the force of a linebacker. It is a universal truth that it’s virtually impossible to say anything appropriate in a moment like this. Nothing is worse than a parent losing a child. The loss
is unspeakable and incomprehensible. Only those who have experienced such a tragedy can possibly know what it feels like. But the events of my day had given me special perspective, and for once I felt like I knew exactly what to say.

“Michael must have given you a lot of joy.”

“Oh, Danny,” he said, smiling through the tears, pointing to the photo inside the casket. “You should have seen him play. And not just because he was my son, either. That was the Acton-Boxboro game. One of the greatest nights for all of them. I loved watching him play more than anything.”

There it was. I knew then I had made the right decision, staying an extra inning to see the end of a high school baseball game while my sisters and cousins and aunts and uncles were already at the wake. And as I drove home, back across the roads of my youth, I knew I had to write something down.

Dan Shaughnessy is a sports columnist for
The Boston Globe.
He has written 11 books, including
The Curse of the Bambino
and
Senior Year,
from which this essay was taken. He has been covering Major League Baseball for more than 30 years
.

ou should’ve seen my father’s arms. He didn’t lift weights or do pushups or exercise them in any way, and yet they were packed tight with muscle. When I was a boy and he lifted his highball in the evening for a sip, a round knot the size of a softball came up under the skin and slowly flattened out when he lowered the glass back down. I loved his arms so much that I memorized every vein, sinew, and golden hair. I knew the wrinkles of his elbows.

In the summer, when he worked for the city’s recreation department, supervising the baseball program at the park, Daddy liked to come home for lunch and a nap. He had lemonade and a BLT, then he had me lie close to him on the sofa and he draped an arm around me. “One … two … three…,” he’d count in a whisper, and then he was out, sleeping that easily.

I lay there wondering if I’d ever have arms like his. I needed both hands to travel the distance around his wrist, the tips of my thumbs and fingers barely touching. I felt the hardness of his forearm. I saw how his wedding band fit him like a strand of barbed wire on a tree whose bark had grown around it. He smelled of the grass and the sun, of green and gold days that started early and ended late.

“Were you a good player?” I asked him once, as he was coming awake.

“Was I what?”

“A good player?”

“You want to know if I was a good player?” “Yes, sir.”

“What kind of question is that?”

“I don’t know. Did they run your name in the paper a lot?”

He looked at me in a way that let me know he wanted my attention. “None of it matters, John Ed. Was I a good teammate? Did I do my best and give everything I had to help the team? These are the questions you need to be asking.”

I wondered how to answer them, these questions he found
of such importance. Many years would have to pass before I was old enough to join a team. He pulled me close again, as if he’d just remembered something. “John Ed?” “Yes sir.”

“Always be humble.”

The rest of the year he worked as a civics teacher and coach at the high school in town. The town was Opelousas, on the road between Alexandria and Lafayette, and it was just small enough, at about twenty thousand, to be excluded from Louisiana state maps when TV weathermen gave their forecasts in the evening. In the morning, my father left home wearing coach’s slacks with sharp creases and a polo shirt with a Tiger emblem and the words
OHS Football
printed in Halloween orange on the left breast, the lettering melted from too much time in the dryer. A whistle hung from a nylon cord around his neck. It was still hanging there when he returned at night and sat down to a cold supper—the same meal Mama had served her children hours earlier. “You don’t want me to warm it for you, Johnny?”