One Shot at Forever (17 page)

Witnessing it all, Brueggemann remembers wondering if the inmates had taken over the asylum over in Macon. At Mt. Zion there was a strict dress code. Students didn't have long hair; teachers
certainly
didn't; and coaches never, ever did. A few months earlier, one of the team's most talented players had decided to grow out his hair even though school rules decreed that a boy's locks could not reach his ears on the sides or the collar of his shirt in the back. Not long after, the boy had received a letter from the school. It read, in so many words: “In compliance with the school dress code, you are required to get a haircut or you cannot play baseball.” The boy had decided to keep his hair. In return, he lost baseball.

But here came the Macon boys, looking like a bunch of country peaceniks—“field hippies” was the term Sweet enjoyed the most—and accompanied by a coach wearing aviator sunglasses who, as Brueggemann puts it, “had this look on his face like he knew all the secrets to the universe and was at peace with that.”

It only got weirder from there. When Macon took the field for warm-ups, Brueggemann remembers hearing the strangest sound coming from the Ironmen bench. It couldn't be?
A rock opera?

The eight-track tape deck had been Shartzer's idea. A gift from his father, it was the kind that split apart, with speakers that could be set on either side. At first, Shartzer brought it to practice just for the fun of it—and because he figured he could. Had he done so during football season, Jack Burns would have no doubt taken the stereo and heaved it over the fence, yelling “THIS ISN'T SOME DAMN PROM!”

But baseball was different. Not only did Sweet allow the tape deck but he appeared to enjoy its presence. This led Shartzer and Mark Miller to the next logical step: warm-ups. So for the first weeks of the season, the Ironmen had warmed up to the type of music opposing coaches tended to find distasteful, a fact that was not lost on Sweet.

At first Shartzer loaded up the box with Santana. Then one day Heneberry and Snitker were at church and their priest, a man known as Father Riick, introduced the class to a soundtrack called
Jesus Christ Superstar
. Around town, Riick was known as the cool pastor, and in
Jesus Christ Superstar
he saw an opportunity to reach the kids through music.

Snitker and Heneberry noticed one thing immediately: that music was catchy. Soon enough, they'd hooked their teammates. As Shartzer puts it, “If you took the words out, the damn music was great.” He bought the album on eight-track and, from that day forward, his was the only tape the team used.

The scene during Macon warm-ups—of boys fielding grounders while singing about riding into Jerusalem, about being “obsessed with fighting times and fates you can't deny”—was made all the more surreal by the boys' hats, a number of which were embroidered with large white peace signs.

While they were a statement, the caps were also a necessity. Midway through the previous season, noticing that many of the boys had old, mismatched hats, a school parent named Dick Jostes who worked at Caterpillar had donated a box of
CAT DIESEL
hats. The Ironmen had worn them right up until the point that someone in the IHSA office caught wind and decided to ban the caps as advertising. Sweet thought this hilarious. A bunch of farmers' kids wearing hats in games few attended didn't strike him as the best advertising idea in the world.

Still, they were perfectly good hats. And, when you
had $1.26 a month to buy supplies
, as school records indicate Sweet received from Macon High that April, you didn't waste anything. So Sweet instructed the boys to cover up the writing as they saw fit. If they followed his lead and sewed a peace symbol rather than a Macon “M” over the
CAT
decal, well, who could blame them?

Beyond the music and the hats, what was most annoying to opposing teams, and especially opposing coaches, was the fact that the Macon boys were
good
. Even with no budget, no assistant coaches, and no bench, the wins piled up. By late April, the Ironmen were
6–2
. By the second week of May they were 8–3–1. Arnold had emerged as a .500 hitter, Snitker was creaming the ball, and what the Ironmen lacked in depth they made up for with hustle, confidence, and a camaraderie forged through the success, and disappointment, of the previous season. They were a team of brothers now, and most
everyone had his own nickname
, from Shark to Goose (Heneberry's handle) to Dud (for Glan, due to his Dudley Do-Right chin) to Snik (for Snitker).

Most of the positions were unchanged: The slow-footed Snitker now manned right field full time, even if Shartzer still complained of having to pitch lefty batters away. In center field, it was the opposite. That's where Shartzer
tried
to get batters to hit it,
“with a little air under it,”
because he knew Arnold would run it down. Left field was the domain of Dave Wells, a tall sophomore with a good arm. Wells' family owned a farm in the area, and he was the greenest of the boys in many respects. He'd begun the season wearing a hat his father had given him that read
FS
, for Farmers Service. Eventually, Wells had abandoned it when too many opposing fans mocked him, yelling out “Hey, does that stand for FARMER SISSY?”

Though Sweet lacked assistants, Bob Shartzer and Dwight Glan unofficially played the role. And with Heneberry now starting every game on the mound or in the field, the team needed a new first base coach. In Trusner, Sweet found the most serious one imaginable, a boy who appeared in the football team's yearbook photo wearing a jacket and tie. He took up his position in the box down the first base line with hands on knees, face in a grimace.

It was a tight group. Sweet rarely used more than nine players and
relied primarily on two pitchers
, Shartzer and Heneberry, whom he alternated every game, regardless of matchup or situation, with the other manning third base. A year older but still stick-skinny, Heneberry remained deadly when his off-speed stuff was breaking and inconsistent when it wasn't. As Maxine Glan said to him after one game: “Oh, John, I really like the games that you pitch. There's so much excitement and so many base runners. Not like Steve.”

Indeed, Shartzer had developed into a force on the mound. At the time, the New York Mets had a young pitcher named Nolan Ryan who was renowned for doing two things: throwing high heat and not giving a damn what the batter thought about it. In many respects, Shartzer was the Nolan Ryan of central Illinois. Even more than in 1970, he relied on intimidation and power. He was wild when he needed to be, unafraid to brush back batters, and his fastball moved late, sinking as it approached the plate. Good thing, as nine out of ten pitches he threw were fastballs, and some games he never threw anything but “the ol' number one,” as he called it. When he did unleash the rare curve, it had nice movement—it was really more of a “slurve,” as much a slider as curveball—but he invariably telegraphed the pitch by emitting a prodigious grunt. Whether due to the speed of his fastball or the infrequency of his curve, opponents had yet to catch on.

By the start of the playoffs in early May, Shartzer had already thrown a one-hitter, a three-hitter, and a handful of shutouts. If he occasionally coughed on the mound, at times violently, few paid it much attention.