One Shot at Forever (21 page)

“C'mon, play catch with me,” Steve would say.

“I will,” Pat would respond, “right after you play school with me.”

“I hate playing school.”

“Well I don't want to play catch, either.”

And thus afternoons proceeded as follows: Pat sitting Steve down at the little desk on their screened-in back porch and playing the role of teacher, instructing him how to read and write. Or, if she was sick of playing school, Pat broke out her dolls and instructed Steve on how to play house. Then, an interminable time later (at least to Steve), the pair walked out into the yard, whereupon Pat wedged a sponge into her mitt for padding and Steve began pitching. Being a Shartzer, Pat didn't just wince her way through it. For years afterward, Steve measured all other catchers against his sister.

As Pat got older and started dating, it was Steve who found ways to turn the tables. “I think it's about time we go out back and play catch,” Steve said on more than one weekend morning. “Oh really?” Pat responded. “Yeah,” Steve said with a smile, “because otherwise I think Mom might like to know what time you got back last night.”

Over time, Pat learned to see through her brother's ploys. Their mother was another matter. Short and proper, Georgianna Shartzer worked as a telephone operator at Illinois Bell. Like her husband, she had high expectations for Steve but it was obvious how much she adored him. In Pat's words Steve was “my mom's little prince.”

Naturally, Steve took every opportunity to use this to his advantage. One time, when Steve was in the eighth grade, Pat was in the kitchen when she heard a shriek coming from Steve's room. She ran in to find her mother staring at a thermometer, face ashen.

“Steve has a fever of 106!” she said.

Pat looked at the thermometer, then looked at Steve, who was propped up in his bed. She knew enough about medicine to know that 106 was pretty serious, but Steve didn't appear to be seizing up. He wasn't pale, or sweating, or drawn. In fact, she thought he looked just fine. Then she noticed something unusual. Steve's bed had a lamp attached to the headboard, the kind with a clamp on the back, and it was turned on. This made no sense. Steve
never
read books. That's when Pat noticed something else: Steve was having trouble holding in, as she recalls, “the biggest shit-eating grin you ever saw.”

“Well, Mom,” Pat said. “If you turn off that lamp and don't let him stick the thermometer against it, I think he'll be fine.”

As much as Steve enjoyed messing with his mom, he felt a great responsibility to his parents, especially his father. Bob Shartzer had been a Depression child. For the Shartzer family to have dinner each night when he was young, everyone had to work, even the kids. As a result, Bob was now driven to ensure his own children had a better experience.

Early on, he'd made a deal with Steve: As long as Steve played sports, he didn't need to work. This made him a rarity among his friends. Heneberry helped on his grandfather's farm, walking the lines of beans for $1 an hour and driving the tractor from the time he could steer it. Glan's father grew corn and soybeans outside Elwin while also working at the Pittsburgh Plate Glass factory, and Jeff was expected to help on the farm and rub down his father's legs when they got too sore from the long days. For their part, the Ottas worked weekends at the Country Manor, flipping burgers and sneaking bites of fried chicken in the back. But Steve never held an after-school job. Some children might have seen this as an opportunity to goof off. Steve viewed it as a responsibility. So when his parents said to him before a game, “We're counting on you, Shark, go out there and shut them down,” he listened. As he says, “I took that shit serious. Very serious.”

Thursday morning dawned blessedly clear. At 1
P.M
., the boys fled class and headed for the bus, playing cards on the hour-long ride to Champaign Central High.

Located two miles from the sprawling campus of the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign,
Champaign Central boasted
the type of modern amenities a school like Macon lacked. What most impressed the Ironmen, though, was McKinley Field. Not just the bleachers and concession stands but in particular the sign at the gate. It read $2
ADMISSION
.

Upon seeing it Mark Miller cracked up, as did Heneberry. “Two dollars? Really?” It was hard to fathom that people were going to pay to watch them play baseball.

But pay they did, and by game time a large, raucous crowd was on hand. Plenty rooted for Potomac, but it felt like even more roared for Macon. One whole section of the bleachers appeared to consist solely of Lynn Sweet fans. There was his buddy Fred Schooley and one of his high school teachers and a bunch of his friends from his Champaign days. And, just down from them, a sturdy man with gray hair standing next to a pretty, older brunette.

Sweet was surprised to see his parents, especially his father. Though the two men were friendly, they shared little in common. Had you met them together, you might not have guessed they were even related.

Lynn Sweet Senior was a true American hard-ass. He grew up in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, the black sheep of seven siblings in the family. He left home early, enlisting in the Army right out of high school in 1933, in the midst of the Great Depression. When he got out, he worked in a shipyard and then enlisted again in early 1943, during World War II. While in charge of a relief convoy, Sweet was sent to the Battle of the Bulge in Belgium. When the front lines broke down, he found himself manning a machine gun in the most deadly American battle of World War II. It is said the average life span of a machine gunner in that battle could be measured in minutes. Sweet survived unscathed.

Three years later, he rejoined the military and eventually shipped out to Korea, after which he remained in the service as a quartermaster. In 1963, he retired with the rank of Master Sergeant. To his children's friends, he became known as “Sarge.”

As Sarge saw it, life consisted of a series of tests, each of equal importance, regardless the context. This manifested itself in myriad ways. One day while Lynn was in college in Champaign, he and some friends were playing a game of tackle football in a city park when Sarge showed up. It was snowing and the grass had turned white, six inches deep with powder in places. “Mind if I play?” Sarge asked. He was almost fifty years old and had lost some of the muscle that once made him so intimidating. Figuring they'd be nice about it, the boys said yes.

On the first play of the game Sarge charged up the middle with astonishing speed, eluded a would-be blocker and laid out the ballcarrier. On the next play, he did the same thing. The college kids were stunned. What they didn't know was that Sarge grew up playing football in the coal towns of eastern Pennsylvania before briefly joining a semipro team. To him, there was no such thing as a friendly afternoon of tackle football.

When the game was over, the elder Sweet leaned on a nearby bench, wheezing. “Boys, I think I'm too old for this,” he said. Without hesitation, they all agreed. None of them wanted any part of Sarge, ever again.

His son, of course, had no choice. From an early age, the two had butted heads. Sarge was given to absolutes, and it didn't help that he was a hard-line conservative while Lynn grew to become an outspoken liberal. To Lynn Senior, it must have seemed a failure of parenting to have brought up his only son on a succession of military bases, instilling in him the virtues of service, and then have the boy turn out to be, in Junior's words, “a total peacenik.” As a result, there were arguments. Sarge wanted Lynn to embrace the military ethos, and became frustrated when Lynn Junior spent his time in the ROTC playing elaborate pranks on his instructors.

Even when Lynn Senior found his niche in civilian life, retiring from the military and working as the business manager for the theater at the University of Illinois, his expectations remained. Through Lynn's time in high school, college, and beyond, his father made clear his disappointment. Lynn in turn made clear his disappointment in his father's disappointment.

And yet, now the son was on the verge of doing something impressive. Not in teaching, or writing, or some other pursuit of the mind, but in athletics, a language his father was fluent in, even if he'd never been much of a baseball man.

Down by the bench, Heneberry was the first to notice. In the two years that Sweet had been coach, it was the first time he'd seen Sweet's dad at a game. Heneberry knew enough to realize it was an important moment. Quietly, he passed word to his teammates.

As expected, the game began as a pitching duel. Then, after three scoreless innings, Dale Otta stepped in. All season, Shartzer and Stu Arnold had received the bulk of the attention. They were the ones who crushed home runs, who the pretty girls in tight tops flocked to. Each was outgoing and, in his own way, supremely confident. But Otta had been nearly as valuable to the team, if not as flashy. Organized and conscientious, he was, as Heneberry says, “often the closest thing we had to an assistant coach.”

So when Otta broke Carley's scoreless streak, naturally it was not with a booming shot over the fence but rather a clean, hard single. It landed just deep enough for Miller to scamper home from second. Moments later, Stu Arnold blasted a fastball over the 320 sign in left field for his seventh home run of the season. Macon led 3–0.

Behind the backstop, the scouts waited for Carley to turn it on, to bring his team back. Instead, the ornery kid from Macon with the peace sign on his hat kept striking Carley out. In fact, that ornery kid kept striking out everybody. Not until the sixth inning did Potomac manage a hit off Shartzer, and he squelched that rally immediately. Meanwhile, Carley was struggling. The Ironmen added another run in the fifth and five more in the seventh. By the time Shartzer finished off a dominating, 9–0 two-hitter with his tenth strikeout, the scouts could be forgiven had they migrated to the other side of the backstop.

Afterward, as the Macon players and fans celebrated, Lynn Sweet Senior descended from the bleachers and made his way over to the Macon bench, where his son was busy talking to a reporter.

Between a different pair of men, hugs might have been exchanged and a son's heart may have swelled. The Sweet men were not given to sentimentality, though. So instead, when Lynn Junior turned to face him, his father said, “Good win. Hell of a pitcher you got there.” And Lynn responded, “We'll try to get one more tomorrow.” They talked about a couple plays in the game, about the opponent that awaited. Then Lynn Sweet Senior patted his son on the back and headed off. It wouldn't be until years later, after his father had passed away, that Sweet would come to appreciate the importance of the moment, how in some respects it signaled his father's first sign of approval of the man his son had become.

Not far away, another father stood, arms crossed, trying hard not to look too proud. Bob Shartzer had spent years preparing his son for moments like this. And now he knew what was needed. Not congratulations but a new challenge. When Steve walked over, Bob sized him up. “That was a good win but we got more hay to mow,” he said. “Time to start getting ready for Bloomington.”

“David Meets Goliath” wrote the local papers, and with good reason. Bloomington High had as many students, twelve hundred, as the town of Macon had residents. A year earlier, the Purple Raiders had won the sectionals behind the hitting and pitching of a strapping junior named Robin Cooper, advancing to the state tournament before falling in the first round. Now Cooper anchored a deeper, more talented team. Despite playing in a tough conference, Bloomington entered the game 21–6.

If that weren't enough to dampen the optimism of Macon fans, word leaked out after the Potomac game: Sweet wasn't going to start Shartzer. It seemed a risky strategy to the reporters on hand. Sure, Shartzer would be throwing on back-to-back days, but he was Macon's star and grittiest competitor. If you had one chance at the biggest game in school history, wouldn't you want your best player on the mound?

Sweet smiled when asked about it. You folks must not understand how we do things in Macon, he said. If he needed a big out, or someone for a relief appearance, Sweet assured reporters he “wouldn't hesitate” to use Shartzer. But he was going to start Heneberry. All season he'd alternated pitchers. What kind of message would it send to the players if he stopped doing it now?

That night, in a mobile home six miles south of Macon in Moweaqua, Bill McClard packed an overnight bag.

It had been weeks since McClard had confronted Sweet. There had been no snide comments, no dark stares. Sweet had begun to wonder if McClard felt he'd broken him. Later, he came to wonder if it was the other way around—if maybe it was he who had broken McClard, or in some way helped change him. Because he had changed.

In his early years at Macon, McClard had gone out of his way to be an enforcer. Not long after arriving, he expelled a student named Charles Dalluge for, as the school board minutes recorded it, “complete disregard for the rules and regulations.” Then he'd fired Guy Carlton. Back then, as math teacher Carl Poelker remembers it, McClard served as “the perfect combination with Roger Britton. Britton took into consideration the kid and
the background
, while Bill would nail anybody's butt to the wall.”

As the years passed, however, McClard had become more lenient. There had been fewer paddlings, more stern talks. Eventually, he began to question his role as a disciplinarian. In high school, he'd been a poor student himself—“never took a book home, just barely got by,” according to his wife, Vi. He'd always been a dreamer, though, a chaser of windmills. For years, he wondered if he'd missed his calling as a psychologist. He felt he understood kids and that he knew what was wrong with education. Discipline, he came to believe during his time at Macon, was only one part of the equation.