One Shot at Forever (27 page)

How to prepare for the biggest morning of your life? That was the question that faced the Ironmen on Thursday night. In one room, Heneberry and a half dozen others huddled around the color TV and watched as Cubs ace Ken Holtzman mowed down Cincinnati Reds batters. Others played games of Pitch, the unofficial card game of Macon.

Throughout, one boy was conspicuously absent. Earlier in the evening, Shartzer had been spotted in the lobby with Mark Miller, briefly conferring with a few female Macon students, but now he was nowhere to be found. No one went looking for him, though, as Steve had asked to be left alone during the tournament. Down one of the long halls, he lay on his bed, staring up at the white perforated ceiling tiles.

Tonight, there was no asthma. His hand throbbed but he didn't think about that, either. Instead, Shartzer thought about how many people were driving up from Macon, and how they were all counting on him. He thought about how far the team had come, and how important it was for him to lead them now. He thought about how, as he later said, “No one elected me to carry the flag, but I took the damn thing and wasn't going to fall on it.”

18

The Macon High students couldn't believe it. S
CHOOL
C
LOSED
T
ODAY
read the sign on the front of Macon High. It was like having a snow day in June.

Not that any of the kids planned on goofing around. The student bus left the parking lot for Peoria at 6:30
A.M
. and it was joined over the course of the morning by enough cars to fill three parking lots around Meinen Field. Flags fluttered from windows and pennants twirled. One Macon fan used duct tape to plaster the side of his white sedan with: #1 M
ACON
I
RONMEN
Y
EA
.

Jane Metzger was one of the students on the school bus and she remembers the giddy excitement of the morning. For two hours, Tim Cook, the diminutive former junior high baseball coach, led a series of Ironmen cheers. In the back, a student had tuned a transistor radio to WLS-AM 890 out of Chicago. At one point the DJ, Larry Lujack, began talking about the state baseball finals and mentioned that some tiny school from Macon had made it. Lujack then cracked that he'd never heard of Macon, and had no idea where it was.

For Metzger, it was one of the first times she realized just how small her town was.

Three hours north in Chicago, hundreds of thousands of people awoke and opened their
Tribune
to see that same small town on the front of the sports page. Above a story reading “Top 2 Draft Choices Sign Bear Contracts” and another about the Cubs with the headline “Santo Has Sympathy for Bench” ran a banner headline: “Lane Tech Wins State Opener, 2 to 1.” Just below, in large letters, it read: “Macon to Provide Next Test.”

Friday morning dawned hot and muggy. Sweet rose not long after sunrise after spending part of the previous night at the bar talking with Jeanne about ways to keep the team loose. Sweet was proud of how independent the boys had become. He wanted them to forge their own identity, to realize the world wasn't that big and that Macon wasn't that small. Now, as the Ironmen were poised to make another tournament run, he wanted outsiders to see the team as self-sufficient, to give the boys credit for their success, not the coach or some “program.” Most of all, he wanted the boys to keep it all in perspective.

So far, his strategy had worked. His stunt with the press had gone over as well as he could have hoped and his decision to shelter the team at Jumer's was also paying off. Now he'd restricted all access. He didn't want the boys overthinking the game; he just wanted them to play.

It was time for one final gambit. He gathered the Ironmen at breakfast in the hotel restaurant. The boys looked up, wondering if Sweet had prepared a speech. Instead he looked them over and, in a very serious voice, said, “Guys, now you've heard that these Lane Tech guys are just like us. They put their pants on one leg at a time.” Sweet paused and scanned the room again. “Well, they're not. They jump into them two feet at a time!”

At one end of the table, Jeff Glan watched his teammates' reactions, the way they begin giggling, almost against their will. He'd heard Sweet refer to himself as a “sponsor” before but Glan saw his coach as more of a psychologist. He'd never had a teacher or coach who understood moods and motivations like Sweet. What Sweet possessed, Glan would later realize, was what people called emotional intelligence.

After breakfast, Jack Heneberry approached. After asking Sweet's permission, he walked off to the side of the room with his son. Looking John in the eye, Jack told him how it would be asking too much to win this game. He told him how the Ironmen had had a great season, how
John
had had a great season, and how he was so proud of him for that Bloomington game. Then he told him that it was OK—no one expected him to win this one.

Then Jack Heneberry pulled out a crumpled piece of paper and handed it to his son. “But this might help,” he said.

By 8:15
A.M
., when the Macon bus left for Meinen Field, the players were already sweating. Though warm on Thursday, it had been pleasant enough—nearly perfect baseball weather. Now the heat hung like a wet blanket over Peoria, as if the whole river town awoke to find the banks had overflowed and taken to the air.

As the bus pulled up, the boys were shocked to see spectators already lining the bleachers. By 9:15, they overflowed onto the grass. One Lane Tech fan with sunglasses and prodigious muttonchops had brought a large snare drum. You could hear the
BANG! BANG! BANG!
from a quarter of a mile away.

The Lane Tech contingent was impressive but paled in comparison to the crowd on the other side of the diamond. There had never been, and likely never will be, a Macon away crowd like this one. As he looked around, Heneberry recognized one face after another: Britton, McClard, Poelker, Burns, the entire Otta extended clan. There was Jane Metzger and Diane Tomlinson, screaming like the cheerleaders they were during basketball and football season. Around them swarmed a horde of students already chanting for the Ironmen, the cheers led by a handsome, dark-haired
senior named Cliff Brown
, who stood waving a large, purple Ironmen flag. There were kids from Blue Mound and kids from Moweaqua, relatives from Decatur and Champaign. There were babies in sun hats and mothers in big dark glasses fanning themselves. Little boys ran in circles behind the bleachers; others like Scott Taylor sat rapt, watching. Heneberry tried to count all the fans but could only guess at their number. A thousand? Two thousand? One thing was sure: Of the twelve hundred residents of Macon, the vast majority were in Peoria on this day.

Farther down, the scouts huddled with their arms crossed, whispering to each other. Heneberry had never seen so many at a game. There was one in a Kansas City Royals shirt, and another with a Yankees hat. Over to the side he recognized Itchy Jones, the coach at Southern Illinois, the biggest baseball power in the state.

Heneberry was supposed to be warming up, but he couldn't help himself. He had to take it all in for a minute. Either way, win or lose, he knew this was the last game of his high school career; if Macon won, Shartzer would pitch the title game. Heneberry thought about how crazy and wonderful it was that on the last day of his athletic career he got to pitch for a chance to reach the state championship. He tried to soak up the moment, to freeze time, to scan the crowd and imprint each face into his memory.

Then, before he took his first throw, he pulled the small, yellow piece of notepad paper from his back pocket one last time. John knew his father lacked traditional baseball training, but Jack had seen enough of his son's games to know the type of hitters he could and couldn't get out. So while the other parents had headed off to celebrate the previous afternoon, ecstatic just to have won one game, Jack had stuck around to watch Lane Tech. Immediately, he'd noticed one player, the Kid with the Big Black Bat, as he described him—Mark Wronkiewicz. “He can really hurt us,” Jack scribbled in a notebook. “Don't even pitch to him.” He wrote the same thing about John Rockwell, the leadoff hitter who'd tagged the monster shot on the opening day of the tournament.

The best piece of advice, though, was one of the last things Jack said before he handed his son the piece of paper. “Son,” Jack had said, “they really looked terrible against the pitcher's curveball in the first game. Now, this guy's a better pitcher than you are, but when he went to his slow curve, they looked sick”—and here he'd placed his hand on John's shoulder and smiled—“and you have a better slow curveball than he does.”

Nearby, Joe Cook and Bob Fallstrom stood and watched, incredulous. Cook had seen Shartzer pitch a number of times, but neither of the men had seen Heneberry in person. Now, as Heneberry sent a succession of floaters toward Dean Otta during warmups, Cook couldn't believe what he was seeing.
This
was Heneberry? The kid couldn't break a win-dowpane. He was, as Cook remembers, “just sort of lobbing it in there.”

On the other side of the diamond, Wronkiewicz was also warming up. Like everyone on Lane Tech, he sported a bright green and gold uniform and he looked, as Cook remembers, “like he just came out of a showroom.” Tall and muscular with a strong chin, Wronkiewicz threw one fastball after another, popping the mitt on each. Presently, Fallstrom turned to Cook.

“Well, this doesn't look like much of a game.”

Cook had to agree with him.
This is going to be a disaster
, he thought.
Why are we even up here?

As the first pitch neared, the two men headed to the small press box behind the backstop. It was farther from the field than either was accustomed to. Whereas at most fields in central Illinois the backstop was only fifteen feet or so behind home plate, at Meinen Field it was closer to sixty.

As always, Cook kept score. Quickly, he scribbled down the lineups:

When he finished, Cook checked his scorebook. For some reason, Lane had inserted its backup catcher, Kryklywec, into the lineup rather than the usual starter. At the time, Cook didn't think much of it.

All that preparation, all those dreams and this is what happens?

At 9:30 the state semifinal began and the Ironmen promptly forgot how to hit. For three innings, all the Macon boys did was go down swinging. Working from a windup, to the sound of the drums going
BANG! BANG! BANG!
, Wronkiewicz blew away one batter after another, striking out six straight Ironmen at one point through a combination of fastballs, sliders, curveballs, and forkballs. For the season, his record stood at 10–1, with 104 strikes in seventy innings. That he'd nearly gone his entire high school career without pitching was hard to believe. As it was, only when a scout saw Wronkiewicz whiffing batters during a summer semipro league and mentioned this fact to Papciak did the old coach get the idea that maybe he, too, should put the kid on the mound.