One Shot at Forever (28 page)

As for Heneberry, he took the mound as concerned as ever about walking the first batter. What's more, that batter was Rockwell, and Heneberry remembered all too well what he did to the first pitch in the quarterfinal game. So Heneberry rocked, unwound, and looped in a curve that appeared headed right for Rockwell's head. Acting on instinct, Rockwell took cover. He was sitting in the dirt, on his butt, when the umpire said “Strike!”

Inside, Heneberry felt a prickle of excitement.
I've got my good stuff
. Of course, the good stuff only worked if his defense backed him up, and in the second the Ironmen ran into trouble. A pair of errors was followed by a sacrifice fly to give Tech a 1–0 lead.
BANG! BANG! BANG!
went the drum.

As the Macon players jogged back to the bench, Sweet stood up to meet them. But rather than ripping into the boys after the errors and telling them to get their heads in the game, he smiled. “Alright, hand me your gloves. I'm going to have Sammy here sew up the holes in between innings.”

Then he patted Mark Miller on the back. “Now I think we've let this big kid get his fill of strikeouts for the day. How about a hit?”

Next to the bleachers a handful of the coaches from the other teams in the tournament watched in disbelief. Who was this guy? For two days they'd read about Sweet, with his peace signs and hippie-dippy approach to the game, and they were sick of it. When Charles Chamberlain, the AP reporter, ambled over between innings, he got an earful. “If Macon wins the state championship,” one of the coaches told him, “it will set back Illinois high school baseball ten years.” Another—of course asking to remain anonymous—called Sweet “a disgrace to the profession.”

On the field, the disgrace gathered his players near the bench. “Guys, run if you get on base,” he said. “It's awful hot out here and I think those city boys are having trouble with it. Let's see if they can catch you.”

Sweet was right about one thing: The weather had become a factor. Though only a little past 10
A.M
., the temperature had soared past 90 degrees and the humidity was extreme. In the field, Lane shortstop Rick Wachholder was already having trouble. He could feel the heat shooting up through his metal spikes, searing the soles of his feet, and he waited as long as possible to head out to the field each inning. Once there, he counted the seconds until he could get back to the bench, where the Lane coaches had a cooler filled with cool, wet towels, which the Lane players draped over their heads between innings. Shartzer looked over and was no longer envious of those thick, pretty uniforms.

It wasn't much better in the stands. The heat was so intense that the generator providing power for the hot dog stand had broken down before the end of the first inning. This being the age before sunscreen and bottled water, the fans had no choice but to pull their hats down and sweat it out. Metzger's hair had long ago shot out into a halo of frizz, and one man from Macon named Marvin Lash ended up going to the hospital with heat stroke. Superfan Cliff Brown had doffed his shirt and now wore only a wide-brimmed hat, sunglasses, jeans, and a bandanna tied around his neck. Around him, other Macon boys followed suit, shifting restlessly, waiting for some reason to cheer.

In the top of the fourth, Dale Otta finally gave it to them. Once again, as he'd done against Mark Carley earlier in the playoffs, Otta broke the pitcher's spell. This time it was a single to center to halt the string of six strikeouts. Once on first, Otta didn't hesitate: It was time to test the backup catcher's arm. Moments later he was at second. With the Macon crowd roaring, the rally continued. Four hits and another stolen base later, Macon held a 2–1 lead.

Now it was up to Heneberry to hold the line, and for three more innings he worked his magic. Just as Jack Heneberry had surmised, the Lane players continued to hack away at fluttering curves in the dirt. Each time they swung at one, Heneberry figured he should throw another in the same spot. By the fifth inning, Lane's assistant coaches were yelling “TAKE SOME PITCHES!”

Still, Heneberry was concerned. His pitches were certainly breaking but he didn't feel like he had great control. If Lane just made him throw strikes, it could get ugly. Every once in a while, just to make sure his dad saw, he pulled out the paper and looked at it, but he no longer needed a scouting report. It was going to be all junk, all the time.

Heading into the top of the seventh, Macon clung to that one-run lead. Then a strange thing happened: Mighty Lane Tech, not Macon, cracked under the pressure. Of all people, Jeff Glan laid down a perfect bunt to start the inning, right off the third base line. Kryklywec, the reserve catcher, got to it in time but launched the throw past the first baseman, allowing Glan to reach second. Then Wronkiewicz uncorked a wild pitch, prompting Papciak to stalk to the mound. He signaled to a relief pitcher, Jim Iwanski, but Iwanski fared no better. Again and again, the Ironmen ran.

Poor Walt Kryklywec. Not only was he unaccustomed to playing this much, but after two hours in that heavy catcher's gear in the thick heat, he was absolutely gassed. Wild pitches in the Chicago city league merely caromed off the backstop ten feet to the rear; here at Meinen Field they skittered to the distant collegiate backstop. When Kryklywec did catch the pitches, it seemed a runner was always going. Three times he made throwing errors trying to nail all those dancing, sprinting Ironmen. As he did, the runs started to pour in: 3–1, then 4–1, now 6–1! All Heneberry needed to do was shut down Lane Tech in the bottom of the seventh to send Macon to the state final.

There was only one problem: Now it was Heneberry who started thinking about the magnitude of the moment. He plunked a batter with a curve that never curved, gave up a double, then walked a batter. Soon Lane Tech was down only 6–3. Worse, the bases were loaded and there were no outs. The time had come for Sweet to make the long walk to the mound.

Slowly, head down, he strolled out. The crowd stared, Heneberry stared. Sweet reached his pitcher and cleared his throat. “So, everybody's looking at me like I'm supposed to come out here,” he said. “So here I am.”

After a moment, Sweet patted Heneberry on the shoulder and walked back to the dugout. Then motioned not to Shartzer but to Jimmy Durbin, the tiny freshman with the jug ears who hadn't pitched the whole season—the kid who could barely get the ball to home plate on a straight line. “Get up and start throwing in the bullpen,” Sweet said.

Durbin's face registered shock, followed milliseconds later by fear.
Me?

So, dutifully, Durbin jogged down the right field line to begin warming up. Behind him, 1,971 fans watched in astonishment. Sweet was thinking of bringing in another pitcher and it was
this
kid? Where was Shartzer? What in the name of all that was holy was this hippie coach thinking?

Back on the bench, Sweet grinned. More important, with every looping warm-up pitch Durbin heaved, so did the Ironmen players. For Sweet, moments such as this were both the most difficult and most crucial times to reinforce his ethos. Otherwise, it was easy to succumb to thinking that the game was more important than it was and lose one's identity.

On the mound, Heneberry stared in disbelief.
Durbin?
Then, as he watched the kid tossing lollipops, Heneberry realized the message Sweet was sending: He had the utmost confidence in him. With that, Heneberry felt a surge of energy. Rather than trying to muddle through, he decided to go for broke.

Climbing back on the mound, Heneberry proceeded to unleash a half-dozen gorgeous curveballs—the kind that peak near a batter's ear and then plummet to the dirt. He allowed one run but, more important, struck out two batters on 3–2 called strikes. And thus the moment—
his
moment—arrived. With the score 6–4 he faced left-handed first baseman Jim Iwanski, who was 1–3 on the day.

Heneberry wound and kicked, his arm out at that familiar three-quarter angle. At the plate, Iwanski tensed his body. He knew what was coming—everyone at Meinen Field did. It didn't make it any easier. Iwanski had been taught not to swing at curveballs until there were two strikes, for the best that could happen was you hit it hard on the ground. But with Heneberry, he knew all he was going to see were curves, and anyone who's played high school baseball knows the sweating nightmare that is hitting a vertiginous curveball. Someone with professional-quality heat has a reputation that precedes him, allowing batters to stand farther back and choke up. But a curveball pitcher is a terrorist who can come from anywhere.

So even when Iwanski saw Heneberry's hand fall from behind the pitch, seeing the magic trick before it was performed, he still had to override his instincts. The ball was floating in high and outside but he knew it would not end up there. Iwanski needed to stay back, to swing at a place where the ball was not. Gathering his strength, he took a mighty cut. The pitch had dropped so far, however, that his bat caught only the very top of the ball on its descent toward his knees. Slowly, the ball bounced toward first base, right at Glan. He caught it with his left foot already on the bag.

There was the briefest of pauses, a millisecond during which a profound shift occurred for the boys in the Macon uniforms. Lives tilted, expectations were altered, legacies formed. After this, nothing would ever be the same again. Then, Meinen Field exploded. Out they came, streaming onto the field: girlfriends in short shorts and parents and teachers and shirtless students tossing their hats in the air, the mad, crazy rush of a small town that suddenly felt big. Circling them all in great arcing loops, like some crazed valence electron, ran Cliff Brown, the giant purple
M
of his flag ruffling through the air.

When it was over, Stu Arnold's four stolen bases had tied a record set by a boy named Lou Elke of Streator High back in 1942, and Lane Tech had tied a tournament record with five errors in one half inning, three charged to Kryklywec and two to Wronkiewicz.

Papciak was steamed. He grumbled and grimaced. When a reporter from the
Journal Star
asked him what happened, he said, “I don't know if it's Lane or me, but we never seem to come through in the clutch.” Later, the players heard that Papciak said he felt the team had “let him down.”

On the field, the players lined up and shook hands. Knowing Lane's reputation, Heneberry expected the players to be bitter or perhaps complain about how
we should have beat these sumbitches
. They weren't. Instead, a couple of the boys said “Great game.” Another said, “We're hoping you guys win the title.”

Then the façade cracked. As Lane center fielder Richie Coleman walked off, he couldn't help himself, breaking down in tears. When Wronk saw him, he began crying, too. He didn't care that the scouts were watching. It was prom night that evening back in Chicago but Wronk wouldn't attend. Neither would he say a word during the three-hour drive back to Chicago. It wasn't supposed to end like this.

For most of Macon, this was enough: this moment. Now the radio DJs would know where Macon was. Now there would be a story to tell the kids, and the grandkids, about how I
was there the day Macon beat mighty Lane Tech
. There was reason for optimism and celebration. There was a reason to be proud of being from Macon. As Fallstrom of the
Herald & Review
would later say, “That really felt like the championship game right there.”

As the students belted out the Ironmen fight song and reporters crowded around Sweet, ecstatic about the underdog story they'd just witnessed, one boy watched in horror, the elation seeping out of him.
Ah fuck
, Shartzer thought to himself,
now it's on me
. He looked at all the people going crazy over the win, at all that jubilation, and he worried. This wasn't the championship. Why were his teammates and the fans acting like it was?
How
, he wondered,
are we going to get channeled and focused and ready for the title game?

19

It was time to regroup. Back at Jumer's, the players showered and stayed as close as possible to the AC, under strict orders from Sweet to remain inside. Meanwhile, Maxine Glan and Georgianna Shartzer hurried to the Laundromat with the uniforms.

At 1
P.M
., the team gathered for lunch in the hotel conference room. Mark Miller, normally the loosest of the boys, was so anxious he could only nibble at his food. The same went for Dale Otta. Presently, a skinny man with brown hair walked in. Most had met him before: It was Fred Schooley, Sweet's buddy from Champaign. Schooley was a savvy baseball man who'd played in the Eastern Illinois semipro league. A few weeks earlier, he'd driven down to Macon to help the team with situational fielding.