One Shot at Forever (31 page)

To the graduating seniors who watched, some of whom would never see Sweet again, it looked like he was riding a wave of joy toward the stage. So that's how they remember him now, thrust up in glory, smiling that wild smile, a man carried into the light by a bunch of boys.

Heneberry in the aftermath

Courtesy of Dale Otta

21

It is almost fifty years since Lynn Sweet first drove from Chicago to Macon. To make the same journey today is to leave behind the concrete overpasses of the city and burrow into a heartland that still feels as if it's from a different era. The central Illinois landscape is one of American flags on porches, blinking radio towers, Baptist churches lit up like beacons in the night, oversized John Deere tractors creeping down the side of the road, general stores with neon Budweiser signs, silver grain silos, and endless green fields of soybeans and corn. Turn on the TV during the fall and chances are at least one station will be covering the IHSA football playoffs; flip to the FM dial and you'll hear the game play-by-play.

Arrive in Macon and the high school baseball diamond is visible from the bypass, its presence advertised by the giant green
H-A-W-K-S
letters planted in the grass. It is a proper, well-groomed field now, with a scoreboard and a batting cage. Behind it, the school—now renamed Meridian High after the merger with Blue Mound—resides in the same brick edifice on South Wall Street. If the district ever gets the funding, the plan is to erect a new school, but it's tough with the state budget crisis. For now, the money has moved up the road to Mt. Zion, where white flight from Decatur has turned the town into a bustling community of restaurants, McMansions, and a gleaming new school.

There is little gleam to Meridian High, though there is reason for pride. Inside the glass double-doors, visitors are greeted by a floor-to-ceiling trophy case honoring the Meridian basketball team, which won the state championship in 2009. A twenty-foot-long photo banner of the players dressed in shiny green uniforms is visible farther in, on one of the gym walls. Triumphant news clippings from the Decatur
Herald & Review
are pasted on office doors. “PRIME MERIDIAN,” they read.

There is an invisible asterisk attached to the banners and trophies, though. There are now up to eight classes in Illinois high school sports, including four in baseball and basketball. In 2009 Meridian competed in
Class 1A
in basketball, the lowest. To win a state title, the Hawks didn't have to play any Lane Techs, Waukegans, or Decatur Eisenhowers. They didn't even have to play Mt. Zion.

As for the long-time pride of Macon,
the shelf where the Ironmen's second-place trophy
used to rest is now occupied by a plaque commemorating the 1995 Meridian girls' softball team. In all, there are nine trophy cases lining the school's front hall, stretching almost the length of the gym. Everything from the dance team to the scholastic bowl is represented. There are no reminders of the school's days as Macon High.

By the same token, a visitor can walk the linoleum-tiled halls, peek into the classrooms, and examine the framed photos on the walls. But nowhere is there any mention of a teacher and coach named Lynn Sweet.

Sweet is not an easy man to find
these days. This is how he gives directions to his house outside Moweaqua: “Take a left at Casey's store, go two-and-a-half miles, and when you see the church signs, take a right on the unmarked road. Go a mile or so and I'm the big farmhouse.”

The house, which Sweet bought in 1982, sits on twenty-five acres surrounded by miles of cornfields. He calls it his “enclave,” a former corn farm that he has transformed into an animal refuge under a state program called Acres for Wildlife. It draws quite a crowd: pheasants, turkeys, coyotes, whole families of deer. Sweet plants blueberries, strawberries, and raspberries; tends to cherry trees; and stocks his three-acre lake with bass, crappie, and bluegill. His barn is thick with the trappings of a life lived outdoors: a hulking John Deere 4020 tractor, five mowers, a wagon, a bevy of bikes.

The old coach now spends much of his time in his living room. Here, with windows on three sides, he can sit in his armchair, watch the wildlife, and read. The shelves are lined with an eclectic collection of books: Ford Maddox Ford's
The Good Soldier, The Embezzler
by Louis Auchincloss,
Field Guide to Eastern Birds
. In a small den there is a photo of his daughter Leslie with Barack Obama, when she was a delegate at the Democratic National Convention. There are also photos of Jack Burns and Mark Miller, laughing and eating, and one of Lynn and Jeanne at the Great Wall of China.

What's left of Sweet's hair is white, and his goatee is an ashen stubble, but the big hazel eyes remain young. At sixty-eight, long retired, he spends most of his time with Jeanne. They visit their daughter in Sacramento, drink wine in Sonoma County, try to get to Chicago when they can. As Sweet puts it, “We don't have a lot of friends, but we know a lot of people.”

He didn't intend to stay in the area; it just sort of happened. They bought a house in Dalton City, ten miles east of Macon, in 1973. Soon Jeanne was pregnant. They had two daughters, Lindsay and Leslie. As the girls got older, both began to realize the power of the family name. Leslie, the older of the two, remembers how people were drawn to her when they learned she was a Sweet, and how it made her feel like a celebrity at times. As she says: “I wasn't royalty based on wealth or power but based on my parents being good people.”

Even so, after that '71 season, things were never the same for Sweet in Macon. At first the Ironmen were riding high. The Macon city council passed a resolution of congratulations to the team (addressed to L. C. Sweet at “Arrowhead Mobile Home, Macon, Illinois”). The Illinois Legislature went one step further, declaring June 14, 1971, “Macon Ironmen Baseball Day” and including in the proclamation a passage that read, “We particularly compliment Coach L. C. Sweet for his outstanding leadership.”

In 1972 the Macon booster club financed overnight trips and the team finally got a full-time bus driver, as well as handsome new purple uniforms. Sweet declined an offer to be an assistant coach at Lakeland Junior College, and Joe Cook wrote a column daring the big-city schools to add tiny Macon to their baseball schedules, though none took him up on it. Behind the trio of Shartzer, Snitker, and Arnold, who all hit over .500, the Ironmen romped through their schedule, winning games by scores such as 26–0, 21–4, and 18–0. They entered the regionals with a string of seven consecutive shutouts, then
lost to MacArthur
despite entering the seventh inning with a three-run lead. Even so, the team had become a local dynasty.

There were expectations now. By most standards, Sweet met them. Over the next five years, Macon extended its streak of consecutive conference victories to fifty-eight while winning numerous district titles, though the Ironmen never got back to the state tournament. By 1976, Sweet's last year of coaching the team, some of the joy had drained out of the job. He'd grown his Fu Manchu into a bushy beard, and his dark hair flowed past his shoulders. “Sometimes I just wish we could go back to that first year,” he told a reporter at the time. “It was just twelve or thirteen guys, and all we had was a bunch of baggy uniforms and a lot of fun.”

The 1976 team finished 16–9, beat Taylorville to win the district, and then lost to MacArthur again, Sweet's last game. Just like that, he quit (in a show of solidarity, so did Jack Burns). Sweet had had enough of the culture of sports and the endless focus on winning. “Games were invented as a way to accommodate leisure time,” he explained to a reporter. “Now they've become a semi-religion… A lot of other people give baseball more importance … especially in high school and amateur sports. The pressure, God, they make you a hero when all you're doing is playing baseball.”

What really got to Sweet were the parents. Teaching their sons how to enjoy life and grow into free-thinking men wasn't enough anymore. The parents wanted college scholarships and trophies. Sweet couldn't take it. “The parents were yelling at me too much,” he says. “They wanted it to be like it was. We'd always win more than we'd lose, but they all expected to go to state, the elusive state…” He trails off, looks out at the window at the birds in his yard.

Sweet moved on. He coached girls' track and, naturally, the team flourished. One of his runners became a state champion, and the Ironmen won several sectionals. Soon enough, Bob Fallstrom was writing stories in the
Herald & Review
titled “It's a Sweet Repeat,” about how the girls were inspired by their coach. Still, it wasn't the same as baseball. Nothing ever was.

Teaching changed, too. Sweet got a master's in secondary English from the University of Illinois in 1974, and added another master's ten years later, but he grew weary of how his legend preceded him in Macon. “I'd walk into a room and people would say, ‘Oh, you're Lynn Sweet. Well, be Lynn Sweet.' I ran out of gas to be me.” Then, in 1994, when Macon High consolidated with Blue Mound, Sweet was expected to teach a standard curriculum, with an emphasis on grammar drills and passing standardized tests. No longer could he have students read
Macbeth
twice or stock the shelves with
Popular Mechanics
. Four years later he retired. He didn't fit in the new teaching environment. “I was happy in the '60s and '70s,” he says.
“The world made sense.”