The Innocent Man (4 page)

In every small town there is a Little League coach who loves the game so much that he is constantly on the prowl for fresh talent, even that of an eight-year-old. In Ada, the guy was Dewayne Sanders, coach of the Police Eagles. He worked at a corner service station not far from the Williamson home on Fourth Street. Word reached Coach Sanders about the Williamson kid, and he was soon signed up.

Even at such an early age, it was obvious Ronnie could play the game. And it was odd because his father knew very little about baseball. Ronnie had picked it up on the streets.

In the summer months, baseball began early in the day as the boys gathered and talked about the Yankee game the day before. Only the Yankees. They studied the box score, talked about Mickey Mantle, tossed the ball around as they waited for more players. A small group meant a game in the street, dodging the occasional car, breaking the occasional window. When more kids showed up, the street ball was abandoned and they headed for a vacant lot for serious games that would last all day. Late in the afternoon they would drift back home, just in time to clean up, eat a bite, put on a uniform, and hurry over to Kiwanis Park for a real game.

The Police Eagles were usually in first place, a testament to the dedication of Dewayne Sanders. The team’s star was Ronnie Williamson. His name first appeared in the
Ada Evening News
when he was just nine years old—“The Police Eagles used 12 hits, including 2 homers by Ron Williamson, who also had 2 doubles.”

Roy Williamson was at every game, watching quietly from the bleachers. He never yelled at an umpire or a coach, nor did he yell at his own son. Occasionally, after a bad game, he would offer fatherly advice, usually about life in general. Roy had never played baseball and was still learning the game. His young son was years ahead of him.

When Ronnie was eleven, he moved up to the Ada Kids League and was the top draft pick of the Yankees, sponsored by the Oklahoma State Bank. He led the team to an undefeated season.

When he was twelve, still playing for the Yankees, the Ada paper followed the team’s season: “Oklahoma State Bank scored 15 runs in the bottom of the first inning … Ronnie Williamson had 2 triples” (June 9,
1965); “The Yankees went to bat only three times … but the booming bats of Roy Haney, Ron Williamson and James Lamb told the story. Williamson tripled” (June 11, 1965); “The Oklahoma State Bank Yankees scored twice in the opening inning … Ron Williamson and Carl Tilley got two of the four hits … each being a double” (July 13, 1965); “Meanwhile the Bank team bounced into the second place nest … Ronnie Williamson had two doubles and a single” (July 15, 1965).

In the 1960s, Byng High School was about eight miles north and east of the Ada city limits. It was considered a country school, much smaller than the sprawling Ada High School. Though the neighborhood kids could attend Ada High if they chose, and if they were willing to make the drive, virtually all opted for the smaller school, primarily because the Byng bus ran through the east side of town and the Ada bus did not. Most of the kids on Ron’s street chose Byng.

At Byng Junior High School, Ronnie was elected secretary of the seventh-grade class, and the following year he was voted president and a class favorite of the eighth grade.

He entered the ninth grade at Byng High School in 1967, one of sixty freshmen.

Byng did not play football—that was unofficially reserved for Ada, whose powerful teams annually competed for the state title. Byng was a basketball school, and Ronnie picked up the game his freshman year and absorbed it as quickly as he had baseball.

Though never a bookworm, he did enjoy reading and made As and Bs. Math was his favorite subject.
When he was bored with textbooks, he plowed through dictionaries and encyclopedias. He grew obsessive with certain topics. In the midst of a dictionary binge, he would pepper his friends with words they’d never heard of, chiding them if they did not know the meanings. He studied every American president, memorized countless details about each one, then for months talked of nothing else. Though he was steadily growing away from his church, he still knew dozens of verses of Scripture, which he often used to his advantage, and more often used to challenge those around him. At times, his obsessions wore thin with his friends and family.

But Ronnie was a gifted athlete, and thus very popular in school. He was elected vice president of his freshman class. The girls noticed him, liked him, wanted to date him, and he certainly was not shy around them. He became very particular about his appearance and fussy about his wardrobe. He wanted nicer clothes than his parents could afford, but he pushed hard for them anyway. Roy began quietly buying himself secondhand clothes so his son could wear better ones.

Annette had married and was living in Ada. In 1969, she and her mother opened the Beauty Casa, a hair salon, on the ground floor of the old Julienne Hotel in downtown Ada. They worked hard and soon built a brisk business, one that included several call girls who used the upper floors of the hotel. These ladies of the evening had been a fixture in the town for decades, and had taken their toll on a few marriages. Juanita could barely tolerate them.

Annette’s lifelong inability to say no to her little brother came back to haunt her as he constantly wheedled money out of her for clothes and girls. When he
somehow discovered that she had a charge account at a local clothing store, he began adding to it. And he never thought of buying the cheap stuff. Sometimes he would ask permission; often he would not. Annette would explode, they’d argue, then he would con her into paying the bill. She adored him too much to say no, and she wanted her little brother to have the best of everything. In the middle of every fight, he always managed to tell her how much he loved her. And there was no doubt that he did.

Both Renee and Annette worried that their brother was growing too spoiled and putting too much pressure on their parents. At times they lashed out at him; some of the fights were memorable, but Ronnie prevailed. He would cry and apologize and make everybody smile and laugh. The sisters often found themselves sneaking him money to help buy things their parents couldn’t afford. He could be self-absorbed, demanding, egocentric, downright childish—the obvious baby of the family—and then, with a burst of his oversized personality, he would have the entire family eating out of his hand.

They loved him dearly, and he loved them right back. And even in the midst of their bickering they knew he would get whatever he wanted.

The Summer after Ronnie’s ninth grade, a few of the luckier boys planned to attend a baseball camp at a nearby college. Ronnie wanted to go, too, but Roy and Juanita simply couldn’t afford it. He persisted; it was a rare opportunity to improve his game and maybe get noticed by college coaches. For weeks he talked of nothing
else and pouted when things looked hopeless. Roy finally acquiesced and borrowed the money from a bank.

Ron’s next project was the purchase of a motorbike, something Roy and Juanita were opposed to. They went through the usual series of denials and lectures and claims that it was something they simply couldn’t afford and too dangerous anyway, so Ronnie announced he would pay for it himself. He found his first job, an afternoon paper route, and began saving every penny. When he had enough for the down payment, he bought the motorbike and arranged monthly payments with the dealer.

The repayment plan was derailed when a tent revival came to town. The Bud Chambers Crusade hit Ada—big crowds, lots of music, charismatic sermons, something to do at night. Ronnie went to the first service, was deeply moved, and returned the next night with most of his savings. When they passed the offering plate, he emptied his pockets. But Brother Bud needed more, so Ronnie returned the next night with the rest of his money. The next day he scraped up all the loose cash he could find or borrow and hustled back to the tent that night for another rowdy service and another hard-earned donation. For the entire week, Ronnie somehow managed to give and give, and when the crusade finally left town, he was flat broke.

Then he quit the paper route because it interfered with baseball. Roy scraped together the money and paid off the motorbike.

With both sisters out of the house, Ronnie demanded all the attention. A less beguiling child might have been intolerable, but he had developed an immense talent for charm. Warm, outgoing, and generous
himself, he had no problem expecting unwarranted generosity from his family.

As Ronnie was entering the tenth grade, the football coach at Ada High approached Roy and suggested that his son enroll in the larger school. The kid was a natural athlete; by then everybody in town knew Ronnie was an outstanding basketball and baseball player. But Oklahoma is football country, and the coach assured Roy that the lights were brighter playing on the gridiron for the Ada Cougars. With his size, speed, and arm, he could quickly develop into a top player, possibly a recruit. The coach offered to stop by the house each morning and give the kid a ride to school.

The decision was Ronnie’s, and he stuck with Byng, for two more years anyway.

The rural community of Asher sits almost unnoticed on Highway 177 twenty miles north of Ada. It has few people—fewer than five hundred—no downtown to speak of, a couple of churches, a water tower, and a few paved streets with some aging homes scattered about. Its pride is a beautiful baseball field, just past its tiny, Class-B high school on Division Street.

Like most very small towns, Asher seems an unlikely place for anything noteworthy, but for forty years it had the winningest high school baseball team in the nation. In fact, no high school in history, public or private, has won as many games as the Asher Indians.

It all began in 1959 when a young coach named Murl Bowen arrived and inherited a long-neglected program—the 1958 team did not win a game. Things
changed quickly. Within three years Asher had its first state title. Dozens would follow.

For reasons that are unlikely to ever become clear, Oklahoma sanctions varsity baseball in the fall, but only for those schools too small for football. During his career at Asher, it was not unusual for Coach Bowen’s teams to win a state title in the fall, then follow it up with another in the spring. During one remarkable stretch, Asher qualified for the state finals sixty straight times—thirty years in a row, fall and spring.

In forty years, Coach Bowen’s teams won 2,115 games, lost only 349, hauled home forty-three state championship trophies, and sent dozens of players to college and minor-league baseball. In 1975, Bowen was named the national high school coach of the year, and the town rewarded him by upgrading Bowen Field. In 1995, he received the same award again.

“It wasn’t me,” he says modestly, looking back. “It was the kids. I never scored a run.”

Maybe not, but he certainly produced enough. Beginning each August, when temperatures in Oklahoma often reach a hundred degrees, Coach Bowen would gather his small group of players and plan the next assault on the state play-offs. His rosters were always slim—each graduating class at Asher had about twenty kids, half girls—and it was not unusual to have a squad of only a dozen players, including an occasional eighth grader with promise. To make sure no one quit, his first order of business was to pass out the uniforms. Every kid made the team.

Then he worked them, beginning with three-a-day practices. The workouts were beyond rigorous—hours of conditioning, sprinting, running bases, drilling in the
fundamentals. He preached hard work, strong legs, dedication, and, above all, sportsmanship. No Asher player ever argued with an umpire, threw a helmet in frustration, or did anything to show up an opponent. If at all possible, no Asher team ever ran up the score against a weaker school.

Coach Bowen tried to avoid weak opponents, especially in the spring, when the season was longer and he had more flexibility with the schedule. Asher became famous for taking on the big schools and beating them. They routinely thrashed Ada, Norman, and the 4A and 5A giants from Oklahoma City and Tulsa. As the legend grew, these teams preferred to travel to Asher, to play on the pristine field that Coach Bowen maintained himself. More often than not, they left on a quiet bus.

His teams were highly disciplined and, some critics said, very well recruited. Asher became a magnet for serious baseball players with big dreams, and it was inevitable that Ronnie Williamson would find his way to the school. During the summer leagues, he met and became close to Bruce Leba, an Asher boy and probably the second-best player in the area, a step or two behind Ronnie. They became inseparable and soon were talking of playing their senior year together at Asher. There were more scouts, both college and professional, hanging around Bowen Field. And there was an excellent chance of winning the state titles in the fall of 1970 and the spring of 1971. Ron’s visibility would be much higher just up the road.

Changing schools meant renting a place in Asher, a huge sacrifice for his parents. Money was always tight, and Roy and Juanita would have to commute back and
forth to Ada. But Ronnie was determined. He was convinced, as were most baseball coaches and scouts in the area, that he could be a high draft pick the summer after his senior year. His dream of playing professionally was within reach; he just needed an extra push.

There were whispers that he just might be the next Mickey Mantle, and Ronnie heard them.

With covert help from some baseball boosters, the Williamsons rented a small house two blocks from Asher High School, and Ronnie reported in August to Coach Bowen’s boot camp. At first, he was overwhelmed by the level of conditioning, the sheer time spent running and running and running. The coach had to explain several times to his new star that iron legs are crucial to hitting, pitching, baserunning, making long throws from the outfield, and surviving the late innings of the second game of a doubleheader with a thin roster. Ronnie was slow to see things this way, but he was soon influenced by the fierce work ethic of his pal Bruce Leba and the other Asher players. He fell in line and was soon in great shape. One of only four seniors on the team, he was soon an unofficial captain and, with Leba, a leader.