Senior Year: A Father, a Son, and High School Baseball

In Senior Year, Dan Shaughnessy focuses his acclaimed sports writing talents on his son Sam?fs senior year of high school, a turning point in any young life and certainly in the relationship between father and son. Using that experience, Shaughnessy circles back to his own boyhood and calls on the many sports greats he?fs known over the years -- Ted Williams, Roger Clemens, Larry Bird -- to capture that uniquely American rite of passage that is sports.

Growing up, Dan Shaughnessy was so baseball-obsessed that he played games by himself and didn?ft even let himself win. His son, Sam Shaughnessy, came by his own love of sports naturally and was a natural hitter who quickly ascended the ranks of youth sports. Now nicknamed the 3-2 Kid for his astonishing ability to hover between success and failure in everything he does, Sam is finally a senior, and it?fs all on the line: what college to attend; how to keep his grades up and his head down until graduation; and whether his final high school baseball season, which features foul weather, a hitting slump, and a surprising clash with a longtime coach, will end in disappointment or triumph.

All along the way, Dad is there, chronicling that universal experience of putting your child out on the field -- and in the world -- and hoping for the best. With gleaming insight, wicked humor, and, at times, the searching soul of an unsure father, Shaughnessy illuminates how sports connect generations and how they help us grow up -- and let go.

Introduction

It was getting dark and I was standing in the parking lot beyond the right field
fence at the high school baseball field. The kids call it ?gthird lot.?h It once provided
parking for Newton North High School students, but that was before too many kids
got cars, so now it?fs reserved for faculty and seniors during school hours. At this
moment, third lot was two-thirds empty and the only remaining cars belonged to
the players on the baseball team, plus a handful of parents and friends.
I had my keys in my hand. I?fd already said goodbye to my old high
school coach, who?fd made the drive down from New Hampshire to sit with me and
watch my son play. It was a cold New England May day and the game was
running long and I had to get going. I was due at a wake for the 21-year-old son
of my cousin. The wake was taking place in the small town where I was born, an
hour?fs drive to the west, and the notice in the newspaper said visiting hours would
be over at 7 p.m.
It had been an emotional day, sitting on the cold metal slats, watching
Sam hit, catching up with my old coach, and thinking about what my cousin
Mickey was going through. I hadn?ft seen Mickey in over a year. We were never
especially close. That happens when you have fifty-one first cousins and move
away after college. But it was easy to remember everything I admired about
Mickey. He was a terrific high school athlete, only two years older than me. He
seemed to be better than everyone else at everything: Football. Basketball. Skiing.
He was strong, tough, skilled, and movie-star handsome. He had his own rock ?fn?f
roll band. Chicks dug him and guys wanted to be him. It would have been easy to
hate the guy, but he was generous and caring, and when I would see him years
later he was always humble about his high school greatness. He?fd made a fine life
for himself, working for the gas company and raising two kids with his wife. Now
he was getting ready to bury his son, young Michael, who had died at home in
bed, another victim of the national scourge of Oxycontin. Michael had been a high
school football stud, just like his father. He had been good enough to win a
scholarship to Wagner College, and there had been a picture in the local
newspaper of Michael signing his letter of intent. Now, just a couple of years later,
his picture was in the paper again, accompanied by one of those impossibly sad
stories about a promising young life that ended too soon.
So I was feeling a little guilty as I stood in third lot, jangling my keys
and watching the high school baseball game groan into extra innings. I didn?ft want
to miss the wake, but I remembered that earlier in the day Mickey?fs brother had
told me, ?gWe?fll be there long after seven.?h Besides, Sam was scheduled to lead off
the bottom of the tenth and he was due. He had been hitting the ball hard all day,
but he was sitting on an 0-4 and I knew his small world would tumble into chaos
and panic if he went hitless for the day. Such is the fragility and self-absorption of
the high school mind.
I was wondering about my own mind, too. I am a professional
sportswriter, specializing in baseball. I?fve been a columnist for the Boston Globe
for more than fifteen years, covering Olympics, Super Bowls, World Series,
Stanley Cup Finals, NBA Championships, and Ryder Cups. I traveled with the
Baltimore Orioles, Boston Celtics, and Red Sox back in the days when writers
really traveled and lived with the ballplayers. I?fve written ten books, seven on
baseball. I can go to any game, any time I want. And yet I find myself fixated on
the successes and failures of Newton North High School and Sam Shaughnessy,
my only son and the youngest of three ballplaying children. Sam?fs sisters had fun
and fulfilling seasons in high school volleyball, field hockey, and softball, and I
was amazed at how following their games connected me to their school and our
community while kindling so many thoughts of my own high school days thirty
years earlier. Probably that?fs why I found myself suddenly skipping Red Sox road
trips and canceling TV appearances because of weather-forced changes in the
high school baseball season. Random Sox fans wanted to ask me about Curt
Schilling and Jonathan Papelbon. I?fd rather talk about Newton North lefthander, J.
T. Ross.
The score was still tied when Sam walked to the plate to open up the
bottom of the tenth, and we were definitely losing the light, making it even tougher
to hit. The Braintree coach came out to talk to his pitcher. I looked at the sky. I
looked at my watch. This was it. I?fd stare through the chain link for one more at
bat, then get in the car. Darkness was going to make this the last inning, even if
the score was still tied after ten.
And then, in an instant, the baseball was screeching over the first
baseman?fs head, over the rightfielder?fs head, over the chain link, and onto the
trunk of the 1998 Toyota Corolla that Sam had driven to school that day. It rolled
across the lot and came to rest under a tree. I retrieved the ball while he circled
the bases.
There was no such thing as a ?gwalkoff ?h home run when I went to high
school. We had read the stories about Bobby Thomson?fs Shot Heard Round the
World, and all my friends and I knew that the Pirates?f second baseman Bill
Mazeroski had won the 1960 World Series with a homer in the bottom of the
ninth . . . but nobody talked about ?gwalkoffs?h until Kirk Gibson dropped one on
Dennis Eckersley in the 1988 World Series. Eck popularized the term, and now
there are walkoff homers, walkoff doubles, walkoff walks, even an occasional
walkoff balk.
In any event, Sam Shaughnessy had his first high school walkoff
homer (a drive-off walkoff, given the dent in the Toyota) and knew enough to take
his helmet off after rounding third base. He had seen Red Sox slugger David Ortiz
do this a lot. A helmetless head is less likely to be pounded by your teammates.
I walked in from right field and delivered the baseball to my smiling
son. I told him not to worry about the dent on the roof of the trunk (not sure my
dad would have been so casual about the damage done). Then I got in my car
and drove to the wake.
The country roads took me back. They took me to the place where I
grew up, the place where I experienced all the highs and lows that were now
happening to Sam. I remembered how it felt to have a moment like he had today,
and I knew he would hold it in his heart for the rest of his life. Sports have a way
of defining our lives, particularly teenage lives. The local high school basketball
games were a big deal in my hometown when I was growing up. Most of our
parents came to the games and sat in the back row of the small gym. The
successes and failures of our team made for conversation around the post office
and drug store in the center of town. We connected through sports.
Two decades later, when my classmates filled out a reunion form,
there was a question regarding your favorite high school memory. I was struck by
how many answered ?gDances after the Friday night basketball games.?h These
were not just the ballplayers and cheerleaders. These were kids who had never
played on the team, but as grownups they had fond memories of cold nights in a
warm gym, when a sporting event was the center of our tiny universe.
The trick is to keep moving forward and not let the glory days of high
school become the highlight of your life.
When I wheeled into the funeral home a few minutes after seven, there
was a line the length of a football field waiting to pay respects to Michael. Inside, I
joined my sisters, cousins, aunts, and uncles and waited for the line to dwindle. In
my mind, I pledged not to speak of why I was late or of how the game had ended.
A couple of hours later, the line completely exhausted, I knelt before
young Michael and said a prayer. Inside the open casket, there was a photo of
Michael celebrating a high school football victory with his teammates. When I
stood up, cousin Mickey was there, sobbing, spent, but still strong enough to hug
me with the force of a linebacker.
It is a universal truth that it?fs virtually impossible to say anything
appropriate in a moment like this. Nothing is worse than a parent losing a child.
The loss is unspeakable and incomprehensible. Only those who have experienced
such a tragedy can possibly know what it feels like. But the events of my day had
given me special perspective, and for once I felt like I knew exactly what to say.
?gMichael must have given you a lot of joy.?h
?gOh, Danny,?h he said, smiling through the tears, pointing to the photo
inside the casket. ?gYou should have seen him play. And not just because he was
my son, either. That was the Acton-Boxboro game. One of the greatest nights for
all of them. I loved watching him play more than anything.?h
There it was. I knew then I had made the right decision, staying an
extra inning to see the end of a high school baseball game while my sisters and
cousins and aunts and uncles were already at the wake. And as I drove home,
back across the roads of my youth, I knew I had to write something down.


Groton to Newton
It?fs embarrassing to admit, but I kept a diary in high school. Such a dork. Today,
a teenager might get away with calling it a ?gjournal,?h but only cheerleaders and
pretty-in-pink girls keep a locked book under the bed and begin each entry
with ?gDear Diary.?h Naturally, I still have the two small books (covering junior and
senior years), and it?fs hilarious to read through the well-worn pages. I have a 35-
year-old niece who was born during my senior year of high school, and during a
recent holiday gathering, I fetched the book to see what I had written on the day
after she was born. And there it was. After several paragraphs about sitting next to
Eleanor Lehtinen in study hall, and getting a pimple on my nose, and Friday
night?fs big win over Nashoba Regional, there was a single closing line that
read, ?gMary had a baby girl last night.?h
In The Rise and Fall of the American Teenager, Thomas Hine
wrote, ?gFiguring out where they fit in — to the universe, the economy, their social
circle, their family — is a project on which teenagers spend a lot of their time and
energy.?h
That, and looking in the mirror and thinking about the next game, of
course.
My hideous, humble journal serves as a reminder of how immature and
insecure one can be at the age of 18. Looking back, I?fm amazed how busy and
needy I was in those final days of high school. But I don?ft need the diary to
remember what it felt like when the next game was the most important event in my
life. There?fs an 18-year-old forever locked away inside all of us; that?fs why you?fll
always see balding men with big bellies driving sports cars, buying young women
drinks, and pulling hamstrings playing full court basketball.
The joy of playing ball never leaves us. If you have hit a baseball over
a fence or finished first in a race or even just sat on the bench — satisfied to be a
part of something with your friends — you never forget the feeling. It starts the
first time we kick a ball into a goal or beat our sister in a footrace when we are 4
years old. It might be in a backyard, on a beach, or in an asphalt alley behind a
three-decker house. You don?ft have to be on Wide World of Sports to
experience ?gthe thrill of victory and the agony of defeat?h: it happens in your
earliest days of dodge ball. Not everyone plays the piano or violin, but just about
every kid boots a soccer ball and runs a race. Fortunate fathers and moms get a
second go-around. Watching a child pass through the same passages connects
every parent to his or her own youth.
I had the good fortune to be born in Groton, Massachusetts, in 1953,
the youngest of Bill and Eileen Shaughnessy?fs five children. Bill was a sales
executive at a bag company, a particularly boring and low-paying job. Eileen was
a nurse. They met when he had his appendix removed at Cambridge City
Hospital, where she worked. Family folklore holds that Mom and Dad?fs first date
was a wake somewhere far north in Maine. My father had been pestering the
pretty young nurse for a date, but she informed him that she didn?ft go out with
patients. He persisted. She finally caved in, but only because she needed a ride
to the wake of one of her roommate?fs parents. Way to go, Dad. Sounds like the
defi- nition of desperation.
My father was a smart, handsome man. He had attended Boston
College, where he matriculated with Thomas ?gTip?h O?fNeill, later the longtime
speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. It turned out that the
Shaughnessys had at one time rented from the O?fNeills in Cambridge, and my
dad liked to dismiss the great speaker by informing us, ?gI put the bum through
college.?h
My dad?fs brother claims Bill Shaughnessy was quite the sportsman in
his youth, but by the time I came along, Dad wasn?ft moving much, unless he was
picking up sticks and stones in our rather large backyard (our twelve-room
farmhouse was purchased for $7,000 with help from the GI Bill one year after
Dad came home from Germany). Dad was thirty-nine years older than me and I
never saw him run. We never played catch or did anything athletic together. I
guess that?fs what friends and older siblings were for. This was the 1950s
and ?f60s, and fathers dressed like Ward Cleaver. Bill Shaughnessy wore white
shirts and black shoes every day of his working life. He did a little yard work
around the house, but that was it. There was one day when he came home from
work and found me by the side door with a baseball bat in my hands, and for
some reason he decided to offer a little instruction. He told me that he had been a
pretty fair power hitter in his day and that he?fd once scattered some local girls
with one of his prodigious blasts off a park bench. Then he proceeded to
demonstrate how he would walk into the pitch as it was coming toward home
plate — for additional power. I was only 10 years old, but I knew that was dopey. I
thanked him for the ridiculous hitting lesson and watched him go inside where
he?fd sit in his brown Archie Bunker chair, read his paper, and maybe wind down
with a highball before dinner.
My dad never made much money, but somehow kept things afloat and
managed to send all five kids off to college. He was a master money manager; we
were so frugal we stripped tinsel off the Christmas tree and used it again the
following year. When I was in high school, and the other four kids were gone —
one still in college — Dad borrowed money from me. My diary entries are quite
clear on this. Dad borrowed $250 of the dough I?fd saved from working as a soda
jerk at the local ice cream and fried clam joint, Johnson?fs Drive-In. Two-fifty was
a fortune in 1970. Minimum wage was $1.60 per hour and making seventy-five
cents in tips in one shift was noteworthy in my daily log.
Poring through the pages of my tattered journals, I am struck by how
many of the daily entries began with ?gDad and I went to the dump this morning.?h
Apparently that was how we bonded. We would load up the trunk of Dad?fs four-
door Ford sedan and off to the dump we?fd go, toting bags of papers and trash
(coffee grounds, eggshells, and other perishables were discarded in separate
barrels and left on the curb to be taken to local pig farms). Dad spilled a lot of
wisdom on those dump runs, but I cannot remember much of what was said. The
conversation I remember best came in November 1963, when we drove to the
dump on a rainy Saturday, the day after our president was assassinated, and he
told me that people would be talking about this for the rest of my life. He saved the
sex talk for a day when he was driving me to the orthodontist (I was 14!). The
dump run was for talking about school and sports and family issues. There are no
dumps anymore, only ?glandfills.?h Sadly, my kids have never been to a landfill. Or a
dump. I have had to find alternative locations for heart-to-heart, dad-to-kid chats.
My mom was even less athletic than my dad. She was a stunning,
strong woman who had helped raise her seven siblings (six brothers), making
lunches, scrubbing piles of laundry, ironing everything (even socks and
underwear), and washing dirty dishes by hand. When she became a wife and
mother, it was more of the same. We never had a mechanical dishwasher or
clothes dryer. My siblings and I share goofy winter memories of bringing frozen
sheets and T-shirts in from the clothesline. We called them ?gthe boards.?h
Mom would have been a perfect politician?fs wife. She was fastidious
about remembering names and writing thank-you notes. She had great posture
(her college yearbook declared that her favorite sport was ?gstanding erect?h) and
the best penmanship of anyone I have ever known. She could not afford luxury
items, but she always insisted on quality. That went for us, too, when it came to
buying shoes or sports coats. We didn?ft have many extras, but the stuff we had
was top shelf. For all of her hard work — chores that made her hands rougher
than she would have liked — Mom was something of a diva. No housecoats or
curlers in her hair when she went out of the house. On beach outings, when it
was time to leave, she made us fetch pails of water so she could wash the sand
off her feet before putting on her shoes. The one-time Miss Silver Laker was ever
dolled up, even when doing housework. She lived to be 81 years old, and not
once did I ever see her with her hair wet or unkempt. Needless to say, I never
saw her run, either.
Groton in the 1950s was something right out of a Ron Howard movie.
The first play I saw in high school was Thornton Wilder?fs Our Town, and it struck
me as totally boring and unremarkable because it depicted conversations and
situations I heard and saw every day. Nothing special about that, right? Ours was
a town of Yankee farmers who said little and wanted no one to know how much
money and land they had. We never locked our doors and dialed only five
numbers to make phone calls. Everyone knew everyone else?fs business, even
when the days of the telephone party lines ended. My wife, Marilou, a native of
Detroit, would be perplexed and charmed by this when she made her first trip to
Groton in 1980. We stopped at Forcino?fs Market to pick up some groceries to
bring home to my mother. As Leo Forcino was ringing up our purchases in his
bloodstained apron (Leo was also the butcher, of course), he stopped, held aloft a
half gallon of ice cream, and said, ?gDan, you might not want this because your
mother was in this morning and picked up some ice cream.?h
?gChocolate chip??h I asked.
?gYeah, chocolate chip, Dan,?h said Leo.
A half mile down the road, closer to home, we stopped at the town
hardware store because Marilou needed double-A batteries for the flash on her
camera. I stayed in the car and told her to ask for either of the Sargent brothers.
My old schoolmates, Dana and Rickey Sargent, ran the store. She picked up a
four-pack of Duracells and as Rickey was ringing up the purchase, she made an
offhand remark about how wasteful it was to have to buy four batteries when you
need only two. Invariably, the other two batteries get lost and go to waste. Hearing
this, old Rick ripped open the package and sold her two of the batteries for half of
the sticker price. Marilou was slapping her forehead and laughing when she got
back to the car.
?gWhat?fs up with this place??h she asked before relaying the story. Stuff
like that never happened in Detroit.
For many years, there were no stoplights in Groton (one was
grudgingly installed for the new millennium). It was a town of 4,000 in the 1950s,
and I went to school with kids who lived on apple, dairy, and produce farms.
Houses were far apart and we rode our bikes everywhere, sometimes lining our
wheel spokes with baseball cards because we liked the way it sounded. An odd
little man named Bravel Goulart cut our hair and would give me a nickel to go next
door to Bruce Pharmacy and fetch a newspaper. Old school. Bravel cut our hair
the way our dads and moms wanted it cut, even after the Beatles splashed ashore
in 1964.
In this vast space of small-town serenity, it was baseball that filled the
long summer days. And it was major league baseball that made us feel connected
to something bigger than Groton. The Boston Red Sox weren?ft very good for most
of the 1950s and ?f60s, but they always had a lot of home run hitters and every
now and then someone would pitch a no-hitter. A huge relief pitcher named Dick
Radatz entertained us by raising his arms over his head when he walked off the
hill after fanning the great Mickey Mantle. We got to listen to the greatest
announcer of them all, Curt Gowdy, and most of the weekend games were on TV.
The Sox were the big league team in the big city. They were ours, even if they
stunk. (Nobody ever said ?gsucks?h in the 1960s, at least not without
punishment. ?gSucks?h is, in fact, the new ?gstinks.?h) They lost more than they won,
but we followed them anyway.
My first trip to a Red Sox game was in 1961, a weeknight win over the
Orioles. Today, I silently curse my deceased parents for not getting to Fenway
one year earlier. Ted Williams retired in 1960 and I never saw him play. His was
a magical name in every New England home when I was a kid, but my folks did
not think to get Danny to Fenway before Ted hung ?fem up. So I went in 1961, in
the second grade, and I remember that famous first glimpse of the Fenway green
when I walked up the ramp with my dad and brother. Fenway was grainy, small,
and gray on the tiny black-and-white Philco at home. Like most people my age,
when I finally walked into that ancient yard for the first time, I was awed,
overwhelmed, and tangled up in green. Unfortunately, I was not struck by the sight
of Ted Williams taking batting practice, so I settled for a rookie leftfielder named
Carl Yastrzemski. The Red Sox beat the Orioles that night, and I fell asleep in the
back seat on the ride home. I was still one year removed from a lifetime?fs
immersion in baseball.
It happened in the summer of 1962. Something just clicked. My older
brother, Bill, was a local teen baseball sensation by the time I was 8, and no doubt
this had much to do with my sudden fascination for all things baseball. I knew
every player on every major league team. I collected baseball cards and baseball
coins and watched every game that was on television. The ?f62 Sox were dreadful,
but that hardly mattered. My world was baseball, and I would play imaginary
games with a rubber ball and my S & H Greenstamp/Tito Francona–model glove.
We got our mail at the post office, and I faithfully stalked the brick building when
my monthly Sport magazine was due. Sport featured a few too many stories about
Mantle and Whitey Ford for my liking, but it didn?ft really matter much as long as it
was baseball. The town librarian learned to set aside any new young-reader
baseball novels. I?fd inhale the cliché-laden texts and return them in a matter of
days. I invented a baseball dice game and played an entire 162- game season
with my imaginary teams. I wallpapered my bedroom with baseball photographs
and played some form of baseball — often by myself — from the time I woke up
until the sun went down, unless of course there was school or a family function.
My sisters still laugh recalling my narration of imaginary games with a rubber ball
at the back porch steps. They would chuckle while they dried dishes at the
kitchen sink. Joan, who is ten years older than me, claims I would sometimes
work myself into a fit of tears while playing one-on-one with myself. ?gWhy didn?ft
you just let yourself win??h she would later ask.
It was not that simple, of course, but how could anyone else
understand the game inside my head? I was an 8-year-old baseball Rain Man.
In Billy Crystal?fs City Slickers, a female character teases three 40-
year-old guys regarding their lack of intellectual curiosity contrasted with their
remembrance of everything having to do with baseball. When she says, ?gI don?ft
remember who played third base for Pittsburgh in 1960,?h all three simultaneously
say, ?gDon Hoak.?h
Alone in the theater, I, too, stared at the screen and said, ?gDon Hoak.?h
I remember my uncle Chappy looking at the scorebook I kept while
watching the 1964 World Series on television (Cardinals over the Yankees, 4–3)
and telling me, ?gThis is good. You should keep doing this. You might be able to do
something with it.?h
Uncle Chappy was probably into his third whiskey by then. I?fm sure he
never remembered the conversation. But I did. And he was right.
As a professional baseball writer for more than thirty years, I?fve
learned that many of the best big league players know little about players who
came before them. It seems that the gifted ones are rarely devoted fans of the
game. They?fre just really good at it. Nomar Garciaparra didn?ft waste any time
memorizing the lineup of the 1982 California Angels. He was busy playing soccer
and baseball better than the rest of his friends. In my experience, people who love
baseball the most are often one step removed from the dugouts and bullpens.
Fans, writers, broadcasters, and professional baseball executives get into the
game because they love baseball. A lot of players get into it because they are
good at it and it pays well. In the spring of 2006, Red Sox reliever Keith Foulke,
the man who closed out the first Red Sox World Championship in eighty-six
years, a pitcher making more than $7 million annually, admitted, ?gI?fll never be
channeled toward baseball. I?fm not a baseball fan. I actually find baseball kind of
boring. It?fs not my life. I can?ft sit around and watch nine innings of a baseball
game.?h
My playing career was fun but unspectacular. Brother Bill was my first
obstacle. When I was a kid, my big brother seemed to be better at baseball than
just about anybody who ever played in Groton. They put him on the high school
varsity as a starting rightfielder when he was in the seventh grade. By the time he
was a sophomore, he was hitting home runs and winning a league championship
as a pitcher. Bill is six years older than I am, and I?fm convinced that I learned to
report on sports by going to his games, then coming home and telling my parents
and sisters what had happened.
Going to Fenway was not common. It was a once-a-year event, like
Christmas and my birthday, and usually timed to soften the blow of my annual visit
to the Lahey Clinic, where I was treated for asthma. Groton is only forty miles
from Boston, but we didn?ft make many long drives when I was a kid, and a trip to
the Hub was treated like a trip to Europe. We usually had to stop at the Howard
Johnson?fs in Concord to mark the midpoint of our long journey. This made
faraway Fenway even more fascinating. Thinking back, I remember a couple of
times when my annual game was rained out, and to this day I deal poorly with
unexpected disappointment. It reminds me of a rainout for that summer day I
looked forward to the most.
Want more childhood trauma? Try this: I was traded in Little League.
In the fourth grade I started out as a member of the Dodgers, but Groton?fs in-town
Little League Dodgers and Yankees were too strong and the Giants and Braves
too weak, so they put my name into a lottery for a dispersal draft to break up the
superpowers. Probably because my brother was so good, the Braves assumed I
would be good and took me for their roster. Sort of the Dominic DiMaggio effect.
My Dodger coach, Andre Van Hoogen, called me before school one morning to
break the news. I was crushed.
I loved Mr. Van Hoogen. He was the father of a raft of talented sons
and daughters, and he?fd come to our town from Chicago, where he?fd coached
Bryant and Greg Gumbel. Mr. Van Hoogen had had a childhood bout with polio
that rendered his right arm useless. Still, he managed to hit us fungoes with his
good arm — smoking a cigarette at the same time. It was impressive. He also was
some kind of engineering genius and used a lot of big words. When we started
calling a familiar umpire by his nickname, ?gJake,?h Mr. Van Hoogen told us to
knock it off. Said it sounded like we were in ?gcahoots?h with Jake. Cahoots. I had
to look that one up. Mr. Van Hoogen had a Fort Devens sticker on his car, which
meant he could drive onto the army base in nearby Ayer and shop at the PX,
where everything cost less. There were a lot of great men like Mr. Van Hoogen
when I was a kid — men who?fd served in World War II and come home never to
speak of it again. Mr. Kopec, dad of my Little League teammate Woody, had
fought on the beach in Normandy.
Then there was Mr. Zeamer, whose house was on Old Ayer Road. My
friends and I knew it as the hallowed home of the great-looking Zeamer girls. My
sister Ann was friendly with the bubbly Jackie Zeamer, and when my dad and I
went to pick up Ann after a slumber party, Dad mentioned that Mr. Zeamer had
been awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for his bravery in World War II.
None of the Zeamer girls ever mentioned this, and neither did their dad.
Tom Brokaw would later call them ?gthe Greatest Generation,?h but we
just knew these remarkable men as solid citizens who seemed to love the pace
and beauty of small-town life. When I started behind the counter at the ice cream
joint, the owner, Norm Johnson, told me the most important thing was serving
customers quickly. He reminded me many of his customers had waited in lines
during their hitch in the service, and they didn?ft ever want to wait in line again.
No doubt there are psychologists who?fd enjoy getting inside the head
of a little boy who was traded in Little League then grew up to be a wisecracking
sports columnist, but we will have none of that here. Getting traded turned out to
be okay, because I got two hats and a small trophy when the Dodgers won it all
that year. I guess it was my World Series share for spending a portion of the
season with the champs.
The real highlight of my baseball playing career came when I was 12
and led the league in home runs, hitting six in nine games. That first homer was
the best. If you love playing baseball, hitting your first home run over a fence is
easily a bigger deal than your first day of school, first kiss, first day on the job, or
any of that other stuff. My first homer came on my first swing of the 1966 season
off Yankee righty, Buzzy Lanni. Big Buzz threw hard and straight and I got him
with the thirty-inch Al Kaline Louisville Slugger I?fd purchased from Moisen?fs
Hardware (later owned by the battery-bartering Sargent brothers) for six bucks. It
was a beautiful, tapered, light bat with wide grain and perfect polish — like those
shiny wooden checkerboards on the shelves of the souvenir shops at Hampton
Beach. It even smelled good. It was my Wonderboy.
Standing on the mound on that perfect May Sunday, big Buzz held a
right-out-of-the-box baseball that was as white as a Chiclet. That?fs how you knew
the game was for real. In all forms of practice or backyard baseball, we?fd use
scuffed balls, taped balls, tennis balls, rubber balls, pimple balls, half-balls,
anything. Not this time. Not on opening day. Hitting this ball would be like making
the first sled marks on a hill of fresh snow. My heart beat fast as I stepped into the
righthanded batter?fs box. This never changed. There was always an element of
fright and anticipation whenever I went up to hit. Now I get that feeling when Sam
is hitting. I suspect it?fs the same for all ballplayers and all parents.
Old Buzz?fs first pitch was a knee-high fastball, right where I like ?fem. I
did not put anything extra into the swing. I simply did what I?fd done before
thousands of times in my backyard. I followed the flight of the pitch, opened my
hips, swung at the ball, and heard a click. The great Yaz once talked about that
perfect hitter?fs moment when you take a big swing, connect with the sweet spot of
the baseball, and feel absolutely nothing as your bat whooshes through the hitting
zone. The hardball takes off like a Titleist struck by a two-iron. I experienced this
only once.
There were no over-the-fence homers for me after that fi- nal Little
League season. I was a scrawny second baseman/out- fielder with little power. I
played three years of varsity baseball at Groton High, but our teams were terrible
and I was lucky to hit .250. We had more fun in the summertime, playing Babe
Ruth games and commuting to surrounding towns in the flatbed of Mr. Friedrich?fs
green truck. He would carry the whole team, ten to twelve guys, in the back of the
rusty old Ford. His son, Albane, painted a ?gchartered?h sign and taped it across the
front of the truck. We would rumble across the bumpy, winding roads of Ayer,
Pepperell, Shirley, and Lancaster, drinking Coca Cola from those 6½-ounce
green bottles and singing songs we?fd heard on F Troop. Then we would harass
the other team?fs players (?gThis kid?fs got nothing! He?fs throwing junk!?h), bash our
way to victory, hop on the flatbed, and chug back to Groton. We might even stop
for ice cream if old man Friedrich had a spare ten dollars. None of it would work
today. You couldn?ft put kids in the back of a truck and you certainly could not hurl
insults at the other team. Not now. Parents and officials would get in the way of
the fun.
When I first touched down on Holy Cross?fs campus in September
1971, I went out for fall baseball for about a week. Once a national power, winning
the NCAA Championship at Omaha in 1952, Holy Cross?fs baseball program was
struggling by the time I arrived. I had brought my spikes and glove to school and
went to a few captain?fs practices. I remember doing pretty well in batting practice
at Fitton Field and getting the attention of the senior captain who was running the
workout. But I knew the time demand would be large and the reward small. A
plodding, .250 hitter from the Wachusett League wasn?ft good enough for Division
I college baseball.
This was the proverbial fork in the road. In high school I had been
class president, played three sports, worked twenty-five hours a week, wrote for
the town newspaper, and even served as an audio-visual aide (the ultimate in
dorkdom). I had promised myself to commit to only one extracurricular activity in
college. It would not be baseball. I would write for the weekly student newspaper.
My first assignment for the vaunted Crusader was covering the
freshman football team. In my first story, I wrote that the freshman football team
was in a ?grebuilding year.?h And I wasn?ft even kidding.
Sports writing worked out pretty well in college. I was sports editor four
weeks into sophomore year and soon realized that it would be prudent to spend
more time on the school paper than on my studies. I nagged the Boston Globe
editors and writers constantly for work, and after my junior year the Globe sports
editor Dave Smith asked me if I would like to cover the Boston Neighborhood
Basketball League during the summer. I would have walked on my lips through
busted glass for any opportunity to get bylines in the Globe. It was then the paper
of Peter Gammons (also a Grotonian), Ray Fitzgerald, Leigh Montville, Bud
Collins, Will McDonough, Fran Rosa, and Bob Ryan. A tour through the Globe
sports department was a walk through the clouds, and I spent the next three
summers driving Globe cars in and out of sixteen different Boston neighborhoods,
watching teenagers play summer basketball outdoors. It was the best training I
could have had. I learned the city from Savin Hill to Mattapan, from Charlestown to
Brighton. Due to forced school busing, the Hub was immersed in racial tension
during those years, but my game knew no colors and no political points of view. I
was a sportswriter for the Boston Globe. I covered and befriended men named
Kevin Mackey, Leo Papile, and Jim Calhoun, guys who made it big in later years.
But in those years, we were all just part of the Hub?fs hoop culture, sweating
nightly and wondering when the city would ever cool down.
I graduated from college in 1975 and spent the next two years blissfully
enjoying independence and learning the life of a sportswriter. I got to run quotes
for the Associated Press at Fenway Park during the World Series season of
1975. It paid only seven dollars per night, but we could eat and drink all we
wanted in the expansive, wood-paneled press dining room at Fenway. I
introduced myself to old Mr. Tom Yawkey. I ate scrod and drank Scotch with
Jumpin?f Joe Dugin, who played third base for the 1927 Yankees. Jumpin?f Joe
had roomed with Babe Ruth and loved to tell stories about the Bambino. He would
sometimes put his glass down, glance at me stuffing my face, and exclaim, ?gThis
kid eats more than Ruth!?h I loved that.
Sitting in the smoky pressroom, I could listen to Billy Martin, Earl
Weaver, Gene Mauch, Dick Williams, Bill Veeck, Calvin Griffith, Clark Booth, and
all the writers I grew up reading. The stories got better as the night lengthened
and the whiskey flowed. I quickly realized you learn the most by just listening.
This experience helped me land a job as a baseball writer at the
Baltimore Evening Sun in the summer of 1977. I was 23 years old and vividly
remember my first road trip to Cleveland. I found myself alone in an elevator with
Brooks Robinson; he asked me my name and how old I was and said, ?gYou?fre
going to have a great time.?h
Brooks Robinson. How many times had I pretended I was him while
tossing the rubber ball against the backdoor porch in Groton? Now, I was standing
with him in an elevator at the Hollendon House in an American League city. I was
in the big leagues, even if it was only as a small writer. The Orioles were then
managed by Weaver and had a pitcher named Jim Palmer and a rookie
designated hitter named Eddie Murray. All would make it to the Hall of Fame, as
would a Maryland high school kid the O?fs drafted in 1978 — Cal Ripken Jr. Cal?fs
dad, a third base coach, used to take me to dinner almost nightly at the old
Dupont Plaza Hotel when the Orioles trained in Miami. When young Cal came to
spring camp, the three of us would dine together.
The Orioles made it to the World Series two years after I left Boston.
By then I was covering the Baltimore team for the Washington Star. A month
before the ?f79 World Series, the O?fs made their final trip to Boston, and I hosted a
Saturday night party in my high-rise corner room at the Boston Sheraton. Weaver
and several of his coaches appeared, and the old men were quite taken with
some of our young female friends. We still talk about Earl dancing in my room
with several of the lovely Brissette sisters. The next day, I gave the maid ten
dollars to clean up the room before my folks arrived for Sunday brunch. Proud of
my expense account, I bought lunch for the folks, and I know Dad loved that.
Later that day, before the game ended, I went to see my parents in section 27 of
Fenway Park. It would be the last time I saw my dad.
The scheduled first game of the 1979 World Series in Baltimore was
rained out. It snowed lightly overnight, and I stopped by old Memorial Stadium the
next morning to see if Commissioner Bowie Kuhn might postpone game one for a
second day. This was long before the cell phone era and I had no way of knowing
that my family in Massachusetts was trying to reach me. When I walked into the
Orioles?f offices, a secretary said, ?gThere he is,?h and whisked me into the office of
veteran public relations director Bob Brown.
?gIt?fs about your dad,?h he said, stumbling to find words.
?gHe died, right??h I asked.
?gYes, he died,?h said Bob Brown.
It was a conversation I?fd been expecting to have since my earliest
days. Dad had had a lot of heart trouble as a young man and we were actually
surprised he made it to the age of 64. I called my mom, brother, and sisters from
Memorial Stadium, then flew home to Boston. We buried Dad three days later,
and I rejoined the World Series in Pittsburgh before game four.
So it was always baseball. The last time I saw my dad was in Fenway
Park. I was in Memorial Stadium when I learned he died. And he?fs buried in a
small cemetery in East Pepperell, Massachusetts, right next to a Little League ball
field.
I even met Marilou — who knows next to nothing about base ball —
through baseball. It was six months after my father had passed and I was in
Chicago with the Orioles, knocking back a few with Weaver and a radio guy in
the Lion Bar at the Westin Hotel on Michigan Ave. A young woman — the only
young woman at the Westin that night — kept running in and out of the bar (I
found out later she was calling her boyfriend from the lobby payphone). I stopped
her, offered to buy a drink, and pointed out that the great Earl Weaver was seated
on a nearby stool. Naturally, she?fd never heard of Earl. A month later, she would
join me in Milwaukee when the Orioles were in town to play the Brewers. When I
introduced her to Earl in the Pfister Hotel coffee shop at breakfast, he blurted, ?gIn
my day, we ordered room service!?h
That Earl always was a sweet talker.
It mattered not that Marilou knew nothing about baseball. I got enough
of it every day from fans and friends. John F. Kennedy was said to be relieved
that Jackie never greeted him at the door with ?gWhat?fs new in Laos??h Marilou and
I were married in February 1982 in Detroit (big draw, Detroit in February), and by
then I was working at the Boston Globe, occasionally covering the Red Sox.
Baseball bookmarked our new family events. Sarah, who would grow
up to become a catcher, was born in 1984, which was a good year to fly our
family to Detroit because the Tigers were on their way to winning the World
Series. When Kate was born in July 1985, I walked from Beth Israel Hospital to
Fenway Park, where I handed out cigars behind the batting cage. Kate, who
would become an outfielder, fell in love with baseball before any of our other kids,
and when she was diagnosed with leukemia at the age of 8, it was the Jimmy
Fund — the official charity of the Boston Red Sox — that saved her life. Sam was
born on a Friday afternoon in October 1987, the day I was supposed to be flying
to Detroit for a season-ending series between the Tigers and Blue Jays. The next
day he (sort of) watched his first game, an extra-inning pitcher?fs duel between
Jack Morris and Mike Flanagan. We brought Sam home on Sunday and I flew to
Minnesota for the American League Championship Series the next day.
Baseball has been there at every important moment of my life. It has
been very very good to me.


Copyright © 2007 by Dan Shaughnessy
Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company

Dan Shaughnessy is an award-winning columnist for the Boston Globe and the author of several sports books, including The Curse of the Bambino, a best-selling classic now in its twenty-first printing. Seven times Shaughnessy has been voted one of America’s top ten sports columnists by Associated Press Sports Editors and named Massachusetts Sportswriter of the Year. He has appeared on Good Morning America, The Today Show, The Early Show, CNN, Nightline, NPR, Imus in the Morning, ESPN, HBO, and many others.
He lives in Newton, Massachusetts.

Part love song to baseball, part autobiography, part a recounting of his son's senior year in high school, this book delivers its tributes elegantly. A columnist for the Boston Globe, Shaughnessy (The Curse of the Bambino ) melds an account of his own coming of age with that of son Sam, who struggles to make his mark at the game his father has made a profession out of covering. In dissecting Sam's trials and triumphs, Shaughnessy recollects his own, in athletics and elsewhere in life. Sure to be a popular title for all public libraries.

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