Long Shot (2 page)

Their house was in Norristown and one of the main attractions was the basement, where my grandfather kept a big wooden barrel to make wine out of grapes he crushed. Technically, it was fortified wine, a form of brandy, but we called it Dago Red. Grandpa was a handy, homey kind of guy—he kept
a neat little garden out back—and on Sunday afternoons, we saw only his domestic side. There was a certain sweetness to it. But he was Sicilian to the bone, and with that came a stern, macho, controlling dimension, under which my father was brought up. You could call it a mean streak, although my dad wouldn’t. In the tradition, he considered it tough love.

My father beat me pretty good. Maybe I was bad at the time. He had one of those cat-o’-nine-tails, with a razor strap that he used to cut in strips, and he’d have that hanging up on the wall. That’s the way he was. But I think that gave me the toughness. He put some balls on me. He used to hit my mother, and when I got to be about seventeen I said, “Hey, Pop, don’t you ever do that again. You’ve got to deal with me now.” He stopped.

My father had his own little welding shop and used to make wrought iron railing. He even invented a thing to twist the bars. He was grinding one day with the grinder and the blade broke and hit him in the eye. He got in his car, holding whatever was left of his eye, and drove himself all the way to Philadelphia; went to the eye hospital there. Nobody knew about it until he came home. He lost the eye. My father was a tough son of a gun.

—Vince Piazza, father

The way the story goes in our family, the Piazzas had a pretty big farm in the Sciacca region of Sicily until a couple of workers on the farm were killed when a cart turned over. Their families sued, and my great-grandparents lost everything. That’s when they came to America, pretty much broke. My grandmother’s family was from central Italy, but she was born over here. She met my grandpa at Holy Saviour Church in Norristown. They eloped when she was seventeen.

A few years ago I visited Sicily with my mom and dad, my brother Danny, and a friend of my dad’s named Gene Messina, who speaks fluent Italian. We were searching for ancestors, and a few miles east of the town of Sciacca we came upon a church tucked into a mountainside. As we approached, a priest suddenly appeared on the steps, dressed all in white. Gene walked up to talk to him and, after a minute or two, waved us over, at which point the priest informed my father, in Italian, that he, too, was a Piazza; they were cousins. Then he led us into the church, which was gorgeous, and down some steps to a cave where, in the sixth century, a hermit named Calogero had taken refuge to pray and meditate after a long journey from
Constantinople. Calogero looked after native animals in that cave, and for his good deeds ultimately became known as the patron saint of Sciacca. My dad asked how Calogero heated the place, and the priest told him to put his hand over a little hole in the wall of the cave. The air there was warm from water—holy water, the priest said—that sprang from a volcano in the top of Mount Calogero (also known as Mount Kronio). The next time my parents were at Holy Saviour, they noticed, for the first time, a statue of a priest holding a deer. It all connected.

My grandfather actually foresaw his own death, about a year ahead of the fact. Late in the summer of 1994, during my second full season in the big leagues, he was buttoning up his garden one day while Vince was visiting. Vince asked him if he was getting it ready for next year, and Grandpa said, “Nah, I’m not going to be here next year. I’m done.”

On the day of his funeral, I was scheduled to film a commercial for Topps at Dodger Stadium. The company was renting out the ballpark for something like forty thousand dollars, so I told my dad that I had to stay in Los Angeles—that if I didn’t, they’d get somebody else to do the spot. My father respected the dollar more than anybody I knew, and I thought for sure he’d understand. He didn’t. He became very upset with me. It was a major point of contention.

Looking back, obviously I made the wrong decision. I was unforgivably selfish. But at the time, the business end of baseball was still new to me and I was uncomfortable with the idea of walking out on a good deal. I said to my dad, “Why are you so upset? You told me he used to beat the shit out of you.”

I think he might have been on the verge of tears when he answered. In a voice so emotional it startled me, he said, “He made me the man that I am!”

• • •

I was born in Norristown, and yes, I lived there, on the sixth floor of an apartment building called Hamilton Hall, for two years, until Danny was born. But I grew up and went to high school in the Philadelphia suburb and my mother’s hometown of Phoenixville, about ten miles away on the other side of the Schuylkill (pronounced SKOO-kul) River. I consider myself a product of Phoenixville. Nonetheless, a lot of people and articles have said over the years that I’m from Norristown, which has seemed to tick off just about everybody in Phoenixville but my dad. Actually, my dad and Tommy Lasorda were the ones who more or less perpetuated that misconception. I guess the way my father saw it, he was from Norristown and I was from
him
, so what’s the difference?

The other myth is that my dad and Tommy were inseparable growing
up. That couldn’t have been, because they weren’t in the same age group or neighborhood. They
were
, however, in the general company of each other quite a bit, only because my dad hung around the ball fields at Woodland Park, where Tommy ruled.

My father played some ball himself, and as I understand it was about as good as a left-handed shortstop could be. He hit right-handed. Not the best combination. Didn’t have a lot of size, either. In fact, I’m the biggest person in my immediate family, by a long shot. That was the main reason why my dad singled me out, early on, as the son to make a ballplayer out of.

The last organized baseball he played was at Stewart Junior High, not long before he grabbed a teacher and threatened to throw the guy out the window for telling him he’d never amount to anything. That hastened the end of my father’s formal education. But the fact was, he needed to get to work, anyway.

His family was so poor that, at school, he would volunteer to collect all the milk bottles after lunch, hoping that some would have a splash or two remaining in the bottom for him to drink. For coal to heat the house, he’d scavenge the city dump, two blocks away, then comb the railroad tracks for pieces that had fallen from the hopper cars. He’d fight anybody who had their eyes on the same pieces.

To my dad, fighting was a fundamental, necessary part of growing up. Day after day, on his walk home from school, he’d be met along the way by an older kid who had brought along somebody to finally take him down. “I’ve got a kid who’ll knock the shit out of you,” the older boy would tell him.

“Yeah, okay,” my dad would say, before tearing into the latest foil and leaving him in tears. He claims he never lost a fight. He did, however—repeatedly—get his ass kicked by his father when he got home, for being scuffed up.

Still, in spite of the rough stuff, the family was in it together, which meant that everybody brought home whatever they could, starting as soon as possible. Long before his job at Judson Brothers, my dad caddied at the golf course where his father did maintenance. He pumped gas at night. He got up at six in the morning for his paper route, delivering the
Philadelphia Inquirer
. The route took him past a neighborhood grocery where his mother was always behind on her charge account. Most mornings, the milk had just been dropped off outside the store and my father would help himself to a quart or two. Now and then, he’d see the light inside come on for just a few seconds and then go out again, so he was pretty sure that the owners,
the Schmidts, knew what he was up to; but they never said anything. Later, it ate at him that he’d taken advantage of their benevolence. When he got out of the army, he planned to face them and make restitution, but they’d passed away.

During his last couple of weeks of basic training for Korea, my dad picked up a bad infection in his foot. While he was in the infirmary, his company was shipped out. The upshot was that he had to go through training a second time, after which his orders sent him to Germany, where he served in artillery and drove a heavy piece of equipment that pulled a twenty-ton howitzer. He says his ears still ring from when they would fire that monster off. His superiors wanted him to go to Officer Candidate School, but then they found out he’d only completed the ninth grade.

He was discharged in 1954 with $325 of mustering-out pay. After a year as a merchant seaman in the coast guard, he applied for a job at Superior Tube in Collegeville. The guy who interviewed him said, “Piazza? You Italian? . . . We don’t hire Italians.” Then he heard they were looking for people at B. F. Goodrich, and it was true. He worked the night shift, pulling tires off the mold in about 120-degree heat, and stayed until they laid him off after seven years. He hadn’t figured on sticking around for the long haul, anyway. Dad had plans, and he’d already gotten started on them.

His first used-car lot operated out of a one-car garage at his sister’s house on Egypt Road in Audubon, between Norristown and Phoenixville. It was a rented house, but the owner didn’t mind him being there; and neither did his sister, since he helped out a little bit with the rent. The lot was effectively a junkyard. When he left Goodrich in the morning, he’d catch a few hours of sleep, then snoop around town trying to find a junker to buy from a dealer. Some of them he could fix, paint, and sell. Others he’d park behind the garage, out of sight, and strip off the parts he could put into another vehicle or somebody’s hands. He bought an old truck for hauling the scrap to the salvage yard, to be crushed for twenty-five or thirty bucks a load. Around five o’clock, he’d head home for the rest of his sleep, and by midnight he was back on the tire line, popping salt pills to keep from passing out. At eight, he’d punch out of the plant and do it all over again. To this day, there’s a junkyard at my dad’s first lot on Egypt Road.

He remained there for about a year after he was laid off from Goodrich, then moved to a better location in Jeffersonville and took on a partner named Bill Garber, who happened to have been a pretty good ballplayer and was a close friend of Lasorda. Tommy had reluctantly retired as a minor leaguer in 1960 and was scouting for the Dodgers, which left him plenty
of time to hang out at Garber-Piazza Auto Sales. After my dad bought out Garber a couple of years later and moved across the street under the name of Gateway Motors, Tommy kept coming around when he could—by then, he had been named a manager in the Dodgers’ minor-league system—for lunch and laughs.

Tommy was not, however, the most important person in my father’s social life. Not after Dad went to a mixer and met Veronica (Roni) Horenci, a pretty young nurse and former high school prom queen who thought he was dapper, danced well, and looked like Tony Curtis. She might also have been impressed that he drove big, fancy cars, and she may or may not have known that they were actually inventory on consignment. Dad liked her well enough that, to spend an evening with her, he was willing to subject himself to ethnic slurs and physical challenges—which he welcomed, of course—at the Slovak Club, where her father bartended and her mother waited tables. Roni intended to become a stewardess, like several of her friends, but my dad, who was a little older, objected, at which point she said something like, “Well, then we should think about getting married.” That was 1966, when, around Phoenixville and Norristown, it was still pretty scandalous for a Slovak to marry an Italian. No matter.

They were eager to start a family—Vince and I were born over the next two years—and to get ready for it, my father put everything he had into the business, including, now and then, the rent money. My mom would call him, all upset, to tell him that a sheriff’s-sale sign had been posted on their apartment door. You weren’t allowed to take it down. The deal was, if you didn’t pay the rent, they’d carry away your furniture. Dad would end up borrowing from a friend to cover it, then pay him back the next time he sold a car. He also maintained a line of credit at the bank. The first time he failed to make a payment, a bank official told him they were going to take possession of his inventory.

With my dad sitting across the desk, the banker called a dealer in Coatesville to see if he’d put in an offer. The dealer, Jim Nelms, knew my dad and asked to talk to him, then told the bank official not to touch the cars because he’d take care of it. So my father and Nelms became partners. About a year and a half later, Dad bought out Nelms and applied for a new Datsun franchise, which was going cheap in those days, before Datsun became Nissan. Business picked up when Datsun came out with the 240Z. Then he bought a Honda dealership, which a lot of people thought was a screwy idea. It didn’t seem so screwy when the energy crisis hit in the mid-seventies.

Before long he had thirty dealerships around Philadelphia. A lot of the
domestics were forced to close because of the gas prices, and Dad bought up their properties. The dealership holdings led him into the real estate business, and then into dealerships in other states. He expanded into Acura—specializing mostly in the high-end line—and Acura and Honda have been his mainstays ever since. He also did well as an investor in the computer repair business. Under Piazza Management, meanwhile, he bought or built who knows how many commercial properties, including the Westover Country Club in Jeffersonville, the Bellewood Golf Club in Pottstown, and an entire historic mining town called St. Peter’s Village.

All that success put my father in better cars (a Ferrari and a Lincoln Mark VI), better clothes (white shoes and leisure suits, although not the crazy guy-from-WKRP kind), and better seats for Phillies games, which he could now attend without hitchhiking to the ballpark and sneaking in (which he did as a kid, when the Phillies played at Connie Mack Stadium). As it turned out, he went big-league around the same time Tommy did.