Long Shot (5 page)

“This kid looks good. I’m gonna tell you the truth—I don’t think I hit the ball as good as he does when I was sixteen, I’m not shittin’ ya . . . . Try to lower the bat now. Get a little lower hand position. That’s it! That’s it! That’s it! . . . He looks good. He really looks good. You really look great, buddy! You do!”

To my dad: “I bet you got scouts on him already, for Christ sake.”

To me: “I’ll be your agent, buddy!”

To Liberatore: “You know who he hits like, don’t you? I’m gonna give you one guess. He’s in the big leagues. You know him.”

Liberatore mentions a name that can’t be made out on the tape.

“No! Hell, no!”

Liberatore: “In the National League?”

“Yeah, a buddy of yours.
Mike Marshall
, for Christ sake! He looks like Marshall! He looks more like Marshall than anybody I’ve seen.”

My dad: “Hit a couple left-handed, Mike.”

“He looks good that way. Good swing. He looks good enough, he should hit
that
way, too. Yes, sir.”

Dad (exaggerating): “Tommy’s never seen this kid. Nobody’s ever seen him.”

“Cock and stride. Cock and stride. Stay back, like you did then. Stay back. Don’t go out and get it. Stay back there. Do it again! Do it again! That’s better! Better! Jesus Christ, I never saw anybody who could pick things up like he does. I never did.”

Dad (fibbing): “He’s got average, good speed, and a good glove. He can play any position.”

“Well, you know, hitting’s going to be his big suit.”

With that, I was finished, but as I walked—or floated—out of the cage, the great man gave me his best advice of the day. “But that’s only half the battle,” he said. And he tapped the side of his head. “The rest is up here.”

We then sat at the kitchen table for a little while, and I asked Ted if he’d sign my beat-up copy of
The Science of Hitting.
Needless to say, I still have that book. And on the first page, in Sharpie-style blue, it says:

To Mike
,

Follow this book and as good as you look now I’ll be looking for tickets in 1988.

Ted Williams

CHAPTER THREE

The batting cage was not the first unusual thing to be housed in our backyard. There was that stupid pony.

My dad always tried to do something cool for us on Christmas. One year, first thing Christmas morning, he and Mom led us through the kitchen for the big surprise, opened the door to the backyard . . . and the son of a bitch was gone! Our big surprise had escaped before we even got a glimpse of him. They jumped into their respective cars and combed the neighborhood, covering all the back roads, knocking on everybody’s door. You’d think he’d have been roaming around in the big cornfield behind the house. Uh-uh. Finally, about two miles away, a lady told my mom that a pony had been strolling up her driveway and she’d put him in the barn with her horse. My dad walked it home, with Mom driving behind with her flashers on.

I mean, I give credit to my father. It was a great idea. We were plenty excited to see that pony clopping down the road. But I think we rode him one time. Whenever we’d try to get on, he’d buck us off. Tanker the pony. Shit. We supplied Tanker with a little shed and an electric fence, and there he stood.

There were plenty of things to ride, anyway, and a dopey pony could hardly compete with the likes of a snowmobile. I can still feel the exhilaration of firing up the Arctic Cat and racing across the open fields in ten inches of snow. Beyond our street, it was all farmland back then. And the reservoir. We built forts back there. Had some big-time snowball fights. Played hockey when the ponds froze. I’d speed-skate and pretend I was Eric Heiden. I really wanted to
be
Eric Heiden.

In the fall, we could always get up football games, neighborhood against neighborhood. Spring Lane would play Ferry Lane or Forge Manor. We’d steal tomatoes from the neighbor’s garden. There’s a dam nearby, and guys would dare each other to walk across the top of it. Danny did it. The area
sounds rural, and to a large degree it was, back then, but the main drag, Route 23, ran by right at the top of our street. There’s an old restaurant and truck stop on the other side of 23—the G Lodge, where I picked up candy bars and grape Bubble Yum. They used the G Lodge for a scene in the movie
The Happening
and called it the Filbert Restaurant. Dad still eats breakfast there.

The neighborhood had everything we needed. We could walk to the golf course. Before extreme sports had caught on, I had a BMX bike that I’d pump as fast as I could down the driveway and across the street to a ramp set up on the far curb, which would send me flying into a vacant field. Vince and his friends had their skateboards, hacky sacks, and jacked-up cars. We got cream soda from the gas station next to the G Lodge. Phoenixville, I’d say, was practically a perfect place to grow up.

It was where my mom grew up, too, except that we were raised in the suburban end of it and she came from right in the town. There was a big difference. Downtown Phoenixville, if you could call it that, had an old-school, industrial, European feel to it—mostly Italian and Slovakian—and still does. The townies tended to be the tough guys.

We experienced the town side of Phoenixville when we visited our grandmother’s house. My grandfather Horenci—Mom’s dad—died when I was seven, and Grandma lived alone in the left side of a narrow two-story, two-family house just across the street from the big shirt factory and around the corner from the Slovak Club. Phoenixville is primarily a steel town, and Grandpa Horenci was a welder raised in Coatesville, Pennsylvania. He was a big guy, and my grandmother was tall, too; my mother has two tall sisters. I obviously got my size from that side of the family—the Slovak side. They came from the portion of Czechoslovakia that is now Slovakia. Grandma Horenci spoke fluent Slovak. The fact is, I’m just as Slovakian as I am Italian.

Grandpa Horenci drove a ’72 Monte Carlo, turquoise with a black top and black seat covers. From him I inherited my neat-freak streak when it comes to cars. He had towels on the seats, and floor mats protecting his floor mats. He’d tell us, “Don’t touch the windows. Don’t touch the doors.” My kind of guy. I believe that, of all the relatives in our family—not counting my dad, of course—he’s the one who would have gotten the biggest kick out of watching me play big-league baseball. I recall my mother being very upset when she woke us up to tell us that Grandpa had died. His funeral was my first brush with death. I remember how cold his hand felt when I touched it.

My mother has done a commendable job of respecting our family’s Italian heritage—you can’t beat the meatballs she makes, the size of baseballs—and,
thankfully, she has also kept us in touch with our Slovakian side. Christmas Eve was always spent at Grandma’s house, with our cousins and a Slovakian dinner of pierogi (kind of like dumplings, with fillings), kielbasas, and sauerkraut mushroom soup. When the family got too big for Grandma’s little house, Christmas Eve was moved to ours. Vince would cut open an apple and each family member would eat a piece of the apple, a piece of a tangerine, and then a little piece of the same walnut. The philosophy is that the family that shares from the same piece of fruit will stay together. Then, on Christmas Day, it was church and turkey. Our ethnic blend was Italian, Slovakian, and all-American.

We were also down by Grandma’s every Friday night, when Mom would take us into town for Nardi’s Pizza. The big controversy was Nardi’s versus Sal’s Pizza Box on Route 23. We were Nardi’s people—and I don’t doubt that the location had something to do with it. Mom was partial to that neighborhood, which meant that, just before school started every year, she bought our gym shoes at Fazzini’s on Main Street: Chuck Taylor high-tops—not to be confused with the wacky orange and red sneakers she picked up at Kmart, which we referred to as our bobo shoes. Downtown Phoenixville was, in effect, our shopping center. To some people, though, it might be best known as the little town that gets terrorized in the science-fiction movie
The Blob
, which was not Steve McQueen’s finest hour. In one classic scene, the blob oozes into the Colonial Theatre and eats the projectionist before the moviegoers run screaming out into the street to warn everybody. That last part is now reenacted every year during Phoenixville’s annual Blobfest. To my knowledge, it’s the world’s only annual Blobfest.

In town, everything was walking distance. My grandmother used to pin the mortgage to the inside of Mom’s sweater—nineteen dollars in cash—so she could walk it safely to the bank. Grandma always worked in a factory she could walk to. However, when my mother was in high school, Grandma, who was, of course, deeply Catholic, sent her on two buses every morning to get to Bishop Kenrick (now Kennedy-Kenrick) in Norristown, where she’s alleged to be the only girl ever crowned both Prom Queen and May Queen in the same year.

I have to say, my mom was very glamorous, with a Jackie O., Audrey Hepburn kind of look. Even so, while Dad could strike fear into any of the kids—me, in particular—it was Mom who was mostly responsible for the discipline in our family. She meted it out with a wooden spoon. Seemed like Danny was the one who was always catching it on the ass.

I can recall only one time when my dad got angry enough at me to work me over pretty good. I was a huge professional wrestling fan; watched the
WWF twice every Saturday. Their theme song, “Gemini Dream” by the Moody Blues, got me fired up every time. I was into all of those guys: Jimmy “Superfly” Snuka, the first one to jump off the top ropes; Bob Backlund, the people’s champ; Jesse “the Body” Ventura, later the governor of Minnesota; Tony Atlas, the black guy, a big weightlifter who would raise people over his head and slam them to the mat; Ivan Putski, the Polish Hammer; Blackjack Mulligan, with the iron claw; and of course his archenemy, André the Giant. Then there were the cream-puff guys, the tin cans who would wrestle the stars. Tony and Tommy were still real young, so Danny was my tin can, the lucky recipient of all my holds and moves. I had some of those, let me tell you. When I did the iron claw, as strong as my hands were, I could really
do
it.

When I was about thirteen—which would have made Danny eleven—I put him in head scissors one day and got kind of carried away. I didn’t really choke him, I don’t think, but I went a little too far and he started freaking out. Then I heard my dad coming. I ran outside and tried to take cover by the woodpile, but Dad walked up and just slugged me in the face. I rolled clear over the woodpile. He yanked me up and said, “Boy, don’t you
ever
fight with your brothers. You’ve got to fight
with
them, not against them. If there’s ever a problem, you better step up and help them because you’re the guy who can get it done.”

Not long afterward, there was an incident on the school bus when some kid hit Vince in the stomach as we were walking down the aisle. Instinctively, I reached back and clobbered the guy. That time, Dad wasn’t even upset with me. I had done as he’d said. A day or two later, the kid’s father approached my dad and started to make an issue of it. My dad said, “You don’t want to go there, do you?”

• • •

Dad would occasionally take me to Flyers and 76ers games. Doctor J, to me, was bigger than life. You know the famous rock-a-bye dunk he made against the Lakers? It was right in front of me.

We were sitting
on the floor
, on the same sideline where Doctor J raced Michael Cooper for the loose ball at midcourt, jabbed it in the right direction, then picked it up, took one humongous dribble, cradled it as he soared through the air, and swung it down right on top of Cooper. You can actually see me on the video of that play, right around the spot where Doctor J snatched the ball and took off. I’m wearing a red Alligator shirt, blue jeans, and Pony shoes. When I was with the Dodgers, Eric Davis was watching that video on the plane one night and I said, “Hey, that’s me, right there!” It was a fun time to be a sports fan in Philly.

But I have to say, I sucked at basketball. I mean, it’s almost incomprehensible how bad I was at basketball—and still am. Mom signed us up for little-kid basketball at the YMCA, along with diving lessons, and I had maybe two baskets my whole career. One time I stole the ball and I was coming up the court with it and the coach was yelling at me, “Give the ball to the point guard!” I didn’t understand the concept. Naturally, I had it stolen back from me. I once fell down and cried about it, and the coach gave me a towel and said, “You get back in there and you get that fucking ball!” He actually cussed at me. My mom had a cow, as we used to say. The f-bomb wasn’t heard much around our house. With my dad, it was always “Jesus Christmas!”

Golf was more up my alley. Dad would take me on Sundays to Woods Golf Center in Norristown and teach me the fundamentals. He thought I had some potential in golf, which I did. Mom and Dad became members of the Phoenixville Country Club so that I could practice there. The club had a one-armed pro, Joe Banyacskay, who was always smoking a cigar and cursing his head off. It was a hell of a walk from our house, carrying golf clubs, but for a few years I’d make that walk just about every day of the summer with my friend Marc Deye.

There was a time when I thought I might want to pursue golf, but I didn’t have the mentality for it. One weekend I was playing with my dad, and playing like shit, and I had a bad attitude going on, which wasn’t particularly unusual. The thing was, he was allowing me to play golf while my brothers were working. So he lit me up. “You’re out here jerking off! You’re done! Get out of here! Jesus Christmas!”

I made the Phoenixville High School golf team in the ninth grade, which was cool because I was able to catch rides from the older guys and no longer had to call my mom all the time to pick me up in the minivan. My golf game was long on power, but short on poise. That became obvious my junior year, when, after sixteen holes, I was leading the Ches-Mont League tournament at two over par. On the seventeenth hole, the guy I was playing with said, “Man, you’re gonna win this thing.” I woke up, saw where I was, and choked it away. Went from left trap to right trap to left trap to right trap. Put up an eight. I was devastated. A teammate, Mike Bland, ended up winning the tournament and went to North Carolina on a golf scholarship.