One Shot at Forever (7 page)

If the teams were makeshift, the program itself was even more so. When Sweet took the job, there was no scorekeeper, no assistant coach, no bus driver, no trainer, no equipment manager, and little in the way of funding. When Sweet retrieved the uniforms from a dank storage room underneath the junior high, he was surprised to find that they were the consistency of burlap sacks. Gray with faded purple lettering, a sports-writer would later describe them as looking like
“World War II rejects.”
The rest of the gear wasn't much better. The hats were mismatched and the collection of baseballs so sparse that in years past when the boys lost them during warm-ups, they'd occasionally been forced to ask their opponents for replacements. As for bats, Sweet started the season with only five and knew that when one broke, it would be a battle to get McClard to free up the five or six dollars required for a new one.

Despite all the logistical issues, the biggest problem—as Sweet saw it—was all the rainouts. How could the boys get better if they never played? Thus his first act as coach had been to walk into the office of athletic director Phil Sargent.

“How can I double the games on our schedule?” Sweet asked.

“Double?” Sargent looked surprised.

“We've got a good team and these boys need to play. Not just in our conference but some of the bigger teams around.”

At Sweet's insistence, Sargent made some calls. Soon enough, Macon had twenty-two games lined up for the season. Sweet figured that would be enough for the boys to get noticed.

5

Of course, to get noticed a team has to play well.

On April first, after nearly a month of practice, Macon opened its 1970 season at home versus Pana High, a school of five hundred students located twenty-five miles south of Macon. Sweet arrived at the field by 2:30. He was not the first one.

“Coach Sweet, I've chalked the field and got the bats out,” said a small, freckled boy.

Sweet smiled. Sam Trusner was the first and only member of his baseball staff. An energetic if uncoordinated freshman, Trusner grew up playing sandlot ball with the rest of the Macon boys. The older he got, however, the clearer it became that he would travel a different athletic path. In eighth grade, the junior high track coach approached Trusner and asked if he wanted to be his equipment manager. If he accepted, Trusner would get to go to the state track tournament, all the way up in Peoria. Trusner jumped at the opportunity and did such a fine job that when Jack Burns got word of it, he lumbered over to the junior high one afternoon during lunch and tracked the boy down. When Trusner looked up, cowed by Burns' size and reputation, the coach announced that he'd heard the young man was a damn fine equipment manager and informed him he'd be doing the same job for the football team in the fall. Trusner swelled with pride.
The high school coach came all the way to the junior high just to see me? How cool is that?
Soon enough, word got around that there was a short, industrious kid who could ease a coach's load. Within a month of arriving at Macon High, Trusner was recruited for the basketball team. When Sweet got the baseball job, Trusner signed on for a third sport.

Now, as Sweet jotted down his lineup, Trusner laid out the first aid kit, the team's four scarred batting helmets, and a small bag of baseballs. Next came the bats, five in a row. They were all different models of Louisville Sluggers: two Mickey Mantles, a Nellie Fox, and a couple of old, beat-up ones. These were the team's
most precious commodity
. Other than one ancient fungo bat, an old “unbreakable” model with a fiberglass grip that drained the pop out of the barrel, all the bats were wood, and the team usually broke at least one per game. When that happened, the boys made do with what they had. If all that was left were longer bats, the boys choked up; if only short ones were left they slid their bottom hand down the knob of the handle. This was still an upgrade from what many had grown up with. For many of the boys, the only way to acquire a bat while young was to loiter outside Fans Field in Decatur, home of the Class-A Commodores, and ask for the broken game bats, which they then took home, nailed back together, and wrapped in electrical tape.

Presently, Sweet walked over and handed Trusner the scorebook. Upon reading down to the number seven hitter in the lineup, Trusner looked up, surprised. After some thought, Sweet had decided to start Stu Arnold in center field over a junior, Gary Mathias, even though Arnold was only a freshman. Since Glan was out with an injury, Sweet had also penciled in the light-hitting Heneberry as the first baseman, batting ninth.

Thus the Macon lineup looked like this:

As the boys arrived and began warming up, Sweet walked the field, checking its condition. Even on a good day, it was a difficult place to play baseball. Home plate abutted the industrial arts building, and there were no outfield fences, unless you counted the cornfield in deep right, which at roughly four hundred feet was considered in play. This led to the unusual sight of outfielders sprinting into the corn and tramping into a forest of knee-high stalks, while a runner madly circled the bases behind them. Sometimes it took minutes for the right fielder to emerge. Other times, the fielder recovered the ball so quickly that Macon's opponents accused Ironmen players of stashing extra balls amongst the corn.

Next, Sweet made his way over to center field, which presented a different challenge. Through the heart of it arced the school's running track, ready to upend any backpedaling fielder. Since shallow center also doubled as the landing area for the discus, the ground behind second base was a minefield of divots and crevices. Thus any ball that reached the outfield on the ground was liable to change direction unexpectedly or, worse, hit a crater and stop dead.

The infield wasn't much better. The mound was a flat patch of dirt, and the loose soil of the basepaths housed so many rocks that Sweet asked the players to periodically comb it with five-gallon buckets in hand. More often than not, the buckets were full in no time.

On this day, the usual challenges were compounded by a game-time temperature of 39 degrees that felt even colder due to a brutal wind. It roared in off the barren cornfields, tearing off the boys' hats during warm-ups and giving new meaning to the term “wild pitch.” Games had been called on account of wind in central Illinois plenty of times before, and this one probably should have been, too. Still, both coaches agreed it was better to at least try to play.

As the game began, Sweet occasionally glanced over at the sideline, waiting for fans to arrive for the home opener. He knew there wouldn't be many, especially early in the season and on such a cold afternoon, but even he was surprised by how lonely it was. In all, maybe a dozen people showed up. Since there were no bleachers, most stood by the fence or sat wrapped in blankets on folding chairs. All of them were parents.

Maybe that was for the best. Macon struggled early, unable to read the conditions. Balls ricocheted off gloves and routine throws sailed wide. Shartzer uncorked a wild pitch and the errors piled up, three in all. On offense, the Ironmen couldn't sustain a rally. In seven innings they managed only two runs on four hits while Pana scored four on six hits. It was little comfort that all four Pana runs were unearned.

Afterward, the Macon players dispersed into the night, stewing about the errors and hoping the loss wasn't the start of another long season. Sweet showered at the gym and drove back to the house in Decatur where he'd recently begun renting a room, replaying the game in his head the whole way.

He wasn't too worried, at least not yet, but he knew if the team lost a couple more games it wouldn't take long for people in Macon to begin branding him a failure. Then again, he'd been called worse.

Some months earlier,
a parent walked into
a Macon school board meeting, looking agitated. Held at 7:30
P.M
. in the high school library, the monthly meetings were usually quiet affairs. The seven members were joined by a treasurer, the principal, and the superintendent. Meetings lasted an hour or so and the board voted on proposals using a simple “yea” or “nay” procedure. Monthly finances were discussed, expenditures recorded, and school matters debated. Most of the time, matters tended toward the mundane. “It was mutually agreed upon that no further consideration be given to the purchase of another lawnmower,” read the minutes for June 16, 1969, “and that the superintendent hire a boy in the community to mow the grass with present facilities at the salary of $1.50 an hour.”

Occasionally, as on this night, townspeople attended. Most of the time, they came to ask the school for something: money for a graduation float, better concessions, new textbooks. This parent, however, had a grander concern. When called upon, he stood up, looked around the room, and made a proclamation. “You've got to get rid of Lynn Sweet,” he said. “That man is a communist.”

Roger Britton was taken aback. He'd heard plenty of accusations leveled at Sweet. One time, Sweet and Ernie Miller walked out of Claire's and, seeing pigeons perched on the grain elevator, grabbed a hunting shotgun from a friend's car, took aim, and fired. That led to a fine of $50 for Sweet for “possession of a loaded and uncased gun,” and $35 for Miller. Another time, McClard became livid when he found Sweet in the gym, playing basketball with his students after hours, and the two men had engaged in a heated shouting match. In each case, Britton had stepped in, calmed the waters, and defended his friend. But
communist?
That was a new one.

The agitated parent proceeded with a litany of reasons why he believed this to be the case, including Sweet's reading selections, his politics, and the fact that, plain for all to see, the man was a hippie who'd be better off taking his act to California.

It wasn't the first time someone had suggested Sweet leave town. To many Maconites, Sweet seemed more foreign than ever by the spring of 1970. Rather than the town having an effect on him, the opposite appeared to have occurred. Not only did Sweet look like a peacenik, but instead of settling down he'd become even more of a vagabond. For a while he lived in an apartment on Front Street, then in a house with Jack Burns down the road in Radford. Now, of course, he lived in that house in Decatur with a bunch of basketball players, some of whom, the women down at the Country Manor restaurant whispered, were
colored
. At times it seemed Sweet just lived out of his car. To invite him over for dinner was often to find Sweet, a few days later, still camped out on your couch. Not that anyone ever minded, for he was excellent company and a conscientious guest. Steve Shartzer remembers a couple of mornings when he awoke to find Sweet on the family's couch, bleary-eyed after a night of carousing with Burns, Britton, and Bob Shartzer. Unfailingly, though, Sweet was always up by 7
A.M
., groggy but dressed and ready. By eight he was at school and teaching, lest he break one of Britton's cardinal rules: Have your fun but always,
always
stand tall the next morning.

Then there was that strange business with the slippers. One morning, Roy Roush, the vice president of the school board, was walking in the post-dawn hours near his house on the eastern edge of Macon when he'd seen the most peculiar thing. There, silhouetted against the morning light, was a man in shorts and canvas slippers, tearing down the street. As the figure got closer, Roush recognized the mop of brown hair and realized it was Sweet, pumping his arms and sprinting around town for what appeared to be no good reason. “Hello there, Roy!” Sweet called out, and then he was gone.

This being 1970, the idea of running for fun hadn't yet entered the national consciousness.
Runner's World
had only recently graduated from being a pamphlet printed out of the Kansas home of a man named Bob Anderson, and it would be a year before a University of Oregon track coach would oversee the release of a shoe called Nike. Sweet was already hooked, though. He loved how running cleared his mind and energized him—“better than a pill,” he told people. He began while living in Champaign in 1962, starting each morning by clocking four miles around town. Macon was not Champaign, though, and concerned neighbors sometimes stopped and asked if he needed help—why else would he be tearing off at such a pace? Other times, pickup trucks swerved as if to hit him, the drivers cackling as they zoomed by.