Playing Scared (23 page)

No longer strong enough to work in construction, Smith enrolled at Sierra Community College near Sacramento, California. The classwork came easily to him. He had always been a good, if lazy, student. But in his second year, he took a public-speaking class, a requirement for transferring to a four-year university, and the first time he stood up to talk, he began to cry. “It almost shattered me. All the ugliness revealed itself in all its ugly ways. Shaking head, knees shaking, voice cracking. Most of the students were seventeen- to twenty-one-year-olds. They didn’t know how to respond at first, they made fun of me.”

They stopped laughing when the teacher, Mrs. Battenberg—Smith remembered her name with affection—stepped in. She arranged for him to tutor his classmates in algebra, his best subject, and encouraged him to keep talking. He printed his speeches out in large block letters to help him stay on track when the rush of noradrenaline so blurred his vision that he could barely read the words on the page. Nor did the problem improve when he transferred to Oregon State University in 1989. As public affairs director of student affairs, he was occasionally asked to give a speech—an effort that made him violently ill, to the point that he sometimes frightened the audience. One time, while delivering a talk at halftime during a football game, he said, “I thought I was going to die.” His classmates pressed tight against him to keep him standing.

The fear of speaking didn’t stop his choice of career. “God may have placed it there so I would remain humble and do all things for Him instead of on my own,” Smith said. He was working on his master’s degree at Western Seminary in Portland when he was unexpectedly solicited by Ariel Ministries, an evangelical group whose sole mission is the conversion of Jews. Would he be willing to go to Russia and convert the Jews of St. Petersburg?

Now it was my turn to be surprised. I toyed with the idea of saying something. Should I casually mention that my mother’s grandparents were Russian Jews from St. Petersburg? That they had permits to reside in St. Petersburg, then Petrograd, at a time when Jews were largely proscribed from life in the city—unless they happened to be university students, intellectuals, wealthy businessmen, or skilled craftsmen? According to family legend, my great-grandfather was a cabinetmaker who had built the interior of the czar’s train. I thought of the intricate, hand-carved rocking chair he made for my grandmother’s wedding day. It was sitting in my living room back home, the only thing left of that generation in my family. “For fifteen years, we were the only outreach to the Jewish community,” Smith continued, rocking me out of my reverie. “It was a very successful outreach—the only messianic missionary service in all of St. Petersburg. Hundreds of people came, people who didn’t know anything about Judaism except that they were Jewish. We were a long time in Russia.”

“A long time in Russia,” repeated Laura. She had a habit of repeating the last few words of every sentence her husband spoke.

As it happened, the Russians had little sympathy for Smith’s stage fright. Unlike the Kansas blogger, they did not find it charming. On the contrary, they were horrified. Smith, who lived in Russia nearly fifteen years, understood. “I was the pastor and the professor, the one with the knowledge and the power. People there expected a certain level of competence and decorum from someone with that status. When I broke down, they didn’t like it. Some of them were angry. Some of them were disappointed in me. They would come up afterwards and say, ‘Pastor, you can’t do that.’ My response was, ‘I’ll probably do it again, pray for me.’ Some of them left and didn’t come back. But the ones who got to know me got used to it.”

Now Smith is back in Kansas, and after twenty years of preaching his voice still cracks, his hands clutch the lectern, his knees quake. Some of his American parishioners, like many of his congregants in St. Petersburg, ask why, if he is truly called by God, he is so nervous. Maybe if he had more faith, they suggest, God would heal him. The weekend I flew to Topeka to watch him preach, his head started aching on Friday. By Saturday night, he was in the bathroom with an upset stomach. “Yes,” he said, “it’s what the Lord has me doing.” It was a part of his life, and he had developed strategies to make it through Sunday services. He always looked for his wife in the audience. He printed out his sermons in a large font, just as Mrs. Battenberg once taught him. He never stopped moving or drinking water.

The Sunday of my visit, he gripped the lectern and rocked back and forth. At sixty-three, he looked, with his white
handlebar mustache, like the Wizard of Oz. It was a hot day in August, and the ceiling fans whirred overhead. The buzz competed with the sound of a tractor engine in a nearby cornfield, where a farmer was plowing under the year’s crop. Everywhere one drove in Kansas that drought-filled summer, the fields were the color of straw. Smith’s sermon focused on what I had come to recognize as his great passion, the all-important business of conversion.

He spoke with an almost painful hesitation. “Say you’re out in the middle of Timbuktu, Kansas. I know we don’t have a Timbuktu, but you’re out in the middle of nowhere and you’re witnessing to a farmer who wants to be baptized. What’s to stop you?”

“Nothing,” Laura called out from a pew in the middle of the church. About thirty people were scattered through the newly painted sanctuary.

“Who does the baptism?”

“You do,” she called.

“That’s right.” He nodded. “There’s absolutely nothing … nowhere in the Bible does it say you have to be a church leader.” He paused noticeably, rocking from one foot to the other. “You find a water spout and let them make a profession of faith and they’re following Jesus.”

His hands shook as he soldiered on. “You know, you know,” he started to say. “You know …” He appeared to have lost his train of thought. “I’m nervous. I’m excited. I might get a little emotional, so bear with me.” He stopped to drink some water. “Each one of us who has professed faith has received a gift, and we are to use it for the building up and
serving of one another, so that others know Jesus Christ.” His hands were shaking now. “Please turn to Ephesians [the tenth book of the New Testament]. A great book, I highly recommend it. It’s a great book.”

The sermon lasted half an hour—in truth, it felt somewhat longer—and the service ended soon after. When I stood up to say good-bye, Laura beamed and gave me a big hug. “I’m going to pray for you and your piano playing,” she promised.

After a storybook year as National League All-Star second baseman for the Los Angeles Dodgers, Steve Sax lost the ability to throw a ball. It began with an error during a game against the Montreal Expos in April 1983, early in his second season. The batter doubled to right center, sending the runner on first to third. The outfielder threw the ball to Sax, who should have held on to it; there was no pressure to throw. Instead, he hummed it wildly to home, where it skipped off the catcher’s shin guard and skittered to the backstop. The man on third scored.

It was a dumb error and not terribly important, except that the next day he made another error. Then came another. If he kept on at this rate, he figured, he’d log 132 errors by season’s end. He was twenty-three years old and had just been named Rookie of the Year. Now, for the first time in his life, he questioned himself. “And when fear and doubt set into your psyche, it will absolutely rob and suck out every chance of success that you have. That’s what it did to me,” he said, sitting behind the desk of his home office in Roseville, California, a well-to-do
suburb of Sacramento. “It took over my confidence in doing the most rudimentary things. Like throwing the ball fifty feet to first base. I couldn’t do it anymore.”

The walls were hung with his team jerseys, all framed and glassed like prized artwork. The dining room table was stacked with brochures and handouts. Sax makes his living as a motivational speaker, and he was preparing for the influx of financial executives who would attend his next seminar. Inevitably, he would tell them about his baseball meltdown. Thirty years after the fact, it still defined him.

In the summer of 1983, Sax would make thirty errors, twenty-four of them in a three-month summer span as his collapse played out before a fascinated public. You didn’t have to be a baseball fan to know about Steve Sax’s fall from grace. The entire country knew. As a sportswriter for the
Houston Chronicle
wrote, “He would throw the ball into the dugout. He would throw it into the ground. Sometimes, he would hold the ball for what seemed an eternity, seemingly afraid of what would happen if he attempted another toss.” ESPN led each night’s broadcast with footage of his latest humiliation. Fans donned batting helmets, baiting Sax to throw at them in the stands. Letters poured in to the Dodgers’ home office, offering advice (“Try to make an error. Then you won’t”), derision (“You’re a freak. I’m a girl and I can throw the ball better than you”), and death threats (“One more time and we’re going to come and put a bullet in your head”). The nation’s gamblers were incensed; Sax had made it impossible to place a bet on a Dodgers game. The letters got so bad that he finally had to turn them over to the FBI.

Some of his teammates avoided throwing Sax the ball, but Dodgers manager Tommy Lasorda refused to bench him. Many times, Lasorda would take him out onto the field before a game, blindfold him, and make him practice his toss. “And I’d throw it every single time right there, blindfolded, to the person at first. I hit him in the chest every single time. And then the game would start and I’d throw that sucker up to Section J somewhere. Here we’d go again, the whole wave of problems, starting over again. I wanted to give up.”

On the road, after a game against the Phillies, the Dodgers went out for dinner at a restaurant owned by one of Lasorda’s brothers in a Philadelphia suburb. Sax returned to his hotel room at three in the morning, too tired to take off his clothes or climb under the sheets. Hours later, as the sun began shining through the blinds, he reached for the covers and felt something on the pillow. He opened his eyes and made out a silhouette. The shape of an ear. Reaching out, he touched something greasy. He switched on the light and found himself staring into the bulging eyes of a dead pig.

“I flew downstairs and went to the concierge’s desk and yelled out, ‘There’s a pig in my bed!’ So we went up there and there was a note attached to the ear and it said, ‘Sax, you better start playing better or else! Signed, the Godfather.’ And the concierge flipped it over, and there was a parking ticket from Norristown. Tommy Lasorda had done this to me as shock therapy. And no, it didn’t help.”

When help did come, it arrived unexpectedly, from his ironfisted father, whom Sax had grown up respecting and fearing in equal measure. John Sax was a farmer and regional
truck driver, “a very tough dude,” a German immigrant who showed his gentle side to only one person—his wife, Nancy. The two had met as children, and Sax recalled how his father “doted on her and treated her like she walked on water.” When Sax was six, the family moved to a farm just outside Sacramento, not far from the stuccoed McMansion where he now lives. He and his younger brother, Dave, helped run the farm whenever their father was on the road. The boys milked the cows, fed the chickens, and irrigated the fields. In their spare time, they played ball: pitching, hitting fungoes, and chasing baseballs through the fields. They ended up as teammates on the Dodgers. Today, they live across the street from each other in Roseville.

By the time Sax was in sixth grade, he was buying his own clothes. By his senior year of high school, he had moved out of the house to escape his father’s anger—and his fist. He had once watched John Sax beat up a man at a traffic light. The Saxes were squeezed inside the family car—a Metropolitan coupe, one of the first American compacts (“And how he got himself and five kids in this car, I’ll never understand, whether with WD–40 and a shoe bar”)—when a young driver cut them off, flashing his middle finger. The light turned red before he could take off. “And my dad got out and went over and introduced himself to this guy,” Sax recalled. “He was from the Vietnam War, he had his fatigues on, and he was biting my dad’s finger. My dad reached in, pulled him out of the car, and hit him. Brrrrr. It was a combination punch. He actually broke the guy’s nose. His head slid against the corner of the door and the windshield, and he took thirty-two
stitches in his ear.” Sax knows this because the local sheriff was his uncle. “It was a bloody mess. My dad got back in the car and had to wait for the light to turn green. That’s how fast it happened.”

But John Sax also was a man of stubborn pride and fortitude. Once, while suffering a slipped disk so painful that he couldn’t lift his leg for weeks, he crawled past his son, through the house, and into the bathroom, where he ran himself a hot bath. “He never once looked up to say ‘Hey, I need a hand’ or ‘I’m in pain’ or ‘Why me?’ He just didn’t want to put anybody out.”

In 1983, when Sax was in the midst of the “yips”—what the rest of the world would from then on refer to as “Steve Sax syndrome”—he called home and confessed that he didn’t know what to do. All his life, he had believed that if he worked hard enough, the rewards would be his. Now, he told his father, he went to bed with his fear. He woke up with it. He felt it sitting at the breakfast table. “Hey, one of these days,” his father told him, “you’re going to wake up and this throwing problem is going to be gone. I know because the same thing happened to me.”

John Sax had played baseball in high school. He was, according to his son, a “darn good ballplayer,” having beat out future major leaguer Woodie Held for shortstop—the position Held would later play for the New York Yankees and six other clubs. In Steve Sax’s mind, his dad was the most powerful man alive. “I thought, Wow, my invincible, stronger-than-life dad! If he could go through it and it didn’t affect him, then I’m not so bad. He said, ‘It’s not you. There’s
nothing wrong with you. It’s just your confidence. You have to get it back one bit at a time. It’s just like chopping down a tree. One chop at a time.’ And that’s the last time I spoke with him. Six hours later he died. Heart attack number five.”