The Brothers K (45 page)

That an all-consuming focus on a single object of desire could achieve a quantitatively spectacular result was no surprise to any thinking person in the early Sixties: the mushroom cloud that accompanied J. Robert Oppenheimer’s dissection of the atom was an unforgettable demonstration of the general principle. But that the same intensity of focus which made any great quantitative achievement possible might also render it qualitatively bankrupt—that a Golden Glove MVP could accomplish a fabulous feat and end up looking, feeling and playing, the following year, like a battle-jagged vet just back from some interior front line—this was the “un-American” surprise and the bitter public lesson of Roger Maris’s life.

Technical obsession is like an unlit, ever-narrowing mine shaft leading straight down through the human mind. The deeper down one plunges, the more fabulous, and often the more remunerative, the gems or ore. But the deeper down one plunges, the more confined and conditioned one’s thoughts and movements become, and the greater the danger of
permanently losing one’s way back to the surface of the planet. There also seems to be an overpowering, malignant magic that reigns deep down in these shafts. And those who journey too far or stay down too long become its minions without knowing it—become not so much human beings as human tools wielded by whatever ideology, industry, force or idea happens to rule that particular mine. Another danger: because these mines are primarily mental, not physical, they do not necessarily mar or even mark the faces of those who have become utterly lost in them. A man or woman miles down, thrall to the magic, far beyond caring about anything still occurring on the planet’s surface, can sit down beside you on a park bench or bleacher seat, greet you in the street, shake your hand, look you in the eye, smile genially, say “How are you?” or “Merry Christmas!” or “How about those Yankees?” And you will never suspect that you are in the presence not of a kindred spirit, but of a subterranean force.

I
n 1961 the best all-around player in baseball became a kind of machine for grinding out long fly balls. As he neared Ruth’s record the man in Maris recognized the Technician of Boink for the inhuman force it was, and began to grapple with it, sensing that his balance—that is, his life—was at stake. He began to lose sleep, and to have trouble eating. His hair began to fall out in clumps. Near the end of the season he would break down during post-game interviews, sometimes ranting, sometimes weeping in front of reporters. Like Darwin and Oppenheimer, Maris found after attaining his end that he had little left with which to re-prove his humanity but his confusion and regret. He would say for the rest of his life that he wished he’d never heard of Ruth’s record, let alone broken it. But he did break it—and radically altered our conception of baseball heroics in doing so. Millions of traditionalists never quite forgave him for this. And one such traditionalist may have been Roger Maris himself. That may explain why the Technician of ’61 so soon became the Strikeout King of the mid-Sixties, the introverted beer distributor of the Seventies, and the cancer victim of 1985.

Once you’re where you think you want to be you’re not there anymore
.

—Tony Gwynn, outfielder, San Diego Padres

I
f there were such a thing as an unadulterated baseball story, and if Papa’s life had been one, I guess I would now describe his first few relief appearances, strain to make drama out of the year the Tugs won the PCL’s Northern Division pennant (1968), carefully neglect to mention that their “world series” with the Southern Division champ was canceled on account of rain, and call it quits. But this is the story of an eight-way tangle of human beings, only one-eighth of which was a pro ballplayer. Ballplaying was Papa’s art, but his family was his plight. Even his new nickname, “Papa Toe,” implied that his baseball story couldn’t be extricated from us. And on the day an eighth of us signed a contract to help coach and pitch “stupid relief” for the Tugs, it brought surprisingly little resolution or relief to our eight-way family tangle.

We were all very happy for him—Mama too, I’m glad to say. And when the season began we piled into the car—rebels and Adventists alike—and began making the pilgrimage down to Tug Stadium, where we lolled in our choice new all-season seats, watched Papa walk around in his Tug uniform, and waved like idiots whenever he happened to grin at us. But as the weeks passed and he continued to do nothing but stand in the dugout talking strategy with John Hultz, or coach first base, or at best stroll out to the mound to steady a rocky young pitcher, we began to find it necessary to tell each other how great it was to be a baseball family again. And then Mama and Bet began to stay home; and Peter and Freddy began to read books; and Everett and Irwin began to spend their time ogling the players’ wives (who’d suddenly become shockingly close to us in age), and coddling their leaking, squalling infants in order to facilitate the ogling; and even I began to wonder whether my box seat was in any way preferable to my old outpost in the laurel hedge.

The basic baseball problem was that the season was too young and the team too full of energy and hope for “stupid relief” situations to arise. Hence the glory of Papa’s resurrected baseball career consisted solely of seeing him in uniform—or, back home, of hardly seeing him at all. Both glories wore off fast. Thus did my siblings and I learn one of the hard lessons of life: the best way to strip the allure and dreaminess from a lifelong dream is, very often, simply to have it come true.

But the flip side of the same principle has enabled my brothers and me to maintain a great deal of dreaminess about our own little baseball careers …

E
verett was the only one of us who really burned with the desire to play ball. But then any desire Everett ever had, he burned with it. What finally quelled this particular conflagration was the number of times he had to listen to high school coaches damn him with faint praise like “He makes up in desire what he lacks in ability,” or “He’s a real scrapper out there,” or “Whatever else you have to say about him, that li’l Everett always gives it his best shot.”

As a freshman at McLoughlin High, li’l Everett stood 5′5,″ weighed 130 pounds, played a sure-handed but feeble-armed catcher, hit .315 in the leadoff spot, and led his team in walks and on-base percentage. As a sophomore he played the same position for the JV B-team, but only hit
.270. As a junior, still stuck at 5′5,″ if not 5′4″ (I think that tension may have literally shrunk him an inch that year), he barely made varsity, was stolen blind as a second-string catcher, and hit .214 as one of those diminutive, coach-emasculated pinch hitters sent in against wild pitchers with orders to squat down low in hopes of a cheap walk. It was a year of total baseball humiliation. In fact it drove the family agnostic to search the soul he didn’t even believe he had to decide whether or not to continue playing ball.

After several weeks of agonizing, Everett decided that his problem was not the fastballs being hurled past him by boys six or eight inches taller and a half hundred pounds heavier, but his eyesight. (What can you expect from a soul you don’t believe you have?) He therefore began a kind of antiheroic quest, journeying first to an optometrist, who told him, “You’ve got eyes like an eagle!,” then to an ophthalmologist, who said, “You’re 20/20, son,” then to a second optometrist, and a third, and so on, till finally he found some sort of eye quack who never did say, in writing, whether he was nearsighted or far, but who at least agreed to sell him a natty-looking pair of glasses.

The odd thing was, the things worked. Whether it was luck, or placebo, or whether he simply needed a homeopathic dose of window between himself and those big pitchers, Everett went out for second base as a tortoise-shelled senior, fought his way into the starting lineup, and even became something of a standout. Though he looked (in the words of one of Irwin’s girlfriends) “cute as a button” in his big specs, his style of play was far from buttonlike: he fought with umps, fought with opposing players, made only three errors all season, hit .281, “did some real scrapping out there,” “made up in desire what he lacked in ability,” “gave it his best shot,” helped his and Peter’s team finish second in the district, and scored the winning run in the play-off game that sent McLoughlin High to its first state tournament in two decades. He even began to talk (while Peter reddened and Papa tried not to smile) about college ball, future minor league tryouts, and a Chance family dynasty.

He then struck out four times in a 15 to 2 loss to North Wenatchee in the play-off opener, handed his new infielder’s mitt to the first kid he passed on the street afterward, stomped his superfluous glasses into the sidewalk, and commenced to grow head and facial hair and study politics and poetry.

T
o reach the crappy little ballfield where we JV B-teamers went about the blooper-riddled chaos which we, with the crazed optimism of young Zen students, also called “practice,” you had first to traverse the football field and the quarter-mile cinder oval where the track team worked out, then skirt the varsity baseball team’s posh diamond. So every day, if I dawdled along slowly enough, I got to sneak a look both at Irwin—the new Washington State prep record-holder in the javelin—and at Peter—the two-time All-State center fielder—before slinking off to my Sorry-State career as a B-grade first baseman.

Like all earthly pleasures, though, dawdling had its price: those wide-open, grassy expanses were, for me at least, a psychological minefield. The “mines” were a number of adult American males, all of whom happily barked in reply to the name “Coach.” The “explosions” were caused by the coaches’ unending readiness to ignore the “Comparisons Are Odious” adage. It was my being one of the famous Chance brothers that brought on the comparisons. And it was my athletic abilities that made them odious.

That I wasn’t ashamed of my baseball prowesslessness is, I think, eloquent testimony to the noble character of my family. I was close to spastic on a ballfield, and they all knew it, but with Papa’s eternal minor-leaguing setting the cautionary example, my family had become as athletically tolerant as Babcock was religiously intolerant. Perhaps part of the tolerance stemmed from an unspoken suspicion that the cause of my spasticity was poor vision in the eye Papa had long ago punched. But I’d noticed no Before & After contrast. I think I simply inherited Mama’s contradictory love of ballplayers and inability to deal with having things thrown at her. At any rate, my diamond exploits, though less lauded than Papa’s or Peter’s, were considered no less interesting or enjoyable around our suppertable, for my family had an unfaltering willingness to make oral literature (be it history, farce or myth) of any sort of baseball escapade. The game in which I made three errors and watched three called third strikes in five innings, for instance, was viewed as a game in which I had taken part in six interesting and enjoyable baseball feats. It was a mere quibble, to the Chance clan, that all the enjoyment happened to have been had by the opposing team.

But at the lofty level of high school, the athletic system of values is not
defined or governed by one eccentric family. It is the Royal & Ancient Brotherhood of Coaches that calls the shots there. And it is, in my experience, a rare high school coach who cherishes the athlete whose chief virtue is the enjoyment he gives to the opposing team …

“W
ho’s that sorry little tortoise?” the varsity track coach, Bobby Edson, bawled into the face of the JV A-team baseball coach on April 20, 1966—a date I remember perfectly because (1) it was Hitler’s birthday and (2) it was the day I hung up my mitt, cap and cleats forever. Bobby Edson, like most coaches, was a kind of mystic: he believed the cosmos was endowed with an ineffable muffling system that rendered all the racist, sexist, tasteless and denigrating remarks made by coaches inaudible to the students about whom they bellowed them.

“That there, believe it or not,” bawled the JV skipper (another muffler mystic), “is the youngest Chance brother.”

“Naw!” Edson blored. “I mean that
fat
kid, with the goggles. The one gapin’ at my Winnie tossin’ his javelin out there.”

“Yup. That’s Toe’s youngest. Katie, they call ’im. Appropriate too, I hear.”

“Think he might firm up any?” Edson wondered. “Wasn’t Winnie kind of a chunk at that age?”

I felt their eyes on my back now, probing my bike tires, X-raying my infrastructure, analyzing my aura for signs of “Late Bloomer” potential. “Nope,” the JV CAT-scanner finally sighed. “Winnie’s a rock. Always has been. Damn nice kid’s the rap on Katie there. But no speed, no suds, no arm, no nuthin’.”

I kept my back turned to hide the slow incineration of my face. Meanwhile the varsity baseball coach, Donny Bunnel, joined them from somewhere, and turned their attentions back to the two family prodigies by bellowing, “Can you feature what my team’d be doing with Irwin battin’ cleanup behind Pete instead o’ chuckin’ spears around out there like a goddamned Jaboom?”

“Shit, Coach,” Edson retorted. “Can you picture what
we’d
be doing with Pete winnin’ sprints and quarters and anchorin’ relays instead of doodlin’ around your pissant ballfield?”

“Ought to breed ’em,” said the JV geneticist.

“There you go,” said Edson.

“Get old Toe to sow a wild oat or two, an’ us harvest the crop,” said the JV agriculturalist.

“There you go.”

“Any more of’m comin’ up at all, Donny?” the JV genealogist wondered.

“Twin girls is it, I hear,” said Bunnel.

“Too bad.”

“Yep. Too damn bad.”

“What’s become of the oldest?” Edson asked Bunnel. “Kinda colorful character, ol’ Herbert, wudn’t he?”

“Everett,” the JV pundit corrected.

“Oh, he was colorful all right,” Bunnel snorted. “He was a fuckin’ handful!”