The Meaning of Ichiro (24 page)

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Don Nomura was born Donald Engel on May 17, 1957, in St. Luke’s Hospital in the Tsukiji area of Tokyo. He was the first child
for Alvin George Engel, a 40-year-old civil service employee working for the Military Motion Picture Association, and his
24-year-old Japanese wife, Yoshie Ito. A younger brother, Kenny, would be born two years later. When Don was six, his mother
walked out, leaving her husband to care for the children, never to return.

“I think that, for her, getting married in the first place had just been for purposes of survival, given her economic condition,”
he said later in a published biography about his life. “It wasn’t that long after the war and things weren’t easy. So she
meets an American, marries him and has two kids, then realizes that she doesn’t want it…. I guess in retrospect it wasn’t
a good time to have mixed blood or half-breed kids, because my mother always said not to tell anybody that she had been married
to an American or that our father was Mr. Engel. I’d say to myself, ‘What the hell is she talking about?’”

At St. Mary’s, a private Catholic school in Tokyo, Nomura showed signs of exceptional athletic ability as well as a penchant
for untimely outbursts of temper (the latter, his teacher said, was typical behavior for children from broken, mixed-marriage
homes). At the age of 16, he was kicked out of school for fighting and was subsequently enrolled at Chofu High in the suburbs
of Tokyo, where he became an All-Star baseball player and in his free time continued his activities as a rebellious social
misfit. He was also seeing more of his mother, who had renamed herself Sachiyo and remarried. Her new husband was the playing
manager of the Nankai Hawks, catcher Katsuya Nomura, who was finishing out a Hall of Fame career. His 657 home runs would
be second in Japan only to Sadaharu Oh.

The next step was enrollment at California Polytech University, where he played baseball well enough to set his sights on
a pro career, if not in the majors then at least in Japan. When he reached the age of 21, he was required by the Japanese
Home Ministry to give up the dual U.S.-Japan citizenship he had been holding and choose one country or the other. His father,
who had moved to Hawaii by then, had always told him to be proud of being an American—“The U.S. is the best country in the
world,” he would say. But the son opted for Japan instead. An opening at the Yakult Swallows had presented itself and he wanted
to play there without being subject to the restrictions on
gaijin,
which at the time were two per team. He took the name Katsuaki Ito, after his mother, and in 1977, he also consented to being
adopted by Katsuya, assuming then the name of Don Katsuaki Nomura.

On the farm team, where he was sent, the daily drudgery was hard enough, but discrimination kept rearing its hydra heads.
One of these belonged to the minor league team’s bus driver, who made a habit of addressing Nomura rudely as
“Gaijin!”
poking fun at his rust-orange hair and, behind his back, referring to him as
keto
(hairy beast). One night, when the driver left his car at the team dormitory, Nomura decided to exact his revenge on the
vehicle. He kicked it, dented it, jumped on it and then urinated on it. A crowd of his fellow players, which included Korean
and other mixed-blood athletes, watched and cheered him on. “I’m doing it for you guys,” Nomura cried, “because this guy is
a goddamn racist—and worse.” This drew more cheers. The police later charged Nomura with a misdemeanor. He was forced to pay
a fine and issue a formal apology.

By this time, the multi-named Ito-Engel-Nomura (occasionally even he had a hard time remembering what his own
nom du jour
was) had come to some conclusions in regard to racial discrimination. From his time in California, he had come to think that
there was indeed a difference between the U.S. and Japan on that score. In the U.S. proper, he believed, there were so many
diverse non-white groups—roughly a quarter of the U.S. population was non-white—and there were so many laws to protect minority
rights, along with a legal apparatus to enforce them, that you could have a decent, successful mainstream life there. In Japan,
by contrast, he thought that if you were not 100 percent Japanese, you often had a more tortuous road to travel unless you
had family wealth, special connections or somehow blurred your identity. It was possible to be shut out of the better universities
and corporations because of your background, and it was much harder to take legal recourse, because of the relative paucity
of lawyers and courts. Since less than 1.5 percent of the population fell into the non-Japanese category, discrimination was
not the social issue it was in the States.

By 1981, thanks to a bad back, a bad batting average and bad relations with the coaches, Nomura was out of baseball and looking
for a job. Worse yet, his father, at age 62, had committed suicide. Nomura had been sending him money from his not-very-substantial
minor league paychecks to help him survive, but it was still not enough. After a business partner had embezzled funds from
their joint enterprise and absconded to the mainland, it was more than Alvin Engel could take. He ran a hose from the exhaust
pipe of his car into the driver’s seat, locked the doors and started the engine. Neighbors found him sometime later. He had
left a short letter saying, “I’m sorry.”

“I went to Hawaii and picked up my father’s ashes and brought them back to Japan,” said Nomura. “I put them in the cemetery
near our house. And I kept the letter. The sad thing is I couldn’t relate it to anybody. Nobody really knew the existence
of my father, because of the way my mother portrayed things to everybody. She lied to everybody about how she had never been
married. She had all these different stories to explain the existence of her children. One, of course, being that me and my
brother were from the orphanage and we never had a father. Or that they were never married. There were so many lies. It was
just heartbreaking.”

In 1982, Nomura packed up and moved to Los Angeles with a new wife, a former Tokyo-based dental assistant. There he worked
a series of eclectic jobs: delivery van driver, minor league scout, Subaru car cleaner, travel agent, night janitor cleaning
toilets in Little Tokyo, liquor store clerk in South Central L.A. and graveyard shift manager at a $10 a night flophouse,
where the clientele consisted of drug addicts, ex-cons and prostitutes (of both genders). For a time, he was so poor he was
forced to send his wife and new baby daughter back to Japan and to live out of his car.

By 1985, however, he had saved enough money to rent an apartment and bring back his family. Then in one incredible night at
a Las Vegas baccarat table, he converted $1,000 into $41,000. Showing uncommon discipline, he brought the money back to L.A.
and invested in the real estate business. He put a down payment on a small house, built up enough equity to secure a loan,
then bought an apartment to rent out.

Nomura rode the stock and real estate market booms of the late ‘80s. The small apartment he had bought, worth $250,000 at
the time of purchase, shot up to $400,000 in value. With this kind of equity, he was now in a position to realize a dream
he had long been nurturing: buying into a minor league club in the States.

He borrowed a quarter of a million dollars from the bank to purchase ownership of a California-based team called the Salinas
Spurs—a Class A entry in the California League. This made him the second Japanese citizen to own a professional baseball franchise
in North America.

The franchise was to serve as a supplementary farm system for Japanese professional clubs, a place where they could send their
new high school draftees for seasoning. Nomura recruited four or five farm team players from Daiei and Yakult, barely out
of their hormonal teens, and played them alongside equally hormonal American minor leaguers and a variety of veteran rogues
and troublemakers not welcome elsewhere in organized ball. Among them were Steve Howe, banned from the major leagues seven
times for drug abuse, and Leon Durham, a onetime MLB outfielder/first baseman who had been arrested for bringing a gun to
the ballpark.

The Japanese visitors picked up a variety of habits from their idiosyncratic teammates—chewing tobacco, long hair, beards,
periodic visits to Nevada’s bordellos—some even developed a taste for the individualistic and infinitely shorter American
approach to training.

A special member of the Salinas Spurs was the clubhouse boy, Mac Suzuki, who had been kicked out of an Osaka high school for
fighting. Nomura had initially made the boy’s acquaintance in the 1988-89 off-season during a baseball clinic in San Diego
arranged by Tony Gwynn and Nomura’s stepfather Katsuya. Suzuki, then 13, had one of the best natural arms Nomura had ever
seen, and Nomura had taken him aside and told him, “Kid, whatever you do, don’t ever quit playing baseball.”

Suzuki’s father, looking for a place to put his wayward son after his rudely interrupted high school career, had contacted
Don Nomura for help and wound up sending the boy to Salinas, in the hopes his new surroundings would instill some discipline
in him. Young Mac swept the clubhouse, washed the laundry, cleaned the spikes, pitched pregame batting practice and sold hot
dogs during the game. He ate and slept with the players and pitched for a local American Legion team as well—all without speaking
a word of English. Unable to read the labels on the boxes in the laundry room, he once unwittingly put Drano in the team washing
machine, ruining all the uniforms.

Suzuki also had the best arm on the team. At Salinas, he grew into a 6′4′′, 200-pounder who could throw the ball 95 miles per
hour. He was an obvious pro prospect, and Nomura signed him to a personal representation contract, making Suzuki the agent’s
first client. He later negotiated a deal with the Seattle Mariners that earned Suzuki a million-dollar signing bonus.

Eventually, Nomura sold the Spurs to a group in San Bernardino for a million and a half dollars. Seeing the willingness of
Hideo Nomo to make a stand and noticing the emergence of at least a handful of independent-minded players who were fed up
with the plantation mentality of the Japanese system, Nomura became convinced that he could become a full-time agent in Japan.
So he set up a company in Los Angeles, KDN Sports, Inc., hired an attorney, a bright, articulate young Berkeley graduate named
Jean Afterman, and set his sights on his next target in Japan, an ursine young heat dispenser named Hideki Irabu.

In the wake of Nomo’s sh
ji-rattling debut, scouts from North America came pouring into Japan searching for more of the same. Officials in the Japanese
commissioner’s office, more than a little annoyed with themselves for having allowed the foreign invaders to slip through
the gates, came up with the bright idea of unilaterally eliminating the irksome “voluntary retired” clause—now known as “The
Nomo Clause” in Tokyo cocktail party conversation. They expanded the restrictions in the Japanese Baseball Convention by adding
“voluntarily retired player” to the class of player prohibited from moving overseas, and they did this without informing their
American friends, although they had clearly been obliged to do so.

The back-room maneuvering, however, did little to prevent a struggle for the services of the aforementioned Hideki Irabu,
a 6′4′′, 220-pound right-hander with a high-octane fastball, who joined the Lotte Orions of Kawasaki in 1991, a year before
they moved across Tokyo Bay and became the Chiba Lotte Marines. It was a case that demonstrated even more vividly than
les affaires Murakami et Nomoaux
just how underdeveloped the concept of individual rights really was in Japan.

Irabu was born in 1968 to an Okinawan woman and an American GI, a young man who had then departed Japan without leaving a
forwarding address. As Don Nomura had discovered, being racially mixed was not a great advantage in a country like Japan,
and the difficult topic of his absent biological father was one that Irabu preferred not to discuss publicly (except to confide
in one unguarded moment, to a couple of sportswriters, that he wanted one day to go to the U.S. and become so famous a ballplayer
that his father could not help but notice).

Hideki was raised by his mother and stepfather—an Osaka restaurateur with the name (interestingly) of Ichiro Irabu. Hideki
was an energetic child with a passion for baseball who displayed extraordinary athleticism before he had even entered kindergarten.
On the advice of his stepfather, he enthusiastically adopted a routine of rigorous exercise to strengthen his body and his
pitching arm—including one drill where he tied a rubber tube to a pole and tugged on it using his throwing motion to strengthen
his arm and back muscles. By the time he was in the eighth grade, he threw such a hard fastball that classmates were afraid
to play catch with him.

Throughout his school years, he would wake up every morning at 5:30 without fail and run. “I was just stunned by his ability
to keep up with a lot of hard work,” the elder Irabu later told a reporter. “Hideki would tenaciously hang onto things that
a normal kid would have long given up. And that made me think that he might grow up to be an extraordinary man.”