BEANED

1959

     Our Bellflower American Legion team played a little better than .500 ball and finished in the middle of the pack in our league. Not much was expected of us in the 80 team prestigious Anaheim tournament at La Palma Park. We didn’t have enough pitching, or a prospect at that position. Our prospects being scouted were Schaal, Milt Swift and me. At bat I had run into a brief slump and Dad had me hit an hour of pepper, just meeting the ball, running the choked up knob end of the bat through my wrists and forearms, a training exercise to induce me into keeping my right shoulder level and my top right hand following through. He told me I was being too anxious, and although it was alright to be aggressive, I didn’t need to be jumping at the ball with my quick wrists; I could wait.

     We won our first two night games and I hit several line drive singles and doubles and the scouts in the stands picked me as shortstop on the regional all star team. I stayed overnight at Jerry Stephenson’s house the night before our next game. We spent the entire day working out. I had dinner with his huge family. Then we were up all night talking baseball, baseball, baseball. I got very little sleep. We kept going on and on about our dads, this player, that player, whether they were in high school, college, the minors, majors. Both of us wanted to sign baseball contracts out of high school. Jerry was an excellent student, I just got by making B’s.

     That night we played Torrance. They had a very tall right-handed pitcher who threw hard, but he couldn’t get his curve over and my first two times up I whistled line drives past his ear into center, knocking in runs. He had a slow move to first and I stole bases on him. My third time up I didn’t pick up a fastball high and in quick enough and the ball smashed into the bottom-back of my head and helmet and sounded like an explosion going off inside my skull. Next thing I remember was sitting in the dirt trying to get up, my Dad and coach urging me to stay down, stay down…I refused and stood up when a doctor came down.

     I was not wobbly. My helmet had ended up at the screen behind home plate and was partially shattered. Dad and coach wanted me out of the game. The doc wanted to look into my eyes. We were ahead in the game. I don’t know why, but I started to go after the pitcher, who was apologetic and back-pedaled. Dad grabbed me.

     “He wasn’t throwing at you. You lost the ball in the lights. Leave that kid alone, he’s as shook up as you are.”

     I shrugged Dad off and sprinted to first base. The ump came over to ask was I okay. I told him I was fine. My ears rang and my brain buzzed, like a faraway ocean. Otherwise I was fine and stole second base. The pitcher, a prospect, was so shook up he walked three straight hitters, not coming close, always outside, and they took him out. When I came up next, I felt my ass oozing out of the box. I didn’t step out. I swung at the first pitch and blooped the ball into right for a single. But I realized I was flailing to get the hell out of the box as the public address announcer boomed out I was the son of Murray Franklin and I got a huge ovation from a packed house as I stood on first.

     After the game, Dad told me I should have taken the first pitch. Mother was irate at my staying in the game and wanted to take me to the hospital for x rays. I refused.

     “You don’t have to be like your Dad!” she scolded.

     Dad said, “He’s okay now. He knows what to do. This might never happen to him again.”

     My pals who didn’t play baseball were often in awe of my style of hugging the plate and almost daring the pitcher to come in tight on me. I tried to explain to them that hitting and all that went with it, including getting away from balls at your head and body, were just part of it, and though a huge part of it, something I was used to, and that wearing a helmet added a whole new dimension to fighting the fear every hitter felt when he watched a hard thrower warm up or stood in against a wild flame-throwing prospect where the ball literally hissed as it jumped that last foot into the catchers mitt and made that resounding pop echoing throughout the stadium.

     This was the ultimate challenge and why I played, why I could not wait to test my courage and dig in against these pricks with the “serious terrifying velocity and heat,” and who reveled in intimidating you, like Jerry Stephenson, who told me more than once that he would “dust” me if he faced me because of my aggressive, arrogant crowding of the plate. Jerry, while warming up before high school and American Legion games, always fired a wild pitch over the catchers head from the mound as the first hitter stood by, to “plant a seed” in that hitter and his team mates minds.

     Our next game I was fine. I took a pitch. I realized my initial response would be to jump at that first pitch to convince myself and whoever was watching that I was not frightened, but I was frightened, and fought it off. I pretended I was playing pepper, just tried to calm down, stay back and meet the ball, and stroked a single to left.

    But we lost the game and were eliminated from the tournament, and so I did not make the all tournament team as the only shortstop out of 80, and realized also that though I had more range and quickness than the other shortstops in contention, and had a quicker release of the ball, they all had stronger arms than me, powerful “major league ready” arms, which I did not. I had big time major league speed and range, something Dad said could not be taught or coached, but he also added you couldn’t teach or coach a stronger arm either—you either had it or you didn’t. I was determined to overcome this deficiency. At any cost.

     (Next Sunday installment: Off the Block and into the Suburbs)

                                     BEANED IN THE BIG LEAGUES

BIG MOE

     In 1942 I got beaned by Phil Marchildon of the Philadelphia Athletics, one of the hardest, wildest throwers in the game. His fast ball clipped me on the top back of my head as I ducked down and away and caromed to the screen, so I didn’t get hit flush. But I was out for a few seconds and woozier than hell and they took me out of the game, sent me to the hospital, where the doctors cleaned the cut on my head and bandaged me up with one of those things that wrap around your ears, like the guys who got head wounds in the war.

     They wanted to keep me overnight for observation, said I had a concussion. I had a pretty good headache and Rose was very upset, didn’t want me to play, but hell, I’d worked my way into some steady playing time after five years in the minors and waiting my turn behind a bunch of donkeys, I was going good, and you didn’t want to get the reputation of a guy who couldn’t play hurt or lost his courage after a beaning, because we had guys on Detroit that were waiting to take your job, you didn’t want somebody coming in and getting hot and putting you on the bench. So I talked our manager, Del Baker, who wasn’t my greatest supporter and who I didn’t care for because he never went to bat for you, was strictly a front office stooge, into playing me the next day.

     Well, in those days we didn’t wear these protective helmets, you took your life in your hands when you hit, and as I stood at the plate  I could feel my ass turning to jelly and easing out—it was like I couldn’t control my ass or my legs, they were pulling out. So I had to step out and gather myself, talk to myself, knowing everybody was watching and wondering, and force myself to keep my ass in. It was a real struggle. I took a pitch and got my bearings. Soon as you take that first pitch you’re back to being familiar with things. I literally pushed my pelvic in and sucked in my ass and moved up on the plate, and settled my legs, and worked the count, and I knocked a single between third and short.

     I was okay after that. I always knew how to get away from the ball, how to pivot on my back leg and duck, taking it on my hide. I had that confidence in my reflexes, and in all my years of playing ball that was the only time I got beaned, and I was dusted dozens of times, but I never got hit that much, even standing close to the plate.

     The guy who got hit the most, the bravest hitter I ever saw, though, was Minnie Minoso, a team mate when I played in Cuba. One of the top pitchers in the league, a very hard throwing Cuban who had a diamond in one of his front teeth, beaned Minoso on the side of the head and he went down like a sack of potatoes, and he lay there motionless. We thought he was dead. The ball park was quiet as a morgue. Minoso was a tremendous ball player and should’ve been in the big leagues years earlier, and he didn’t move. The docs gave him the smelling salts for about a minute and suddenly he jumped up and ran down to first base. He stole second and third and next time up he stood on top of the plate, like he always did, leading the league in getting hit by pitches, and drilled a double off the wall.

     Every time you start to think you’re tough, you look at a guy like Minoso, and it humbles you.

(Next Sunday installment: The Kid gets beaned)                              

                                  A NEAR RACE RIOT AT CRESSY PARK

1959, Summer

     My parents were discussing moving out of Compton to a safe all white suburb 20 miles away. They fretted over our house going down in value due to the influx of blacks in town, and they feared for Susie going to Compton High, where black girls beat up nice white girls. When they asked me about moving I went into a rage. We had a nucleus of players at Compton High that could win everything. Moving was unimaginable.

     Meanwhile, the Compton American Legion post refused to sponsor our team, which infuriated Dad, who called members “pompous cheapskates and phony patriots.”  Some of the Compton and Dominguez high players signed on with Legion teams in LA and Long Beach, while my team mate Paul Schaal (who would play a decade in the big leagues) and I signed on to play third base and shortstop for the Bellflower team, 10 miles away.

     Bellflower was all clean-cut white kids, a former farm community. Paul owned a black ’51 Ford coupe and drove us to games all over San Gabriel Valley. Right off we produced. Our coach, a father of a senior pitcher, was overjoyed to have us, left us alone. Except for a powerful but slow-moving left-handed hitting catcher named Milt Swift, who was a prospect, Paul and I were their best players. We were free agents having nothing on our agendas but baseball, talking baseball, so dedicated that the Compton Connie Mack League team, led by the great Jim Rooker, picked us up to play our positions among kids up to 19 years old. Now Paul and I played weeknight games and weekend day games, including Sunday doubleheaders.

     Dad wanted me to get a driver’s license and an old jalopy like Paul’s, so I could help him out with deliveries at his store, where I was working part time stocking, writing out orders, waiting on trade, and trying not to fight with him when he warned me to not “go so goddam fast!” I agreed to get a license and it took about a week of Dad teaching me on his stick-shift Rambler before I almost crashed the car as he yelled at me for grinding the gears. Mother taught me on her automatic transmission Pontiac, and much to Dad’s sourness, I passed the driving test, and with my savings I paid for a 1952 Chevy Powerglide coupe, a real pig, according to my cousin Bob

     So now I was making deliveries and alternating with Paul on our baseball excursions. We played our games, stopped for burgers afterwards and discussed our dreams. Paul had a rifle arm at third and a quick release, great wrists, and, like me was an instinctive player though his swing was loopier than mine and thus more powerful when he connected.

     Our Connie Mack team was superb and stocked with some tough kids, including the toughest fighter I knew, Jim Rooker, our pitcher/firstbaseman/outfielder/leader. We shared Cressy as home park with an all black team in the same league from South Central LA and Watts, and, since most of the guys on our team were racists, the rivalry was especially vicious. Many of the players on the black team were from Centennial High, including the bruiser who intimidated me at second base. We beat them our first game and in the rematch a couple weeks later Dad coached, because our regular coach went on vacation.

     The desire to beat us by the all black team had that summer turned into a rabid and savage crusade, similar to the old Hollywood Star/LA Angel rivalry at its most heated, and on this night we had trouble keeping our poise. From their dugout they blistered us with personal abuse. Dad instructed us to ignore them, but it seemed these guys, without supervision from their coach, were obsessed with erasing centuries of white man’s abuse of their race on our cocky white asses. Ron Bart was ready to do battle, however the odds, with the crowd ten to one black over white—in their territory.

     I came to bat in the bottom of the 9^th with the score 3-2 in their favor with runners on second and third and two out. Dad was coaching third and hollering down to me to “get a good pitch!” I stared at the lanky black pitcher and fouled off a pitch that was eye-high. I was a notorious “bad-ball hitter” hitter, and Dad hurried down the line to meet me at the plate.

     “Relax. Be patient. Slow down,” he advised, white spittle caking the corners of his lips. “Don’t get behind and hit HIS pitch!”

     “I hit best with two strikes, Dad. Leave me alone. I know what I’m doing.”

     He grimaced, gritted his teeth, jogged back to his coaching box. The next pitch was a snake of a hissing fastball at my knees, on the inside corner, an area that generally gave me trouble, but this time I lashed it on a rising line between the left and center fielders. I tore down the line and rounded first as the center fielder gave chase and Dad waved our runners around the bases, the ball rolling toward the fence on the dew-chilled grass. I was churning hard around second base when the left fielder blind-sided me with a vicious football block at my knees, sending me airborne, head-over-heels to land face-first on the dirt infield.

     When I looked up, Dad had the kid by the throat with his left hand and was smacking him hard in the face with his right hand as the kid back-pedaled into centerfield, his head bobbing back and forth like a speed bag in a boxing gym. Finally Dad dropped him in short centerfield, where he lay like a broken doll, and turned to hurry back into the infield, where our entire team had gathered; some wielding bats as Jim Rooker pulled me to my feet, a wild, gleeful look in his eye. My legs were fine. Jim’s older brother Wayne was with us, bat on shoulder as the black team and their fans trickled onto the field, out-numbering us five to one. They milled ominously, many in trench-coats. Then Dad was among us, gesturing us to close ranks, like a western movie where cowboys were surrounded by a whole tribe of Indians. He instructed us to drop our bats and form a circle. The massing blacks, moving toward us, were cut off by their powerfully built catcher, George Hill, an all league lineman on the Centennial football team. I’d played against him in junior high. He grabbed me by the elbow, faced my father. “Mr. Franklin,” he said. “You folks line up behind George, and he get you out of here.”

     We quickly gathered our equipment at the first base dugout and in single file followed big George through and past the growling, baleful mob, out to the parking lot adjoining the spacious park and jumped quickly into our cars and in a caravan moved out onto Rosecrans boulevard as the mob stood looking on.

     Driving slowly, Dad said, “He was just a kid, Dell, but I did what I did because nobody messes with anybody on our team, whether it’s you or anybody else. There’s no place in the game for what that kid did. He’s lucky I didn’t kill him.”

     A week later we were slated to begin the regional playoffs at Cressy, but only a few players showed up, including Rooker, Schaal, and Ron Bart, and Jim’s brother and Paul’s Dad and brother as our only fans. There was a good crowd. Our cast of five sat in the dugout while the opposing team from the Valley warmed up. A bunch of kids from the black team we’d beaten on my winning hit entered our dugout in humble posture, including the kid Dad had bopped around and nearly strangled. He walked directly to Dad, who stood, and apologized, head and eyes lowered, voice a feint rasp from Dad’s throat gouging.

     “Sorry, sir, I lost my head.”

     The black kids, one-by-one, approached Dad and apologized, caps off. None of them glanced at me or my team mates, and the kid who’d cut my knees out from under did not apologize. One of the kids asked where the rest of our team was, and when Dad said he didn’t expect them to show, he said, “We play for you, Mr. Franklin. We play for you anytime.” His team mates nodded. Dad thanked them, said he’d like to coach them, but explained it didn’t work that way.

     We forfeited the game.

    

(Next Sunday’s installment: Big Moe beaned in the big leagues.)

The Ball Player's Son

                                            BLOOD TRANSFUSION

1959

     Dad and Mom got into a savage argument that erupted at the dinner table a day after my act of cowardice. Every point he made was shoved down his throat with barbed venom. Finally he grew so exasperated and enraged that he fired a fork at her, and it made a direct hit, sticking in her tender bicep. Mother stared at him coldly and pulled it out, calmly walked out of the dining room, but not before telling him in an arctic tone of voice to “pack his bags and get out of the house.” Susie ran from the table, shrieking.

     This was a first; he’d never touched her, and she’d never booted his ass out. He packed a bag and moved into a shabby motel in Compton. The relief of tension in the house was instant. We were at last calm. Mom made a show of being happy, but I knew things couldn’t go on like this, especially when cousin Bob, Dad’s right hand man at the store, came by to inform us Dad was a mess and would probably get in a fight over a traffic altercation and end up in jail if Mom didn’t take him back. He was so irritable in the store he was driving everybody crazy, working 70 hours a week

     A week into his absence I was sitting on the porch still moping over my craven display when Dad drove up in his Rambler wagon, bounced over a curb and back down into the gutter, coming to a crooked stop. Mother was instantly on the porch, hands on hips, looking cross. The shot-gun door opened and Dad fell out onto the strip of grass separating the sidewalk and curb and, on his hands and knees, vomited profusely into the gutter. I walked over to stand near him as neighbors piled out of their homes to observe the toughest, most famous guy in town resemble a skid row drunk. It was a Saturday afternoon. I’d never seen Dad this drunk before. I’d seen him happily lit with his baseball pals, but never like this—never.

     While I stood over him, he peered up, and muttered. “Yer motha, she knows everything! Never wrong. Shit.” He spewed out bits of vomit, hiccupped several times. “Go tell yer motha I’m comin’ home. That’s my house, too. I goddam worked for it. I paid for it. I won’t be a goddam mouse in my own house!”

     He sat up, holding his head. He tried to rise but teetered and I held him up. He smelled foul. I hoisted him by the armpits and dragged him like a 6 foot heavy bag toward the front door of our house. Mother and Susie stood on the porch looking like executioners. They turned away abruptly and made sour faces as I grunted and pushed past them, hauling Dad. I got him into the house and led him to the bathroom where he puked some more in the toilet. Then he sat on the side of the tub.

     “All I do is work!” He shouted. “And I’M the goddam villain. I’m no wife beater.
I’m not Black Bart!”

     Doors slammed. I peeled off his sweat-drenched, vomit-sprayed shirt, pulled off his shoes, then his pants. He stood, wavering, and I caught him as he slipped out of his boxer shorts and led him to the shower. I got him in the shower. I turned on the cold spray full blast and savored his shuddering cries. I handed him a tooth brush with paste.

     “In case she ever kisses you again, Dad.”

     “Very funny.”

     I kept an eye on him so he didn’t collapse in the shower and cut himself to ribbons on the glass door. After more of his howling and growling, I got him out, tossed him a towel. He wrapped it around his waist and I led him toward the bedroom, where mother and Susie packed a bag and skittered past us and out of the house, headed for gramma’s. Dad collapsed face first on the bed and was immediately snoring loudly through a thrice broken nose. I was stuck with Black Bart.

                                                   ----------------    

     Next morning, late, Dad was too hungover to eat. He stood in the kitchen drinking coffee, his face doughy and stubbly, eyes bloodshot.

     “You know your father’s no drunk,” he told me. “Your mother knows it, too. She knows she’s gotta go pretty far to me fork her.” He belched. “Anyway, thanks for taking care of your old man.” He stared at me for a long time, appraising me with those bad eyes. “Now,” he said. “Go get the bag of balls. We’re gonna hit.”

     We hauled the gear to the Roosevelt rock pile as churchgoers returned for yard work, stood with garden tools to observe us. I knew I was in for SOME thing as we warmed up, both of us humming the ball pretty good, like burn-out. He wore his grim game face. Then he grabbed a bat and said he was going to hit, because he was to play in an Old Timer’s game at Dodger Stadium before a Dodger game. Last year, down in San Diego, he hit a 385 foot homer at Westgate Park in an Old Timer’s game and his arm was still pretty strong.

     I tossed some normal BP and he pulled half a dozen ropes into leftfield. He waved the bat at me and implored me to throw harder. I did. He laced two balls that nearly took my head off. “Harder!” he shouted, a superior smirk on his mug, digging in. I wound up and fired one up and in and he tomahawked it, the ball soaring and curving over the heads of some young neighborhood kids who began shagging in the outfield. God, could he hit!

     “KNOCK ME DOWN!” he bellowed, waving his hand at himself, taunting. “Come on, bird-boy!”

     I fired a medium fastball and instead of ducking he took it on the shoulder and snarled at me. “That all you got? My my, the mosquitoes are biting early this year, aren’t they, bird-boy…? Goddam mommy’s boy!”

     I fired a ball as hard as I could before he could get set and he took it on the backside; then tossed the bat at me like a spinning propeller and I jumped over it. Then he was striding toward me. “Now you hit.” He said, eyeing me like somebody he’d like to punch.

     I took my stance, preparing for a duster. He made me wait; then lobbed a big slow curve down the middle for a strike, and when I froze and took it he jeered and then before I could get set he quick-pitched me a fastball inside which I fouled off. He loaded up and I rifled the next pitch into left field. Then he planted one in my backside, a hummer. I refused to acknowledge the bruising sting. Then he side-armed one at my ankles and I jumped over it and went down on my ass while he horse-laughed, holding the ball, flipping and catching it, in his glory.

     “Ready to hit, birdie?”

     “Fuck you! Bring it on!” I jumped up, dug in.

     He was so happy, happier than I’d seen him in some time, needling, competing, confronting, like he was playing again, and not working his ass off in his shithouse and driving all over hell and back, even if he was his own boss and making way more money than he’d ever made in baseball.

     I rifled three of his fastballs into leftfield before he dusted me. I made sure to hug the plate and took a low outside curve ball and ripped it up the middle and nailed him on the foot and he went down in a heap and sat on the mound cursing and grimacing in pain. I waved my bat at him, “Get up old man, knock me down with your weak shit. I OWN you!”

     He stood and grabbed balls from the bag and began feeding me fastballs, one after another, and his tricky off-speed curving drop, and I hammered everything. Something had busted loose in me. I wanted him to hit me. I wanted the pain. I was so relaxed, felt outside my skin looking in instead of inside looking out; an exhilaration and sureness coursed through my blood. My stroke was simple, level, compact, quick, a perfect extension of my father’s swing, the swing I’d learned and copied from him, even adopting his mannerisms of touching the plate and digging in and pumping the bat twice before laying it on my shoulder while I eye-balled the pitcher, and I realized, as I hammered out line drive after line drive with violent precision, that the demented man on the mound was part of me and I was part of him, that indeed we looked the same, smelled the same, and the same wild Russian blood ran through our veins, and that no matter what happened from here on out we were one and the same and I could not escape him, whether I liked it or not. I must deal with it.

     Finally, panting for breath, bent over at the knees, he looked up and grinned at me as balls came rolling in from the kids shagging in left field. He walked toward me, flipped me his glove. “Look, you know making the pivot at second you never let the baserunner intimidate you, I don’t give a fuck who he is, you hit the sonofabitch between the eyes with the ball when he comes in high, and I guarantee he’ll never come in high again, unless he wants a hair-lip or a new nose.”

     Dad grimaced as he talked. No doubt because of his toe. “You let these kids hit now. Pitch to ‘em.” He smacked me hard on the shoulder and set off toward the house, limping badly; neighbors, out in force, looking on. When I got home an hour later, mother was back. They were in the bedroom, Dad face down on the bed, icepacks under his toe and on his back, mother massaging his neck. An ugly purple welt was on his backside. Mother looked up at me as I stood in the doorway. She shook her head, but there was a glimmer of accepting good humor in her eyes. “You two,” was all she said.

     (Next Sunday installment: “A Near racial riot at Cressey Park”)

                              AN ACT OF BLATANT COWARDICE

1959

     We had a big game with all black Centennial High, our cross-town rival, a school Ron Bart hated, especially after they thrashed us in football. We played them at Cressey Park, a fine municipal stadium with symmetrical fences and stands wrapping around from third to first bases and lights and a press box, where Howard Handy, sports editor of the Compton Herald American newspaper, sat and reported on games. The ball park was located in the black part of town, off Central and Rosecrans boulevards. Like us, Centennial had some good prospects, including smooth switch-hitting sophomore shortstop Roy White, who would go on to have a big career with the NY Yankees, and several formidable specimens—strapping, sinewy, mercury-quick man-children with fierce us-against-them attitudes. The stands were filled with mostly black folks.

     Bowlin, already drawing scouts with his live fastball and excellent control and poise and confidence, pitched, and it was close, a tense game. A very powerful senior outfielder who played linebacker on the football team, was on first base, and he began talking to me at second base. “Comin’ down, skinny white boy, gonna cut your balls off, gonna take yo skinny ass out!”

     Loman cupped his hand to his mouth. “Don’t pay him no mind, Ragman. He’s all jive, just bluffin’.”

     “I been sharpenin’ my spikes, boy, gonna cut you up good.”

     Sure enough, the hitter slapped a ball in the hole between short and third. Loman backhanded it and in one motion that I felt took forever snapped me a perfect waist-high peg. I heard the base runner thundering down the line screaming like a kamikazi, and for the first time ever I hopped like a frightened hare across the bag too quickly to avoid his spikes-high slide. The ump called him safe in a voice that seemed to boom and echo in my ears for unendurable minutes. I never completed the throw to first, gripped the ball tightly, head down, unable to look at my team mates or anybody as the baserunner stood, smile gleaming as he brushed himself off.

     I heard the Centennial dugout’s chorus: “Buck buck buck! Chicken boy! Buck buck buck!” I heard the baserunner whisper, “Footsteps.” Finally, I faced Bowlin, who’d stepped off the mound to deliver me a look of pure loathing and disgust. “Gutless motherfucker,” he fumed.

     “Gutless yourself,” I growled back, finding my strangled voice. I gunned the ball at him so hard he staggered to catch it. Then I heard Ron Bart at first: “Guess you didn’t inherit your old man’s CAJONES, huh?”

     I couldn’t look at him. Centennial broke the game open, and when the inning ended I went to the far end of the dugout and sat. Even Edgmon left me alone. Loman finally sat beside me, stared straight ahead, patted my knee. He never said a word, and on the bus ride back to campus, after we lost, he sat beside me in the back.

     “Everybody has a day like you did,” he said softly. “Next time, you’ll get ‘em back. I know you will. That’s how you learn.”

     “Loman, sometimes I wish I were you,” I found myself telling him. “Black, with no Dad as an ex big leaguer, and folks expectin’ me to fill his shoes.”

     He gazed at me. “If you feel that way, like you wanna be me, well, my friend, you are in powerful big trouble.”

     When I got off the bus last, Edgmon waited for me, put his arm around my shoulder and walked me toward the locker room. “Son,” he said. “I’m stickin’ with you no matter what. I’m in your corner. What happened today, it’ll never happen to you again. I guarantee it. You got spooked. I been spooked. You got too much heart and character. I know you, and you got the right stuffings.”

     At the dinner table that night, I felt like it was extra quiet.Dad acted as if nothing in particular had happened, and though I didn’t see him at the stadium, I’m sure he’d heard about it. When you prove yourself a coward, you’re sure the whole world knows about it, and the mirror is no friend. Nobody is.

     (Next Sunday installment” Big Moe Gets the Boot.”)