The All-County Incident

(Note: All conflicts and feelings of malice resulting from the described incident below have long since been resolved. High school gives us healthy competition and sometimes not-so-healthy competition. Either way, we live and we learn…However, sometimes it’s not until years later that we learn the WHOLE story. Tonight, I will attend the funeral of a childhood friend’s mom, whom we’ve just lost also to cancer, and I guess it’s just gotten me thinking about the loss of my own dad and how we learn to cling tightly to the good memories so that we can continue to survive with the bad… Anyhow, I hope you get a laugh out of it and if you, my dear frienemy from high school, are reading this, I hope no hard feelings are stirred up and that you will correct anything that I have wrongly depicted that you feel needs correcting.)

Up until my sophomore year in high school, playing ball was my jam. It came so easy. I was 5’8” by the time I hit middle school and came from a father who could have/should have played college ball (I learned this only after he passed away when his family told me. I knew he’d chosen to join the Navy after high school and that his family was poor but I never knew it cost him his hoop dreams. Turns out, he couldn’t have afforded to go to college without the Navy, even if it had been on a well-deserved basketball scholarship. Instead, he joined the Navy and sent money home to his family. That’s just the kind of man he was.) I grew up with Dad coaching me on and off the field whether I wanted him to or not. 

I was best as basketball because of my height, as I towered over pretty much everyone else at that age, but it was softball I loved. I was a slugger and by my freshman year, I earned an award for the Varsity team’s most homeruns hit during the season.  By that time, dad was just my off-the-field coach, but like me, he always had a hard time staying silent when he thought a wrong was done and I can recall one particular incident that caused me an especially hard time in school…

It was nearing the end of that 9th grade softball season and the All-County Team was getting ready to be announced.  The coach made his nominations and I wasn’t one of them.  Another freshman, however, was.  As I recall, Dad’s objection was that she was a great ballplayer but had been hurt and out for most of the season and there was a better choice for the nomination he felt the coach had overlooked.  Anyway, Dad spoke up and pointed this out to the coach who apparently told the nominated player’s mother who said something to dad before one of the games, something along the lines of, “You shouldn’t have said (so and so)” and Dad replied with, “You don’t even know what I said”, and they let it go at that.  Well, I guess the player’s mom told the player who told her/my (high school is so complicated…) friends and they gave me hell about how we(Dad and I) were just jealous that I wasn’t nominated and so forth.  Everyone, including myself, assumed it was me that Dad thought should have been nominated.  After all, I had the most homeruns… Anyway, I hadn’t had anything to do with Dad talking to the coach, but I’m sure I stood my ground, because that’s just what I did back then, right or wrong.

Later on in the same month, the All-State Team was named.  I, as a freshman, received Honorable Mention for All-State.  I remember sitting in my same seat in English class, surrounded by the same kids who had mocked me just weeks before for our “jealousy” over the All-County team nominations, and just grinning to myself and thinking, “We sure showed them, Dad.” 

 

Years later, not long before he passed away, I found two softballs on my dad’s desk with game scores written on them.  Of all the homeruns I’d hit, why were those two the ones he’d chosen to keep, I asked dad. He asked me if I remembered the ordeal at the tournament where he and so-and-so (the player’s mom’s name shall go unmentioned as, again, peace has long since been made) had bad feelings over the All-County softball nominations? I said, of course, and he proceeded to tell me the rest of that story a la Earl Pitts in my early childhood memories:

After they’d had those few words, he chose to move his chair to behind the outfield fence and watched the game from there, I assume alone, to avoid further confrontation (I guess. Remember, this is being recalled some 20 years later.)  Anyway, that’s where he was sitting when I sent not one but two homeruns from back-to-back at bats over the fence right to him.  He was so proud and, because he’d been sitting out there, he was in the right place to grab them and stick them in his coat pocket. 

When I told that part to Dad, about the other kids making fun of me in class for being jealous that I didn’t get the All-County nomination and then how I was so proud of the All-State nod, Isaid, “Well, then I guess we showed them twice, didn’t we?Once with the home runs and once with the award.” He looked at me like I had three heads and said, “I wasn’t even arguing for you to be nominated. I was talking about Jess.  She was a senior who pitched well every single game and had a solid batting average.  He wouldn’t have won a game without her.  You were just a freshman!”

Well, at least I’ll always have my home run balls and another memory to bring me a smile when I miss him more than I think I can stand it.  Sometimes, I look at my two beautiful daughters and think, “Look, Dad! I hit two more home runs for you to be proud of.” I think they are keepers, too.