Jason kept a picture of Maddux above his desk in our dorm room at Young Harris College in the north Georgia mountains. A beautiful athlete, the best on campus, Jason played only intramurals and spent serious time at his desk. A physics workhorse and calculus whiz, he kept Maddux’s image at eye level.
Shuffling and pardoning down the aisle to our seats, Jason stopped and squeezed my shoulder. “Look,” he said.
Maddux strode toward home, hurling the ball through the night.
It’s 2014. I’m 37. My wife and daughter are both asleep. I’m a thousand miles from the stadium-turned-parking-lot. On YouTube, Kenny Lofton of the American League Champion Cleveland Indians looks at the first pitch for a ball. Inside, low. I don’t remember the call. I remember all of us standing, holding our breath. Then I remember light. Thousands of lights. Waves of tiny diamonds. The whole stadium flashing and Jason, who would die five months later on the side of a south Georgia highway, leaning into my ear and whispering, “Maddux.”
2. Prospects
SCOUTING REPORT: Greg Maddux, age 18, by Chicago Cub Scouts Mapson and Jorgensen
Height: 5'11, Weight: 155, DOB: 4/14/66. Home: Las Vegas, Nevada.
Abilities: I really believe that this boy would be the number one player in the country if he just looked a little more physical. Has average to above average fastball now. He has a big league CB but needs to be more consistent with it.
Weakness: Lacks control on all his pitches. Just has to get ahead of hitters more often. Sometimes cocks his wrist too early on his curve and telegraphs it.
SCOUTING REPORT: Jason Kenney, age 19, by Boyhood Friend & College Roommate Collins
Height: 6'2, Weight: 216, DOB: 1/9/77. Home: Atlanta, Georgia.
Abilities: Three-Sport Athlete. Center Fielder, Georgia Little League World Series team, 1990; Fullback and Tight End, Atlanta Colts Pop Warner Football National Champions, 1991; Guard and Small Forward, Dunwoody High School, Georgia High School Basketball Champions, Undefeated, Ranked No. 3 by USA Today, 1995.
A “natural.” Hyper-competitive. Crazy instinctive touch and feel. Inspires envy.
Once bowled a 290 in Rome, Georgia, while consuming 2½ pitchers of Bud Light.
Weakness: Lacks control (drinking). Dismissed from basketball team two days before state title game—showed up drunk (again) to school. Binge drinking since age 14.
3. The Caddie-Fanatic
Trouble found Maddux on the second pitch. Kenny Lofton—that leadoff fury with legs electric—hit a scorcher to sure-handed shortstop Raffy Belliard, who butchered the ball. Lofton stole second. Lofton stole third. Baerga bounced to short, Lofton scored.
One–zip.
“It’s okay, Gregory,” Jason said.
Jason didn’t speak directly to Tom Glavine or John Smoltz or any other athlete. Unlike me, he wasn’t prone to hero-worship. As a kid, he didn’t wear the jerseys of Dale Murphy, Dominique Wilkins, or Deion Sanders. Jason identified more with the game and the desire to be playing. His father, Charles Kenney, played basketball at Georgia Tech and tried out with the Hawks. His older brother, Keith, went to Tech on a hoops scholarship. Jason, Boy-Midas, was next.
“Nothing we can do about that,” he instructed Maddux.
When Jason started attracting attention for his abilities on the diamond and the court, he answered the Dionysian call of the party. His cup overflowed. In college, he estimated he spent 75 percent of his high school nights drunk or high. Jason told me this sober one winter morning, months after the World Series, at breakfast. His tone didn’t betray bragging or bitterness, just curiosity. Instead of ACC ball at Tech, Jason was playing against me that winter in an ancient, empty gym in the mountains of north Georgia.
Maddux escaped the inning. Jason stood, excused himself, saying he needed a drink.
Twelve-packing our way through the Colorado Rockies and a sweep of the Reds, we drank beer in the playoffs just as we did in the regular season. Every game. Except for Maddux’s. Jason didn’t drink when Greg Maddux pitched. “We’re good,” he’d explain, though it wasn’t clear where the boundaries of “we” began or ended.
Maddux was warming up to begin the second when Jason returned with two cups of coffee and a bag of peanuts. He handed me a coffee.
“Let’s get to work, Gregory,” he said.
Jason used “Gregory” when Maddux was in trouble, which was rare that year (19-2, 1.63 ERA). But against Cleveland—Lofton, Albert Belle, Jim Thome, Manny Ramirez, Eddie Murray—the water was deep.
“There you go, Gregory. Fastball inside. Now, changeup away.”
During his tenure with the Braves, Maddux had a cadre of entirely forgettable catchers: Damon Berryhill, Charlie O’Brien, Eddie Perez, Paul Bako, Henry Blanco. Maddux’s personal pitching valets. Catcher caddies. Unknown to the sporting world in 1995, Maddux also had a singular fan, a real fanatic, from the Latin fanaticus, meaning “enthusiastic, inspired by a god.”
“There you go, let him ground out, Gregory.”
“Cutter inside. Handcuff him. Yes. Like that.”
“Curve, Gregory, then fastball, then change.”
By the third, Jason was speaking only to Maddux, calling pitches and predicting where the outs would fall. Grounder Belliard. Groundout Lemke. Strike three looking.
Maddux found a groove, a keyhole, and Jason did too.
It’d be too much to tell you that every pitch and pop of the bat traveled the path of Jason’s words, but for three straight innings the ball seemed to do exactly that.
4. Fish Story
Over the years, I’ve shared little about World Series Game 1. I don’t trust my words. That for which we find words, Nietzsche writes, is something already dead in our hearts. Besides, the heart of baseball is already clogged with stories of Too-Soon-Gone-All-Star-Best-Dead-Buddies and Forlorn Fathers. I don’t trust memory when it’s sweetened by a sentimental, high-fructose, Field of Dreams corn syrup.
What I saw, though, is what I saw. And only recently have I inched closer to the truth.
Before the Internet was in our pockets, Sports Illustrated arrived once a week in the mail. It was a big deal. Babe Ruth had Grantland Rice, DiMaggio had Jimmy Cannon, and in our days Greg Maddux had Tom Verducci. On August 14, 1995, the week we enrolled as freshmen at Young Harris College, the cover of Sports Illustrated featured Greg Maddux with the headline: “The Greatest Pitcher You’ll Ever See.”
In the cover story, Verducci attempts to explain in prose Maddux’s astonishing range of gifts: intelligence, control, humility, instinct. “But,” Verducci writes, “he is even better at analyzing hitters—so good that four times this year, while seated next to Smoltz in the dugout, he has warned, ‘This guy’s going to hit a foul ball in here.’ Three of those times a foul came screeching into the dugout.”
Jason’s SIs from August 1995 to March 1996 now sit in a trunk in my closet. A few weeks after the accident, his father Charles gave me the magazines along with Jason’s Little League baseball cap, white Adidas basketball shoes, and Physics notebook. Charles said that Jason loved me like a brother and I wasn’t ready to hear that yet. Each item, even the date-stamped magazines, stood as singular reminders of my greatest failure.
I can’t think of Jason today, or of the days leading up to his death, without thinking of Greg Maddux. And I can’t think of Maddux without thinking of Verducci. With Maddux’s Hall of Fame induction this summer, after having not opened the trunk in years, I cracked it open, brushed the dust off Verducci’s article, and found the movie of my memory experiencing technical difficulties.
What unsettled my memory are two events stuck within the timeline of my best friend and our favorite pitcher.
It’s September 1995. Jason and I are fishing the banks of a golf course pond near Lake Chatuge in north Georgia. A golfer lines up his 8-iron approach. Jason says, “Watch. He’s going to shank this. But don’t move. It’ll land between us.” The shot slices. Rises. The man yells, Fore! A heat-seeker, the ball hits right betwee
n us. The man issues a stream of apologies. Jason looks at me, winks, and casts his line back into the water.
It’s October 1995. World Series Game 1. Maddux is dealing in dark matter and the ball is dancing as Jason calls pitches and outs. This Jedi-Mind-Meld can’t last forever, but it’s happening. For five innings Maddux is no-hitting Cleveland and Jason is part of the orchestration. The moment is as real as the spinning Titleist golf ball streaking past my left ear.
For years, I chalked up both memories as spooky coincidence. Jason had somehow accessed Maddux’s wavelength. Now, I know better. Jason read Verducci closely. The picture at his desk was the first step. Each time he glanced up from his work, those calm brown eyes were the eyes his met. At the pond and at World Series Game 1, he decided to experiment further. Jason wanted to graph Maddux’s control and command onto his own days, which had so often before drifted toward the edge of the road.
5. A False Summer
See Greg Maddux: surviving Albert Belle; frustrating Eddie Murray; freezing Manny. Fly-out. Grounder. Strike three. Jason’s words, barely over a whisper, move with the ball. And the ball changes—it’s an aspirin, a Wiffle ball, a whitetail.
Maddux works quickly. The bill of his cap dips his eyes in shadow. Batters must locate the ball—a dart, a dove—from a man inside a mirage who’s locked in a conversation with himself and, apparently, my best friend.
See Jason Kenney: elbows on knees; holding a cup of coffee like a prayer; eyes locked on Maddux. He is 18 and he is handsome and his face is prematurely lined. He’s wearing jeans and a gray hoodie. His eyes won’t leave Maddux. To understand what Jason sees in Maddux, you have to travel back five years and 515 miles to Bloomington, Indiana. You have to see what he wanted to find in himself.
Look at Jason. We’re 13. Sharing a dorm room at Indiana University at the Bob Knight Basketball School. Two boys in Air Jordans amidst a sea of boys in Air Jordans. Curfew. Lights out. Windows open. Jason is telling me about his dad.
Earlier that day, during the team games before lunch, Jason put on such a show that IU assistant Ron Felling and Coach Knight (tanned, huge) took up spots under the basket. They watched Jason drain a three, defend the pick-and-roll, grab weak-side rebounds, and—with the game tied, seconds left—drive hard and draw a foul. With Bobby Knight looking on, arms crossed, Jason sank the first free throw and then the second. All net.
After the game, Knight—unsmiling—approached Jason and the same hand that fell on the shoulders of Coach K, Bird, and Jordan now rested tenderly on Jason’s. Anointment. Knight spoke; Jason nodded. Knight kept speaking; Jason kept nodding. Finally, Knight smacked Jason—not softly—on the shoulder and Jason jogged off the court, head down.
At lunch, Jason brushed off our table’s persistent questions, saying Knight just gave him a pointer on defending the post.
Nonchalant at lunch, at night, in the dark, Jason pontificated. Did you know, he asked, that I’ve never been this far from home? What would his dad say about the free throws? Could I tell his knees were shaking? Did I know Charles grew up without a dad? Just drove off when Charles was seven. Alcoholic. Landed in Miami. Did I know playing ball became Charles’s obsession? Did I know Charles led the state of Georgia in scoring his senior year? Did I know Charles vowed to God, each time one of his six children was born, to be a good father? Did I know that Jason had promised himself to make his dad proud? That he was going to play at Tech too? That this was why he played so hard?
There was a lot I didn’t know.
For the rest of the week, counselors at camp—high school coaches, small-college assistants—called Jason “Bailey Junior” after the ballyhooed Hoosier recruit, Damon Bailey, who’d just arrived in Bloomington. Every day, in drills, getting water, at the IU bookstore: Hey, Bailey Junior. Made me proud. And his sidekick. Made me sick.
Riding down I-75 in a minivan as Jason slept, I saw a line of future coaches and scouts waiting to put their hands on Jason’s shoulders. I took stock of my mere adequacy against his star. A Jason highlight reel had already played in my head; in Indiana, he added narration, a voice-over, a past, present, and future.
I never forgot Jason’s promise.
Careful what you promise.
Every child dreams perishable dreams. It requires a hard lunacy to hold a friend accountable to their summer camp musings. But not every kid has the gift. I couldn’t let go of Jason’s potential. Neither could he. The deficit between his incredible promise and our intramural reality drove Jason’s preoccupation with Greg Maddux in the fall of 1995. Maddux: that rare athlete (rare person) who realized the absolute limit of his potential.
That wasn’t all, of course. There was more. More to Jason’s affection, curiosity, and interest. More than I can know.
See Maddux: top of the fifth; one out. Thome shortens his swing and punches a ball to left. Cleveland’s first hit. See Jason smile, sip his coffee, say: “Sorry, Gregory. My bad.”
6. The Vow
Greg Maddux! On top of a fire truck! Red lights spinning! No sirens, just cheers—Maddux, Maddux, Maddux! And there he was! Above us! Twenty feet in the air! Jason and I skipped Monday classes and made the hundred-mile pilgrimage south to stand shoulder to shoulder with half a million tomahawk-chopping Braves fans near Atlanta’s Woodruff Park. World Series Victory Parade. And there was Maddux! Waving like an awkward emperor! Hair parted in the middle! Oh, Maddux! Jason grabbed his disposable camera and clicked as the City of Atlanta fire engine, approaching speeds of five miles per hour, crept down Peachtree Street, toward Auburn Avenue, carrying Greg Maddux out of sight.
In the first week of November, Jason got the film developed. Was he disappointed? The pictures revealed raised foam tomahawks, the heads of strangers, the side of the fire truck, and in one, the possible outstretched right hand of Greg Maddux.
A few days before final exams in November, Jason placed an index card on the bulletin board above his desk, just to the right of his image of Maddux. On the card, he’d written FOCUS. On another index card, below the first, he wrote: THINK BIG. After the holiday break in Atlanta, during the first week of January, Jason wrote a quote from Emerson, “To be great is to be misunderstood,” and tacked it above the image of Maddux. A few days later, while we were doing homework, Jason asked if I’d take a 40-day vow with him.
“What kind of vow?” I asked.
“A vow with God.”
“With who?”
“God.”
“About what?” I asked.
“Staying sober. For 40 days.”
I hesitated. Whether I acknowledged it or not, Jason’s “issues with drinking” were my upper hand. I didn’t want to lose that advantage, even if it was illusory. Jason rolled his desk chair next to mine. “I’ve tried this before. I need you to hold us to it.”
I recalled enough from Sunday school to know 40 was the number of days Jesus went to the desert and Noah sat drifting as the world sank. Jason had surrounded the image of Maddux with meaning, literally. Now I wasn’t sure where that meaning was headed.
“What’s the longest stretch you’ve gone without a drink?” I asked.
“Six days. Six days last summer. I tried the 40-day vow then.”
“What happened?”
“Couldn’t do it.”
“Forty days?” I asked.
“Forty days,” he said.
Saying no to Jason was hard, even if it wasn’t clear what you were saying yes to.
“So let it be written,” I said.
He smiled. “So let it be done.”
The cheesy Technicolor lines were from Cecil B. DeMille’s Ten Commandments starring Charlton Heston, a film we were subjected to 20 times a year in junior high. I went over to Jason’s desk. The bulletin board shrine to Maddux began to take on a new light. I picked up a small desk calendar Charles had given him. Each day held a unique Bible verse. I counted out 40 days, and read. I counted again. Then I handed Jason the calendar and he made an audible sound as if being punched.
The Bible verse took the remaining spot to the left of the image of Maddux, and on it we marked off our days. If Jason was to become more like Maddux, it wouldn’t be in the carnival barker voodoo of predicting the path of a ball. It would have to be in some deeper commitment—the very thing that makes us human: the capacity to make and keep a promise.
At the end of each day, Jason, not without self-dramatizing ceremony, announced the day completed and how many days we had left.
“So let it be written,” I’d respond from across the room.
“So let it be done,” he’d say, marking off another day next to Maddux.
7. Control
Whatever wavelength Jason found with Maddux fell flat in the seventh inning. Albert Belle, Jason’s greatest fear, was on deck. Belle, who had 50 homers in a time when that meant something, had hit the ball hard each at-bat. Jason, suddenly silent, kept his head down, shelled his peanuts, and tried to drop each shell into the empty Dixie paper cup between his feet.
Carlos Baerga led off the inning. Maddux struck him out in three pitches.
Albert Belle—whose menace radiated from his massive eyes and bulging forearms—strode to the plate. Jason juggled peanuts from his right palm to his left.
On a 1-2 count, Belle hit a screamer toward third. Chipper Jones gloved it and fired to first. Out! Jason sighed. If Maddux could go the distance, he’d avoid having to see Belle again. On the next pitch, Eddie Murray hit a comebacker. Three outs. Eight pitches. As Maddux made his way off the mound, Jason stood and stretched with the assembled masses. Then he disappeared.
The Best American Sports Writing 2015 Page 8
