Sam was an eighth grader that year, and he and I went to watch our girls go eyeblack to eyeblack. I felt like the president of the United States at the Army-Navy game, required to switch sides at halftime. It was impressive to see real MIAA officials with their zebra shirts and whistles. None of the players appeared to be inebriated. Not so impressive was the conduct of my daughters. Sports competition has always brought out the innate baggage of sisterhood. It was unfortunate that my daughters had been assigned to play in the trenches. This meant they could line up against one another on every play. Trouble—remember Dot-tie and Kit in A League of Their Own?
You could see it escalate. Sarah would be in charge of blocking Kate when the seniors were on offense, and Kate was trying to contain Sarah when the juniors had the ball. On each series of downs, there was more agitation, more grabbing and pulling. Before you could say "WWF," my daughters were rolling around on the ground, kicking, gouging, and cursing at one another. The referee, who did not know they were related, ejected both. A couple of Carla Everetts. Like I said, instant family folklore.
It was the drinking and these kinds of episodes that brought that flyer to our home in the fall of 2005. Under the hideous headline SAYING NO TO THE "POWDER PUFF" GAME, Principal Huntington wrote, "In years past the game got out of hand and even resulted in some injuries. In an effort to have more control, we tried monitoring the game and the crowds and even got professional referees. Despite our best efforts last year, emotions ran high and got out of hand. Cars were damaged and students were hurt, which caused us to cancel the pep rally. After much thought, we have decided to cancel the game altogether as a school sponsored activity."
No more Powder Puff ... the end of an era ... another high school tradition banished in the name of safety and progress.
What made the Powder Puff missive particularly disturbing was the fact that it came on the heels of the cancellation of Halloween at our local elementary school. The squashing of Halloween by our well-intentioned school principal made national news. Good Morning America, Fox News, NPR, and the Christian Science Monitor were just a few of the national outlets that reported the sad story.
Underwood principal David Castelline, who forever will be a hero in the Shaughnessy household after the delicate manner in which he handled Kate's bout with leukemia, stepped into a minefield when he ceded to the wishes of a few parents and teachers who complained about elementary school teachers dressing up in costumes on Halloween. Teachers told Castelline that at least three students said they were not coming to school on Halloween because celebration of the day offended their religious beliefs. The principal's letter read, "The traditional practices we have engaged in regarding Halloween are offensive to the religious beliefs of some members of our community. In our continuous attempts to make our school a place where all members feel welcome, we will not be celebrating Halloween in school this year."
Yikes. Another tradition bites the dust in the interest of political correctness. I wondered what would happen if children who live in vegetarian households complained about Thanksgiving? And what about the school-sanctioned Gay/Straight Alliance at North? One day a year is designed as ToBGLADay (Transgender, Bisexual, Gay, Lesbian Alliance), a presentation of programs by the Gay/Straight Alliance. In 2005, Newton North's ToBGLADay program included a discussion with transgender people and a documentary film exploring the way gay issues are taught in elementary schools. Some might find this offensive or against their religion, but those voices will not be heard. Marilou says I should shut up about this and probably she is right.
November's mail also brought Sam's registration letter from the Selective Service System. The letter explained that he must register for military service and failure to do so might result in imprisonment for up to five years and/or a fine of not more than $250,000. He could register online, over the phone, or by mailing the form back to Palatine, Illinois. Marilou handled just about all of Sam's paperwork, but she refused to be involved in this process.
"I'm not doing it," she said, dumping the letter on my belly as I lay reading in bed. "You do it. Mothers can't be part of that."
That took me back to 1969, when my brother graduated from college and instantly became eligible for the draft. My dad was a World War II veteran, winner of a Purple Heart after getting wounded by shrapnel in Germany. Bill Shaughnessy Sr. didn't want to see his son go off to war, but he wasn't having any part of the conversation when my mother started talking about Bill Jr. going to Canada. Being Irish, we didn't hear a lot of raised voices in our home through the years—it was always easier to pretend nothing was wrong—but I remember Mom and Dad getting into it over this one. I was a sophomore in high school, and my mom was already keeping copious records of my asthma treatments to make sure I'd get a medical deferment. Brother Bill had no outs. Vietnam was in full fury, and he was off to basic training a few months after getting his college diploma. Fortunately, his time overseas was spent in Germany, throwing baseballs instead of grenades.
The antiwar movement was in full bloom during my high school days. We watched Uncle Walter Cronkite on the nightly news and noted his disapproval. We let our hair grow, played "Ohio" on our turntables, and pasted war protest photos on the school bulletin board. But ours was a symbolic dissent. Nobody was burning American flags in Groton, not with Fort Devens next door to our little town.
Folks from the Fort drifted into our lives with some regularity. I still remember the southern drawl and high energy of a U.S. Army general's wife who served as a student teacher when I was a senior. She was at once inspirational and kooky. Eager to assimilate into our world, she accepted an invitation to bring the general to the school prom, and our dates got to dance with the general when the orchestra instructed us to change partners during one of the slow numbers. When my date returned from her twirl with the general, she breathlessly remarked, "The general was great. A regular guy. We just talked about regular stuff"
Hearing this, my friend Doug Richardson sighed and said, "What did you think he was going to talk about—napalm?"
Inspired by the general's wife, Doug went to the Citadel, and today he is a one-star general living in Tacoma.
There weren't a lot of young people with an eye on military service in those days. My name went into the draft lottery in 1972 and my birthday put me at dangerously low number 33. Fortunately, Richard Nixon stopped the draft before our time came and my mom never needed to unleash my asthma files on the Selective Service Board. But I still carry my draft card. It was issued August 6, 1971; they told us to keep it on our person at all times and no one ever rescinded the order. It says I'm six foot one and 155 pounds (ah, the golden days), classified as 1-A.
Sam made his military registration phone call on a Sunday while our nation was knee deep in another war that was wildly unpopular at home. I knew he was hoping to get drafted ... by the Orioles or Brewers or Pirates. Kids today don't worry about getting a call from Uncle Sam.
At this same time, his English class was reading The Things They Carried, the popular book written by Vietnam War veteran Tim O'Brien. For an assignment inspired by the book, students were required to write a story using personal backpack contents to describe themselves in the third person.
An excerpt from Sam's essay:
Newton North student Sam Shaughnessy carries an assortment of items he sees as necessary for his very existence. The items he carries do not weigh a great deal in the metric system. What he carries cannot truly be weighed in units. Because to Sam, his baseball bat weighs more than his car, and he drives a pretty big sedan ... Sam carries his sense of humor everywhere he goes. Humor represents negative weight; it lightens the load of all the heavy things a person humps ... Sam carries a baseball bat. A bat made from rock maple wood. Unfinished, yet more polished than anything he owns. The lower half of the bat is filthy, sticky and stinky with pine tar. But it smells good to Sam. In fact, he loves the smell of pine tar, especially in the morning. It smells like victory. The bat is 33 inches lon
g and weighs 30 and a half ounces. Sam carries this bat around everywhere, both literally and metaphorically. The bat he carries is the most important tangible and intangible item he carries. His bat is his respect. It is what brings out his greatest talent, because when Sam is standing in the batter's box, holding that bat, everyone on the field and watching the game looks at him with respect, even though he is wearing suggestively tight bright white pants. The bat he carries enabled him to be accepted into a college that would not accept him for the grades and SAT scores that he carries. It is ironic that his bat was more important for getting into college than his SAT tutoring, than his sleepless month slaving away at his Junior Thesis for his AP History class, and his hard work throughout high school pulling up B's to B+'s for GPA sake. The extra help he sought out for math to get that A on the term test was not as important as the solid contact of the barrel of his bat with an 88 mile per hour fastball in front of the college scouts in attendance.
National Letter of Intent Day was November 9, and on November 8 an envelope arrived from an overnight service—Sam's commitment letter from Boston College. Nothing informal about this sucker. There were three copies of the letter of intent and three copies of BC's scholarship commitment to Sam, citing his "agreement to enroll in the Fall of 2006." Underscored in bold type was the line, "Do not sign these documents prior to 7:00 A.M. on the National Letter of Intent signing date."
Seated at the kitchen island on Wednesday, November 9, at exactly 7:00 A.M., Sam signed the letter while his mom snapped a picture. A couple of days later, there was a press conference at North when a couple of Sam's high-profile classmates signed letters to play Division I basketball at two of the better hoop institutions in the land. Senior guards Anthony Gurley and Corey Lowe sat in front of cameras and microphones and scratched their names as their coach explained that each player was receiving an award worth something in the neighborhood of $200,000. Gurley, a six foot three guard (he, too, had a key to our house and a toothbrush in the second-floor bathroom), was going to Wake Forest. Lowe was bound for Providence. No one could remember two guards from the same Massachusetts high school getting scholarships to Division I colleges in the same year. Small wonder the basketball Tigers were preparing to defend a state championship.
During these dark-early days of November, Sam was talking about not playing basketball for the upcoming season. It was a crushing prospect for his needy dad, but there was no way to influence my son on this matter. He was 18. He had a baseball scholarship. He was holding up his end. He even stacked a cord of apple wood that was dumped in our driveway. He'd played eleven years of organized basketball—many of them with Messrs. Gurley and Lowe—and we'd all seen the game pass him by. He was a five foot ten wannabe power forward on a team with stud guards who measured six foot three and two. He was a baseball player in a football body with none of the standard physical skills needed for basketball. He wasn't tall and had no outside shot. And yet the idea of Sam hanging up his sneakers was appalling to me. Sam had endured the humbling junior year on junior varsity. He'd learned how to play the game correctly. And now he was going to retire a year early—when he had a chance to ride the bench for the potential two-time state champs? All I could do was point out the obvious benefits of playing—foot speed, camaraderie, a last go-around with kids he'd been playing with for more than a decade—and hope he decided to try out for the team.
He missed the official basketball meeting, a telling gesture and an insult that the varsity coach would not be able to forgive. Compounding the sin, he scribbled potential Newton North batting lineups on the back of the basketball application envelope.
"Is that ironic?" Sam wondered.
We were always kidding about the misuse of irony. I maintained that it was best never to use the word since it was too often substituted for coincidence (Alanis Morrisette's song "Isn't It Ironic?" cites multiple examples of things that are patently not ironic), but Sam liked to probe the proper use of the mysterious word. It struck him as ironic that he'd be writing baseball lineups on the envelope that housed his basketball application.
I told him my favorite "ironic" story, a small-town tale involving a bat and ball, naturally.
Like a lot of baseball lifers, my boyhood chum John Iannacci wanted to keep hitting, fielding, and throwing after high school. If you are not a college-caliber player, and you live in central Massachusetts, your best option tends to be softball. After graduating from college, John got married, had a couple of kids, and built his own home on an apple farm in Lunenburg, Massachusetts. He prolonged his life on the diamond, serving as player-manager of a modified fast-pitch team populated with some high school teammates, plus a brother-in-law and friends from work. The league featured teams sponsored by local farms and businesses—even an entry from the correctional institute in Shirley. Every year, it seemed, John's boys would cop the regular-season title, earning home field advantage for the playoffs, only to be foiled by injuries, bad calls, or bum luck. Eventually, they came together for one last season, agreeing that they'd hang up their cleats after one final quest for the grail. They even came up with a curtain-call slogan: "Take no prisoners." You can guess where this is going. John's boys won the regular-season title, advanced to the final round of the playoffs where they were guaranteed to get three out of five at home in the championship round ... then found themselves up against the prison team in the finals. The hard-earned home field advantage went down the tubes because the correctional team couldn't leave the joint. The Big House provides the ultimate home field advantage. John's boys were pretty upset with this development after all their hard work, but things took a turn in their favor on the eve of the final game, when the star pitcher and catcher of the correctional team escaped. Taking no prisoners, Iannacci's boys finally got their trophy. Truly ironic. I think.
In mid-autumn of '05, Sam was the subject of a full-blown article written by Mike Reiss in the Globe's West Weekly section. At the time, I was engulfed in a messy controversy when a large faction of Red Sox Nation chose to blame me for the resignation of wildly popular Sox general manager, Theo Epstein. Less than twenty-four hours before Theo's bombshell announcement, I'd written a column that represented my take on Theo's relationship with his boss, Sox CEO Larry Lucchino. The story was largely greeted as far too favorable to the unpopular Lucchino at the expense of wunderkind Theo. A shit storm came my way when Theo resigned the next day. The Globe's conflicted relationship with the Sox came into play (the New York Times, which owns the Globe, owns 17 percent of the ball club), and there was blame and pain throughout our region. Naturally, Sam was oblivious to my travails. He got a kick out of my hate mail but was otherwise unmoved. It is the natural bliss of being 18. We all wish we had it—and the power sleeps (when's the last time you slept past noon?) that come with it.
I went to Los Angeles for a week to appear on ESPN's Jim Rome Is Burning, to work on book projects, and to get away from the Theo fallout. While I was gone, Sam procrastinated with his Boston College application. It was almost as if he felt the need to be difficult because the process was going to be so easy for him. Most of his classmates were sweating and filling out multiple (not forty-seven, I hope) applications. I remembered designating our dining room as the War Room when Sarah went about the process of applying to six colleges. So now Sam was showing us that he could still make this difficult even when it was teed up for him.
Marilou indicated that he'd broken up with a girlfriend while I was away. As far as we knew, this was a first of sorts, primarily because Sam never owned up to having any girlfriends in the first place. There were a lot of girls and a lot of friends but no girlfriends. Marilou worried about the new permissiveness (like we were different?) and "friends with benefits" and a 2005 high school environment in which teens didn't date or go steady as much as they "hook up." I preferred to fall back on the usual "don't ask, don't tell" guy mentality. Sam always hated to talk about sex. I think it embarrassed him more than it embarrassed me to try to talk about it.
All kids think they know everything anyway, and I knew he already knew what he needed to know by the time we had "the talk" when we were alone in a hotel on a family road trip when he was about 12. I told him he didn't know as much as he thought he knew and don't be afraid to ask, but I knew he never would. As he entered his teens, every now and then, always in the car (why is it always in the car with dads and sons?), always during daylight, I'd ask, "Got any questions about the sex stuff?" and he would say no and quickly turn up the radio.
He did respond differently once. We were driving around and I'd figured it was time to check in, so I threw out the "Got any questions about the sex stuff?" and he came back with "No. And are you gonna bring this up every time we go to the batting cages? That's always when you bring this up."
I pledged to myself not to do that anymore. It could make a young guy want to stop hitting.
Sam knew the message: "Respect girls the way you'd want guys to respect your sisters. And don't get anybody pregnant."
That was pretty much it. I'm Irish. I didn't want to tell him any more than that, and I really didn't want to think about what he might be up to. I knew it was going to be easier for him than it was for me (he was better-looking, more athletic, more popular, and lived in a more permissive time than his dad), but I also knew that Sam wanted to play baseball in college and he was mindful of things that could foil his plan. This is how I convinced myself that he'd steer clear of booze, drugs, and teen pregnancy. Sam very much liked the "don't ask, don't tell" system. He knew a lot of cute, smart, and funny girls, and he did seem to have respect for them. He and Kate had always been thicker than thieves, and he knew she'd beat him up if he disrespected a nice girl. And until he was about 16, he truly worried that Kate could beat him up. Meanwhile, he'd covered himself with some glory defending the honor of his sister Sarah in the infamous New Year's Eve Bash of 2003 at the Shaughnessy residence.
Senior Year Page 9
