Senior Year

by Dan Shaughnessy

  That soggy night in Braintree turned out to be a breakout game for Sam. In a 10–5 victory over the Wamps, he walked twice, scored four runs, and went 3-3, including an eighth-inning grand slam over the 360 sign in center. Ever surgical at home plate, he swung at only four of the twenty-one pitches thrown to him. The Tigers clinched a spot in the state tourney with their tenth victory, but there was a big loss when Nicky Wolfe injured his knee running the bases in the first inning. He went for x-rays that night, and it looked like he might be done for the season.

  Nicky was on crutches the next day when the Tigers lost to Dedham 5–1. Dedham featured a big righthanded pitcher, Holy Cross–bound Bobby Holmes, who stopped our Tigers on one run in six-plus innings and also hit a home run. While Holmes was demonstrating that he was the best player in the Bay State League, Peter Gammons was on the radio telling people that Sam was going to be selected in the major league draft in June. A national baseball icon and legitimate Hall of Famer, Peter is also a good Groton boy who grew up playing baseball with Bill Shaughnessy. Peter's prediction seemed preposterous, especially given Sam's 2006 high school performance in comparison to some of the other local players.

  During these finally dry, golden days of spring, Newton postmen were delivering graduation party invitations by the thousands. We got six during the rain week—Julia, Dani, Gabe, Kayla, Benjamin, and Nick. The invitations were all pretty staid and most insisted "no gifts please." Competition for attendance would no doubt be fierce. In 1971, I was mandated to return home after graduation ceremonies, where my parents played host to an impressive collection of aunts and uncles who came to Groton to celebrate my passage from high school. Diary entries indicate I received an impressive stack of envelopes containing $5 and $10 bills; I'd gotten a $50 gift from my godmother, Annabelle. That translated to $500 in today's market, an impressive demonstration of love and support from my favorite aunt.

  We were planning a dual celebration for Sam and Alexis. On the glossy invite, Marilou juxtaposed two photos: one featuring the boys at 6 years old, arm and arm, after a soccer conquest; the other from high school with Sam and Lex in the same formation, ten or more years later. I suggested a caption contest for the cover and party invitees were free to check one of the following: 1. Separated at birth, 2. Two guys with great hair, or 3. Brothers from another mother.

  The invitations went in the mail on the best day of Alexis's life—the day he got into the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. The day he received his letter, Lex and I went to a reception for U-Mass big shots in downtown Boston, where they congratulated him on his admission and offered to help steer him through the landmines of financial aid, orientation, work-study, and housing. Alexis's family was over the moon. He was going to be the first member of his family to attend college directly after high school. He'd already won an $8,000 scholarship, and one of the North housemasters whispered to me that he was in line for a big award on graduation night.

  I was working on an Alexis-Sam piece for the Living section of the Globe, something that would maybe give a boost to the much-maligned Metco program. I interviewed both boys, getting the usual monosyllabic answers, except when Sam said, "All I remember is that we met on the day before the first day of kindergarten, and Lex had this really high voice and he had a hightop 'fade' haircut. Also, he loves condiments more than any person on the planet. Mustard, ketchup, hot sauce, you name it."

  The next day, Alexis left a school essay on my desk, suggesting it might have some comments I could use for the story. He wrote, "Without Metco, who knows what my life would be like. Statistically, I'd either have dropped out of school, died, or ended up in jail. When I look at some of my friends in Boston, some are in jail, two or three dead, and many have dropped out of school because of motivation and/or having a baby. I refuse to be another statistical black male and I plan to be successful and break down barriers in my lifetime."

  Our Kate flew to Ireland right in the middle of all this. As part of her course load at Boston University, she'd committed to a two-month work-study in Dublin, and this meant leaving her team of frizzy-haired freshmen and missing Sam's final days of baseball and high school. This hurt. Kate had been the ultimate big sister for Sam, and I knew he was going to miss his touchstone sibling.

  The Tigers went to Framingham on Saturday, May 20, to face Pat Connelly, a control artist who'd walked only a handful of players in his entire varsity career. He'd been scouted by the big league bird dogs in the spring of his senior year, and he put an 0-4 collar on Sam over the first eight innings. James Greeley got the ball for North, his thirteenth appearance in the Tigers' sixteen games. With his future college coach (from the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts) looking on, and his mother prowling the perimeter like a burglar, Greeley pitched the first eight innings without allowing an earned run. Framingham led 3–1 when the Tigers came to bat in the top of the ninth. North rallied, tying the score at 3–3, and setting up Sam to face a reliever with the bases loaded and two out. Facing a kid who'd struck him out three times in April, Sam fell behind 0-2. As ever, he worked the count to 3-2, then hit a laser double into the gap in right-center, scoring all three runs. Greeley got the side in order in the bottom of the ninth and his mom, Cheryl, was crying after the final out. She said she was thinking about her dad, an affable old man who always sang in the stands during the games. He'd died just before the start of the season and all the players went to his wake.

  "I wish he could be here to see this," she said. "I wish he could have seen senior year."

  James Greeley's heroic deeds were too quickly forgotten. The bus left without him.

  "We forgot Greeley," Sam admitted the next day. "We were all on the bus having fun, talking about the game, when Alex Lee's phone rang. It was Greeley. He was still at the field. I guess he got a ride. Pretty funny."

  There was a team dinner at Coach Donnellan's house that Sunday night. There were only four days of classes left for these knuckleheads. We were truly nearing the finish line. That's why I was so relaxed when the phone rang just after 7 P.M.

  "Dad, I was in a car accident."

  We'd had this conversation earlier in the school year—a late-night episode that turned out to be pretty harmless. This time there was a little more urgency in Sam's voice.

  "Are you okay?" I asked.

  "Yeah," he said. "I had Nick and Max with me. We're all okay. I think somebody might have been hurt in the other car, though."

  "Where are you?"

  "The corner of Washington and Lowell." "I'll be right there."

  I could see the ambulance and the blinking lights about a quarter mile before I got to the scene. When I pulled over, the EMTs were putting a woman—wearing a neck collar—into the ambulance. It was still light outside, a nice spring night after some late afternoon thunderstorms.

  I recognized both EMTs. One coached the Babe Ruth Cubs in Newton, and he'd ordered Sam intentionally walked several times (his greeting to Sam at the scene was "You can hit homers, but you can't drive"). The other EMT was the son of a woman who babysat for Sarah and Kate when they were infants. I'd given this guy a pair of Larry Bird's sneakers when he was a little kid. The police officer was Paul Marini, and it turned out he went to Newton North with the brother of the coach who'd just hosted the team dinner. Newton's got more than 80,000 people, but this felt like a crash scene from Martin's Pond Road in Groton.

  The cop was clearly on Sam's side. He told Sam it looked like it was the other car's fault. Our Toyota Camry looked like P. T. 109. The back right wheel was almost knocked off. It was going on the disabled list, maybe even longer than Big Nick Wolfe.

  "I didn't even see the guy until just before he hit us," said Sam as the tow truck took the car away. "He never even hit his brakes. Wolfie saw him first and yelled, 'Oh, shit!' "

  This concluded quite a week for Wolfie, AKA "Fatboy." He was still on crutches from his Wednesday's base running mishap, still waiting for results of the MRI. Now this.

  Thirty-five y
ears earlier, I'd been in the back seat of Barry Cunningham's red Volkswagen Beetle when we were hit by an onrushing car while Barry tried to execute a left turn. Back then, I'd been the one to alert all passengers of the imminent impact. I remember yelling, "We're gonna get hit," just before Mr. E. Eddie Edwards torpedoed the side of Barry's car. Barry's two-door was a one-door after that day.

  Sam went to work on the accident report that night. Applying his senior physics theories, he figured out how many feet the guy traveled in the two seconds he'd needed to execute the turn.

  The next morning Newton North was ranked number twelve and Sam was named "Player of the Week" in the Boston Globe school sports section.

  "Player of the week," I said. "Pretty good. See if you can be Driver of the Week this week."

  "Good one, Dad."

  June

  Sam never said anything about the captaincy, and it wasn't until the final week of the regular season that I learned he'd been reinstated.

  "Sam didn't tell you about that?" Coach Siciliano asked me when we were chatting after another shutout masterpiece by J. T. Ross. "We took care of that after the Braintree game. I asked the players if they knew that Sam had lost his captain title and they said no, of course, and I told them—'Well, Sam and I had a little problem, but we're all straight now because Sam is being a good teammate.' They all laughed and said I was just doing it because he'd hit a grand slam that night."

  It struck me how different the whole situation would have been with girls. Softball players would have buzzed about the rift between player and coach. There would have been a lot of instant messaging and late-night gossip regarding the touchy situation. Not with guys. High school boys just don't have the maturity and depth of their female counterparts. They think about the next slice of pizza and the next game. There's no time for introspection when you are occupied 24/7 taking care of your own selfish needs.

  Captain Shaughnessy and friends had quite a final week of the 2006 regular season. The last games on the schedule coincided with the final days of school for seniors, the spring athletic awards night at North, and the beginning of party and prom season. It was finally warm outside and the smallest event seemed suitable for framing. This was it: the last week of lunch money, the last reminders to get to bed early for a morning test, the last days of parking in third lot and of watching my son from the far side of the chain link fence.

  Sam and his classmates observed the annual "Senior Countdown" on the Thursday before Memorial Day. It was their final day of school after thirteen years together, and the 550 members of the graduating class gathered on the long dirty corridor known as "Main Street." Equipped with water balloons, confetti, sparkling water, and all other forms of stupidity and signage, they counted down the final ten seconds of the final minute of the final year. When they got to zero, they trashed the corridor—and one another—then started chanting something original like "Let's get drunk!"

  Ah. Good times.

  I was sitting on my porch, writing, when Sam and Emily came roaring up to the front of our house in her 1987 white Ford Mercury. Wearing a Golden State Warriors jersey—better to show off those impressive guns—Sam hopped out of the passenger seat, raised his arms toward the sky, and shouted "Victory!" He was smiling. She was smiling. The sun was shining. Emily and Sam reminded me of Brenda and Eddie from Billy Joel's "Scenes from an Italian Restaurant." Bookend ballplayers, a couple of days earlier in their respective baseball/softball victories over Weymouth, they'd both gone 1-3, hitting a triple, and taking a called third strike. Like Sam, Emily was a four-year letterman who'd been called up to the varsity in the middle of her freshman year. Not that we ever asked, but they still claimed to be "just friends," even though they were going to the prom together for the second consecutive spring.

  Sam and Emily both had captain duties at the awards presentation at North that same night. These events can be interminable, but I wasn't dreading a moment of it, even though the baseball team was scheduled to appear at the end of the program—after softball, boys' and girls' lacrosse, boys' and girls' track, boys' volleyball, and boys' and girls' tennis.

  When the hardball players finally took the stage, I happily noted that they were wearing dress shirts and neckties. No jeans. Stylin' in his shiny pale-blue shirt and white tie, Sam looked like an extra from Goodfellas, but I was happy he'd been a ringleader in the baseball team's class act. At the podium, Sam, J. T. ("Captain America"), and James took turns reading their teammates' names. Before closing, Sam summoned his favorite teammate, Big Nick Wolfe, who was still on crutches. Nicky had only recently learned that he was done for the year. He'd torn his ACL on that seemingly innocent base running play in Braintree, and it had taken more than a week for him to get a confirmed reading of his MRI. Sam said, "We want to dedicate the rest of our season to Big Nick, who helped us get this far." Then he embraced his friend. It was a legitimate man-hug, one of those "I love you, man" moments popularized in beer commercials—yet another example of things being better today. Guy teammates never hugged one another in 1971. Someone would have suggested we were "homos."

  At the end of the night, individual awards were presented by the athletic department. The final, most-coveted honor was the "Team Above Self" citation given to the boy and girl who pay no attention to personal stats and care only about wins and losses. Needless to say, I was not on the edge of my seat before the male winner's name was called. It's pretty fair to say Sam Shaughnessy will win a Rhodes Scholarship before he'll get a Team Above Self award. The citation went to Jon Laussen, a football/basketball starter who'd done grunt work without complaint for four years. He'd played in the trenches on the gridiron and took about five shots all season while starting at power forward for the basketball state champs. Laussen was the personification of Team Above Self. Good call by our veteran athletic department.

  "Way to go, Chavo," Sam told his classmate after the ceremony.

  Chavo. Captain America. Fatboy. Everyone gets a nickname in high school, and sometimes we never even know why. Sometimes they stick. My favorite one in Groton was Jesus Martin. His real name was Dave Martin, and he was several years older than me. He got his lasting nickname because of a flub during an otherwise mundane basketball practice in the mid-1960s. In order to finish practice, the players had to make twenty consecutive lay-ups off the three-man, full-court weave. When they got to nineteen, Dave Martin missed the shot that would have sent everybody home, and a weary, angry teammate shouted, "Jesus, Martin!" From then on, he was Jesus. More than thirty years later, I walked into a bar across the street from the Boston Garden and a young man introduced himself and his dad, saying they were from Groton. I didn't hear the young man when he told me his own name, but when he turned to his dad and said, "This is Dave Martin." I quickly asked, "Jesus—is that you?" The older man smiled and nodded. Still Jesus after all those years.

  The Tigers were bused to Wellesley to play crosstown rival, Newton South, at Babson College the day after the awards ceremony. I arrived a half hour ahead of the team and was in my car reading the paper when Sam came off the bus and threw his freshly minted school yearbook at me.

  Here's a not-too-surprising confession: I love high school yearbooks. I still have all four of my books from Groton and every couple of years I'll sit down and thumb through the pages, reading shallow thoughts that were scribbled by those friends and acquaintances of my youth. I shudder to think of classmates' dusty books scattered across New England, many with yellowed pages marked by my syrupy script from 1968–71. In those days, in my small world, it was a big deal if somebody signed "Love, Alicia," instead of "All the best, Alicia," and I was always looking for clues in those often-forced autographs. There were funny ones, too, of course. When we were seniors and a nervous freshman would ask us to sign his book, we'd write something clever like "I can't begin to tell you about the good times ... because there haven't been any! Take care, Danny Shaughnessy."

  We just killed ourselves laughing with that one.

&
nbsp; I still smile when I see one autograph on page sixteen of my senior book. There's a photograph of my favorite janitor (they're custodians now, but they were janitors then), Ray Hickey, leaning against a door frame, left foot on a chair, his thick, calloused hand resting on his knee. His signature is scrawled neatly over his picture. It means something to me now and I like to think it meant something to him then. He was a hard-working guy who kept the gym floor clean and watched our backs and we loved him for it. Hope he knew that.

  In the back of my yearbook, there's a passage written by Chris Young, a boy I'd known since seventh grade. Chris and I grew apart during the high school years, and in June 1971 he wrote, "Daniel—It wasn't long ago when you and I were both men of learning. But time has changed that as I'm sure you're well aware. I really appreciate understanding people's lives and people like you have the most strangest, yet something tells me the best. So if you ever get the urge to sit down and talk—Chris."