by Wayne Coffey
I can see this is going nowhere, that she is not going to cop to anything, and finally drop the subject. I say good-bye to my family and head to Billy and Lynn’s. The next few days, predictably, are awful, the worst kind of emotional relapse. It’s almost as if I’m reliving the abuse again and again, with an extra measure of humiliation brought on by her refusal to acknowledge anything, triggering an appearance by toxic old friends in the back of my head saying: Did it really happen the way I remember? Did she really do all these things, or did I dream it?
The helplessness, the shame—it all comes back in a torrent. It’s almost a week before it begins to recede, and I don’t feel seized up anymore. In a few weeks I head off to college in Knoxville.
I never see the babysitter again.
GIBBS HALL is the athletic dormitory at the University of Tennessee, conveniently located near the Volunteer sports facilities. I arrive in Room 329 of Gibbs in the fall of 1993 with two duffel bags stuffed mostly with sweatshirts and sweatpants and with the mind-set of a walk-on. I am a top recruit, I guess, but I never want to think of myself in those terms. It’s the main reason why I couldn’t stand the recruiting process, which is basically Smoke Blowing 101. They tell you how great you are and have pretty girls escort you around campus on your official visit, and then they have you meet with some of the players, who want to take you out for a night on the town, as if this were all part of a typical day at the University of Tennessee.
I don’t want to be fussed over or gushed over, and I sure don’t want a night on the town. I just want to take some interesting English classes and play baseball and compete at the highest level possible. I am not there long before I get a glimpse of one of the best ballplayers I’ve ever seen. His name is Todd Helton.
Helton is recruited to play football and baseball at Tennessee. He’s the backup quarterback to Heath Shuler in his first two years, and then the backup to Jerry Colquitt, who waited years to get a chance to play, as a junior. In the season opener, Colquitt rips up the ligaments in his knee, and Helton takes over. Three weeks later, Helton bangs up his own knee and gets replaced by a kid named Peyton Manning.
Helton knows his future is in baseball, and after people see Manning play, he isn’t getting the job back anyway. Helton eventually quits football, but in the fall of my freshman year, he is still playing. We’re having a baseball workout just down the hill from the football practice field and one day I see Helton walking toward the ball field during a break in football practice. He is wearing his orange football jersey and football cleats and has his helmet in his hand.
Can I jump in and get a couple of swings? Helton asks the coaches. They say sure. He puts down his helmet and grabs a wooden bat and gets in the cage. He hasn’t had a single warm-up swing. He eschews aluminum in favor of good, old-fashioned lumber. On his second swing, he crushes a ball far over the right-field fence.
That’s good, thanks, Helton says, picking up his helmet and going back to football practice. I tried not to stare.
Helton is one of the greatest clutch hitters I’ve ever seen. During the NCAA regionals my freshman year, we are down four in the eighth inning against Arizona State when he comes up with the bases loaded. One swing later, the game is tied. Helton comes through again and again with his bat, but he is also a phenomenal left-handed relief pitcher, once putting together a string of forty-seven scoreless innings. He still holds the school save record (twenty-three).
Helton is something to watch, but the truth is that Peyton Manning puts on the best show in Knoxville, Saturday after Saturday. Peyton and I become friends, and I’m a sideline spectator at Neyland Stadium—one of the perks of being an athlete—for almost every Tennessee home game. The more I study him, the more I appreciate what he brings to the field. Peyton is a good, accurate passer, but he doesn’t have an arm that totally wows you; it’s not as if I watch him throw and think, That is the most beautiful ball I’ve ever seen. He’s got nowhere near the arm that Heath Shuler had, or even the arm that Brandon Stewart, a quarterback who transferred to Texas A&M, had. Peyton even throws his share of ducks, but it doesn’t matter, because everything else is so out of this world that it overrides any little flaw he might have. His decision making, his presence, his gift for leading and making others around him believe—they are all without peer. He is the guy you want in charge, a guy who has been around the game his whole life and it shows. I learn so much from observing him, because it’s a reminder that the best pitchers are not necessarily the ones who throw the hardest or have the scouts salivating over their natural arm strength. The best pitchers are the guys who have a plan and know how to execute it—who know how to compete and never stop doing it.
AS MUCH AS I am in awe of Todd Helton’s two-way talents and Peyton Manning’s quarterbacking stature, they are not my inspiration during my freshman year at Tennessee. My inspiration is a softball pitcher from Nashville named Jane Dickey.
My little sister. The sister I left behind when I moved in with my father—something I’ve felt guilty about for a long time.
Before I go to college, Jane gets involved in a relationship with an older guy. She gets pregnant at fifteen years old. She’s a superb student and first-rate athlete at a private school in town, and you can imagine what she’s dealing with at such an age, when she’s not much more than a child herself. Everybody has an opinion about what to do. More than a few people privately advise her that if she goes ahead and has a baby now, she might as well say good-bye to every goal and dream she has ever had. Officials at her school tell her that if she decides to get married, she will not be welcome back. So now her education is on the line too.
Amid all this noise and pressure and a society that sometimes wants to treat childbirth as an inconvenience, Jane says, I am going to have this baby.
She says, I didn’t plan on getting pregnant and the timing is terrible, but I have a human life to nurture now and that is what I am going to do, and nobody is going to change my mind.
My parents completely support her decision and do what they can to help her.
So Jane has the baby and gets married and gets tossed out of school and winds up living on an army base with her husband. She graduates high school through a GED program. She loses her last two years of high school, and college, and a good piece of her childhood. Eventually she has to get out of a marriage that probably never had a chance. It is some load of freight, but my sister carries it with grace and dignity.
Jane’s reward for doing the right thing is a beautiful daughter, Abby, who is now eighteen years old and makes everything worth it a million times over. Abby is the pride of my sister, and a young woman who is cherished by the whole family. Jane’s strength and courage as a teenage mother is something I draw on and admire, not just in my freshman year at Tennessee, but for years beyond.
THE FIRST START of my college career is against the University of Miami, one of the top programs in the country. It’s even more special because Anne Bartholomew surprises me by flying down for the game from Davidson College in North Carolina where she’s spending her freshman year—and with no small effort: she goes around dormitories singing Christmas carols in exchange for donations. Her renditions of “O Holy Night” and “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen” are so well received that she earns two hundred dollars and books a plane ticket using cash.
I battle hard in the game, but we’re down, 3–1, in the middle of the seventh, at which point everything stops, and not just for “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.” Lazaro Collazo, the Miami pitching coach, is standing behind home plate in his baseball uniform, alongside a clergyman and a woman in a wedding dress. They proceed to walk beneath a canopy of upraised baseball bats, a sixty-foot-six-inch procession to the pitcher’s mound.
I have seen a lot of things happen on ball fields. I have never seen a wedding during the seventh-inning stretch.
I am happy for the newlyweds but not happy for me, because—for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer—my start is over
. By the time they exchange vows and rings and get the bats back in the bat rack, almost a half hour has passed.
You’re done, R.A., Bill Mosiello, the pitching coach, says. I don’t want to send you back out there after such a long delay. I try to argue, but probably don’t do it strenuously enough. I make a point to remember that.
Even as a freshman, I become the staff workhorse, and the owner of a fast-changing body. I had never lifted a weight in my life before I enrolled in Tennessee; now I’m lifting all the time, having Creatine before every workout, and adding slabs of muscles to my quads and hamstrings and deltoids. I go from 175 pounds to 210 pounds, and my fastball jumps from the 87- to the 89- to the 93- to the 94-mile-per-hour range. I’m still not a prototypical, strike-out-the-side power pitcher, but I can bring enough heat that it makes my breaking pitches and changeup more effective.
I wind up winning fifteen straight games after the Collazo nuptials, and we make it to the regional finals. I throw seven innings in a victory over Northeastern on Thursday, then come back on Sunday against Arizona State, another huge baseball power. I go ten innings and throw 140 pitches, losing on an opposite-field single by Antone Williamson in the tenth. It is a brutal defeat, but the pain gets put in perspective in a hurry. I go over and shake hands with Jim Brock, the legendary Arizona State coach. He is gravely ill with cancer. His body is so full of chemotherapy that his eyes are yellow.
Congratulations, Coach Brock. Good luck in the College World Series. I will keep you in my prayers, I say.
Thank you, young man, Jim Brock says. Arizona State goes on to beat Miami, but then is eliminated by Oklahoma, the ultimate winner. Coach Brock dies four days after the College World Series ends.
I MAKE ALL-AMERICAN as a freshman, and do my usual sticking and moving in Gibbs Hall and around campus, just the way I used to in Green Hills. I flit around the dorm, alighting here and there, making friends and being cordial but making sure nobody gets too close. As long as you don’t let anyone get close, you can’t get burned, can’t get hurt. I don’t think that consciously; I just live that way, a fugitive who doesn’t know what he’s running from.
The one thing I don’t run away from is work. Indeed, I want to pile it on. I want to be the most committed, hardworking guy on the team, an attitude that is only reinforced by my freshman experience, which underscores to me that, short of having Sandy Koufax–caliber stuff, the greatest attribute a pitcher can have is a willingness to compete. Without an out pitch, a weapon I can turn to again and again when things gets stressful, I have to be aggressive with my fastball and inventive with my other pitches, and refuse to give in. I have to be a bulldog, which isn’t so much a pitching strategy as it is a pitching mentality.
You know how hitters talk about never giving away an at-bat? I don’t ever want to give away a single pitch. Even if I’m getting belted around, I want every pitch to have conviction behind it. I want it to be a pitch I’m bringing as a personal challenge to the hitter: Let’s see what you can do with this. I’ve always believed talent is overrated and will is underrated. Or, as Uncle Ricky used to tell me over and over: “The mental is to the physical as four is to one.” I’m learning that he is right again.
AT THE END of my sophomore year, we need to win two games in the regional finals to advance to the College World Series. Dave Serrano, my pitching coach, gives me the ball Thursday and I go seven innings before he pulls me with the victory in hand.
We’re going to need all you’ve got on Sunday, the coach tells me. Our opponent in the regional final is Oklahoma State. A record crowd of 5,086 turns out at Lindsey Nelson Stadium, our home field. (Lindsey Nelson, a UT grad with an affinity for outlandish sports jackets, later became the legendary first voice of the New York Mets.) We score in the third to go up by a run before Oklahoma State ties it up in the bottom of the eighth. I’ve thrown about 150 pitches by then. Serrano comes up to me on the bench.
Great job, R.A. Really great job. We’re going to let the bullpen take it from here.
I look right back at him and say, You are not taking me out of this game. Serrano walks away. I go out for the ninth. After the ninth he approaches me again and says, That’s it. You are done.
I am capable of being a complete idiot when it comes to leaving games. I can be a totally obstinate, impenetrable donkey, refusing to listen to reason or heed authority figures. This is exactly how I behave in the Lindsey Nelson Stadium home dugout that day.
I am not coming out of this game, I tell him. Serrano tells me later that I look at him like a guy in the middle of war who refuses to put his gun down.
I retire Oklahoma State in the tenth, and when I come into the dugout, Serrano collars me right away and tells me again, more emphatically, that my day is done. He is losing patience now. He tells me he has never been a win-at-all-costs guy and isn’t going to start now.
You’ve pitched your butt off but I’m not going to risk hurting your arm. You’ve got a lot of years ahead of you in this game.
He starts to walk away and I hold him there. My anger is starting to rise. I am not going to let him entrust this game to somebody else. I’m just not.
I don’t care what you say. I am going back out there and I am finishing this game, all right? This game is mine. Nobody else’s. I feel fine, feel great. I’m going as long as it takes.
Serrano comes right back at me and tells me I’m not in charge and now we are nose to nose, bumping into each other. There isn’t going to be a dugout rumble, but there is a major confrontation in the biggest game of the year.
I walk away and tell him again: I am finishing this game. That’s it. It’s mine.
Coach Serrano doesn’t respond. I think, and hope, I’ve finally worn him out.
We take a 3–1 lead in the top half of the eleventh (Oklahoma State is the home team for this game, and if they beat us and force a second game, then we are the home team), scoring on a suicide squeeze. Now I have three more outs to get.
I retire the first guy, but then Rusty McNamara, the Oklahoma State left fielder and number two hitter, works me for a walk. Not what I am looking to do in that spot—put the tying run at the plate. The next hitter is Peter Prodanov, the shortstop. He’s a right-handed hitter and a good stick, so I have to be careful, but the guy I really don’t want up is in the on-deck circle: Tal Light, their designated hitter. Tal can tie this game up with one swing, and then I’ll have to have another fight with Coach Serrano to come back out for the twelfth inning. I want to end it here. I want to get Prodanov to hit it on the ground, if possible.
I throw a two-seam fastball away and he goes with it, making pretty good contact, hitting a high-bounding ball to first. Todd Helton snares it just over his head and runs to the bag for the second out, then fires to second to see if we can get McNamara, who beats the throw but overslides the bag. Shortstop Matt Whitley puts the tag on him. Rusty McNamara is out and the game is over, giving Tennessee its first spot in the College World Series in forty-four years. The whole team rushes to the mound, engulfing me. It is one of the greatest thrills of my career. In the pile, Dave Serrano gives me a hug.
You are the most stubborn kid I have ever coached, do you know that? he says. Nobody is even a close second.
I can see the conflict on his face, the pride he feels for one of his pitchers coming through in a big moment, and the regret he has that he allowed a kid to bully him out of a decision. I found out later that I threw 183 pitches.
WITH HELTON departing for pro ball after being selected eighth overall by the Rockies in the June 1995 draft, head coach Rod Delmonico has to replace our best hitter and a dominant closer. I couldn’t help any with the hitting, but about a month into my junior year, Delmonico is tired of us blowing late leads and decides to make me a closer.
Whatever you need, Coach, I say.
The bullpen agrees with me from the start. I love the challenge and the stress, the whole hair-on-fire urgency that comes with closing. I love being able to just try to blow the doors of
f without having to worry about pacing myself over nine, or eleven, innings. In back-to-back outings, I hit 96 miles per hour on the radar gun, my highest reading ever.
Before the year is out, though, I am back in the rotation, because we weren’t getting many late-inning leads for me to protect. We just don’t have enough to make another run to the College World Series. I finish my career the same way I begin it, with a loss on the road, this time to Clemson in the NCAA regionals, minus the seventh-inning wedding ceremony. In between those two losses, I win a school-record 38 games and pitch a record 434 innings.
I’m sad the year doesn’t end on a better note, but it’s impossible to stay down for long. The big-league draft is approaching and the Olympics are right after that. There’s a lot going on, a big adventure and a big unknown ahead of me. I think of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and words of his I learned in a nineteenth-century literature course along the way:
Go forth to meet the shadowy Future, without fear, and with a manly heart.
CHAPTER SIX
COVER STORY
The summer of 1996 is going to be the best time of my life. I am sure of it. After finishing my junior year at Tennessee, I’m in my third summer pitching for Team USA, preparing for the upcoming Olympic Games in Atlanta. I’m waiting for Major League Baseball to have its June free-agent draft.
I’ve been thinking about the big leagues since I was a seven-year-old kid who wanted to be the next Nolan Ryan.
Now the time is here. I try to act ballplayer blasé about it, but the truth is this:
It is huge. It is everything.
If the buzz is correct, I will be the first-round draft choice of a big-league organization. By the end of the summer, hopefully after an Olympic gold medal, I will have a big check in the bank. I will buy Anne a beautiful engagement ring and ask her to marry me.
I will be on my way.
