Jim & Me

by Dan Gutman

  Just because Bobby would be willing to leave me behind didn’t mean it would be okay for me to leave him behind. If I lowered myself to his level, I would be no better than he was.

  “Bobby?” I called, quietly at first, and then a little louder. “Bobby!”

  The park was silent. At least five minutes had passed since I’d last heard the voices of those guys who were chasing us. Either they were gone or they were hiding in the dark, waiting to grab me again.

  “Over here,” Bobby finally called.

  I felt around in the dark until I found him about 50 feet away, hiding behind a tree.

  “Are they gone?” I asked.

  “I think so.”

  “Let’s blow this pop stand.”

  “You got that right,” Bobby replied.

  Bobby and I found a comfortable spot on the grass under the tree. We were both anxious to go. He gave me the card he had stolen from me earlier and grabbed my hand. I closed my eyes, even though I could barely see anything with them open anyway. It didn’t take long for the tingling sensation to come back and do its magic as it worked its way up my arm and across my body.

  Soon I reached the point of no return. I felt our bodies disappearing.

  We were gone.

  23

  Run on Anything

  “JOEY! HURRY UP!”

  The instant Bobby and I got back from 1913, my mom started yelling that I was late for my game. Bobby went home and Mom dropped me off at Dunn Field on her way to work. I was still buttoning up my jersey when I jumped out of the car.

  “Stosh!” Flip Valentini shouted when he saw me. “Where were you? We needed you!”

  “I’m sorry!” I said, but Flip and the guys on my team didn’t look like they were ready to accept my apology. One glance at the scoreboard told me why. We were batting in the bottom of the last inning, and we were down by a run to the Exterminators. They no longer had Kyle the Mutant, but they were still good. There were two outs. The bases were empty. It was almost a hopeless situation.

  “We really needed to beat these bums!” Flip snapped when I got to the bench. “You let the team down, Stosh.”

  Phillip Rollison was walking up to the plate. He was batting fourth, which would have been my spot in the lineup.

  “Can I pinch-hit?” I asked Flip. I really wanted to help the team, and I wanted to make up for being so late.

  “Fuhgetaboutit,” he barked. “That wouldn’t be fair to the guys who showed up on time. You wanna help? Go coach third.”

  Phillip bounced to short on the first pitch, and it looked like that would end the game. But the shortstop bobbled the ball and Phillip was safe at first base. We had the tying run on with two outs.

  Owen Jones grabbed his bat and we all knew what he had to do—advance Phillip to second so he would be in position to score on a single. The third baseman took a few steps toward home plate in case Owen was bunting, although that wasn’t likely with two outs.

  But that’s exactly what he did. Owen squared around and dropped the ball down about three feet in front of the plate. Phillip took off for second base.

  The Exterminators’ catcher threw off his mask and pounced on the ball. He whipped it to first. You could tell he hurried his throw, and it was high. The first baseman jumped and reached for the ball, but it was over his head and into rightfield. Everybody started screaming.

  “Keep going!” I shouted to Phillip as he rounded second. “Go!”

  The rightfielder picked up the ball and threw it to second. That was a mistake. He should have thrown it home. Phillip had just about reached third.

  I had a quick decision to make. Should I wave Phillip around third to try and score the tying run? Or should I tell him to hold up and hope the next batter could drive him in? Who was up next? I didn’t know, and there was no time to turn my head away to find out. How fast was Phillip? What kind of an arm did the second baseman have? So many little decisions. All I had was a millisecond to decide what to do.

  Sometimes you just have to gamble.

  “GO!” I shouted to Phillip, windmilling my arm around.

  Phillip rounded third and dug for the plate.

  “Home it!” the Exterminators yelled, and the second baseman relayed the ball to the catcher, who was ready for the inevitable collision.

  The ball bounced a few feet in front of the plate. When the catcher went to scoop up the short hop, Phillip came barreling in and knocked him over. Arms and legs, caps and gloves were flying. The ball skittered to the backstop. Phillip touched the plate with his hand.

  “Safe!” yelled the ump.

  Everybody on our bench and the parents in the bleachers were going crazy. We had tied the game! Just as important, Owen had advanced all the way to third in the confusion. He had bunted for a triple. Good hustle!

  The winning run was only 90 feet from home. I was afraid Flip was going to have a heart attack from all the excitement.

  The pitcher was furious, stomping around the mound and glaring at his catcher. If he hadn’t chucked the ball into the outfield, the game would have been over. The Exterminators’ coach jogged out to the mound and whispered a few words to calm down his pitcher.

  Carlos Montano was up next. He looked nervous. I knew he didn’t like pressure situations, and the game was on the line. Nobody likes to make the last out in a game. You always feel like it’s your fault. I should know.

  Coaching third, I leaned over to whisper to Owen.

  “Two outs,” I reminded him. “Run on anything. A grounder. A hit. A fly ball. A wild pitch. Anything. Got it?”

  “Run on anything,” Owen repeated.

  The Exterminators’ pitcher looked in for the sign. That was when I got a brainstorm.

  “Hey, pitcher!” I yelled.

  The pitcher looked over at me.

  “Lemme see that ball for a sec, will ya?” I asked.

  “What for?”

  “Just lemme see it,” I said, holding my hands out to catch it.

  He flipped me the ball underhanded. I stepped aside to let it roll past me.

  “Go! Go! Go!” I shouted to Owen.

  Owen took off and crossed home plate standing up, with the winning run.

  Well, let me tell you, there has never been such a ruckus on a Little League field. The Exterminators’ coach shot out of his dugout like it was filled with cockroaches. The pitcher was throwing a tantrum. Screaming parents came running off the bleachers, waving their arms around. I half expected the cops to show up and start dragging people off to jail.

  “That’s illegal!” the coach screamed at the umpire. “They can’t do that!”

  “There’s nothing in the rule book that says you can’t ask to see the ball,” the ump explained. “Your pitcher threw it away.”

  The guys on our team were going nuts. We had finally beaten the Exterminators. Flip gave me a big hug and told me he was sorry he yelled at me. Everybody was clapping me on the back, as if I had driven in the winning run. And I hadn’t even set foot on the field.

  In the middle of all the celebrating, I felt a tap on my shoulder. I turned around and was more than a little surprised to see Bobby Fuller standing there.

  In the mad rush after returning from 1913, we hadn’t had the chance to talk about our trip at all. After what we’d been through together, I was actually happy to see him.

  “Nice move getting that runner home,” he said with a smirk. “Hmmm, I wonder where you got that idea.”

  “Oldest trick in the book,” I said.

  “Did you hide some baseballs in the outfield grass too?” Bobby asked.

  “Very funny.”

  “Y’know, there’s hope for you, Stoshack,” Bobby told me. “Maybe you’re not such a Goody Two-shoes after all. With a little push, you could come over to the dark side with me.”

  “Doubtful,” I replied. “Extremely doubtful.”

  While I was talking with Bobby, my dad came rolling over. Dad rarely comes to my games. He says it’s because
the field isn’t wheelchair accessible, but I always thought there was more to it than that.

  “Smart thinking, son,” he said. “Did you come up with that all by yourself?”

  “Believe it or not,” I told him, “John McGraw taught it to me. In 1913.”

  “You did it?!” Dad said, all excited. “You met McGraw? What was he like? Was he the jerk they say he was? Did you get something signed for me?”

  Oh, no! In all the excitement, I had completely forgotten to bring back something signed by John McGraw for my dad. I was kicking myself. Dad doesn’t have a lot of pleasure in his life, and this would have given him some.

  “Actually he did get something signed for you, Mr. Stoshack,” Bobby said.

  He reached into his backpack and pulled out a thin book. The title was Rules of Baseball. I remembered seeing that. It was the book John McGraw was reading in the Giants’ dugout.

  “What’s this?” Dad asked.

  “It’s John McGraw’s personal rule book,” Bobby told my dad. “See, he wrote a bunch of comments in the margins, and he signed it too.”

  “McGraw said he read the rules so he would know how to break them,” I added.

  My dad looked like he was holding a chunk of solid gold. I hadn’t seen such a big smile on his face in a long time.

  “John McGraw’s personal rule book!” Dad marveled. “This is priceless! It’s like owning Shoeless Joe Jackson’s shoes.” My dad thanked me, and said he would see me soon.

  By that time, most everybody had cleared the field. Bobby and I were alone on the grass, just like we were when we snuck into the Polo Grounds.

  “How’d you get McGraw’s rule book?” I asked Bobby.

  “How do you think?” he replied. “I’m a pickpocket. Duh!”

  “You are evil, man!” I said, but we both had a laugh over it.

  There was an awkward pause after that. The field was awfully quiet. Bobby was still hanging around, which was kind of weird. We’d never been friends. I kept expecting him to say he had to go somewhere, but he didn’t.

  “Listen,” Bobby finally said, “I never had the chance to thank you.”

  “Forget it,” I told him. “It was cool for me to meet Jim Thorpe too.”

  “No, I mean I wanted to thank you for not leaving me behind back there, in 1913. You could have. I deserved it.”

  “I know,” I said. “Don’t think I didn’t consider it.”

  “Part of me wishes you had left me there,” Bobby said.

  “Leave you in the past?! Why?”

  “Y’know how Jim said he lived in the wrong time?” said Bobby. “Well, sometimes I feel the same way. I kinda liked it back in the bad old days.”

  “We can go back to visit sometime, if you want,” I told him.

  “I just might take you up on that,” he said. Bobby put out his hand, and I shook it.

  “There’s still hope for you, man,” I told him. “With a little push, you could come over to the light side with me.”

  “Doubtful, Stoshack,” he said. “Extremely doubtful.”

  Well, all in all, things worked out okay. At least I didn’t get shot at this time.

  I guess Jim was right. There’s bad in good and good in bad. I always thought I was a pretty good kid. But I had just cheated to win a ball game. And I had come within seconds of leaving Bobby in 1913—nearly making him vanish from the face of the earth.

  Then there’s Bobby, who I always thought was the baddest of the bad. I never told him I promised to bring back a souvenir for my dad. He could have kept John McGraw’s rule book for himself, maybe sold it for thousands of dollars. But he gave it to my dad for nothing. And he gave Jim his iPod too. There was some good in him after all, just like there was some bad in me.

  As I watched Bobby walk away, I realized something. Sometimes you can change history, and sometimes history can change you.

  Facts and Fictions

  EVERYTHING IN THIS BOOK IS TRUE, EXCEPT FOR THE stuff I made up. It’s only fair to tell you which is which.

  Jim Thorpe, John McGraw, Christy Mathewson, Lord Byron, and all the players of 1913 were real people. After Jim Thorpe’s Olympic medals were taken away from him in January 1913, a number of major-league baseball teams made him offers. It’s too bad he chose the New York Giants; he and John McGraw could not get along, and Jim never got the chance to develop as a baseball player. Jim was fast and had a great arm, but had problems at the plate. He got just 35 at bats in 1913, and he only made five hits (for an average of .143). The Giants won the pennant easily, but lost their third World Series in a row. Jim never got a World Series at bat. The next season, McGraw let him bat just 31 times and he got six hits. In 1915, Jim got twelve hits in 52 at bats.

  The rap on Jim was that he couldn’t hit a curveball, as seen in this short piece that appeared in The New York Times on March 15, 1916:

  McGraw eventually did get rid of Jim.

  Interestingly, after Jim was traded, he started to hit. In 1919—his final year in the majors and the only season he was given a real chance (159 at-bats)—Jim hit .327 for the Boston Braves. So he must have hit at least a few curveballs (maybe because Stosh taught him how?). Jim’s lifetime major-league average was a respectable .252. We’ll never know how good he could have been if he had signed with a team that was more supportive from the start.

  In 1915, while still playing baseball, Jim began to play professional football for the Canton Bulldogs. He played for other pro teams too, and when the American Professional Football Association was formed in 1920, Jim was hired to be its president. The APFA later became the NFL. Football was Jim Thorpe’s true love.

  Jim suffered from bad timing. The Depression struck soon after he retired from sports in 1928. He took whatever work he could find to support his growing family (seven children with three wives). He was a house painter, security guard, bartender, and bouncer, and he managed an Indian wrestler named Sunny War Cloud. Jim even had some small roles in movies, such as Klondike Annie, with Mae West, and Northwest Passage, with Spencer Tracy. And yes, in 1931, he was one of the laborers who helped build Los Angeles County Hospital.

  The story you just read took place just 23 years after the United States Army killed Sitting Bull and 153 Lakota Sioux at Wounded Knee, South Dakota. That was the end of the Indian Wars. Many people still considered Native Americans to be “savages” even after Jim Thorpe stunned the world at the 1912 Olympics. Few people know that Native Americans—the original Americans—were not even granted American citizenship until 1924.

  Jim Thorpe was proud of his Indian heritage. Toward the end of his life, he started a new career as a public speaker, traveling the country to give lectures on behalf of Indian education, citizenship, and equal rights. Health problems eventually slowed him down. He died on March 28, 1953, after his third heart attack, in Long Beach, California. He had been living there in a trailer park.

  Jim Thorpe had a hard life—and a hard death too. He was buried in Shawnee, Oklahoma, but when the town refused to build a memorial for him, Jim’s wife Patsy moved his body to Tulsa. Plans for a memorial didn’t work out there, either.

  Patsy heard that the Pennsylvania towns of Mauch Chunk and East Mauch Chunk were thinking about merging and changing their names. She agreed for Jim to be buried there if they named the town in his honor. They did, and that’s where Jim is buried today. Jim Thorpe never set foot in Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania.

  After his death, Jim began to get some long overdue recognition for his accomplishments. He is now a member of the College Football Hall of Fame, Pro Football Hall of Fame, National Track and Field Hall of Fame, United States Olympic Hall of Fame, Pennsylvania Hall of Fame, and National Indian Hall of Fame. In 2000, when ABC’s Wide World of Sports set out to name the Athlete of the Century, they didn’t choose Michael Jordan, Babe Ruth, or Muhammad Ali. They chose Jim Thorpe over them all.

  As a man, Jim was complicated. Having survived an abusive father, his twin brother’s death, lifelong prejudice
against Indians, the Olympic scandal, career failure, and the death of his own son from infantile paralysis, it’s not surprising that he had problems with alcohol.

  Jim was also a modest, generous, and kind man who actually would give money to strangers and lift up people’s cars to help them change tires. When asked what was the greatest moment in his athletic career, he would invariably talk about a fish he once caught rather than his Olympic or football heroics.

  Jim never fought to get his Olympic medals returned. But attitudes about professional athletes participating in the Olympics changed over the years, and there were many attempts by others to clear his name. In 1983, two of Jim’s children were presented with reproductions of his gold medals. (The originals had been lost, stolen from museums.) In 1992, professional athletes were finally allowed to participate in the Olympics.

  In 2001, Jim Thorpe was finally recognized as a true American hero: His picture was on a Wheaties box.

  Much of what was described in 1913 really happened. Christy Mathewson really did play six games of checkers simultaneously. Guys were constantly challenging Jim Thorpe to fights and wrestling matches. Newspapers really did create telegraphic simulations of baseball games. There are only two known copies of the Colgan’s Jim Thorpe card, making it one of the rarest cards in the world.

  The Polo Grounds was virtually the capital of baseball in the first half of the twentieth century. After the Giants moved to San Francisco, it became home to the Mets for their first two seasons. It was torn down in the mid-sixties and replaced with an apartment building.

  There are also some minor fibs, stretchers, and outright lies in this book. While John McGraw did attempt to pass off an African American named Charley Grant as Chief Tokahoma, it happened back in 1901. Similarly, while McGraw’s groundskeeper was famous for sculpting the foul lines and bending the rules in every possible way, that was when he was with the Baltimore Orioles in the 1890s.

  The 1931 Jim Thorpe baseball card is a fake that my wife, Nina, made. There was no 1931 Jim Thorpe baseball card.