Road Work: Among Tyrants, Heroes, Rogues, and Beasts

by Mark Bowden

  There are more than forty boys in the gym. Twelve will play jayvee. Twelve will play varsity. A yellow legal pad lies on the floor, off to one side of the court. At one this morning Scoogy sat with the pad at his kitchen table, sipping a glass of iced tea, and wrote out sixteen names in pencil. He wrote down the returning varsity players: Maury, Glenn, Carl Cannon, Ty Legree, Johnny Miller, Robert Taggert, and Brian Ward. He also wrote down Nin, Mark, Poughkeepsie Kris, Doober, Maurice (Cup) Peterson (a six-two senior guard-forward who has shown ferocity under the basket), Dante Buchanan (a gaunt junior forward with terrific skills but a brooding personality that troubles the coaches), Preston Jones (a dignified senior guard with good moves whom Scoogy cut last year), Keenan Chase (a forward from last season’s jayvee who’s a prodigious leaper), and Ramzee Stanton (a promising junior forward-center who recently transferred to Coatesville High from a school in Philadelphia).

  Already axed are Damon, Eric, and a number of other seniors hustling through the second day of tryouts, desperate to make an impression. They are as oblivious to their fates as Tion, who is still lounging in the corner, holding a big blue winter coat over his long legs. It’s as though he believes that making the team is simply a matter of showing up. His hip is fine now, but he’s in danger of flunking one of his classes and becoming ineligible. “My teacher gonna talk to Scoogy about it,” he says. Asked about Tion, Scoogy just shakes his head.

  Scoogy had planned to hang this list of sixteen outside his office tomorrow morning and take one more day to make the last four cuts. But after practice the list is further trimmed. The coach stands in the middle of the gym with Nick, Ricky, and a third assistant, Mark Bailey. Most of the boys have gone home. A few wait for rides in far doorways.

  “I don’t know why you have him on this list, the way he drags himself up and down the court,” says Mark, pointing to Dante’s name. “I’ll never forget what he did to me in that jayvee game last year, after I pulled him out. When I sent him back in, he just sat there on the bench staring at me. Just flat-out refused.”

  “He’s got talent, but he hasn’t showed us anything,” says Ricky.

  Scoogy draws and redraws a red line through D. Buchanan.

  The next target on the list is Poughkeepsie Kris. His skills are on a par with those of the other top point-guard candidates, but he missed two weeks of intramurals when he was suspended for fighting, and he’s in academic trouble. “If he stood out a lot from the other guys, maybe you’d consider it,” says Mark, “but with these other things…”

  “You’ve got too many point guards as it is,” says Ricky.

  Scoogy draws another red line through K. Bottoms.

  The discussion turns to Preston. “He’s a great kid, a super kid,” says Ricky. “But you can’t have that many guards. Why drag it out for him?”

  Scoogy has Preston in gym class, and he likes the kid a lot. He slowly draws a line through the boy’s name.

  “You’re going to have to get rid of Doober,” says Nick. “You can’t keep that many point guards.”

  “Yeah, but Doober, he’s the smartest kid on the court sometimes,” says Ricky.

  “I’ll give him another look,” says Scoogy.

  When they finish, Ricky ribs Scoogy: “Man, you are gonna be unpopular around here. You ain’t even gonna be able to go to church! People gonna be throwin’ Bibles at you!”

  WEDNESDAY, 7 A.M.

  The cold morning sky is streaked with orange and purple clouds. The school is stirring to life. A few boys come wandering down the hallway leading to Scoogy’s office.

  “Where the list at?” one says.

  “List ain’t up yet?” asks another.

  Scoogy strides in at 7:10. Overnight, sitting up at his kitchen table, he decided to keep thirteen players on the varsity, something he vowed last season he wouldn’t do, because it means more disgruntled guys without enough playing time. He’ll deal later with the players coming from the football team. By then at least one of these boys will have difficulty with his grades or will miss a practice—in other words, will cut himself. For now, though, Scoogy has his team. He opens his office door, thumps his briefcase on the desk, and withdraws a white 81/2" × 11" lined sheet of paper on which he has written in bold pencil:

  The following individuals should report for boys varsity basketball practice today at 2:45:

  B. Ward

  R. Stanton

  J. Miller

  C. Bacon

  R. Taggert

  T. Legree

  M. Peterson

  L. Boyer

  M. Hostutler

  G. Gray

  C. Cannon

  D. Holmes

  K. Chase

  He tapes the list to the brown tile wall outside his office. “I just thought to myself coming in here, Technically I’m fifty years old,” Scoogy says. “Now I’m fifty-one. I like to just put it up and get the hell out of here.”

  Which he does. Quickly, boys in bulky winter coats crowd around the list.

  “Cup!”

  “No! Cup made it!”

  “Nin.”

  “Ooh, Dante’s not on it.”

  “Keenan made it, and Ramzee.”

  “Kris ain’t on it!”

  “Kris not on there?”

  Cup emerges from the crowd overjoyed. He is embraced by one of his friends.

  Nin, the little sophomore with long dagger sideburns and big varsity dreams, approaches alone. “You on it,” a friend tells him. “You on the list.”

  “Don’t play with me, man,” Nin says. The crowd parts for him as he approaches the wall. He makes two fists and leans up close. “Oh, my God!” he shouts.

  Ty, one of the returning members of last season’s varsity, saunters down the hallway wearing a white stocking cap that sticks up five inches from his head. “I ain’t got to look,” he says. “I know I’m on it.”

  Mark, the Great White Hope, arrives with a friend. He stands before the list silently for a moment. No more worries about transferring to Bishop Shanahan. He turns away from the list with a broad smile. As he walks off his friend asks, “That isn’t the varsity list?”

  “That’s varsity,” says Mark.

  “You kiddin’ me? You made varsity?”

  Poughkeepsie Kris has gotten the word. He comes down the hall, his head down, his face a mask of anger and disappointment. He looks at the list briefly and then heads into the adjoining boys locker room.

  Next comes Damon. He’s afraid to look. “Am I on it?” he asks a friend. “No, I know I’m not on it.” He walks up, studies the list for a moment, and then steps into the locker room. Inside, Damon and the starting point guard, Maury, try to console Poughkeepsie Kris. “You got all year to work on it, man,” Maury tells him. “Next year, you come back, it’ll be your year to shine.”

  “That’s right, Kris, you still got a year, man,” says Damon. There will be no next year at Coatesville for Damon.

  Eric comes down the hall alone. He approaches with the same grim determination he showed standing on the sideline during all those intramural sessions. Eric does not dress in baggy jeans like the other boys. He has on straight-legged pants and a sweater. He stands at the back of the crowd around the list, craning for a look. “Let me see,” he says.

  “You ain’t got to see,” says one boy, teasing. “You cut, man.”

  Eric leans in, blushes, and then turns to walk away.

  “No, no, wait, E!” shouts Ty, pushing clear of the crowd, chasing Eric with his hand outstretched. “You did good, E. You did good.”

  Ty stops, hand still outstretched, as Eric walks slowly away without turning back.

  EPILOGUE

  When Scoogy went home the day he posted his list, he found an angry note from the grandmother of a boy he had cut. During the season the team struggled, as the coach, who turned fifty-one in December, had feared it would. The Red Raiders ended the regular season last Friday with a 10–14 record, good enough for the Ches-Mont League championship, and
will go to the state District One playoffs, which will begin this week. Coatesville’s most consistent scorers were Maury Boyer and Glenn Gray. Nin Bacon was a spot player and, according to Scoogy, “got some good experience.” Mark Hostutler came off the bench in one game and scored 18 points. “It was the best night of my entire life,” he says.

  Eric Kruse didn’t attend any of the Red Raiders’ games. He played on two rec league teams and plans to throw the javelin for the Coatesville track team in the spring. Damon Watson, meanwhile, helped out the Red Raiders part of the season as team manager. He attended almost all of the home games.

  SCHMIDT’S MISFORTUNE

  MAY 1982

  The Phillies’ great third baseman had a prickly relationship with the sports reporters who chronicled his amazing career, but he was generous with me when I asked for his help in writing this story. The idea was to follow him through the first few games of the season, wait for a game when he clobbered a few good hits, and then write a detailed account of each at bat. I wanted to get inside his head during his duels with pitchers. As you might expect, Schmidt was a serious student of hitting, and routinely studied videotapes of each at bat after every game. I was privileged to sit alongside as he did this. He got off to a slow start in 1982, but kept working graciously with me game after game. It got to the point where he would grimace when he saw me coming to interview him after each game. Then, with one swing in Shea Stadium, he broke a rib and brought his new season to an abrupt halt. I felt like I had jinxed him, and told him so in the locker room afterward. “I wasn’t going to say it,” he said, and then apologized to me for ruining my story by not getting more hits.

  April 13, 1982. Opening Day at Shea Stadium. Mets vs. Phillies. Top of the second inning.

  Mike Schmidt eases into the batter’s box with ritual, a lifetime of accumulated tics. This rectangle of soft soil bordered with lye is his realm. He grooms it with the spikes of his right shoe, then steps out to knock dirt off the spikes with his bat. He takes two slow practice swings. With two deep breaths he attempts to clear his mind completely, of the hostile fans arrayed in steep walls of seats all around him, of how he has been hitting lately (badly), of the pain of the broken toe on his left foot, of the thousand whispered images that float uninvited across the still pool of his concentration.

  Then he steps back in, digging his right foot into the back corner of the box, the corner farthest from home plate, and planting his left foot closer in, about two thirds of the way up.

  Standing this way, legs spread wide, slightly bent at the knees, leaning forward from the waist, his left shoulder and back are turned toward Mets pitcher Randy Jones. Schmidt tugs at the brim of his batting helmet, takes two rhythmic half swings, and then steadies the bat, holding it up and back and bolt upright. His hands in tight batting gloves work at the bat’s grip as Jones goes into his windup.

  Schmidt wiggles the bat ever so slightly. He is watching, not the pitcher’s gyrations or the ball, but Jones’s slot, the place over his left shoulder where Schmidt knows from long experience this left-handed pitcher habitually releases the ball. As the ball is thrown Schmidt’s bat goes stock still and in that instant he sizes up the pitch and decides, Let it go.

  He drops the bat slightly and strides forward with his left foot as he watches the ball all the way into the catcher’s mitt. It passes through the outside corner of the strike zone. The umpire, crouching, turns to his right and juts his hand out sharply as he calls the pitch. Strike One. The walls of Mets fans shout their approval.

  Again the ritual: smoothing the dirt. Rapping the spikes, the practice swings, very deliberate, the deep breaths, then planting first the right foot, then the left, tugging the helmet, the rhythmic half swings. Bat back. Watching…watching…

  Jones releases a spinning pitch, an off-speed breaking ball to the outside corner. Something clicks right with this one.

  Schmidt moves toward it instantly, striding forward, concentrating on keeping his left shoulder turned in so he can reach the bat across with enough strength to hit the outside pitch into right field, swinging smoothly, not violently, just meet it, reaching out…Smack!…but wait…in the same instant of sweet connection pain flashes through Schmidt’s body and mind, terrible pain—pain that explodes through his torso and chest and emerges finally in a wrenching scream….

  The ball is well hit. It rises in a slow high arc toward deep right field and curves toward the foul pole, away from sprinting Mets outfielder Ellis Valentine, who is not going to catch it….

  Schmidt, limping slowly toward first base, clutching his back with his left hand, watches the ball, hoping for once in his life that it won’t clear the fence for a home run. He felt muscles along his rib cage tear away from bone—X-rays would later show he had cracked his lower left rib. He doesn’t think he can get around the bases….

  The ball falls just at the base of the right field fence, well over 300 feet out, dead in the corner. Schmidt stands on first, doubled over, holding his back.

  Just like that, one swing, one base hit, one freak twist, and Mike Schmidt’s 1982 season came to an abrupt halt.

  He had been eager to play, to get started. He was convinced greatness would be his this season. His performance, by most measures already the best in baseball, has been improving steadily over the past three years. An intensely cerebral ballplayer, Schmidt believes he’s finally got this game figured out. He knows more each time he walks on the field.

  He is thirty-two years old, a millionaire several times over. He has two lovely children and a loving wife. His spirit is ripe and full with Christian fervor. He has it made.

  “Do you believe this?” he asks later, down in the visiting team’s clubhouse, the muffled sounds of the Shea Stadium crowd overhead. Schmidt has stripped to his underwear and has a big pack of ice wrapped around his torso under a Phillies T-shirt. He can’t quite stand upright. His steady, serious blue-eyed gaze is troubled.

  “I mean, I was afraid it would clear the fence because I didn’t think I could make it around the bases. I was hoping the ball wouldn’t go out. What’s the rule on that? Do I have to run around the bases myself? Can they substitute somebody for me in the middle of the play to run for me? I don’t know what the rule is on that.”

  Breathing hurt. Walking hurt. Sitting hurt. Mostly thinking hurt. Right away Schmidt was thinking a month and a half. For a man whose success depends upon run totals, hit totals, and home run totals, slicing off a sixth of the season is like exacting a pound of flesh. The damn thing hurt like that, too. Game five of the Phillies season. He hadn’t even gotten started and now he was out. Just like that.

  Schmidt knew only one way to take it. “It’s the will of God,” he said quietly. But the look on his face said Why?

  Two months earlier. Monday, February 13, 1982. Innisbrooke, Florida.

  Schmidt is hitting golf balls and he is perplexed. His standards are all out of whack. Just because he’s arguably the best hitter in baseball, winner of the National League’s Most Valuable Player award for two consecutive seasons, that doesn’t mean he ought to be a great golfer, too. But tell Schmidt that. Here he is with his two-iron and a big wire-mesh basket full of golf balls, wincing with displeasure every time he swings.

  It is a dazzling morning, a warm winter day to break the hearts of folks up north. Just back from taping a segment of the television program The Baseball Bunch and a weeklong cruise in the Caribbean, Schmidt is pleased to be in his winter golf-haven near Clearwater. Spring training doesn’t officially begin for a week, and he’s looking to squeeze in as much golf as will fit. Sporting his usual leathery suntan, he’s got on a blue sun visor, a bright red Phillies polo shirt, and a pair of lumpy blue bell-bottom trousers. Sandy brown hair falls in neatly cut layers over his ears to the bright gold chain around his neck.

  Baseball’s premier slugging third baseman somehow seems smaller than you might expect, out of uniform here in Florida. He’s six feet two, about two hundred pounds, but the physical
presence is still shy of the legend.

  Mostly Schmidt is just built wide. His shoulders and arms, right down to his thick wrists and his upper legs and buttocks, seem too big for his torso, as if they belonged to someone else. He has high, prominent cheekbones from which his face cuts down sharply in two angled lines to his chin. What must have been a difficult case of teenage acne has left scars along these chiseled features, softening them somewhat, adding to his weathered complexion a curious blend of ruggedness and vulnerability. He’s got a wad of Skoal pressed into his right cheek and a knot of concentration on his brow.

  Thwack! One after the other he strokes the balls cleanly. They zip off at one angle or the other, falling down toward a target flag about 200 yards away across the hazy green field. Thwack! There is power and even a hint of grace in the brute swing, but it seems wrong. It lacks the fluidity of a truly gifted golfer’s. He hits in the mid-80s and aspires to much, much better. Thwack!

  “You know what kills me about this game?” Schmidt offers unsolicited. “You only get one chance, you know what I mean? In baseball you get three strikes or four balls, but in golf you get just one swing. You spend the whole time walking down the fairway looking at the ball and sizing up exactly where you want to hit it. And then you get one chance. When you blow it, man, it makes you feel like throwing your whole golf bag in the lake.”

  Thwack! The ball spins off on a slow slice away to the right of the flag. Schmidt turns with a frown to an Innisbrooke golf pro who has stepped out of his cart to watch. “I’ve tried everything,” he tells the pro. “I’ve tried baseball grip, crossing hands, locking fingers. It doesn’t seem to make any difference.”

  Schmidt’s problem is control, not power. To demonstrate, he steps back a bit from the ball, gripping the two-iron like a baseball bat, bending at the waist and taking a vicious cut. “Aaaaugh!” he grunts, and he slams it perfectly. The golf ball rises in a straight line from the tee and just keeps on going up, up, and up over the long grass fairway, still up as it passes over the distant target flag, up over the slope beyond and over the fence atop the slope and over the tennis courts past that. There is a moment of stunned silence. Even Schmidt is surprised.