Chumps to Champs

by Bill Pennington

  “He told me he would play professional baseball in New York,” Father Moore said.

  Billy told his best friend, Ruben de Alba, the same thing.

  “We’d be walking down the street and Billy would say, ‘I’m going to play for the Yankees someday,’” de Alba said seventy-six years later as he sat in a Bay Area assisted living facility. “I’d say, ‘Yeah, sure, Billy.’ I kind of laughed it off. You know, like, ‘Yeah, sure, whatever you say, Billy.’

  “But he wasn’t kidding. He would turn to me and say, ‘Listen, you wait and see. I’m going to come back here and remind you of this when I’m playing for the Yankees.’”

  Father Moore, meanwhile, had less time for the wild dreams of the second-grader in his confessional. The priest eventually decided that while Billy’s aspirations were admirable, they were also driven in part by jealousy. Was not one of the commandments “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house” (or field)?

  Father Moore ordered Billy to clean the church pews as penance. And Billy did. Father Moore then said he would see Billy at Sunday Mass. And Billy would be there. He even woke his cousins who lived in the neighborhood to accompany him.

  “I’d be asleep and Billy would be tapping on my bedroom window telling me and my brother, Nick, to get up and go to church,” remembered Mario DeGennaro, whose mother was the sister of Billy’s mother. “My house was just a couple of blocks away and he’d come get me, badgering me until I went with him.

  “It was easier to get up and go than to argue with him because Billy, like his mother, knew how to argue.”

  DeGennaro, now in his eighties, has lived his entire life in the Berkeley area, where for many years younger locals would ask him to explain the Billy Martin he knew.

  “There were a lot of things people completely missed about him,” said DeGennaro, whom Billy always called “Cousin Mario.” “The one thing that always surprises people is how religious Billy was, even as an adult. I know he did a lot of crazy and wild things, but even in his final days, he was a guy who would quietly go to church. You could find him sitting there thinking to himself.

  “When we were kids, me and my brother, we would start talking or horsing around in the church pew. But Billy would jab us hard in the ribs with an elbow and say, ‘Shut up. Don’t do that here. Show respect.’

  “Billy was one of the guys in our neighborhood—he fought and scrapped and wanted to get somewhere like the rest of us. But he always had this other side, too. Like in church. He sat there and behaved.”

  After church, the DeGennaro boys—Nick was two years younger than Billy, and Mario the same age—would walk back from St. Ambrose’s—which was halfway to the Berkeley hills. They returned to the densely packed streets near their homes, near the intersection of 7th and Virginia streets.

  “On so many of those walks Billy would be talking about baseball,” Nick DeGennaro said. “And he’d say to Mario and me, ‘I’m going to play for the Yankees.’ And we heard it so much we wouldn’t even look at him after a while. We would just say, ‘Yeah, sure, Billy. We know.’

  “But we didn’t believe him. Not then at least.”

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  About the Author

  BILL PENNINGTON is an award-winning sportswriter for the New York Times and the author of Billy Martin, On Par, and The Heisman. A former syndicated columnist, he was also a beat writer for the New York Yankees. Pennington is a ten-time winner of the Associated Press Sports Editors’ annual writing award. He lives with his family in Warwick, New York.

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