SUMMER SPORTS CLASSIC II

What We Pass On

From fathers to sons

Photo by Joshua Peacock on Unsplash

For much of my life, at least into my forties, I would have never thought to use the term “cruel summer,” even though I loved that 1983 Bananarama song. My childhood and teen summers, even in heat-stroked central Alabama, were idyllic for many reasons: my birthday falls in the middle of July; there was always the potential and once or twice even the realization of a summer romance.

And then there was baseball.

Whether playing it, watching it on TV, or heading to the various ballparks, including legendary Rickwood Field, the oldest professional baseball stadium in the country, I followed baseball as closely as I could. Behind my passion was my dad, who taught me to catch, used to hit fly balls to me after work, and gave me my love for the New York Yankees.

Dad was like no other baseball fan I’ve ever met. Most of us root for one team and hate all the others. Dad, however, loved the Reds, the Tigers, the Red Sox, the A’s, and the Yankees. Strangely, he never told me that he loved the Yankees. In fact, the only clue I got was that in 1963, when the Yanks faced the Dodgers in the World Series, both Dad and I cheered for the Yanks who were mercilessly swept by LA.

Or maybe there was another clue, at least about his love for the Yankees.

For my fifth birthday in the summer of ’61, Dad gave me a Roger Maris/Mickey Mantle “M&M Boys” T-shirt, the only gear from a Major League team that he ever gave me.

Still, how could he have loved so many teams? Most of the teams he loved were in the American League. But there was another, more personal pattern.

Every one of these teams that Dad favored claimed Birmingham as their Double-A affiliate from 1939 on. And while he had many fine traits, Dad prized loyalty to home and family above all else. He was also passionate about Ted Williams, Lou Gehrig, Mickey Mantle, Johnny Bench, and Al Kaline — players who played their entire career with one major league team.

See? Loyalty.

My soul would have loved to have been one with Dad’s in the years 1953–1956, when the Yanks were Birmingham’s “Big club.” I missed this chance by the slimmest of summer Zoysia grass blades, since being born in July 1956 meant that, among other things, I wasn’t aware when Don Larsen pitched his perfect World Series game that fall.

So my earliest memories were of his championing not the Yankees, but the Tigers, Birmingham’s parent club from 1957–1961.

When anyone asked how I became a Yankees fan — and after 1965, why I didn’t pull for the Atlanta Braves — I explained that the Yanks were my team because every Saturday and some Sundays, they were on TV, back in the days when CBS televised one game each weekend day. Of course, it was easy to love the Yanks because they almost always won.

I also got obsessed, as a kid, with collecting Yankee baseball cards, which in 1961 and 1962 you could get on the back of Post Cereal and Jell-O boxes.

The problem here was that Dad was loyal to Kellogg’s cereals, and buying Post caused certain frictions. I’d beg and scream until someone cut those cardboard treasures off the box. Then, when they’d try to get me to eat either Sugar Crisp, Raisin Bran, or Sugar Pops, I wouldn’t. I liked Corn Flakes, Sugar Frosted Flakes and Rice Krispies — all Kellogg’s brands — just like Dad.

The household budget could hardly take even wasted cereal hits, as I was informed so many times. What did I care, though, when I had pictures of Clete Boyer, Tom Tresh, Elston Howard, Ralph Terry, and Whitey Ford for my very own?

I didn’t share Dad’s love for the Tigers, or for any of his other teams. And I didn’t go to a Birmingham game until they were reorganized in 1964 and became affiliated with the then Kansas City A’s, who moved to Oakland in 1965. From that first game, I began loving the A’s, too. Over the next few years, we saw Gene Tenace, “Blue Moon” Odom, Vida Blue, Bert Campaneris, and…Reggie Jackson play at Rickwood.

But even though the A’s green and gold uniforms were striking, they could never match the thrill I got whenever I saw the Yankee pinstripes.

The decades passed, and whether I found myself involved with high school theater, high school girls, and even after I moved away to college, Dad and I kept each other up on the hits and errors of our favorite teams.

Even then, I still didn’t believe that he loved the Yanks as I did.

In the midst of the Joe Torre-managed 1996–2001 years — Dad came down with symptoms of Parkinson’s Disease: the hand tremors; the slowed, dragging foot; the increasing inability to say what he wanted to say. On one visit home and basically on a whim, I brought him a vintage Yankees cap. He recognized it, smiled, and put it right on.

“You know, your daddy always loved the Yankees,” Mom said.

He smiled at me again, and even though the words wouldn’t come, in that moment, finally, I understood what he meant. And I believed it.

During the last few months of his life, he wore that cap every time he went outdoors. Still, those outings became fewer and fewer. Toward the end, he rarely left his lift chair, and his only remaining words were,

“Where’s your mother?” And “Sho ‘nuff.”

So in 2000, when the Yanks faced off against the Mets in the first Subway World Series of my lifetime, Dad didn’t care. When she turned the series on, Dad simply fell asleep in front of that historic scene.

My father passed early in the morning on December 24. I got to see him one last time before he left us, but truthfully, I don’t think he knew who I was. He just stared and blinked. A family friend described him then as looking like a lost, wild animal.

Over the following weeks, my grief coursed through me. I knew that losing Dad would leave a hole and that in so many ways, I was his best friend as well as his elder son. However, I didn’t understand what it would feel like when March and baseball’s spring training began.

I knew no one who cared as much about baseball, who understood both its history and our history with it, like my dad. No one, that is, except my therapist, a Jewish man like my dad but also, unlike Dad, a native New Yorker. And like dad, my therapist was a committed baseball and especially committed New York Yankees fan.

“They’ll never let you down,” my therapist said about the Yanks.

If he were alive today, he’d have to at least consider altering that opinion.

As we spoke that early March day, I had an inspiration. My therapist lived in Camden, Maine, and I in Greenville, South Carolina. Still:

“Would you be willing to meet me in New York for a Yankees’ game this summer? My treat!”

Though it likely violated the therapist-client relationship, he agreed without hesitation. So I bought the tickets online for a game in late May. We were all set. I would say with my best childhood friend who lived in Manhattan, and my therapist would fly into New York that morning and meet me at Yankee Stadium for the 4 p.m. game.

My best friend, by the way, doesn’t hate baseball as much as he knows nothing about it. As we were out to dinner the night before the big game, he asked me:

“Are there two baseball teams in New York?”

I almost said something disparaging about the Mets, something like…

“No, only one,”

But I felt too good for disparaging anything. This anecdote will be important later.

I had given my therapist my friend’s phone number, just in case something happened. And something did.

We hadn’t been home for even fifteen minutes that night when he called:

“I’m sorry Terry, but I won’t be able to come meet you. The weather’s bad up here, storms tonight and tomorrow, and my wife doesn’t want me to fly.”

On one level, of course, I understood, and I told him so. I would have been too embarrassed to say otherwise, to say what I truly felt right then.

Are you fucking kidding me? Don’t you, of all people, understand my grief? I can’t believe you’re passing up this chance to console me, to see the Yankees with me. To be the stand-in for my father.

Though I didn’t say that, I did have enough residual grief inside that I couldn’t distinguish the logic from the disappointment, and from the very deep hurt I felt. I hung up the phone, feeling like I had nothing left of what I had formerly loved so deeply.

I also had an extra ticket for the game in my pocket.

My friend had overheard. When I hung up, he got this funny and almost sympathetic look on his face — one that seemed to say…

“I can’t believe I’m about to say this,”

And I’m sure that was the truth.

“Uh, do you want me to go with you?”

While I really didn’t want to face the next day and an entire four-hour baseball game in Yankee Stadium alone, I also couldn’t force a guy who doesn’t even understand the game to spend his day indulging or even comforting me.

“No, that’s okay.”

Nothing in the above story is especially cruel, or cruel at all, really. It was just Nature doing what Nature does. And though I was going to see the Yanks play the Indians, part of me wondered why I was still going, and why I still cared.

I had no answers, only two tickets, and so at 1:00 I set out for the stadium by myself.

As I searched for my entrance gate in the “old” Yankee Stadium, I saw a man sitting on the ground, his back against the outer stadium wall.

“Does any body have an extra ticket? I just wanna see a game.”

He must have been my therapist’s age, and close to my Dad’s age when he passed — late 60s, early 70s. Clearly, he had seen better days. I didn’t know his circumstances, but to conclude that he was homeless would have been well-founded.

I instinctively took one step toward him, and then I reconsidered:

I can give him this extra ticket. No one else wants it, and I don’t have it in me to try scalping. But, if I give him the ticket, then…

…He’ll be sitting right by me for the whole four-hour game.”

So I walked away.

I wasn’t in the best of spirits, true, and had I not been so confused, hurt, and lost, maybe I would have said YES to him, and to the universe, which was clearly trying to get my attention.

I JUST WANNA SEE A GAME.

Had he ever been to a game before? Had he been to many a long time before with his dad? Would this be his last chance? Did he see me start toward him and then walk away?

I don’t know, and I didn’t look back.

The tickets were in the upper deck on the third base side, an area where, truthfully, there were many empty seats. To this day, I remember nothing about the game except that when Paul O’Neill walked to the plate, the sound system played The Who’s “Baba O’Reilly.”

I think the Yanks won, which seemed to me both then and now the most meaningless event of not just that day, but for all the preceding ones since that past Christmas Eve.

I took the wrong subway back to my friend’s apartment. Eventually, I found the right way, and then the next day I flew back home.

I had already thrown the ticket stub and that unbroken extra away.

Maybe I had considered my therapist to be my surrogate dad, and maybe he sensed that and decided to disappoint me early rather than late in our time together. I had many more sessions with him, our last session a week before the 2004 baseball season started, on a Monday.

On the following Thursday, he dropped dead from a massive heart attack as he was about to board a plane for New York City.

I remembered thinking when my wife told me the news,

When your therapist dies suddenly, to whom do you turn for help?

In the moments following his death, I saw clearly old Yankee Stadium, and a man who was no longer there. There are so many men like that.

Walking past that poor man might not have been the most selfish and cruel decision I’ve ever made, but it’s up there. And no one else has ever known about it until now.

When the Yanks beat the Phillies in the 2009 World Series, I felt so good for the first few minutes. My wife and my daughters celebrated with me, and the next day I called my mother.

“Your daddy would have been so happy,” she said.

“I know,” I said.

But after I hung up, I felt so empty inside.

So empty, and despite it all, so very much alone.

Thanks to Mike Butler and Beyond the Scoreboard for publishing, and good luck to the other contestants in this summer’s writing challenge.