Knots in My Yo-Yo String (4 page)

I was off with the gun. My memory of those fifty yards has nothing to do with sprinting but rather with two sensations. The first was surprise that I could not see any other runners. This led to a startling conclusion:
I must be ahead!
Which led to the second sensation: an anxious expectation, a waiting to be overtaken.

I never was. I won.

Froggy Dixon didn’t even come in second. That went to Billy Steinberg, a stranger then, who would become my
best friend in junior high school. He would also grow to be faster than I, as would many of my schoolmates. But that was yet to come. For the moment, as I slowed down and trotted into a sun the color and dazzle of the medal I was about to receive, I knew only the wonder of seven astounding seconds when no one was ahead of me.

The fifty-yard-dash champion for Hartranft Elementary (age 12, 1953).

From ages eleven to sixteen, if someone asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I gave one of two answers: “A baseball player” or “A shortstop.”

Major league baseball—that was the life for me. And I wanted to live it only as a shortstop. When I trotted onto a diamond, I instinctively headed for the dusty plain between second and third. I never wanted to play any other position. When we got up sandlot games, no one else occupied shortstop. They knew it was mine.

I was eleven when I first played Little League baseball. To give as many kids as possible a chance to participate, the Little League declared that some of us would share uniforms with others. And so the season was exactly half over when I pedaled my bike up to Albert Pascavage’s house to pick up his uniform: green socks, green cap, gray woolen shirt, and pants with green trim. I packed my precious cargo into my bike basket and drove it carefully home. I was a member of the Green Sox.

During one game in that half season I played second base—apparently no one told the manager I was going to be a major league shortstop. Our opponent was the Red Sox. The batter hit a ground ball right at me. I crouched,
feet spread, glove ready, as I had been taught in the
Times Herald
baseball school. I could hear the ball crunching along the sandy ground. It hit my glove—but not the pocket. Instead it glanced off the fat leather thumb and rolled on behind me.

Shortshop, Green Sox (age 12, 1953).

My first error!

I was heartbroken. I stomped my foot. I pounded my fist into the stupid glove.

When the inning was over and I slunk to the Green Sox bench, the manager was waiting for me. I thought he was going to console me. I thought he would say, “Tough luck, Jerry. Nice try,” and then tousle my hair.

That’s not what happened.

What he really did was glare angrily at me, and what he really said was, “Don’t you ever do that again.” He pointed out that while I was standing there pounding my glove, two Red Sox runs had scored. “Next time you miss the ball, you turn around and chase it down. You don’t just stand there feeling sorry for yourself. Understand?”

I nodded. And I never forgot.

Like most of the kids in my class, I got better at sports simply by growing older. I went from being one of the worst players in Little League as an eleven-year-old to making the all-star team as a twelve-year-old. The following year I was the only seventh grader to start on the Stewart Junior High School team—at shortstop, of course. It mattered little that I was not very good at hitting a curve ball, since most pitchers threw only fastballs.

During the summer of junior high school I played in a baseball league called Connie Mack Knee-Hi, for thirteen- to fifteen-year-olds. Before each game, one team would line up along the first-base line, the other team along third base. The umpire stood on the pitcher’s mound, took off his cap, and read aloud the Sportsmanship Pledge, pausing after each line so the rest of us could repeat it in chorus. We pledged ourselves to be loyal to, among other things, “clean living
and clean speech.” In the final line we promised to be “a generous victor and a gracious loser.”

In the Knee-Hi summer of 1955, I had little chance to be a gracious loser. My team, Norristown Brick Company, swept through the local league undefeated, winning our games by an average score of 12–1. One score was 24–0. One team simply refused to show up. Our pitchers threw four no-hitters, three by Lee Holmes. Opposing batters could no more hit Bill Bryzgornia’s fastball than spell his name. We were a powerhouse.

We beat Conshohocken two out of three to gain the state playoffs. Three wins there put us into the title game. On a bright Saturday afternoon at War Memorial Field in Doylestown, Norristown Brick Company defeated Ellwood City, 4–2, to become Connie Mack Knee-Hi champions of Pennsylvania.

In the awards ceremony after the game, we were given jackets saying
STATE CHAMPIONS
. Ellwood City players got trophies. A jacket would eventually wear out and be thrown away, leaving me with nothing to show for our great triumph. But a trophy was immune to frayed cuffs and moth holes. A trophy would be forever. I watched as each Ellwood City player walked up for his trophy and half-wished I had been on the losing side.

A week later, during a banquet at the Valley Forge Hotel in downtown Norristown, to my relief, we were each given a magnificent trophy.

Two buddies (Anthony Greco and Bob Hopple) and me (left), heading off to dance at Grace Lutheran Church, 1955. I’m wearing my Knee-Hi State Champions jacket.

Chucking dust on a four-base diamond was only part of the baseball life. There was the long list of major league batting averages to pore over each Sunday in
The Philadelphia Inquirer.
There was the baseball encyclopedia, my first history book, to study. Long before I knew the difference between Yorktown and Gettysburg, I knew Ty Cobb’s lifetime batting average (.367) and Cy Young’s total career pitching victories (511).

There were cards to flip. We bought Fleer’s bubblegum just to get the baseball cards, and then we dueled. Slip one corner of the card between forefinger and middle finger and flip outward, Frisbee-like, toward a wall. The kid whose card lands closest to the wall picks up the other kid’s card. The stacks of cards I won this way would be worth a fortune today if I had kept them.

There were baseballs to tape. Seldom in our sandlot games did we have a ball with a real stitched horsehide cover still on it. Most often the balls were covered in
black utility tape. A white ball was a real treat. It meant that someone had sneaked into the medicine chest at home and used up half a roll of first-aid tape.

There were hours to spend bouncing tennis balls off neighbors’ brick walls, any wall but that of the mysterious barber across the street. For hours each week I scooped up the rebounding grounders, practicing to be a great shortstop. Considering the thumping I gave those houses, it’s a wonder I was never chased off. Maybe the people behind the walls understood that in my mind I was not really standing on George Street but in the brown dust of Connie Mack Stadium, out at shortstop, fielding hot shots off the bat of Willie Mays.

And there was the glove. My glove bore the signature of Marty Marion, slick-fielding shortstop of the St. Louis Cardinals.

Each year at the end of summer vacation, I rubbed my glove with olive oil from the kitchen cabinet. Then I pressed a baseball deep into the pocket of the glove, curled the leather fingers about the ball, and squeezed the whole thing into a shoebox. Standing on a chair, I set the box high on a closet shelf. Baseball season was officially over.

For the next six months we would hibernate, shortstop and glove, dreaming of the Chiclets-white bases at Connie Mack Stadium, feeling in the palm the hard, round punch of a grounder well caught.

Like cowboys and then sports, grade school was a constant presence in my life, though not an especially interesting one. It seems to me that most interesting stories about grade school are told by kids who got in trouble. I never got in trouble. I was, as they say, a Good Boy.

But what is a Good Boy? From the world’s point of view, it is a boy who appears to be good. The key word here is
appears.
For I believe that beneath the appearance of most Good Boys is a Bad Boy waiting to break out. Oh, I don’t mean bad in the sense of committing crimes or hurting people. I mean bad in the sense of, say, leaving a wad of chewing gum on the teacher’s chair. Or washing the blackboard with spit. Or jumping up from your seat in the middle of silent reading, standing on top of your desk, raising your fists to the ceiling, and roaring with all your might, “Phooey!”

That kind of bad.

Let me tell you something about the Good Boy: Just because he doesn’t get into trouble doesn’t mean he doesn’t appreciate trouble. I know I did. I understood what a boring world this would be without the troublemakers. And so I was a big fan of Leonard Wilfong, who
was always getting into trouble. I didn’t exactly stand up and applaud when Leonard did something bad, but I gave him my undivided attention, and if I thought I could get away with it, I laughed.

To the Bad Boy, that’s the reward: laughter. It’s the payoff of a deal that is never spoken of, never written down, yet is understood perfectly by the kids in class. It’s as if back on the first day of first grade, all the boys had a secret meeting and one of them was voted to be Bad Boy. He—in our case, Leonard Wilfong—accepted the job, along with the punishments that would surely fall to him, with the understanding that the rest of us would (1) pay attention and (2) laugh.

And the meeting broke up and Leonard Wilfong went forth and did outrageous things, and we laughed. Neither Leonard nor the rest of us understood this, but in a sense we were laughing at ourselves, for Leonard Wilfong was the embodiment of the Bad Boy in all of us. Leonard did what we did not have the nerve to do. Leonard did not have the same fears we had. He feared spelling tests and long division and report cards. He did not fear trouble. He did not fear rules. And though we did not envy Leonard Wilfong his punishments or his bad grades, we absolutely envied him his recklessness. We respected him as the representative of that which was secret in ourselves. We saluted him with our attention and our laughter.

When the teacher wasn’t looking.