Читать книгу Rage - Peter Golenbock - Страница 14

5

GAINING EXPERIENCE

NOT LONG AFTER I RETURNED HOME FROM my first year at Auburn, I received my draft notice. The Vietnam War was raging, and I knew that if I was drafted my professional career would be over before it began. I preferred not to have to give up playing baseball. I called Johnny Murphy and asked him what to do.

“No problem,” said Murphy. “Call the governor of Connecticut and let him know, and he’ll take care of it.”

When my dad came home, I told him about Murphy telling me to call the governor.

“That doesn’t sound right,” Dad said.

Instead, my dad called a local Irish Middletown politician who was the head of the Democratic Party. The man suggested that I come and see him.

The politician lived in a big mansion on High Street. He and I sat in a large sitting room.

“Just go down to the National Guard tomorrow and enlist, and you’ll be all taken care of,” he said. The next day I went down to the National Guard office and got in line. When I returned home, my dad asked me what had happened.

“They didn’t take me,” I said. “I’m number 252 on the waiting list, and if I’m number 252, I’m going to be drafted. There’s something wrong.”

“Let me call him again,” said his father.

I returned to the politician’s house.

“Did you speak to Captain Dzailo?” he asked.

“No.”

“They must have forgotten to tell you,” he said. “Go in tomorrow and talk to Captain Dzailo. He’ll take care of you.”

I returned to the National Guard recruiting office and asked to see Captain Dzailo, who said he was expecting me. I signed the papers, and the following day I found myself at Fort Dix, New Jersey, getting my hair cut for the National Guard.

The National Guard enlistment consisted of four months of boot camp at Fort Dix followed by six years of weekend service in New Jersey, rather than two years of trekking through the rice paddies while getting shot at in Vietnam.

Captain Dzailo had fixed me up, all right. I owe you, captain.

I was an excellent marksman with a .45-caliber pistol, and I was adept at hand-to-hand combat. In fact, of all the soldiers in my battalion, hundreds of men, I finished with the highest proficiency score. I had a 97.5 score out of 100 for my skill shooting a .45 caliber, an M-16, and a mortar; for fighting hand to hand; and for my proficiency in medical training. I had the highest score in the battalion. I’m damn proud of that. I still have the trophy.

We learned hand-to-hand combat, a skill I really loved. It was a perfect vehicle to unleash my aggression and pent-up anger. One of the soldiers I fought was Boston Red Sox outfielder Tony Conigliaro. Tony was cocky. He came at me with a rifle. I parried, stepped to the side, and hit him with my elbow right in the forehead, almost knocking him out.

Tony was pissed. Now it was my turn to go at him with a rifle, and I figured he was going to try to knock my block off. The sergeant had said to me, “When you thrust with a rifle, drop your head down so the steel helmet will be facing him.”

Sure enough, I went after Tony C with my bayonet, and he parried me perfectly, and then he stepped to the side and gave me his best shot with his elbow—right into my steel helmet!

I was made platoon leader, and two of my squad leaders were Tony and Billy Rohr. Billy was a young kid who pitched for the Red Sox. They were great guys.

We had to go on bivouac. It was winter in New Jersey, and it was absolutely freezing. Tony came up with the bright idea that I needed to sneak into the officers’ tent and steal some coal. Not that he had to sneak in—I had to sneak in. Tony said, “We could burn the coal in one of our steel helmets inside our little pup tent and stay warm.”

I snuck inside the officer’s tent, swiped ten pieces from a huge pile next to the stove, hid them in my jacket, stole some matches, and snuck back to our little tent.

Tony put the coal in his helmet and lit it, and we went to sleep. The next morning we awoke to find that the coal had burned a large hole in our tent.

“Okay, you wise guys,” our superior officer said, “you’re sleeping with a hole in your tent.”

“This was your idea,” I told Tony. “You’re sleeping under the hole.”

Two nights later it snowed. I woke up at six o’clock in the morning when the bugle blew, and I looked at Tony, and all I could see were his nostrils. The rest of his face was covered with snow.

One evening in January Tony and I were invited to leave our little pup tent, where we slept on the hard ground, and enter the warm tent of the superior officers. We were told, “The son of the general is having a Little League banquet, and the general wants to know if you two will come and speak.”

“Of course we will,” I said.

Tony wasn’t quite so willing.

“Oh no,” said Tony. “I’m not doing this for nothing.”

“I think we should just go,” I said.

“I’ll tell you what,” Tony said to the general’s assistant. “If we can get a weekend pass, we’ll do it.”

I thought to myself, They are going to throw us in the brig. But they didn’t.

Instead, they gave us weekend passes. Tony and I spoke at the Little League banquet at Fort Dix, New Jersey, and then spent the weekend in New York City.

Tony, an idea man, was always looking for ways to escape the freezing bivouac.

“If we join the boxing team,” Tony said, “we could get off bivouac for a couple of days. Let’s join the boxing team.”

“I don’t want to join the fucking boxing team,” I said.

“We’ll join the boxing team, and we’ll fight each other, and we’ll just play patty-cake,” Tony said. I was stupid enough to agree.

The boxing program was in the evening. We had to box three three-minute rounds. I was a heavyweight. Tony was a light heavyweight. As soon as we put on the trunks and the boxing gloves for the first time, they split us up.

The boxer I was scheduled to fight came from Europe. He was about five foot ten, 225 pounds, and he looked out of shape. I had seen him around the PX before. He didn’t seem very imposing. I figured that for three rounds I’d shuffle around and jab him.

My opponent turned out to be the heavyweight champion of the army.

I covered up the best I could.

I didn’t realize until afterward that when I covered up my face, he hit on my biceps hard, and pretty soon I couldn’t hold my arms up to protect my face. So by the end of each round he was just beating the shit out of my face. Oh God. My face was like a piece of hamburger.

After the second round I told Tony, “If I make it through this fight, I’m going to kill you.” That fucker hit me more times than I could count. I had dozens of bumps and bruises on my arms where he kept pounding them. He hit me on my side and he hit me on the side of my head, and after he was done with me I had cauliflower ears the size of the largest piece of cabbage you’ve ever seen in your life. For three rounds he battered the living shit out of me.

I kept thinking, Ring the bell. Oh, please ring the bell.

And that was the last time I listened to one of Tony’s crazy schemes.

My company commander was an American Indian with a chip on his shoulder. He hadn’t gone through West Point, but had come up through the school of hard knocks. He wanted to prove he was tough.

Our company went on bivouac again. On the last day, everyone got up at six o’clock in the morning. At eight o’clock in the morning, trucks arrived to take the men back to their barracks. But our company commander had other ideas.

“My company will run home,” he said.

The barracks were twenty miles away. He told me, “You’re in charge, and I expect everyone to make it.”

We were a National Guard unit. We had lots of snotty-nosed lawyers. These weren’t the type of guys you wanted to bivouac with, never mind go to war with. Halfway home, several of the men informed me that they wouldn’t be able to go the distance.

“We have to make it,” I told them.

“I can’t walk,” one guy whined.

“If I have to beat the living shit out of you, or have another guy drag you along, you’re going to make it,” I told him.

“Yeah, let’s see you make me,” one of the other men said to me.

That really pissed me off, and I hit him alongside his head with the butt of my rifle. The man rolled down a small embankment, and I faced the rest of the men and snarled, “Next.”

The man had a concussion, and two other men helped him make it the rest of the way home. One of his buddies carried his gun. Another carried his equipment.

We started at nine o’clock in the morning and arrived at our barracks at six o’clock at night. It was brutal, but we got everyone back. We covered roughly twenty-five miles in nine hours.

My four months of National Guard training ended just in time for me to go to spring training. In fact, I had exactly one day to report for the first day of spring training at the New York Mets’ camp in St. Petersburg.

By 1966 the Mets had shed their most notable flakes and characters, including Choo Choo Coleman and Marv Throneberry. But that year they did feature first baseman Dick Stuart, a power hitter who played first base as poorly as, or even worse than, Throneberry had. Stuart’s nickname was Dr. Strangeglove, and the irony was that Stuart’s lousy attitude had been the reason I hadn’t signed with the Red Sox, and here he was playing with us.

We had a weigh-in, and I was waiting in line behind Dick. We had to strip down and get on the scale, and when trainer Gus Mauch saw how much Stuart weighed, he slapped him on the rump and said, “Holy shit, look at the size of that ass.”

Stuart stepped down and said, “Gus, it may be big, but wait until you see this ass tie into a fastball.”

In one of the intersquad games, a pop-up was hit down the first base line, and Dick circled under it like only he could. He put his glove up, but caught the ball in his bare hand. You talk about a guy who was made for the role of designated hitter—the rule adopted by the American League in 1973 that let one batter in the lineup do nothing but bat.

Unfortunately for Stuart, the DH wouldn’t be instituted for another six years.

On opening day of spring training, the Mets faced Bob Gibson and the St. Louis Cardinals. The Mets scored five runs off Gibson in the three innings he pitched.

I was sitting on the bench next to outfielder Al Luplow during the game.

“I hope I’m not speaking out of turn,” I said to Al, “but Gibson doesn’t look too impressive to me.” I didn’t realize it, but the veteran Gibson was working on a particular aspect of his mechanics and wasn’t caring too much about the results.

Luplow, also a veteran, put his hand on my shoulder and said, “I don’t know how long you’re going to be here, kid, but if you stay here long enough and you catch him at the end of spring training, you’ll see quite a difference.”

Three weeks later, on a Friday night, when the Mets faced Gibson again, he gave up one hit and struck out twelve in seven innings. What happened in three weeks? I thought. Jeepers. Wow!

Toward the end of spring training, the Mets sent me down to Double-A Williamsport, Pennsylvania, managed by former Pittsburgh Pirates outfielder Bill Virdon. After the Mets released Wes Westrum, they should have picked Bill to be Westrum’s replacement. In Bill, they would have had a terrific manager. Bill was a strict disciplinarian and he worked players very hard. He was no-nonsense. He was a guy you could talk to—he wasn’t aloof—but you had to befriend him. He wasn’t a players’ manager in the sense of him befriending you. You had to go seek him out.

Bill worked the pitchers hard. I’d start on the right field line, run out to center field with the baseball, and throw it to him; then I’d run to left-center field and he’d toss it back. If I loafed, he’d throw the ball way over my head and I had to run as hard as I could to catch it. With Bill, there was no jogging. One time Bill sharply criticized me, and I commented that he should ease up on me because I had been pitching so well.

“My job,” Bill replied, “is to get every ounce of potential out of you, and that’s what I intend to do. It’s nothing personal, Bill. You seem to react better when someone’s on your ass than when someone is more lenient. Unless things change, this is the way I’m going to treat you.”

After four months in the Army Reserve, I reported to Williamsport in the best shape of my life. My weight was down to 185, and I was in top shape. I had my stuff, and I had the pleasure of throwing to catcher Lloyd Flodin, who was great at handling pitchers.

Lloyd had great hands; he caught everything, and we had great communication.

During one game Lloyd wanted me to throw a sidearm curveball. We didn’t have a signal for it, so Lloyd dropped his fingers down to the dirt, and in the dirt he made a half circle that started at the side of the plate and curved back toward the middle of the plate. He nodded at me, and I instinctively knew what he wanted. I threw a sidearm curve for strike three. Lloyd laughed for most of the rest of the inning when the two of us returned to the dugout.

“That has to be a baseball first with that signal,” Flodin said to me. “I’m dumb enough not to run out to the mound to talk to you about it. I’m drawing the sign in the dirt, you pick it up, and you throw a strike!”

Lloyd was terrific. Unfortunately, Lloyd couldn’t hit, and he never made it to the majors.

At Williamsport I had a solid infield behind me. Terry Christianson, a pitcher at Auburn, was moved to first base, where he did a nice job. Ken Boswell, who would soon move up to the Mets, was at second. Kevin Collins, another future Met, was at shortstop, and bonus boy Jim Lampe played third. Lampe was an outstanding fielder and a solid hitter, but he had one serious shortcoming that kept him from reaching the majors: He couldn’t catch a pop-up fly ball during night games. Jim wore really thick glasses, and at night, every time a pop fly would go up in the air, he’d yell, “I can’t see it. I can’t see it.” I don’t know how they signed that kid. They must have just scouted him during the day. If the shortstop couldn’t run over and make the play, the ball would just hit the ground.

One of my finest performances came against the Elmira Pioneers, managed by Cal Ripken, Sr. I was warming up before the game, and Bob Johnson, who had moved up with me from Class A, was watching me throw.

“Are you really going out to the mound with that shit?” Bob wanted to know. “Jesus Christ, we’re going to have to take the married men off the infield. I can catch that fastball with my bare hands. We’re in trouble here.”

But there’s a difference between warming up and pitching in the game. Bob was taunting me about my fastball as I warmed up, but once I got out there, I struck out sixteen batters. The only hit I gave up was to Felix Delgado, the Elmira pitcher, a swinging bunt down the third base line that we let roll, and it ended up sitting on the foul line.

I may not have been throwing very well in warm-ups, but once I got into the first inning, man, my juices just kicked in, and that was the best game I pitched in the Eastern League that year.

My most memorable weekend during my season with Williamsport came after I met a stunning stewardess on one of the team’s flights. She had been Miss Alabama, she was living in New York City, and I couldn’t believe it when I asked her for her phone number and she gave it to me. She warned me, though, not to come over without calling first.

After I called her to see if she’d be around, I decided to go to New York to see her.