Best Tony Conigliaro Article Evah!!!
June 28, 2008
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This is what we were all about before 2004! Tony Conigliaro was the quintessential RED SOX! He made Boston giddy!
TONY C WAS BOSTON BASEBALL!
Return From The Dark
On a night in Boston a pitched ball blinded—and nearly killed—Red Sox Outfielder Tony Conigliaro. Here begins the story of his early terror and his struggle toward recovery
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This story begins on Aug. 18, 1967. That was the day I was hit in the head by a baseball, which very nearly ended my career—not to say my life. A couple of inches higher and I'd have been killed. We were playing a night game with the California Angels , and Fenway Park was packed the way it was for nearly all our home games in 1967, when Boston was fighting for a pennant. (The last time the Red Sox had won one was 1946, when I was one year old.) Just before I came to bat in the fourth inning somebody threw a smoke bomb. A cloud of black smoke hung over the field, delaying the game about 10 minutes. I'm not terribly superstitious, so I didn't think much about it. But I've thought about it a lot since.
Jack Hamilton was pitching for the Angels . He was a hard thrower who was frequently accused of throwing spitballs, or greaseballs or whatever you want to call them. The point is his ball broke in a funny way, like no pitch is supposed to break. My first time up I had singled off a curve-ball, so this time I went up there looking for a fastball, figuring to hit it up the middle, hard. Just before he made his first pitch I wondered if the delay had caused his arm to stiffen. It was the last thought I had before he hit me.
The ball came sailing right toward my chin. Normally a hitter can jerk his head back a fraction and the ball will buzz by. But this pitch seemed to follow me in. I know I didn't freeze, I definitely made a move to get out of the way of the ball. In fact, I jerked my head back so hard that my helmet flipped off just before impact.
Funny, you never go up there thinking you're going to be hit, and then in a fraction of a second you know it's going to happen. When the ball was about four feet from my head I knew it would get me. And I knew it would hurt because Hamilton was such a hard thrower. I was frightened. I threw my hands up in front of my face and saw the ball follow me back and hit me square in the left side of the head. As soon as it crunched into me, it felt as if the ball would go in one side of my head and come out the other; my legs gave way and I went down like a sack of potatoes. Just before everything went dark I saw the ball bounce straight down on home plate. It was the last thing I saw for several days.
I was never knocked out but I wish I had been. I rolled on the ground trying to stop the pain in my head with my hands. The impact of the ball made both my eyes slam shut and I felt a tremendous swelling in my mouth. I couldn't see. I remember thinking, I'm blind, I can't see. Then I heard Rico Petrocelli 's voice saying, "Take it easy, Tony. You're gonna be all right." Rico was the next hitter after me and he was the first person to reach me.
The swelling was so bad inside my mouth that I was worried about breathing. My mouth was filling up fast with fluid—I thought it was blood but it wasn't. I had only a small opening that I could breathe through, and then the thought started running through my mind: Suppose this thing closes up? I won't be able to breathe. I thought, Oh, Jesus, if this thing closes up on me I'm gone. That's when I asked God to keep me alive. That's when I knew He could take me if He wanted to. It was like a showdown between me and God, and I was afraid I would die right then and there.
If there was any sound coming from the stands the pain blotted it out. There was just one big deafening whistling going on inside my head. I couldn't see out of my eyes. I couldn't stand the pain and I couldn't do anything about it and I immediately became sick to my stomach. Then I remembered that my family was in the stands, my mother and father and my two brothers, Billy and Richie. I didn't want them to worry, and yet I knew they had to be worried by what they saw. I knew things looked terrible with me lying there on the ground. Later on some of my teammates told me they thought I was dead. "Your eye looked crushed," Rico told me. "It made me sick to look at it."
I could make out Buddy LeRoux's voice telling me to lie still until the stretcher came. Buddy is the club's trainer and I had always felt close to him. Then, after what seemed like a year of waiting, I felt myself being lifted onto a stretcher. I was carried off the field and into the clubhouse. They laid me out on one of the trainer's tables and Buddy put an ice pack against the side of my head. "Buddy, this pain is killing me," I said. "Give me something." It hurt so much I could hardly talk.
"I can't, Tony," he said. "Relax. Dr. Tierney's here."
The Red Sox team physician, Dr. Thomas M. Tierney, had been sitting in the stands, and the moment he saw them carry me off he rushed down and was waiting for me in the clubhouse when I got there. He's been a close family friend for years, and knowing he was in the picture made me feel a little better. But when he didn't say anything to me and just acted like a doctor I became worried about my condition all over again. What he did while waiting for an ambulance to come—though I didn't know it at the time—was to test my blood pressure and reflexes.
I had no idea what was happening to me and I felt helpless. The room was deathly quiet. If I hadn't heard the scraping of spikes on the hard floor I would have thought there was something wrong with my ears, too. Some of my teammates had come back from the dugout to see how I was. A couple of guys grabbed my wrist and squeezed hard to encourage me, but nobody was saying anything. I don't know how many of them came back or even who they were, but I know Dick Williams , the Sox manager, never came back and that has always bothered me. Maybe he was too busy at the time, but whatever the excuse it hardly made me feel warm about him afterward—not that it ever was that way between us, anyway.
Somehow I knew my father was there, even though he didn't say a single word. Buddy told me later how easy my father made it for everybody by just standing there off to one side, keeping out of the way and not making a scene. We're a very close family, very emotional, and in times of trouble we really come together. But my father is also blessed with a special calm that comes over him in situations where he knows there's nothing he can do, and I'll never know how he kept himself under control that night. Billy and Richie had come into the clubhouse with him, and I found out later that Richie had hidden in a corner and bawled into the wall so I wouldn't hear him.
From outside somewhere I heard the wailing of an ambulance siren. I thought, Thank God, now maybe I'll get something to kill this pain. By now I just felt like screaming out and crying, but I didn't want to act like a baby in front of my father and brothers. I was trying to hold it all in, but it was hard.
The ride to the hospital was the longest of my life, even though it was only about 15 minutes from Fenway Park . The driver was speeding all the way with the siren going full blast, and every time he turned a corner or put on the brakes I thought my head would split wide open. My father and Dr. Tierney rode with me in the back.
I was taken to Sancta Maria Hospital in Cambridge , just across the Charles River . Once I got there I thought they'd stop the pain. But the first thing they did was take me to an examination room where a neurosurgeon looked me over and took X rays. They were afraid I might be hemorrhaging internally. Fortunately, I wasn't. If I had, I would have been in real trouble. Every time they moved the position of my head to take a picture I felt like screaming at them to get the hell out of there and leave me alone. But I knew I had to hang on. The pain was so severe now that even if I could see out of my eyes it would have hurt too much to open them.
Finally I was taken upstairs to a room and put to bed. I was extremely woozy and wanted only to sleep but couldn't because the pain was still with me, worse than ever. Fluid was oozing out of my mouth onto the pillow—I still thought it was blood. My parents were allowed to come in for a few minutes with Billy and Richie. They didn't say very much. My mother just held my hand, trying not to cry. But she is a woman with great feelings and, unlike my father, she shows them most of the time. I didn't want to make things worse by telling her how much my head hurt, and it killed me to know how miserable everyone was. I silently asked God not to let this thing tear them up and make any of them sick because of me.
After they left, the thought shot through me that I might never see them again. As I lay there in the dark, death was constantly on my mind. An empty feeling came over me. I wanted someone around me to hold onto, but no one came. I was never so alone in my life.
During the night I managed to sleep in spurts of 15 or 20 minutes. Either I'd wake up with the pain running through my head or it was the nurse coming to check on me. Sancta Maria Hospital is Catholic and some of the nurses are nuns. My nurse would come in to take my pulse and blood pressure every 15 minutes or so. Once I remember asking her, "Am I gonna be all right?" and she said, "Oh, you're fine. You'll be all right." You know the way they talk. But it frightened me to death the way she kept running out to find the doctor every time. In my whole life this was probably the closest I ever felt to God. I've never been terribly religious. Oh, I go to church on Sundays, but that's just because I grew up doing it. But now I was begging Him to let me live. I wasn't thinking of baseball anymore. I knew if I could just get well I'd be able to hit again.
The next thing I remember was waking up the next morning and feeling someone holding my hand. A voice said, "It's me, Tony, Tom Yawkey ." I couldn't believe it. Yes I could. I'd believe anything about this fine man who owns the Red Sox . He had always been kind and patient with me and listened to my problems; I knew I could always go to him when I was in trouble and I went to him many times. Now, as busy as he was, he was sitting in my room holding my hand and telling me not to worry.
I think I realized then that this was the guy I was really playing for, nobody else. Maybe I didn't like Dick Williams very much and griped about him, but this was the man who really mattered. He and, of course, my family and my fans. Tom Yawkey is not only the best owner in baseball, he's the best friend a ballplayer ever had. He'd do anything to help his players and he knows I'd do anything for him.
During the morning I heard a commotion going on outside my room. The door was ajar and I heard the nun say, "But you can't come in here. He's not having any visitors." Then I heard another voice say, "Ah, come on, Sister, just let me in for a minute." I recognized that voice, all right. It was Mike Ryan , my roommate and closest friend on the ball club. "Is that you, Mike?" I called out.
"Hey, roomie, you in there?" he yelled. "Hey, come on out. I got the babes and some beer waiting downstairs in the car. Let's go." I thought the nun would have a fit. But I was too sick to even laugh. "No, I'm dying, Mike," I said. "Some other time."
"Come on, Sister," Mike said. "See, he needs me. Let me in." She finally did. "How'd you get up here anyway?" I asked. "Sneaked up the fire escape," he said. I laughed. When he left I felt a lot better. I also found out that Jack Hamilton had come by that morning and wanted to see me but they wouldn't let him up.
There was absolutely nothing I could do those first couple of days in the hospital except lie there like a vegetable. But once I realized I was out of danger I began thinking for the first time about the beaning. The big question I asked myself was: Did Hamilton hit me intentionally? I had been in a slight hitting slump going into the series with the Angels and pitchers usually don't try to stir up guys who are slumping. So I decided to give him the benefit of the doubt.
Besides, I figured the pitch he hit me with was a spitter. I was hit because of the crazy way it broke in on me. If a guy's going to hit you, or even brush you back, he certainly isn't going to throw a spitter—he gives you smoke. I didn't feel one way or the other about Hamilton before he beaned me and I don't hate him for what he did. I have no grudge against him, but I wouldn't invite him over to the house for dinner, either. Only one person in the whole world knows if Jack Hamilton was trying to hit me that night.
It's not that I object to getting thrown at. I feel that brush-back pitches are part of the game and I've always accepted them. Not beanballs, though. There's a difference. It may be slight, but it's there just the same. It's maybe a difference of a couple of inches, a difference between being hit and not being hit, a difference of what's on the pitcher's mind. Some pitchers just try to loosen the batter up at the plate so he doesn't get a good toehold. I'll go along with that. But any pitcher who deliberately throws at a batter is a coward. It takes more guts to throw the ball over the plate.
I was a happy man when I woke up on my second morning. I could see. Not great, the sight out of my right eye was fuzzy, but I could make things out. All I saw were flowers and mail sacks, a roomful of them. They knocked me out. Thousands of letters—we counted 13,000—from people all over the country. They must have started writing the night I was hurt.
But just being able to see again was enough to revive my spirits. I couldn't tell sunlight or whether it was a beautiful day outside or a cloudy one. The headaches eased off to where I could go a few hours without feeling pain. That's when they started giving me all the medication I needed and that's when Dr. Tierney told me how bad things looked when I was first brought there.
"You're a lucky guy, Tony," he said. "We were really worried about you for the first 24 hours or so. Had the pitch been two inches higher you would have been dead." He then explained that I had suffered a linear fracture of the left cheekbone and a dislocated jaw. I had taken the brunt of the pitch high up near my temple, and the tremendous concussion is what caused my eyes to slam shut. He told me that even after the left eye opened, it would be weeks before the swelling would go down so they could examine the damage inside. He's a real pro and I'm glad he always leveled with me.
On his next visit Dr. Tierney let me look at myself in a mirror. What I saw sickened me. The left eye was black and purple and nearly the size of a handball. I could actually make out the imprint of the stitches where the ball had hit me. On top of that I had lost seven or eight pounds and I looked pale and emaciated.
For the whole time I was in the hospital Mr. Yawkey came to see me every day. So did a lot of my teammates, guys like Ryan and Rico and George Scott . But I never heard from Dick Williams at all. He never came up to the hospital and he never dropped me a line or anything.
This upset me. I felt I had contributed something to the ball club and had given the man everything I had. I was hit in the face by a baseball and nearly lost my life, and I felt the least he could do was show me he knew I existed. Sure, my relationship with Williams hadn't been a great one—but I did my job. I played ball and didn't give him any trouble. I guess we just started out disliking each other and things never got any better. We first met back in 1964, when I was a rookie trying to make the ball club and he was a veteran trying to hang on. Somehow they roomed us together for a short time. We never got along. I didn't like him because he was cocky. Johnny Pesky was the manager then and Williams was always talking behind Pesky's back, saying how he would have done things differently. He acted like he knew it all, and I couldn't understand what he had to be so cocky about when he never could hit a baseball very well in his whole life.
Time dragged on in the hospital. By the third day the sight in my right eye came back pretty close to normal and the left eye opened slightly. The Red Sox put me on the 21-day disabled list, which meant I couldn't play anytime before Sept. 9. But now I was beginning to realize that it was going to be quite a battle getting back before the season was over. A few days later I felt this even more, when the Red Sox picked up Ken Harrelson to play right field. I didn't resent the move. Anytime you get a guy with Harrelson 's home-run bat you're helping yourself offensively.
But I felt cheated and angry because of what I was missing. This club had such youth and spirit and desire that it was just ungodly being around them. Every game was a big one, and we were all too excited to be tired. At the time of my beaning I was having what was probably my best all-round year. I was hitting .287 and had 20 homers and had knocked in 67 runs. The only time I had ever hit for a higher average in the majors was my rookie year of 1964, when I batted .290. The next year I was the American League 's home-run champion with 32, the youngest player ever to lead the league in homers. The way I was hitting the ball in 1967 I think I could have come close to .290 and finished with 30 homers and 100 RBIs. Anyway, I wanted to get back and help.
The last day I was in the hospital a Dr. I. Francis Gregory, the ophthalmologist at Sancta Maria, came to see me. He was a nice little man and he kept calling me "my boy" all the time. He ran some tests on my left eye and told me I was 20/80, which wasn't too bad considering how recently I had been hit. My right eye was 20/15, and they concluded that my left eye must have been about the same before the injury. I left the hospital with the understanding that I would come back later for more tests.
My family lives in Swampscott, which is on the North Shore about 11 miles above Boston . It's a nice quiet place that becomes a resort town in summer. Even though I've had my own apartment in Boston for several years, I go back there often and really regard it as my home. Now, my father's not a rich man, but he's not a lazy one, either. The reason we were eventually able to move to Swampscott is that he worked hard all his life and managed to put enough money together so we could live well. He worked at many jobs. Right now he's plant manager at the Triangle Tool and Die Company in Lynn. He's never afraid to take a chance. One time he got some chickens and planned to sell them at a profit, but they all got sick and died and he lost his money. Another time he and his brother Guy bought up a lot of Christmas trees and told themselves, boy, we're going to get rich. They stood on a street corner every day for weeks, but nobody would pay them what they were asking. They lowered their price and wound up making about $3.85 and catching pneumonia.
The point I'm trying to make is that my father is a pretty big man to me. He's always there when you need him. When I was a kid, if my mother called him and told him she was having trouble with me he'd leave work no matter what time it was and come home to see about the problem. He handled it, usually with his hand, but he handled it. So when it came time for me to leave the hospital who else but my father would be there to take me home?
The day after I got home my parents and I went away for a vacation. For a while I felt my eye was improving, but when we got home after two weeks I could see very little change. I had double vision, and I found that if I didn't want to do silly things like tipping over glasses I had to reach for them slowly.
I phoned Dr. Gregory and set up an appointment. The first thing he did was give me an ordinary eye test. I could make out the big E on top with my left eye, and not much else below it. He looked a little grim at this point. "This is not so good, my boy," he said. "Something's happened to the eye. Something is seriously wrong with the seeing part of your eye. Look, let's go down to see my friend Charlie Regan at Retina Associates. He's equipped to do things I can't do here. This is a retinal job and I want him to see it."
I felt weak all over. My throat stuck and I didn't know if I could talk. I was as scared as I've ever been in my life. I finally managed to say, "What does this mean? Will it get better?"
"I can't tell you that now," Dr. Gregory said. "I think you might have a bleb on your eye. That's slang for cyst, a blister. It's normal for one to form after an injury like the one you've just had. But I can't tell anything more until we get a closer look at it."
The next day I met Dr. Gregory at Retina Associates. The building looked like an abandoned warehouse. The whole thing was beginning to frighten me, although I later found out that Dr. Regan was one of the leading ophthalmologists in the country.
After extensive tests I sat with Dr. Regan in his office. He told me that I had a blind spot in my left eye caused by a cyst in the macula, which is in the center of the retina. The macula is only about one-tenth of an inch in diameter, but it is where our direct vision comes from. It is the part of the eye that enables us to read small print or, as Dr. Regan explained, lets a ballplayer judge the speed and distance of a baseball coming 90 miles an hour at him.
I don't claim I understood everything he said, but I do know it all sounded terrible, as though I were being told my playing days were ended. I got up courage enough to ask Dr. Regan if I'd ever be able to see well enough to play ball again. I tried to make it sound flip but I dreaded to hear his answer.
"I don't know," he said as nicely as he could. "The eye may still be undergoing changes. It's something we'll have to watch for a while."
A couple of days later I decided to have a game of catch with Richie. When he threw the ball to me I found I had to concentrate very hard on watching it with my right eye or I'd catch it in the heel of my glove. I could tell Richie was watching me closely, so not to worry him I started fooling around. "Hey, Richie," I called, "watch this curve." And I started breaking off curveballs. Funny, I could put the ball where I wanted to, but it was hard to see the ball clearly when Richie threw it back. I tried to nonchalant it, you know—flick out my glove at the last second to make the catch. That way if I dropped a throw, it wouldn't look bad. If Richie caught on, he kept his mouth shut and just caught me. Afterward, at bat playing pepper, I missed the ball a couple of times. That may not seem like much, but I had never missed hitting the ball in pepper in my whole life. Never. All Richie did was laugh and keep tossing the ball in.
Finally I was so disgusted with myself I quit. I went into the house and straight to my room. The next day I tried playing again—with no improvement—and the next and the next and the next days. Once I remember throwing the bat against the fence and running inside the house. I was just dying to get back into the pennant race and here I couldn't even play ball with a kid brother.
I had stayed away from the ball park because I couldn't stand going there and not playing. But four weeks after the accident I figured I had to go.
I got to Fenway early. When I opened the clubhouse door everything looked the same. Reggie Smith , our rookie centerfielder, was sitting against his locker smoking a cigarette, Carl Yastrzemski was on the trainer's table getting some hot stuff put on his arm, George Scott was looking over a pile of bats trying to pick the ones with hits in them.
They all seemed to see me at once, and then they were all over me—Rico and Scotty and Mike Ryan . "What ya say, roomie?" Ryan said. "Come down to give the troops a peptalk?" "T.C., T.C.," Scotty said. "Gimme five, man," and he slapped palms with me.
I was glad to see them, of course, but there was also a nervousness in me I couldn't explain. I felt like an outsider in the clubhouse. I wasn't able to contribute anything. I was just a visitor. I felt all knotted up inside and I knew my guts would explode if I didn't get out of there in a hurry. So I made my excuses, said I had a headache and would watch them on TV. When I got home I didn't bother to switch the set on.
The next time I went back to Fenway Park I suited up. I had to feel a part of it even if I wasn't. But I wouldn't take any hitting. I knew how bad I'd look. Instead I went to the outfield to shag flies, but even out there I wasn't too sure of myself. When the ball came at me I saw two or three at the same time, so I decided to finesse it. I'd let the ball drop a few feet in front of me and then I'd nonchalantly pick it up. Some of the guys out there with me would ask, "How's the eye, Tony?" and I'd say, "Oh, fine. It's coming along fine."
When the club went on the road I drove out to Fenway Park . Keith Rosenfield, our regular bat boy, was sanding down a bat when I walked into the clubhouse. "Hey, Moe," I said, "I feel like working out. How about flipping some in to me?" Moe's a small kid with big dark eyes, and those eyes sure bugged out now. All the kids who work for the club love to play ball, and anytime a player asks them to practice with him they jump at the chance.
While I changed, Moe went to get some balls and tell the ground crew to put up the batting cage. My heart began to race. I was getting that edgy feeling I always get before a ball game. I picked up a couple of my favorite bats. I grabbed a helmet with an earflap on the left side and went out to meet Moe.
As I stepped into the batter's box I suddenly realized that this was the spot where I'd been hit. It gave me a cold feeling. I wondered if I really could make it back all the way, and I remember telling myself that if I ever did I wasn't going to be gun-shy. I'll dig in and crowd the plate like I always did, I said. I wasn't going to let a little beaning bother me.
"O.K., Moe," I yelled out. "I'll lay a couple of bunts down first." I got the thick part of my bat on his first pitch and dropped it down the line. It was a good bunt. I tried several more, mostly to get the feel again, and finally I called out, "O.K., I'm hitting. Just throw strikes."
Moe nodded, went into a big windmill windup, kicked his leg up and threw a powderpuff. He weighed all of 120 pounds and he really couldn't throw very hard. I hit the ball weakly to short. I hadn't seen it very well and I didn't get all of my bat on it. But I didn't really care at this point. I just wanted to get the sensation of hitting a baseball again. I have always loved hitting. When I was a kid I used to hit till my hands bled. Now I just wanted to prove to myself that I could come back no matter how long it was going to take. I couldn't stand the thought of being away from baseball.
Moe threw me another one like the first one and I topped it down the third-base line. I missed the next one completely. It was a high inside pitch. Before, if I had decided to go for it I would have got wood on it. Not now.
I could see Moe was worried. "Look," I said, "I'm wearing a helmet and it's got an earflap. If you come close I'll get out of the way. O.K.?"
Now Moe got real serious and began aiming the ball down the middle. He got a good one over, but the best I could do with it was send a fly to shallow center. I missed a couple and I could feel the hairs on the back of my neck pinch. I was good and mad. I realized I could see the ball only with my right eye. When I tried to see it with my left, tears would come and I'd lose it.
"Was that a strike?" I'd ask when I let one go by on the outside. "No," Moe'd say. "Low and away." I couldn't tell. Dr. Regan was right. I couldn't judge anything. That's how bad it was.
I stayed in the cage for almost an hour, trying every way I knew to get a hit, but it was no use. I went inside, took a shower and got a rub from Vinnie Orlando, who does the same thing for Mr. Yawkey every day. "How'd it go out there, Tony?" he asked.
"Don't ask, Vinnie," I said. "It'll make you sick."
A week later I saw Dr. Regan again. My vision was 20/100 and my distance judgment was still poor. "The blind spot is still there, Tony," he said, "and your distance vision is so poor that it might be dangerous for you to play any more ball this year."
There it was. Somebody finally said it to me. Now I had the word. "There's no way," Dr. Regan said, "you could get ready in time to play in the World Series if the Red Sox make it." We set up another appointment for October and I left. The next day the Red Sox announced that I was through for the year.
I had to be alone and I went back to my apartment. I lived on the 10th floor of a modern building that had balconies. Mine overlooked the ball park but the view was almost entirely of right field. I stood there by myself for most of the afternoon trying to fight down the things going through my mind. I began to cry. Later on, when the game started, I stood out there in the dark and watched Harrelson playing my position. I could hear the crowd howling and I realized how nice the park looked with all those lights on. I realized how much I missed it and how I wished I were playing. And I suspected I'd never play again.
The season was down to the last week. When the club got home I went to the ball park every day. But, of course, I wouldn't go near the cage. I'd suit up and shag flies in the outfield, fielding them on hops. I was trying to convince everyone that I was just keeping in shape and staying away from the writers.
We won the pennant when Detroit , playing a couple of hours later than us, lost its last game. Suddenly there was champagne and screaming in our packed clubhouse. We had been a 100-to-1 shot this year and we'd taken the pennant. The Impossible Dream. The guys were pounding each other on the back; the noise was so deafening I couldn't hear myself screaming. It was wild. But all of a sudden a terrible feeling of depression came over me. What was I feeling so good about? I might never play again. I was sitting in front of my locker and I broke into tears. I couldn't stop myself. Mike Ryan saw me and put his arm around me. "What's wrong, roomie?" he said. I shook him off. "Just what the hell did I do? What did I contribute?" I asked. Tom Yawkey told me, "Tony, you helped. You were a part of it." I pretended that everything was O.K., but I got away from the celebration as soon as I could.
I was allowed to sit on the bench during the Series against St. Louis . Before the game I went around the locker room juicing up the players—saving the Boomer for last. That's George Scott . He's always hanging around me and he's truly one of the funniest people I know. I've never seen a guy in my life maintain his confidence like the Boomer does, even when he's in the worst kind of slump. I've also never met anybody who's more superstitious. He'll spend half an hour before a game examining each one of his bats looking for the ones with hits in them. He talks to them. He'll grip a bat and say, "You got any hits in you today?" Then he'll pump it a few times with those powerful wrists and throw it down on the floor with a thud and say, "You ain't got nothin'." He'll pick up another one and do the same thing until it's time to go out. By then he's sure he's found the right bats. And when he has a good one he'll lock it up in our little bat room so that nobody else will find it.
"How you feeling today, Boomer?" I asked. "Hey T.C., T.C.," he said. "Somebody's gonna get hurt out there today."
"What are you talking about, George?" I said.
"I'm gonna hang out some peas today and anybody gets in the way is gonna get hurt," he answered with the most serious expression on his face.
Then he starts saying, "I can do it, I can do it, I can do it." And goes to the mirror and looks into it and says, "You can do it, George." That is what I had said a few days before, looking into my own mirror. But I didn't say it with the same conviction as George. We lost the Series in the seventh game and I went home to spend a long lonely winter.
June 22, 1970
Sports Illustrated
RLF
-JESTER~RSM
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