Field of Dreams

The ball rolled to my feet by the baseball diamond cut into an Iowan cornfield and it was a perfect metaphor for what was happening to me.

I was standing along the third base line at the "Field of Dreams" movie site in Dyersville, Iowa, on a hot August morning when the cliché rolled up. I mean, really, how often would that happen in real life? You stand at a baseball field immortalized in a movie where grown men go to repair their relationships with their fathers over baseball and a ball rolls up to you.

You don’t get many chances like that, especially symbolic ones for baseball fans.

It was a sign and I had to accept the challenge, the honor of this occurring.

My wife had just passed away a month earlier and my friend, as guys do, thought a road trip would help me at least attempt to set the keel straight again in my stormy seas.

We drove from West Plains, Mo., and got lost under the Interstate 44 and Interstate 55 exchange in St. Louis, Mo. We met people at a rest stop in central Illinois and even drove around Knox College to see where Abraham Lincoln debated Stephen Douglas in 1858. We joked about my friend’s GPS system getting us lost and we nearly ran out of gas in some forlorn Children of the Corn type town near the Iowa-Illinois line.

It was a good road trip.

We made it to Dubuque, Iowa, before the depression of losing my wife started creeping back into my life.

I remember standing outside the Dubuque hotel wondering why I was there and where my life was headed. Yes, my keel was knocked astray and I didn’t see calm seas ahead.

The following morning, we drove to the Field of Dreams, which is located in the most rural part of Iowa imaginable. We topped a hill after making several turns and, then, there it was. The magic, the mystery of it all beckoned. Maybe it was merely the suggestion that the place had become baseball mecca rather than it being an actual holy ground.

Either way, I was taken by it. I, like all guys, loved the movie “Field of Dreams.” And I, like all guys, won’t discuss how I teared up at the end when the Kevin Costner character plays catch with his father on the same field that stood before me.

I walked closer to the edge of the field when it happened.

A father, who later told us he was in his 80s, reunited with his 55-year-old son there and they were playing catch. He missed a ball and it rolled to me.

I picked it up and looked at him.

Flashback to about 6 months earlier. I had just painted a small storage building behind my home. It was supposed to be red, but the paint faded and it turned pink. I did not want a pink shed, so I hastily painted it again. The repetitive actions of slapping paint rendered a tear in my rotator cuff.

Six months later I was at the Field of Dreams with a bum right arm.

I picked up the ball and threw it back to the father.

I say ‘threw.’ Actually, the ball wobbled about 15 feet and plopped to the ground as the shoulder cried in pain. I’ve seen babies get better loft on pitches.

It was symbolic. My one chance of a lifetime to do something meaningful, something zenlike, and I blow it. The ball fell short, the keel was not uprighted, the seas continued to storm.

I did buy a souvenir baseball at the trinket store at the Field of Dreams and now, six years later, I sometimes take the ball and throw it up in the air.

It goes a ways up. I think I’m going to be okay.

Henry Aaron's Home Run

On April 8, 1974, Henry Aaron and I both entered new worlds at nearly the same time.

With one swing of his bat that night, Aaron surpassed Babe Ruth’s career home run record and 715 became a hallowed number for baseball fans. Aaron also became an even more vehement target for the prejudice he endured while chasing Ruth’s record and on a much lesser level, I learned of the hatred shown to those who differed from the majority.

A few hours before his homer, my parents and I arrived in Arkansas, completing our move from northern Minnesota. I was nervous at the time, not because I was entering a foreign land, but I feared we would not be settled in front of a television set in time to see Aaron play.

Aaron had been my favorite player since I followed baseball. In fact, when I lived in Madison, Wisc., my parents once drove to Milwaukee. As a small child, I heard some tale that Aaron’s wrists were so strong that he could hit a ball through an outfield wall. Of course, it was a fable, but as my parents drove past County Stadium in Milwaukee, I searched the stadium wall for holes to see if the story was true.

We left Minnesota in a snowstorm that put us a day behind our moving schedule and I feared we wouldn’t see Aaron’s historic home run. I knew it was coming and I knew it would be that Monday.

I urged my parents to drive faster as the afternoon began edging toward evening.

We arrived at a home we rented temporarily as we waited for the moving van, and as my parents unloaded the car, I turned on the television set and searched for the game. It was a snowy picture and I had to stand, holding the rabbit-earred antennae to tune in as clear a picture as I could.

Shortly after 8 p.m., Aaron hit his home run in the fourth inning off L.A. Dodgers pitcher Al Downing. I was ecstatic. I had seen history and, even at the age of 13, I knew it was something I’d hold on to for a life time.

I still consider Aaron as my favorite player. Above my bed now, I have a picture of that 1974 home run. Most people have pictures of Jesus or John F. Kennedy in prominent places. I have a baseball player as my shrine.

After he hit his blast, I wrote in a baseball book I had that Aaron was the “Home Run King” and I drew fireworks around his picture (remember, I was 13 then).

I took the book to school a few days later on my first day there. A classmate asked to look at the book and when he saw the picture, he looked at me with disgust. “What are you,” he drawled in a thick southern accent. “A N----- lover?”

I was stunned. I never thought of race when I thought of Aaron. He was a baseball player. He was simply Henry Aaron. He transcended race.

I had my own accent back then; with my northern accent, I sounded like an extra from the movie “Fargo,” and I endured my own type of prejudice. I was made fun of for the way I talked. By no means I am comparing what I went through with Aaron’s life. I didn’t even know he received death threats and was constantly under attack because of his race until I read books about his career years later. But I gained somewhat of a perspective, albeit very minor, of what he had to live through.

But while my own attacks continued in the school, I did have some comfort. I knew that, despite the ignorance of the students at the school, I saw something historic and I relished in that. It helped.

Making a Memory

I was in a northeast Arkansas liquor store picking up four small bottles of wine for the mother of my college girlfriend of some 30 years ago when I realized I was making a memory.

I was heading to the mother’s home to watch the 2012 NCAA basketball championship game between Kansas and Kentucky. It was a spur of the moment thing that I thought would be a cool venture. The mother went to Kansas when Wilt Chamberlain was playing college ball there and I thought the experience of watching a national championship game with an alum would be entertaining.

We all put things that are bigger than our lives into our own perspective in a way to understand them on a closer level or to file them in our memories. If we’re old enough, we remember where we were when Kennedy was shot, or when the space shuttle Challenger exploded or when the Twin Towers collapsed.

I do the same with sports. I associate the game with where I was when I saw it, so to better remember it. Many of the NCAA basketball championships that I saw when I was younger was with my father. I saw the 1989 Michigan vs. Seton Hall game on a big screen television I had just bought. I caught the 1997 Arizona vs. Kentucky game on a kitchen television in the first home I purchased. North Carolina won its 2005 championship over Illinois while I watched in my wife’s hospital toward the end of her life.

I remember the games by the places where I’ve seen them.

So, this year was no different.

I created a memory again.

The mother of my former girlfriend doesn’t hate me for the fact that her daughter and I never made it. We’ve remained close; in fact, the former girlfriend and I are still friends. And her mother, at 77, is perhaps the most intelligent sports fan I know. I can't let that go.

I drove an hour toward the mother’s home before stopping to pick up the wine bottles. I know nothing about wine, so I asked one of the clerks for help.

“What kind do you want?” he asked.

“I don’t know,”  I replied. “I’m picking it up for someone.”

When he asked who, I could have just told him it was for a friend. Instead, and maybe this is because of my years as a reporter that I feel compelled to give the full story, I opened up.

“It’s for the mother of my former college girlfriend,” I told him. “I’m heading to her home to watch the game tonight.”

The clerk looked at me, silently.

“Kind of different, isn’t it?” I said.

”Yeah. We don’t get that much here,” he answered.

I motored on and made it to her home in time for the tip-off. She was wearing a blue Kansas tee-shirt and, despite Kentucky being a huge favorite, she held hope for her Jayhawks.

Kentucky built a large lead, but her hope remained and in the second half when Kansas tried to mount a comeback, her spirits soared. In the end, though, Kansas lost by eight points.

Still, it was a good game and the memory will stay with me. When I categorize the NCAA championships I remember, I’ll recall the hospital game, the ones with my dad, other ones in various places  along my life's trek and the 2012 game I saw with my former girlfriend’s mom decked in her Kansas tee-shirt.