More about the late Jim Bouton: "Hey, it’s O.K. to be on the outside."

The striking part about Ball Four's appeal that Jim Bouton's critics routinely missed is perfectly stated by Charles P. Pierce in one succinct sentence at Deadspin.

Jim Bouton made it acceptable -- even, maybe, cool -- to love baseball again.

As usual, baseball's current ownership cadre is working overtime to miss this lesson. Meanwhile Pierce's tribute to Bouton is spot on, as usual, though not to ignore Tyler Kepner's fine thoughts in the New York Times.

In particular this passage from Kepner turned my head. As always when it comes to writing, if you can find the words that hit your reader in the gut, you've won the game -- then you start all over again, next time.

I had first talked to Bouton 25 years earlier, in 1992, when I was a teenager and had just read “Ball Four” for the first time. I was an aspiring sportswriter but also a frustrated high school pitcher — a warm-up guy. When I read his book, Bouton seemed like a friend. It was good to know there was someone like him out there.

“I don’t think any teenager feels comfortable in his group,” he told me then, when I mentioned how deeply I connected with the book. “You’re trying to figure out how the world works: ‘How do you get from here to there, who am I and how do I fit into things and what the hell am I going to do with my life? I don’t have any answers.’ And so to read a book by a guy who’s in the same situation, who’s 30 years old, they have to say to themselves, ‘Hey, it’s O.K. to be on the outside.’”

On the outside, forever and always; I'll be 59 in August, and yep, that's me.

I'm still unsure about who I am, still trying to figure out the world and determine how I might fit into it, still completely baffled as to what I might do with my life, and still reacting viscerally to Quadrophenia by The Who because after all, I've no more clue than the protagonist Jimmy as to why this uncertain feeling is still here in my brain.

Pierce again, grasping fundamental points.

Ever since Bouton passed on Wednesday at the age of 80, of a particularly vicious form of amyloid dementia—Americans of a certain age have been dropping lines from Ball Four as though it had been published last week, instead of nearly 50 years ago. Many of the primary reactions on the electric Twitter machine to Bouton’s death was some variation of Seattle Pilots manager Joe Schultz’s philosophical pondering—“shitfuck” or, alternatively, “fuckshit.” Friends consoled friends, advising each other to smoke ‘em inside and then go pound some Budweiser. There were some mournful renditions of “It Makes a Fella Proud To Be An Astro.” Ball Four did more than sell a lot of books and corrupt a million young American baseball fans. It implanted a conception of being a fan that was totally different from anything that had come before it, a strange but hilarious commingling of unbridled affection and informed cynicism that mirrored Bouton’s own, a love for the game energized by an enthusiastic disrespect for the people who run it, and for some of the “unwritten rules” that had deserved to be mocked for decades.

Perhaps I've never realized the extent to which Bouton was a role model for me. Lest we forget, in Ball Four writer Bouton reminds us that a college term paper written by fellow pitcher Mike Marshall was called "Baseball Is an Ass" -- not the game itself, but the authority figures attached to it. 

“With (Steve) Hovley gone, Mike Marshall is probably the most articulate guy on the club, so I asked him if he had as much trouble communicating as I’ve had and he said, ‘Of course. The minute I approach a coach or a manager, I can see the terror in his eyes.’ ”

Just like in Nawbany when they see you coming and cross the street to walk on the other side.

Let's conclude with these words by Bruce Markusen in 2015, and the two retrospectives he composed.

"All these years later, many of us still care about the characters of Ball Four. And I suspect we always will."

“Ball Four’s” Characters Revisted: The Seattle Days

“Ball Four’s” Characters Revisited: On to Houston

R.I.P. Jim Bouton: "After Ball Four, sports hagiography was never the same."

Jim Bouton has died at 80.

Long live the memory of Ball Four's author. On Twitter and later at The Nation, sportswriter Dave Zirin recalled an epic meeting of the minds.

After Ball Four, sports hagiography was never the same. I was fortunate enough to speak on several panels with Bouton — including one in Boston with historian Howard Zinn, where Bouton and Zinn, longtime admirers of each other, met for the first time.

Bouton with Zinn?

How could I avoid being a Jim Bouton fan?

In my experience, Jim Bouton wasn't just the quirky character who wrote "Ball Four," the book that opened the door on what really goes on behind the curtain in Major League Baseball. To me, he was more of an anarchist. (The Village Voice even referred to him once as "Baseball's Bolshevik.") He didn't just like to challenge authority, he reveled in it. He loved throwing grenades into foxholes to see what would happen and where the debris landed.

The preceding excerpt is from a column by Tony Dobrowolski in the Berkshire Eagle from Pittsfield, Massachusetts, a city that figured prominently in what I believe was Bouton's final book, FOUL BALL: My Life and Hard Times Trying to Save an Old Ballpark."

In his first diary since Ball Four, Jim Bouton recounts his amazing adventure trying to save Wahconah Park, in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. Host to organized baseball since 1892, Wahconah Park was soon to be abandoned by the owner of the Pittsfield Mets who would move his team to a new stadium in another town---an all too familiar story.

Coincidentally, we drove through Pittsfield in route to Northampton MA on June 29, at which point we were only twenty miles away from Bouton's home in Great Barrington.

How influential has Bouton's Ball Four been in my life? Well, it's been 45 years since the first time I read it, and numerous anecdotes not only are fresh in my mind, but remain part of my daily repartee.

One of them is about a Seattle Pilots teammate who had a particularly vehement spat with the umpire behind home plate. Weeks passed, stars aligned, and this hitter again came to bat, with the same umpire calling balls and strikes.

The first pitch was ridiculously far outside, and the umpire decisively called it a strike. Bouton's teammate stepped out of the box, but said nothing. The next pitch was two feet high, and the batter somehow tommy-hawked it off the outfield wall for a double.

The umpire turned to the Pilots bench and said, "See? It makes him a better hitter."

Then there's the one about Bouton's former teammate, the legendary superstar Mickey Mantle.

It was the mid-1960s, and the Yankee dynasty was beginning to fade. The aging slugger Mantle arrived at the ballpark massively hungover and was given the day off by the team's sympathetic manager, but late in the game, with the Yanks behind, Mantle was needed to pinch-hit.

Half-blind with pain and the effects of the previous evening's dissipation, "The Mick" lofted a majestic game-winning home run.

He slowly circled the bases and returned to the dugout to greet his cheering teammates, saying to no one in particular: "You have no idea how hard that really was."

The following dates to 2016.

---

Cultural education: Jim Bouton's landmark book, Ball Four.

John Thorn is the Official Baseball Historian for Major League Baseball, and as Thorn rightfully gushes, Jim Bouton is the author of Ball Four, one of the most influential books of my reading life. In the early 1970s, my copy looked just like the one pictured here.

Not unexpectedly, an overview of Ball Four by Mark Armour at the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) website is among the most complete that I've seen.

Today’s fans and writers, children or young adults when they first devoured the book, re-read it every two or three years. The book is universally viewed as well-written, provocative, thought-provoking, and funny. It is difficult to imagine that such a book could be controversial, that its author would be shunned by people within the game for many years, and in fact is still shunned. It is so.

Thorn takes the story from here.

Jim Bouton: An Improvisational Life, by John Thorn (Our Game)

... What emboldened me to approach (Jim Bouton) was my knowledge of his ongoing efforts to bring baseball back to Wahconah Park in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, which had hosted baseball on this same spot since 1892.

“It might interest you, Jim,” I offered, “that baseball was played in Pittsfield a full century earlier, and I have evidence of a prohibition against its play anywhere near a newly erected church. The actual document, I was told by the town clerk, survives.”

This stunned him. It was a great way to promote Pittsfield and his campaign. We became fast friends. He and his colleagues went on to scour the town’s archives and unearthed two manuscript copies of the “Pittsfield Prohibition” of 1791 and, barely a month after our conversation in Hackensack, we held a press conference. Because the ban placed baseball — as played by that name — in 18th-century America, the discovery turned out to be an international event. (For more about the Pittsfield story and what it means, see: https://goo.gl/BH9nOc) ...

There have been a couple "vintage" baseball games played in metro Louisville during recent years, and I've always been out of town, which is frustrating.

... A Vintage Base Ball Federation followed, with games in a number of locations for several years. I was involved in all of it, but for me the principal benefit of reviving the old ball game was the friendship with Jim that continues to this day. Though we get together with our wives regularly for dinner at a favorite neighborhood restaurant, I confess to being star-struck still — and not because Jim won twenty games for the Yankees a couple of times before I went off to college.

He is the man who wrote Ball Four.

I will not detail Jim’s life here. His biography is wonderfully sketched by Mark Armour in an entry for SABR’s Baseball Biography Project (https://goo.gl/Xre4Gs). Permit me to focus now on Ball Four: its landmark place in history; the revolution it inspired; and the importance of the impending sale at auction of its underlying notes, drafts, audiotapes, and related materials, whose very survival was largely unknown.

---

There's also this:

On the Seattle Pilots, George Brunet and the lives of journeymen.

To New Albany's Joe Dean, it was string music. For me, high school basketball was a mixed gym bag.

Sectional champs, 1978.

Last night, Floyd Central beat New Albany in boys basketball for the first time in 15 years, a span of time comprising 20 consecutive losses. There are hundreds of potentially interesting topics to be spun from this sporting news, but I like to pick my spots, which in this instance is the opportunity to recall my own underachieving career in high school basketball.

These lightly edited and updated thoughts have appeared at least twice here previously, most recently in March of 2014. They may not be particularly edifying, but at least they're honest.

---

ON THE AVENUES: String music?

It has been 39 years since my final basketball game as a member of Floyd Central’s varsity.

I'm occasionally reminded of this ancient factoid, like when a Facebook friend request came to me from my former coach, Joe Hinton. I duly accepted the request, and thought it very nice of him to ask. We didn’t always see eye to eye back in the day, but it’s been long, long ago.

One quite tumultuous time, we were on entirely different pages. It was late in the basketball season during my senior year, as my decidedly non-illustrious career was fast approaching a merciful conclusion. At a practice session just prior to the 1978 sectional, the coaching staff revealed the official tournament roster, and the list didn't include my name.

Granted, the omission was mostly deserved based on purely inconsistent performance, and yet I was annoyed at what I perceived as a slight, responding with a two-hour concentrated display of faux "go team" enthusiasm and contrived, vaudevillian, entirely mock "rah-rah."

This apparently was mistaken by the coaching staff for a death bed conversion to team spirit, if not genuine depth of feeling. The following day, I was reinstated to the roster. It never dawned on me to pursue a career in acting, or I might be portraying Josh Dallas’s father on television by now.

Happily, or so it seemed, I'd neglected reporting this turn of events to my father. Unhappily, his old friend (Hinton) already had done so, which may have been the devious intent from the beginning. The whole off-and-on scenario did little to improve matters on the home front.

As the late Gomer Pyle once said: “Surprise, surprise, surprise."

---

Almost 40 years later, I can't attribute truly coherent motives to my teenage ambivalence about sports, these ultimately meaningless games being just about the only form of communication between a father and his son. The father was an ex-Marine who had traded athletic opportunities for three years as a gunner on a Navy ship in World War II, and he was keen – perhaps overly so – to see his son succeed at basketball and baseball.

However, the son just wasn't wired for this kind of pressure, at least during those hormonally-charged years, and surely it is indicative of my fundamental disconnect that while I always enjoyed the essence of the games themselves and still do, my favorite book about sports was (and remains) Jim Bouton's Ball Four, which celebrated the timelessness of baseball while exposing the vacuous and inane nature of jock culture.

Bouton spoke directly to me, fervently and personally. I fancied myself a thinker, not a sweat hog. I'd have gladly settled for "thinker and lover, not a fighter," except that I hadn't been able to convince any girls of my credentials, and in truth, doubted whether any such talent existed.

So, it came back to me and my brain, together against the world. It should suffice to say that locker rooms were mind-free zones, and brains in sports were the object of lingering suspicion unless one happened to be an otherwise semi-literate point guard who could remember the plays and run the offense.

There I was, kicked off the senior-dominated basketball team and then placed back on it, contemplating yet again how it came to be that we were such persistent underachievers as a squad, utterly failing to capitalize on the rosy potential predicated by all observers, including my still simmering dad … and understanding, as I always had, that it all owed to a lack of cohesion.

In other words, too few of us liked each other off the court, and this distaste had a way of being glaringly obvious on the court, to Joe Hinton's fuming dismay.

Our sectional draw was a breeze. We were lumped into a bracket with smaller rural schools as a result of one or the other cynical maneuverings common to the political byways of the purportedly pristine Indiana state sport of basketball, which naturally had much more to do with smoky hotel room maneuvers at the national political party conventions of the 1920's than the farmyard ideal preferred by so many fans.

The cheering section probably knew better, but worshipped all the same.

We won the sectional and advanced to play Scottsburg in the Saturday morning game at the Seymour Regional the following week. The Warriors, from a school far smaller than ours, had nonetheless soundly thrashed us at home a few weeks earlier.

In today's parlance, Floyd Central had "match-up" problems with Scottsburg, which is to say that they had one of their finest teams ever; though not demonstrably better at every position, the Warriors played as a team, something we couldn't match.

I knew there would be little playing time for me, and at that point, it no longer mattered. Amid much hoopla and a special pep rally, we boarded the bus on Friday afternoon for the 40-minute drive, an early evening shoot-around, a buffet meal and an overnight stay at the Days Inn.

At this juncture, two worlds were set to collide.

While some of my best high school friends were athletes, only a few of them were on the basketball team. I mostly ran in different circles, and at various times, yes, there was beer involved, though seldom if ever during the basketball season. Ambivalence aside, I tried to play it straight as often as possible.

But for the Saturday regional festivities, a few of my heartier-partying friends had reserved a room at the very same hotel where the team was staying – only my buddies called it the Daze Inn, and planned to treat it accordingly.

---

Floyd Central unceremoniously exited the tournament in the morning session, and Scottsburg advanced to meet Clarksville in the evening finale. I'd like to remember that in defeat, we came together as a team and grasped an eternal cliched truth or three, but from my perspective, all I felt was pervasive relief that finally, at long last, the ordeal was over.

There was a post-game chat and showers, and we returned to the hotel to eat and waste a dilatory afternoon playing euchre before riding back to the gym on the bus and watching the championship game, which was to be our last solemn obligation as a dysfunctional unit.

You've probably already guessed what happened next.

I promptly stole away from the ennui, and by the time the bus exited the Daze Inn parking lot several hours later, I was completely and blissfully smashed.

The bathtub in the party room was filled with canned beer and ice, and a story already was making the rounds as to how the designated underage beer buyer with his older brother's ID had run into a few of our teachers at the exact same package store and exchanged earnest pleasantries with them at the checkout counter.

Me? I was just happy to shed the weight of expectations and get myself dazed, even if remaining as clueless as always with respect to how the future would play out, although perhaps my vocational path forward in the beer and brewing business already was being plotted amid the plodding.

Eventually one of the assistant coaches dressed me down outside in the hotel courtyard when he saw that I held a smoldering Swisher Sweet in my hand. Did I really want to be kicked off the bus and suspended for smoking?

No, not at all, and I snubbed it out, because I'd already decided that my final act of courageous defiance against The Man (which one, exactly?) would be to drink a beer on the team bus in route to the evening championship game, and this I proceeded to do -- already crazily intoxicated, strategically seated all the way in the rear, a Schlitz Malt Liquor Bull artfully hidden in my gym bag, top popped discretely, and chugged quickly before hiding the empty again for the post-game ride home with my parents.

I'm neither proud nor ashamed of these recollections.

I did what I could with what I had at the time, and if awarded a time-travel "do over," probably I'd have worked harder at sports -- not for anyone else’s satisfaction, but for my own.

In retrospect, my work ethic was there all along, if latent and inchoate; it took a while for it to emerge fully formed, later in life. So be it. In truth, the thing I miss most about high school is singing in choir, not playing ball. I didn't know it then, but I know it now.

I'm forever hopeful that in the cosmic scheme of things, the ability to learn from one's youthful angst and missteps is what matters most. If not, I may be in serious trouble.

To this year's high school basketball players, my best wishes. If you're lucky, you'll forget all about it very, very soon.

Cultural education: Jim Bouton's landmark book, Ball Four.

John Thorn is the Official Baseball Historian for Major League Baseball, and as Thorn rightfully gushes, Jim Bouton is the author of Ball Four, one of the most influential books of my reading life. In the early 1970s, my copy looked just like the one pictured here.

Not unexpectedly, an overview of Ball Four by Mark Armour at the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) website is among the most complete that I've seen.

Today’s fans and writers, children or young adults when they first devoured the book, re-read it every two or three years. The book is universally viewed as well-written, provocative, thought-provoking, and funny. It is difficult to imagine that such a book could be controversial, that its author would be shunned by people within the game for many years, and in fact is still shunned. It is so.

Thorn takes the story from here.

Jim Bouton: An Improvisational Life, by John Thorn (Our Game)

... What emboldened me to approach (Jim Bouton) was my knowledge of his ongoing efforts to bring baseball back to Wahconah Park in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, which had hosted baseball on this same spot since 1892.

“It might interest you, Jim,” I offered, “that baseball was played in Pittsfield a full century earlier, and I have evidence of a prohibition against its play anywhere near a newly erected church. The actual document, I was told by the town clerk, survives.”

This stunned him. It was a great way to promote Pittsfield and his campaign. We became fast friends. He and his colleagues went on to scour the town’s archives and unearthed two manuscript copies of the “Pittsfield Prohibition” of 1791 and, barely a month after our conversation in Hackensack, we held a press conference. Because the ban placed baseball — as played by that name — in 18th-century America, the discovery turned out to be an international event. (For more about the Pittsfield story and what it means, see: https://goo.gl/BH9nOc) ...

There have been a couple "vintage" baseball games played in metro Louisville during recent years, and I've always been out of town, which is frustrating.

... A Vintage Base Ball Federation followed, with games in a number of locations for several years. I was involved in all of it, but for me the principal benefit of reviving the old ball game was the friendship with Jim that continues to this day. Though we get together with our wives regularly for dinner at a favorite neighborhood restaurant, I confess to being star-struck still — and not because Jim won twenty games for the Yankees a couple of times before I went off to college.

He is the man who wrote Ball Four.

I will not detail Jim’s life here. His biography is wonderfully sketched by Mark Armour in an entry for SABR’s Baseball Biography Project (https://goo.gl/Xre4Gs). Permit me to focus now on Ball Four: its landmark place in history; the revolution it inspired; and the importance of the impending sale at auction of its underlying notes, drafts, audiotapes, and related materials, whose very survival was largely unknown.

The baseball wormhole continues: Joe Pepitone and the 2015 reissue of Joe, You Coulda Made Us Proud.

Photo credit: Little Studio Films.

In the mid-1960s, Joe Pepitone and Jim Bouton played together for the New York Yankees. Later, Pepitone famously dismissed Bouton's Ball Four, only to co-author an epochal book of his own: Joe, You Coulda Made Us Proud.

The two works are very different, but equally groundbreaking. Bouton rendered made major league ballplayers into genuine humans, and destroyed the heroic masks. Pepitone gutted himself with a crazed, self-loathing and relentlessly honest autobiography/confessional, pulling no punches to own jaw. It's dark, hard to read -- and absolutely essential.

I have not read Joe, You Coulda Made Us Proud since the summer of 1976, and my dog-eared paperback disappeared before high school graduation. Last year I simply missed these two excellent essays by Dan Epstein in Rolling Stone.

If the Bookseller is reading ...

Joe Pepitone on Smoking Weed, Screwing With Sinatra and 'Seinfeld'

His 1975 autobiography raised eyebrows, and 40 years later, it still shocks. Now, baseball's all-time partier reflects on a life lived to the limit

Joe Pepitone is in an upbeat mood today. "Everything's good, and that's honest," he confides over the phone to Rolling Stone. "Next time you talk to me, and I'm screaming and yelling at you and don't want to talk to you, you'll know everything's horseshit" ...

... Throughout it all, though, Pepitone has never lost his sense of humor – nor, as evidenced by his being name-checked on episodes of Seinfeld, Curb Your Enthusiasm and The Sopranos, has he lost his pop-culture cachet. Last year, Little Studio Films optioned the book rights to Joe, You Coulda Made Us Proud, and Pepitone is guardedly optimistic about seeing his colorful story make it to the screen. "I just sit back," he says, "but it seems to be going really good so far. We'll see!"

For now, though, he's happy to strut down memory lane and share some thoughts with us about his book, his wild times and those infamous hairpieces.

As for the book itself ...

'Joe, You Coulda Made Us Proud:' The Best Baseball Book You've Never Read

Joe Pepitone partied with Frank Sinatra and Mickey Mantle and slept with half of New York. Now, 40 years after it was published, his raucous bio gets a much-deserved reissue

In 1970, Houston Astros pitcher Jim Bouton published Ball Four, one of the most influential baseball books ever written. Breaking the clubhouse code of omertà by portraying ballplayers as skirt-chasing, hard-partying regular guys rather than paragons of virtuous American masculinity, Ball Four forever changed the way that the press covered professional sports; it also unleashed a wave of massively entertaining (and deeply off-color) player memoirs, including Sparky Lyle's The Bronx Zoo and Bill Lee's The Wrong Stuff.

Though Bouton's best-selling memoir was rather hilarious, most of his colleagues weren't laughing at the time. "Why didn't he write that he was the horniest [expletive] in baseball?" complained Joe Pepitone, who had been Bouton's teammate in New York and Houston. But in 1975, Pepitone would follow the trail blazed by Ball Four and write a tell-all of his own – Joe, You Coulda Made Us Proud – a book which was not only far more revealing than Bouton's, but also made it exceedingly clear that the horniest expletive in baseball was, in fact, Pepitone himself.

On the Seattle Pilots, George Brunet and the lives of journeymen.

It all started when I stumbled upon a documentary about the 1969 Seattle Pilots (released circa 2010). You can skip Part One (it's only a snippet) and begin here: The Seattle Pilots: Short Flight into History.

The Seattle Pilots were an American professional baseball team based in Seattle, Washington for one season, 1969. The Pilots played home games at Sick's Stadium and were a member of the West Division of Major League Baseball's American League. On April 1, 1970, they moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and changed their name to the Brewers.

Jim Bouton played for the 1969 Seattle Pilots, and wrote a book about it. It is no exaggeration to state the Ball Four is one of the seminal texts in American sporting history, and I fairly devoured it at the age of 12, with repeat readings for years to follow.

Save for Ball Four, the Pilots would remain little more than an archaic footnote in major league history. It explains why 40-plus years after reading it for the first time, this documentary brings the ill-fated Pilots vibrantly back to life through both archival footage and filmed appearances by surviving players -- and their ranks have thinned considerably, before and since filming.

Most of those still here to tell the tale are in their mid- to late-70s. Sicks Stadium is long demolished. Seattle was awarded a second expansion franchise in 1977, and the Mariners have succeeded where their predecessors failed.

Internet + baseball fan = Memorial Day weekend rabbit hole doubleheader, and so it is that I began researching the life of pitcher George Brunet, who features prominently in Bouton's book, most famously during a digression about the usefulness of underwear. Brunet also is the topic of a fine anecdote in the film, as related by Greg Goosen (repeated here).

The Brunet narrative trail has been blazed, starting here.

Cooperstown Confidential: The wild life of George Brunet, by Bruce Markusen (Hardballtimes)

... We know plenty about the stars, the legends, the Hall of Famers. We know their stories; we enjoy hearing about them. But it is the journeymen, the less talented players who truly fascinate me. They seem to be the most colorful; they have to overcome the greatest adversities. Their stories are often the most compelling, if only we are willing to dig and search.

One of those journeymen who has intrigued me is George Brunet. I first became aware of him in Jim Bouton’s Ball Four. I then heard about his exploits, at an advanced age well into his 50s, in the Mexican League.

In every sense, Brunet was a baseball lifer, amply fulfilling the many cliches about southpaw eccentricities and emptying more than a few bottles along the way. His career in the big leagues was average at best, though good enough for parts of 15 seasons. Today, such longevity is awarded with millions.

But that's only the half of it, as Brunet played in the minors, majors and Mexican League for 37 consecutive years, from just after high school to the age of 54 -- from Eisenhower through George H.W. Bush.

All told, Brunet pitched more than 6,000 innings and set the minor league record for strikeouts (3,175). He finally retired in 1989. Remaining in Mexico, he died only two years later following a heart attack.

Markusen has it pegged. The journeymen among ballplayers are the most interesting, probably for the same reason Bull Durham is the best baseball movie.

It's all about the stories.

ON THE AVENUES: String music?

ON THE AVENUES: String music?

A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.

It has been 36 years since my final basketball game as a member of Floyd Central’s varsity.

I was reminded of this ancient factoid in the rear view mirror because a Facebook friend request recently came to me from my former coach, Joe Hinton. I duly accepted the request, and thought it nice of him to ask. We didn’t always see eye to eye back in the day, but it’s been long, long ago.

One quite tumultuous time, when we were on entirely different pages was late in the basketball season during my senior year, as a decidedly non-illustrious career was fast approaching a merciful conclusion. At a practice session just prior to the 1978 sectional, the coaching staff revealed the official tournament roster, and the list didn't include my name.

Granted, the omission was mostly deserved based on pure performance, and yet I was annoyed at the slight, responding with a two-hour concentrated display of faux "go team" enthusiasm and contrived, entirely mock rah-rah, which apparently was mistaken for a death bed conversion, if not genuine depth of feeling, resulting in my reinstatement to the roster the following day.

It never dawned on me to pursue a career in acting, or I might be portraying Josh Dallas’s father on television by now.

Happily, or so it seemed, I'd neglected reporting this turn of events to my father. Unhappily, his friend (Hinton) had already done so, which may have been the devious intent from the beginning, and the whole off-and-on scenario did little to improve matters on the home front. As Gomer Pyle once said: “Surprise, surprise, surprise."

---

Three and a half decades later, I can't attribute truly coherent motives to my teenaged ambivalence about sports, these largely meaningless games being about the only form of communication between a father and his son. The father was an ex-Marine who had traded athletic opportunities for three years as a gunner on a Navy ship in World War II and was keen – perhaps overly so – to see his son succeed at basketball and baseball.

However, the son just wasn't wired for that kind of pressure, at least during those hormonally-charged years, and surely it is indicative of my fundamental disconnect that while I always enjoyed the games themselves and still do, my favorite book about sports was (and is) Jim Bouton's "Ball Four," which celebrated baseball while exposing the vacuous and inane nature of jock culture.

Bouton directly spoke to me, fervently and personally. I fancied myself a thinker, not a sweathog. I'd have gladly settled for "lover, not a fighter," except that I hadn't been able to convince girls of my credentials in the former, and in truth, doubted whether any such talent existed, and so it came back to me and my brain against the world.

It should suffice to say that locker rooms were mind-free zones, and brains in sports were the object of lingering suspicion unless one happened to be an otherwise illiterate point guard who could remember the plays and run the offense.

There I was, off the senior-dominated basketball team and then back on it, contemplating yet again how it came to be that we were such persistent underachievers, utterly failing to capitalize on the potential predicated by all observers, including my still simmering dad … and understanding, as I always had, that it all owed to a lack of cohesion. In other words, too few of us liked each other, and this distaste had a way of being glaringly obvious on the court, to Joe Hinton's fuming dismay.

Our sectional draw was a breeze. We were lumped into a bracket with smaller rural schools as a result of one or the other cynical maneuverings common to the political byways of the purportedly pristine Indiana state sport of basketball, which naturally had much more to do with smoky hotel rooms at the national party conventions of the 1920's than the farmyard ideal preferred by so many fans.

They probably knew better, but worshipped just the same.

We won the sectional and advanced to play Scottsburg in the Saturday morning game at the Seymour Regional the following week. The Warriors, from a school far smaller than ours, had nonetheless soundly thrashed us at home a few weeks earlier. In today's parlance, Floyd Central had "match-up" problems with Scottsburg, which is to say that they had one of their finest teams ever, one better than ours at almost every position.

I knew there would be little playing time for me, and at that point, it no longer mattered. Amid much hoopla and a special pep rally, we boarded the bus on Friday afternoon for the 40-minute drive, an early evening shoot-around, a buffet meal and an overnight stay at the Days Inn.

At this juncture, two worlds were about to collide. While some of my best high school friends were athletes, only a couple of them were on the basketball team. I ran in different circles, and at various times, yes, there was beer involved, though seldom if ever during the basketball season. Ambivalence aside, I tried to play it straight as often as possible. But for the Saturday regional festivities, a few of my heartier partying friends had reserved a room at the very same hotel where the team was staying – only my buddies called it the Daze Inn, and planned to treat it accordingly.

---

Unsurprisingly, Floyd Central exited the tournament in the morning session, and Scottsburg advanced to meet Clarksville in the evening finale. I'd like to remember that in defeat, the team came together and grasped an eternal truth or three, but from my perspective, all I felt was pervasive relief that finally, at long last, it was over. There was a post-game chat and showers, and we returned to the hotel to eat and waste a dilatory afternoon playing euchre before riding back to the gym on the bus and watching the championship game, which was to be our last solemn obligation as a dysfunctional unit.

I promptly stole away, and by the time the bus exited the Daze Inn parking lot several hours later, I was blissfully smashed. The bathtub in the party room was filled with canned beer and ice, and a story already was making the rounds as to how the designated underage beer buyer had run into a few of our teachers at the exact same package store and exchanged pleasantries with them at the counter.

I was just happy to shed the weight of expectations and get myself altered, even if clueless as always with respect to how the future would play out.

Eventually one of the assistant coaches dressed me down outside in the courtyard when he saw that I had a smoldering Swisher Sweet in my hand. Did I really want to be kicked off the bus and suspended for smoking?

No, not at all, and I snubbed it out, because I'd already decided that my final act of courageous defiance against The Man (which one?) would be to drink a beer on the team bus in route to the evening game, and this I proceeded to do, already crazily intoxicated, strategically seated all the way in the rear, a Schlitz Malt Liquor Bull artfully hidden in my gym bag, top popped discretely, and chugged quickly before being hidden again for the ride home with my parents afterward.

I'm neither ashamed nor proud of these recollections. I did what I could with what I had at the time, and if I had to do it over, I'd have worked harder at sports than I did -- not for anyone else’s satisfaction, but for my own. Seems that the work ethic actually was there all along, though latent; it just came later in life, and so be it.

In truth, the thing I miss most about high school is singing in choir, not playing ball. I didn't know it then, but I know it now. I'm hoping that in the cosmic scheme of things, that's all that matters. If it isn't, I may be in trouble.

To this year's basketball players, in a tournament or out, and whether in high school or college: If you're lucky, you'll forget all about it very, very soon.

(The preceding was posted at NAC in 2008 and later appeared as a newspaper column in truncated form. This is the revised, full-length version)

Big Hair and Plastic Grass.

Thanks to Reverend Bob for linking to this book: BIG HAIR AND PLASTIC GRASS: A Funky Ride Through Baseball and America in the Swinging '70s, by Dan Epstein.

Yo, Randy ... Randy Smith ...

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May brought additional migraines for Bowie Kuhn, via an advance excerpt of Jim Bouton's Ball Four that appeared in Look magazine. A diary of Bouton's 1969 season with the Pilots and Houston Astros, sprinkled with reminiscences from his days with the New York Yankees, Ball Four is--at least by today's standards--a highly entertaining if relatively tame read. But back in 1970, Bouton might as well have gone to Cooperstown and smeared the plaques with his own feces.