The Sweet Season
Part II
Miles from Williamsport, Pa., where Chicago’s Jackie Robinson West baseball team recently captured the national Little League World Series title, each year boys—and girls—play the game on local diamonds in seasons filled with life's lessons, with hopes and dreams.
The only thing stolen: bases
This is the second in a series
By John W. FountainThis is the second in a series
No OGs. Just older men,
graying, or balding or simply seasoned by life and eager to share their wisdom.
To see black boys thrive. No courthouse holding pen. Just a dugout.
No sagging. No prison
orange. Uniforms—blue shirts tucked neatly into gray pants. Shoes laced and
tied, caps not cocked to the side.
No bullets flying. Fly balls. No murder tally. Only runs. No running for cover. No guns. No fighting, except the fight to win.
★★★★★
★★★★★
The sweet season: Baseball.
Boys. Sunflower seeds. A field. And dreams. Little League Baseball teams.
This is the story of a team
of boys called the Cubs, most of them from Ford Heights—a forlorn hamlet of
2,787, about 30 miles south of Chicago. A story about boys, who, this summer,
would discover baseball. It is the story of a season filled with challenges. A
season beyond their wildest dreams.
Miles from Williamsport, Pa., where
Chicago’s Jackie Robinson West baseball team competed in this year’s Little
League World Series, each year boys—and girls—play the game on local diamonds
in seasons filled with life's lessons, with hopes and dreams.
Jaheim is a lanky quiet kid,
a natural athlete, even if his propensity for baseball wasn’t yet clear when
the season began. There is Tony—Coach Kirby’s grandson—a coffee-brown boy with
big eyes. There’s Isaiah, a sure catcher, who at 8, already has years of
baseball experience. He happens to be one of two boys who live in Olympia
Fields. His dad Leland White III is a college grad and has coached his eldest
son and namesake who blazed the trail for younger brother Isaiah. He’s one of
two boys from Olympia Fields. Mostly, the boys, like Jaheim, are from Ford
Heights: Sharod, Caleb, Brandon, Teron…
From the beginning, the task
of Kelvin Oliver aka “Coach K” and Coach George “Kirby” Green was
comprehensive.
‘Throw a ball with two
fingers, not your whole hand.’
‘Don’t hold a bat like you’re
sweeping with a broom.’
‘Put the glove on your hand,
no, the other one.’
“Run…” a coach yelled at a
practice.
Other coaches chimed in with
one tip or another: “You can’t be afraid of the ball.”
“Don’t sling the bat.”
“Sli-i-i-ide.”
“Don’t slide into first!”
“Hey, come over here, hurry
up, run. ‘I said run’.”
In the beginning, some of the
boys duck and dodge. Or the ball rolls through their legs. Or they run away
from it—too fast, too hot. They learn that getting hit by a baseball can hurt. The
boys fumble and stumble about, look lost. It’s soon clear that this is going to
be a learning season rather a winning season. The coaches figure they had better
focus on the fundamentals first, worry about winning later. Much later. Like
maybe next season.
Walk
this Way
On 12th Street,
not far from where he lives, Coach Kirby, 52, stood on a field of overgrown
wild grass and weeds, green and straw brown. Kirby knelt down and pulled back
some of the growth in search of evidence that this was once a potential field
of dreams. “See, here’s some gravel.” There are also still the remnants of the
fence that hugged home plate. Partially rusted and with its top missing, it
marks the place where home plate once shone but now sprouts grass.
Providing a guided tour to a
reporter on this day, Kirby pointed out old haunts while recounting the history
of his hometown as he rolled past blight, past the area where the drug boys
hang out, past abandoned buildings. There is the barren plot of land where a
housing development—so troubled and violent that everyone around here called it
Vietnam—once stood. And nearby are the boarded and decaying low-rise buildings called
“the Bronx.” The story goes: the boys in the Bronx and the boys in Vietnam
didn’t get along—were always fighting and shooting at one another. It didn’t
matter that there was no real line of demarcation other than a single street. Nor
did it matter that they mostly grew up together. Bulldozed or vacated now,
there is no sign of animosity and the violence that Kirby says once marred this
section of town. Nor any more inhabitants—only poverty, decay and the sun
shining down on potential-rich fields of green that now lay barren.
Around the corner from the
former baseball field stands a site that Green blames for helping to put the
death nail in baseball. It used to be a tennis court. But on this day a group
of girls sat on metal stands overlooking a basketball court where young men
played a pick-up game. Other boys dribbled on the sidelines, or else watched
the older boys shooting jump shots, driving to the basket, stutter stepping and
crossing over. Basketball and football are the sports of choice for young black
men, both Kirby and Oliver say.
And in their eyes, the
elevation and transcendence of basketball and football in the eyes of many a
young black boy—aided by the likes of Dr. J and Walter Payton, Michael Jordan
and others whose star power and success over time—left baseball in the dust.
Ultimately, this has meant fewer and fewer black boys playing baseball—creating
a well-documented dwindling of African Americans from the game integrated by
Jackie Robinson 67 years ago (1947). It is a baseball legacy that includes the
Negro Leagues and names like Josh Gibson and Satchel Paige. Gone is the golden
era of baseball for African Americans when names like Ernie Banks, Fergie
Jenkins and Billy Williams were on the tips of the tongues of black boys as
their favorite sports heroes. Today they have long since been replaced by names
like D Rose, Durant, Briggs, Vick, “Bones” Jones…
Oliver and Green know that’s
what they’re up against. And yet, both coaches are not willing to concede that
baseball is out for the count.
“Green
Machine”
Green grew up playing
baseball in Ford Heights, back when the town was East Chicago Heights, before
the town’s name was changed in 1987 in an effort to give it a makeover, even if
it didn’t work. Even if poverty and some systemic issues that can ail a town
are more stubborn. Back in the early 1970’s, when Green was a kid, most boys
played baseball.
From nearly sunup until
sundown, everybody played hardball on the baseball field next to Cottage Grove
Elementary School. Or sometimes Green and the boys played “strike ‘em out” at
the fence in his yard, or else on the home-made baseball diamond on a lot
adjacent to his home, where he lived with his parents and seven siblings—a
brother and six sisters. He was a Cubs fan back then and can still recite the
lineup—Hundley, Beckert, Santo, Kessinger...
Back then, Green lived and
slept baseball—his father’s first love. A Ford Heights policeman who later
drove a truck for a living, his father George W. Green, drilled into his sons
the game of baseball. In those days, all of their fathers were around. The boys
in the town used to go out to the baseball field every Saturday and play
against their dads. Green recalls the devotion of a man named “Excel Walker,”
who coached Little League baseball and also youth football. How the man didn’t
have a car. But he would walk up to the community center and beg up on
uniforms. How the uniform tops and bottoms would be two different shades of
green. But it didn’t matter to the boys. They always had uniforms. The “Green
Machine,” they used to call them. There was a sense of community back then.
Back then, it was unusual to see someone without a dad around. Times have
changed.
Green and his wife are high
school sweethearts. Born a day apart, they have been together since they were
17 and have four grown children. He moved away from Ford Heights for years, farther
southwest to University Park, where they raised their children.
He moved, in part, because he could see the handwriting on the wall for Ford
Heights, which had long been marred by corruption and poverty. Then, in 2007, 19
years after he moved away, he and his family moved back to the family’s house
where he had grown up, a brick ranch on a sprawling emerald plot of land.
Green still sees baseball as
blue collar, a skilled game, a team sport, a teacher of lessons for life. As an
opportunity to instill discipline in young men and to mentor boys whose fathers
are MIA, imprisoned, inebriated or simply not around. In his estimation, most
boys in his town are growing up today without the influence of a father. And he
believes simply that good coaches can be good surrogates.
___________________________
___________________________
___________________________
The way Coach K sees it, you have two options:
You do something. Or you do nothing.
___________________________
___________________________
___________________________
Still, coaching comes with a
price. Green admits that his wife sometimes scolds him for spending so much
time coaching and says he should spend more time with his own family. Green
understands, he says. But somebody has got to help these boys. At least that’s
the way he and Oliver see it. Or else, they say, we’re doomed.
By
Any Means Necessary
Oliver, 58, has been married 31 years. He and his wife Pam, a television
news planning producer, have raised a son and two daughters. Although Oliver
lives in a comfy suburb, 30 miles south of the big city, he doesn’t feel
entirely removed from the social elements that plague it. A village of Olympia
Fields trustee, he is also an advocate for education and involved with a
community of men working to improve the troubled Rich Township High School
District 227, where discipline, poor test scores and a feuding school board
have been well documented.
Oliver, 58, has been married 31 years. He and his wife Pam, a television
news planning producer, have raised a son and two daughters. Although Oliver
lives in a comfy suburb, 30 miles south of the big city, he doesn’t feel
entirely removed from the social elements that plague it. A village of Olympia
Fields trustee, he is also an advocate for education and involved with a
community of men working to improve the troubled Rich Township High School
District 227, where discipline, poor test scores and a feuding school board
have been well documented.
Oliver sees evidence of the
same kinds of issues that affect poor black Chicago neighborhoods encroaching
upon the south suburbs, if not already totally enveloping some of them. Issues
like poverty, poor quality schools, familial breakdown, a disintegration of
community and an erosion of the social and cultural fabric in a way that threatens
us all.
Oliver sees these issues as
symptomatic of a larger failure to simply put children first. And he sees the
politics, red tape and status quo bureaucrats, including some school board
members and administrators, as roadblocks to success for black boys and girls.
For him, the issue of education couldn’t be more critical. Oliver, who, in April
2013, launched an unsuccessful bid for mayor of Olympia Fields, also sees
mentoring as a way to point young people in the right direction and also to
help shepherd them.
The way Coach K sees it, you have
two options: You do something. Or you do nothing. Coaching baseball is one way
for him to do something to help create community, to provide a lifeline for
boys, to be “fathers” in the community. To use the lessons of baseball as
lessons for life. To save black boys by any means necessary. One player, one
game, one season at a time.
Batter
Up!
After a month of forfeits and rainouts, they finally played their first game in late May. The Cubs were nervous and plenty green: missed balls, fielding errors, swinging at bad pitches… The mercy rule is invoked in the 4th inning. Cubs lose: 18-6.
The next game isn’t much
better. Cubs lose 23-3. Soon five players would drop off. Then more losses:
5-3, 7-6… But there are signs of progress, including, finally, a win. It was
enough for coaches to point to for the sometimes bewildered, sometimes
frustrated, sometimes embarrassed boys as evidence of their growth. And yet,
proof that there were lessons still to learn.
After a month of forfeits and rainouts, they finally played their first game in late May. The Cubs were nervous and plenty green: missed balls, fielding errors, swinging at bad pitches… The mercy rule is invoked in the 4th inning. Cubs lose: 18-6.
The next game isn’t much
better. Cubs lose 23-3. Soon five players would drop off. Then more losses:
5-3, 7-6… But there are signs of progress, including, finally, a win. It was
enough for coaches to point to for the sometimes bewildered, sometimes
frustrated, sometimes embarrassed boys as evidence of their growth. And yet,
proof that there were lessons still to learn.
Work hard—nothing good comes
easy. Be a team player. Don’t slack or sulk. Keep your head up. Never give up. And
never underestimate the power of hard work and having a dream.
Win or lose, the team forms a
circle on the field after each game. All hands in. “On three…”
“Cubs!” they all yelled in
unison, ever hopeful.
With losses mounting as the season winded
down, the good news was: the Cubs were getting better. Also clear—by their
effort and by the passion shining in their eyes—was that these boys no longer
simply wanted to just play the game. They wanted to win.
Next:
The Impossible Dream