For Ford Heights Boys of Summer, Finally A Field of Their Own

The Sweet Season

three years later,
the story continues...

By John W. Fountain

     FORD HEIGHTS, Ill. (August 11, 2017)—Here, in Ford Heights, a field of dreams lives. That was as clear as a perfect baseball afternoon on Friday. It shone like the green grass carpet and the soaring silver backstop that has now replaced the tattered rusty one that not long ago was among the old remnants of a forlorn field overgrown with weeds.

     On Friday, the rebirth of youth baseball in this south suburban village echoed with each crack of the bat--restoring a sound that had long faded in a place where baseball died...

READ Fountain's Chicago Sun-Times column

Baseball. Boys. Sunflower seeds. A field. And dreams.

The Sweet Season

Part IV

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.

We, the media, keep missing the story
This is the fourth and final part of the series

By John W. Fountain

Page-one pathology. Front-page fatalism. Ten o’clock neuroses. Murderers, muggers, robbers, rapists, we are. The number-one suspect. Societal menace. Thug. Heartless. Criminal. Or so goes the portrait of black American males that too often fuels the American news media engine and the perceptions about black males. Ours is the mug shot below the headlines.

Ours the soulless brown eyes staring back without remorse. Too often, ours is the story of our supposed propensity toward criminality in a world in which a racist and unfair justice system holds different rules and different outcomes for males of color.

Ours a jaded portrayal overall by the media at large who help make every black male, all 19.9 million of us—even in a “post-racial” America—all potentially guilty by genetic association.

America’s most hated. Most wanted. Most feared.

Baseball. Boys. Sunflower seeds. A field. And dreams.

The Sweet Season

Part III

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 Matteson Olympia Fields Cubs pose at season's end after the title game.

Baseball principles teach kids not to give up
This is the third in a series

By John W. Fountain

      In the bottom of the 6^th and final inning, the tension was thick like molasses. Win or lose, the season for the M.O.F. Cubs was already a winning one—and baseball a game of life, the field just a classroom for lessons by their coaches to help these little boys someday grow into good men.

Dominique, a short, stout kid with a mean fastball and in a good groove on this warm evening in July, stood at the mound, time ticking on the last game of the season for these boys of summer. An inning earlier, they squandered a lead, looking on the verge of a complete meltdown. It’s not like it hadn’t happened before—this season.

But it was soon clear—after Aiden, Dominique’s little brother, had run off the field with tears streaming down his face in frustration over an error—that the Cubs had learned to fight. Clear that the boys had absorbed the principle of teamwork, of never giving up, of cleaving to the words and faith of their coaches. Clear was that this group of unlikely champions wanted not just to learn to play baseball but to win.

Baseball. Boys. Sunflower seeds. A field. And dreams.

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. Fountain

No fatalism. No pathology. Simply a slice of life in middle America. Of little boys and men with Little League hopes and dreams. No gang. Team. No guns. Bats. The only hitters are base hitters. The only thing stolen: bases.

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.

★★★★★

★★★★★

Baseball. Boys. Sunflower seeds. A field. And dreams.

The Sweet Season

Part I

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 Sweet Season begins in Ford Heights
This is the first in a series

By John W. Fountain

  The Sweet Season. It is a time when graying or balding men—even men in their twilight years—still remember like yesterday. It is a time we all remember. A time when little boys—and girls—are innocent and free, to a certain extent, no matter what cruelty their eyes might already have seen. A time when smiles curl easily at the edges of their faces and joy shines in their eyes like the glint of sun on polished chrome. A time when boys aren’t ashamed to hug each other. When a bag of potato chips and a pat on the back from a coach are still sufficient prizes.

The Sweet Season. A time in our lives when disappointment and pain over a loss can dissolve as quickly as a two-run lead in one inning. A time when the fate of a season can hinge on one last at bat. One last hope.

It is a time when there’s not much sweeter than the sound of a bat smacking a fastball, the sight of it sailing into centerfield for a  bases-loaded-clearing hit. Or the pop of a catcher’s mitt and the yell of “Streeeeeiiiike threeeeee!!!” by a giant-sized umpire, leaping from his crouch.

Or a sip of cold water on a sun-drenched summer’s evening at the end of a sweaty game or practice, the mix of chatter and laughter of little boys rising like crickets as they their collect bats and gloves against a purplish sky. 

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 south suburban hamlet of 2,787, about 30 miles south of Chicago. It is a story about boys, who, this summer, would discover baseball. The story of a group of men with a passion for hardball and also for trying to save black boys at risk to gangs, homicide and prison—at a time when baseball has waned as the sport of choice among African Americans.

Miles from Williamsport, Pa., where Chicago’s Jackie Robinson West baseball team is currently playing in the Little League World Series, each year boys—and girls—play the game on diamonds that, despite the environs, can be fertile ground for life’s lessons and also for dreams. This is their story. The story of a season filled with challenges. A season beyond their wildest dreams.

____________________________

____________________________

There is something about baseball.
...Something about playing beneath a 
baby-blue sky kissed by marshmallow clouds.

____________________________

____________________________