One Shot at Forever, page 17
This would be wonderful. It would bring glory to the school. It would also give him a headache. A week earlier, when planning Macon High’s end-of-the-year school schedule, McClard had slated graduation for the evening of June 4 at 8 P.M. At the time, he couldn’t imagine any possible conflict.
Now, he began to worry. That is, until he received the news: As expected, Lane Tech had won its first game in the tournament over Piasa Southwestern, which meant Macon would be facing the best team in the state of Illinois in the second round. Graduation would not be an issue.
17
The Baseball Factory
In home after home in Macon, people began packing and making calls: “Macon is playing Lane Tech!” If you didn’t know better, you’d have thought a hurricane was bearing down on the town, so frenzied was the activity. Those who hadn’t already gone up to Peoria started finding ways to do so. Farmers closed up their barns, business owners stuck CLOSED FOR TOURNAMENT signs in their windows. Cathy Schley, who worked as a nurse at a hospital in Decatur, started thinking of what excuse to use when calling in sick for work the following morning. After some thought, she decided on diarrhea. No one argued with diarrhea.
To the students at Macon High, Lane Tech was so exotic-sounding it might as well have been the capital of a foreign country. A school in Chicago with fifty-two hundred boys? Who knew such a thing existed.
Indeed, the two schools could scarcely be more different. Founded in 1908 as a training school for boys, Lane Tech at first offered courses in cabinetmaking, foundry, and welding. By the twenties, it had broadened its curriculum considerably. Its music program was designed by Chicago Symphony Orchestra director Frederick Stock, and the Lane print shop turned out a daily four-page paper and a monthly fifty-six-page magazine. By the late thirties, Lane had moved to a new campus, and at nine thousand, the student population was so vast that classes had to be held in shifts.
From the start, Lane dominated Chicago sports. To walk its halls is to see row upon row of plaques, the spoils from hundreds of city championships in a variety of sports. Its most famous athletic alum was Johnny Weissmuller, who won five gold medals over the course of two Olympics, set sixty-seven world records, and later went on to star in the Tarzan movie series. Lane’s football program turned out pro players, including Fritz Pollard, who was later inducted into the NFL Hall of Fame as the league’s first African American head coach. The athletic department’s crown gem, however, was baseball. The program produced over twenty major league players, won dozens of city titles, and was a regular at the state tournament.
Whereas only a handful of new players came out for the team each season at Macon High, baseball was survival of the fittest at Lane. In the spring, prospective players were judged like prime livestock, run through a variety of tests under the watchful eye of the seniors. The competition was staggering. Greg Walsh remembers being handed a tag that read 431 when he came out as a freshman. Next to him, a boy named Richie Coleman received 432. Walsh was taken aback. He turned toward the man doling out the numbers. “We thought these were only freshman tryouts,” he said.
“These are freshman tryouts,” the man responded.
As opposed to Macon, where the boys grew up together, the Lane Tech team was essentially a Chicago-land All-Star squad pulled from a host of feeder schools, and most players had never met until the first day of practice. If it was too wet to go outside, the players ran in the hallways, which were so vast that the track team was said to occasionally hold the 4 × 100 relay inside.
Lane’s head coach was Ed Papciak, a large bespectacled man with a pendulous gut. Though able to both instill fear and command respect, Papciak was not the most strategic of coaches. He had only one sign, a brush down his left arm to tell a player to steal. (At one point, one of his players said, “Coach, maybe you want to mix it up, use an indicator,” prompting Papciak to do just that. But since he still only had the one sign, only now preceded by an indicator, opponents eventually figured it out and began pitching out upon seeing the indicator.)
Not that it mattered. With so much talent, Papciak didn’t need to employ much in the way of strategy. So dominant was Lane that it routinely won city league games by a dozen runs. Even so, Papciak was a notorious griper—about his field, his players, and his resources.
There wasn’t much for Papciak to complain about in 1971, though. In this, Lane’s record-tying tenth trip to the tourney, the team was as talented as ever. Its lineup was full of major league prospects, all of whom were excellent dead fastball hitters, their timing honed from summers playing on semipro teams. Ranked first in Illinois entering the year, Tech had started slow, going 6–4 to open the season. Then team captain and star pitcher Mark “Wronk” Wronkiewicz held a players-only meeting, after which the team went on a tear. By the time of the semifinal against Macon, Lane boasted a 32–5 record.
Now, after an unexpectedly tough 2–1 win over Piasa Southwestern that had infuriated Papciak—“we hit like a bunch of minis out there today,” he told reporters—Lane was two games from fulfilling its destiny. The only team the players viewed as a threat was Waukegan, which was in the other bracket. It’s fair to say that Macon, with its hippie coach, tiny roster, and number two pitcher slated to take the mound, did not. Even that hippie coach appeared to know what he was in for. As Sweet was quoted as saying in the Thursday afternoon Herald & Review: “Lane Tech will have to go to sleep for us to beat them.”
It was not the only time Sweet appeared in the papers that afternoon and the following morning. The Tech-Macon semifinal may have been a monumental mismatch, but that only made it irresistible to reporters, who couldn’t get enough of Macon and, in particular, Sweet. Phil Theobald of the Peoria Journal Star wrote that Sweet “wouldn’t stand out in your local commune.” Another scribe said that Sweet “picked up his coaching methods from the L. C. Sweet Coaching Manual, with contributions from Dave Meggyesy, Rennie Davis, and Timothy Leary.” Another went even further, describing Sweet as “a pinch of a bad Mexican hombre, a fun-loving Joe Pepitone, and a collegiate peacenik,” as well as a “liberalized, long-haired, mustachioed thinking pinko” who if he “ever got too close to a police van at a protest mop-up … would find himself in need of a lawyer.” Others just ran a virtual transcript of Sweet’s comments the previous day.
Sweet read the coverage and smiled. He was amazed at how well his little press conference had gone over. His immediate goal had been to draw attention away from the players. He didn’t want them bothered, becoming anxious about the media or having to answer for the hats and hair. He also knew that all the ridiculous coverage—and the feelings it engendered among rival teams and coaches—would galvanize his kids.
On a larger scale, Sweet delighted in using this relatively grand stage as an opportunity to tweak the coaching establishment. Just as he’d thrown out the English curriculum at Macon High and been successful with his own methods, now he had a chance to prove that there was more than one way to coach a successful high school team. He looked around and saw fifty- and sixty-year-old war vets with flattops who ran their teams as if they were still in the Army. Sweet was pretty sure that regimenting young men to the point where they’re not thinking for themselves wasn’t a good way to get the best out of them. Though he was too modest to say it, he really thought what he was doing was in some small way revolutionary. He’d gone into the hardest, most doctrinaire corner of the scholastic experience and proven that a team didn’t need a dictator to win, that a coach could put the emphasis on the experience—on fun and cooperation and the kids—and also win.
While most of the press was having a ball mocking Sweet, one reporter had caught on to what he was doing. It was Bob Fallstrom, the Herald & Review editor who’d received Sweet’s survey all those months earlier. Now he penned a column for Friday’s paper that had a different tone. Called “Sweet Ignores Coaching ‘Rules,’” it compared Sweet to Vince Lombardi. Wrote Fallstrom:
Many high school coaches try to imitate Lombardi. After all, winning is just as important on the prep level—unfortunately. It’s win or look for another job—in most cases.
I’ve often thought that prep athletics are being spoiled by this “must win” approach. Ruined because the fun of competing is being squeezed out of existence, replaced by relentless pressure to succeed.
Then along comes L. C. Sweet. And his team, without coaching, without haranguing, without discipline, is successful…
Most of the coaching fraternity regard Sweet as a freak.
But there is no denying that the Macon players are relaxed, having fun. Having a ball, instead of being uptight about losing.
Is having fun so unorthodox in high school athletics? Do coaches have to be a combination of Vince Lombardi and Gen. Patton?
Sweet doesn’t think so. I’ll back him up.
How to prepare for the biggest morning of your life? That was the question that faced the Ironmen on Thursday night. In one room, Heneberry and a half dozen others huddled around the color TV and watched as Cubs ace Ken Holtzman mowed down Cincinnati Reds batters. Others played games of Pitch, the unofficial card game of Macon.
Throughout, one boy was conspicuously absent. Earlier in the evening, Shartzer had been spotted in the lobby with Mark Miller, briefly conferring with a few female Macon students, but now he was nowhere to be found. No one went looking for him, though, as Steve had asked to be left alone during the tournament. Down one of the long halls, he lay on his bed, staring up at the white perforated ceiling tiles.
Tonight, there was no asthma. His hand throbbed but he didn’t think about that, either. Instead, Shartzer thought about how many people were driving up from Macon, and how they were all counting on him. He thought about how far the team had come, and how important it was for him to lead them now. He thought about how, as he later said, “No one elected me to carry the flag, but I took the damn thing and wasn’t going to fall on it.”
18
The Drums
The Macon High students couldn’t believe it. SCHOOL CLOSED TODAY read the sign on the front of Macon High. It was like having a snow day in June.
Not that any of the kids planned on goofing around. The student bus left the parking lot for Peoria at 6:30 A.M. and it was joined over the course of the morning by enough cars to fill three parking lots around Meinen Field. Flags fluttered from windows and pennants twirled. One Macon fan used duct tape to plaster the side of his white sedan with: #1 MACON IRONMEN YEA.
Jane Metzger was one of the students on the school bus and she remembers the giddy excitement of the morning. For two hours, Tim Cook, the diminutive former junior high baseball coach, led a series of Ironmen cheers. In the back, a student had tuned a transistor radio to WLS-AM 890 out of Chicago. At one point the DJ, Larry Lujack, began talking about the state baseball finals and mentioned that some tiny school from Macon had made it. Lujack then cracked that he’d never heard of Macon, and had no idea where it was.
For Metzger, it was one of the first times she realized just how small her town was.
Three hours north in Chicago, hundreds of thousands of people awoke and opened their Tribune to see that same small town on the front of the sports page. Above a story reading “Top 2 Draft Choices Sign Bear Contracts” and another about the Cubs with the headline “Santo Has Sympathy for Bench” ran a banner headline: “Lane Tech Wins State Opener, 2 to 1.” Just below, in large letters, it read: “Macon to Provide Next Test.”
Friday morning dawned hot and muggy. Sweet rose not long after sunrise after spending part of the previous night at the bar talking with Jeanne about ways to keep the team loose. Sweet was proud of how independent the boys had become. He wanted them to forge their own identity, to realize the world wasn’t that big and that Macon wasn’t that small. Now, as the Ironmen were poised to make another tournament run, he wanted outsiders to see the team as self-sufficient, to give the boys credit for their success, not the coach or some “program.” Most of all, he wanted the boys to keep it all in perspective.
So far, his strategy had worked. His stunt with the press had gone over as well as he could have hoped and his decision to shelter the team at Jumer’s was also paying off. Now he’d restricted all access. He didn’t want the boys overthinking the game; he just wanted them to play.
It was time for one final gambit. He gathered the Ironmen at breakfast in the hotel restaurant. The boys looked up, wondering if Sweet had prepared a speech. Instead he looked them over and, in a very serious voice, said, “Guys, now you’ve heard that these Lane Tech guys are just like us. They put their pants on one leg at a time.” Sweet paused and scanned the room again. “Well, they’re not. They jump into them two feet at a time!”
At one end of the table, Jeff Glan watched his teammates’ reactions, the way they begin giggling, almost against their will. He’d heard Sweet refer to himself as a “sponsor” before but Glan saw his coach as more of a psychologist. He’d never had a teacher or coach who understood moods and motivations like Sweet. What Sweet possessed, Glan would later realize, was what people called emotional intelligence.
After breakfast, Jack Heneberry approached. After asking Sweet’s permission, he walked off to the side of the room with his son. Looking John in the eye, Jack told him how it would be asking too much to win this game. He told him how the Ironmen had had a great season, how John had had a great season, and how he was so proud of him for that Bloomington game. Then he told him that it was OK—no one expected him to win this one.
Then Jack Heneberry pulled out a crumpled piece of paper and handed it to his son. “But this might help,” he said.
By 8:15 A.M., when the Macon bus left for Meinen Field, the players were already sweating. Though warm on Thursday, it had been pleasant enough—nearly perfect baseball weather. Now the heat hung like a wet blanket over Peoria, as if the whole river town awoke to find the banks had overflowed and taken to the air.
As the bus pulled up, the boys were shocked to see spectators already lining the bleachers. By 9:15, they overflowed onto the grass. One Lane Tech fan with sunglasses and prodigious muttonchops had brought a large snare drum. You could hear the BANG! BANG! BANG! from a quarter of a mile away.
The Lane Tech contingent was impressive but paled in comparison to the crowd on the other side of the diamond. There had never been, and likely never will be, a Macon away crowd like this one. As he looked around, Heneberry recognized one face after another: Britton, McClard, Poelker, Burns, the entire Otta extended clan. There was Jane Metzger and Diane Tomlinson, screaming like the cheerleaders they were during basketball and football season. Around them swarmed a horde of students already chanting for the Ironmen, the cheers led by a handsome, dark-haired senior named Cliff Brown, who stood waving a large, purple Ironmen flag. There were kids from Blue Mound and kids from Moweaqua, relatives from Decatur and Champaign. There were babies in sun hats and mothers in big dark glasses fanning themselves. Little boys ran in circles behind the bleachers; others like Scott Taylor sat rapt, watching. Heneberry tried to count all the fans but could only guess at their number. A thousand? Two thousand? One thing was sure: Of the twelve hundred residents of Macon, the vast majority were in Peoria on this day.
Farther down, the scouts huddled with their arms crossed, whispering to each other. Heneberry had never seen so many at a game. There was one in a Kansas City Royals shirt, and another with a Yankees hat. Over to the side he recognized Itchy Jones, the coach at Southern Illinois, the biggest baseball power in the state.
Heneberry was supposed to be warming up, but he couldn’t help himself. He had to take it all in for a minute. Either way, win or lose, he knew this was the last game of his high school career; if Macon won, Shartzer would pitch the title game. Heneberry thought about how crazy and wonderful it was that on the last day of his athletic career he got to pitch for a chance to reach the state championship. He tried to soak up the moment, to freeze time, to scan the crowd and imprint each face into his memory.
Then, before he took his first throw, he pulled the small, yellow piece of notepad paper from his back pocket one last time. John knew his father lacked traditional baseball training, but Jack had seen enough of his son’s games to know the type of hitters he could and couldn’t get out. So while the other parents had headed off to celebrate the previous afternoon, ecstatic just to have won one game, Jack had stuck around to watch Lane Tech. Immediately, he’d noticed one player, the Kid with the Big Black Bat, as he described him—Mark Wronkiewicz. “He can really hurt us,” Jack scribbled in a notebook. “Don’t even pitch to him.” He wrote the same thing about John Rockwell, the leadoff hitter who’d tagged the monster shot on the opening day of the tournament.
The best piece of advice, though, was one of the last things Jack said before he handed his son the piece of paper. “Son,” Jack had said, “they really looked terrible against the pitcher’s curveball in the first game. Now, this guy’s a better pitcher than you are, but when he went to his slow curve, they looked sick”—and here he’d placed his hand on John’s shoulder and smiled—“and you have a better slow curveball than he does.”
Nearby, Joe Cook and Bob Fallstrom stood and watched, incredulous. Cook had seen Shartzer pitch a number of times, but neither of the men had seen Heneberry in person. Now, as Heneberry sent a succession of floaters toward Dean Otta during warmups, Cook couldn’t believe what he was seeing. This was Heneberry? The kid couldn’t break a win-dowpane. He was, as Cook remembers, “just sort of lobbing it in there.”
On the other side of the diamond, Wronkiewicz was also warming up. Like everyone on Lane Tech, he sported a bright green and gold uniform and he looked, as Cook remembers, “like he just came out of a showroom.” Tall and muscular with a strong chin, Wronkiewicz threw one fastball after another, popping the mitt on each. Presently, Fallstrom turned to Cook.
