An Irrevocable Condition: First Pitch in Oxford
By: Martin Bihl
Tags: Baseball, Ole Miss, Family, University Of Mississippi, Twto

Fly away home, little boy. Fly from school and the people you don’t know and the games you don’t understand to a television transmission from inside the ivy-covered walls of Wrigley Field. When the old stadium still did not have lights, so they played their games during the day. When even the World Series was played during the day. When Florida did not have a professional team but Montreal did. Fly to the warm and reassuring Windsor-knotted voice of Jack Brickhouse. To the inexplicable Hall of Fame anger of Leo Durocher and the studied uncouth of the bleacher bums. To teach yourself this game and insert it into your consciousness during dull afternoons, because, if truth be told, during these pre-cable, Nixonian days, it’s the only thing on television after school that even a five-year-old can watch without losing his mind. Fly away to all of this to grow up in America in this way.

Now drive, little boy, out of the years, out of the City of Brotherly Love, past old Fort Duquesne, across the good river and the crossroads and onto the prairie to the gateway. Then down through the cradle of the civil war, past Elvis and the Lorraine into the Delta, to prove to yourself again that the old man was right, that the past is not dead, it’s not even past. To where Meredith walked. And Manning played. And to where your ninety-year old uncle will throw out the first pitch tonight at his alma mater.

I am back in Oxford again, back after many years, for a family occasion, as they are all always family occasions. The last time was to watch my cousin play his last college baseball game. Decades have spun past since that spring day, marriages and families and deaths and lives and now I am back, to watch his father, who also attended this school but in those pre-civil rights days, to watch him take the field, finally.

Because it was supposed to happen before. Two years ago he began warming up, amidst the snow and ice in what passes for spring in Chicago, his hometown. Getting in shape because he refused to be like the other alumni he’d seen throw out pitches. Old withered half-men standing nearly at the batter’s box, making some pathetic, arthritic lob that the catcher has to field like some damn shortstop on the second or third hop. He was going to throw from the pitcher’s mound, and send a strike into the catcher’s mitt that you’d hear in centerfield. He was going to throw from the pitcher’s mound, or he was going to die trying.

Which is how he ended up in the hospital. And why now, two years later, I am making this cross-country pilgrimage to this dark county of the Old Moster’s vision, north of Parchman, and east of the crossroads. Where the air in April is sweet and heavy with the scent of magnolia and wisteria. My uncle is down there on the field already, in front of the Ole Miss dugout, warming up, throwing to players. I watch him talking to the kids around him as he throws, as easy and smooth as if he’s been doing it all his life. Which he has, of course.

This is not his first time back of course, not by a long stretch. Many is the time he will load up his big car and drive down for golf, for camaraderie, for the games. He used to stop off in Vicksburg and see his old pal Kayo Dotley who set football records for Ole Miss and did a stint with the Bears in the Papa Bear years. My mom is always getting a call from him while he’s on his way south, chastising her for not coming with him. Hell, he even has season tickets to the baseball games.

Just around the time I begin to worry that he’s about to pitch himself out, the handlers begin to direct him out to the pitcher’s mound. My cousin walks with him as the Public Address Announcer begins recounting his sporting life to the eleven thousand who have packed Swayze Field. Of his feats here at Ole Miss. Of his years as an umpire and referee in the Big Ten. Of the accolades and the awards he accumulated over his ninety years. And then the PA mentions the tryouts with the major league teams and his life for a few years in the minors, and I am reminded of a family story, which may be apocryphal, or which may not. The story is this.

After my uncle graduated from Ole Miss, he attracted the attention of some big league teams. Mostly around the Midwest because this was mid-century America when geography was destiny. And he was invited to try out. So he did, because you do. And he did well. Fielding, hitting, running the bases. I don’t know, maybe I’m embellishing here. But baseball stories are like fishing stories, so let it be. He was doing well. Not well enough to be a lock, but well enough to be a part of the team.

And then this kid gets up and starts hitting batting practice. And my uncle is watching. And these balls are just sailing out of the park. Tape measure stuff. And my uncle looks at the kid and he says to himself, well, if that’s the standard, I’m done. Because I’m not in that kid’s league. So he packs up and heads home and marries my aunt and begins his life.

And it’s quite a thing, to have the clarity to stand in the middle of your dream and see a greatness beyond your own. For it is one thing to see it from the sidelines, as the spectator, with no skin in the game. I’ll give you an example. I recall watching my cousin — my uncle’s son who now stands on the infield as my uncle throws out the first pitch — play his last game at this very university when he was a senior. All the players on both sides were good — you don’t play Division I anything without having game. But there was one kid on the opposition, a shortstop, and you could just tell, just by looking at him, that this kid was Major League stuff. It was that obvious. And then when he played, the way he moved on the infield, the way you could see him seeing the game, you knew. It wasn’t posturing. It wasn’t bravado. It was just a different level. Clear as day.

So I understand being able to see that, because I saw it in that shortstop. But it’s different, it takes a terrific level of self-knowledge and awareness and even confidence in who you really are, to see it in yourself. To measure yourself against someone else, and, without jealousy or bitterness, with only the appreciation of a true professional and with a profound level of integrity, to find yourself wanting. And to accept that.

But here’s the thing. The kid my 22-year-old, post-graduate uncle was watching effortlessly pound the ball over the wall? That kid was Frank Robinson. Frank “only guy to win the MVP in both leagues” Robinson. Frank “First Black Manager in baseball” Robinson. The guy who hit for the triple crown in 1966. Who was number four in home runs when he retired (behind Ruth, Aaron and Mays). Who was elected to the Hall of Fame on the first ballot. That’s who my uncle was watching. Who made my uncle say, well, maybe not. Maybe not me.

Later, as we sat in the stands, watching Ole Miss beat the stuffing out of the Gators, I said to him, “You know, there are a lot of guys who had great careers in baseball who weren’t as good as Frank Robinson.” I said, “Hell, there are a lot of guys in the damn Hall of Fame who weren’t as good as Frank Robinson.” I said, “You could have played. You still could have played pro ball.”

He just looked out at the field, and so I watched him look at the game. And I thought about the family he started, and the life he’d had, the ups and downs, the slings and arrows. And I thought about the family he made out of everyone he knew. The neighbors, the guys he has breakfast with every morning up in Chicago. The guys in his reffing crew. All the players who played in all the games he’d reffed. I thought about those kids he’d warmed up with before throwing out his pitch — kids who’d lined up to shake his hand after he did, dozens of them, every one of them wanting to show respect. I thought about the people here in this stadium who know him, who call him by name, a good six hundred miles from his home.

And I thought, he made his choice. We make the choices we make because of who we are when we make them. And these choices don’t just end up defining us, they are defined by us. And they tell us — even without our knowing it at the time — who we are. Who we will be. So that in a way, our lives are lived to decode what we already knew.

And look, I’m not foolish enough to think that baseball is a metaphor for anything. It’s a game, a child’s game we grow up with and play, some of us. But it can be a reminder. A reminder of the often circular nature of things. You don’t watch as many games as some of us have watched, you don’t play as many games as some of us have played, without admitting that that circadian rhythm of leaving home and returning home resonates in some deep parts of your soul.

The mistake, perhaps, is to think that the circle has to lead you just to home. Or to be so damn simplistic about what home can be. Must be. Sure, it can be a geographic place. The territory you have always lived in, like the Chicago of my uncle and my cousin. Or it could be where your friends are. Or where your comfort is. Or where your past was. Or where your future is. Or maybe, just maybe, it’s where your freedom lies.

I think about this last part as Florida makes its last out of the inning, as Ole Miss comes in to bat. As the PA begins to play the at once weirdly incongruous and yet ironically relevant “Rebel, Rebel”. I get up and shake my uncle’s hand. “You’re not leaving, are you?” he says with a worried look.

“No, I’m not leaving” I tell him. “It’s just time to go home.”