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He
has worked at a school, for a department store and in a
warehouse. He has a wife and four children. But 44-year-old
Mike Peterson never turned a double play in the major
leagues, never played point guard in the NBA and never
picked off an
NFL pass. "So
wherever I've been," he says, "people tend to ask the
same thing:
You were on the cover of
Sports
Illustrated. What the heck are you doing
here?"
It was a blessing and a curse, being tagged
kansas schoolboy
marvel. On the bright side, it brought attention to the
Mayberryesque town of Yates Center (pop. 2,178 in 1971), where the
5'10", 155-pound Peterson was a self-effacing
three-sport prodigy at Yates Center High. On the downside,
expectations for Peterson suddenly grew sky-high. "The
same week the article came out I was at a camp in Colorado,
and everyone there wanted to play
me one-on-one in basketball," he says. "If they did
well, they asked why they weren't on the cover. It was as
if I was supposed to be the world's greatest
athlete."
Peterson was merely a very good athlete in a very small
town, which was the point of the SI story. Despite batting
.398, scoring 21.2 points per game and intercepting nine
passes as a
senior,
he was ignored by major-college recruiters. Peterson wound
up playing centerfield and point guard at
nearby Kansas State Teachers College, in Emporia, quitting
basketball after his freshman year to concentrate on
reaching the bigs. "If I'd known then
that I wouldn't make it in either of the sports,"
Peterson says, "I would've stuck with both and just
had as much fun as
possible."
In 1976 he signed with the Seguin (Texas) Toros, a
short-lived independent-league baseball team. The next
year—faced with "the reality of not making it,"
Peterson says—he returned to Emporia, earned his education
degree and has remained in Kansas ever
since. He taught for a year in the Olathe school district,
managed a J.C. Penney distribution center in Lenexa for a
decade and now is a warehouse coordinator in Overland Park
for a company that makes novelties and snacks. He has two
daughters, Nicole,
16, and Amanda, 10, and two stepdaughters, Christy, 25, and
Michelle, 22. He has been married to Jane, his second wife,
for two
years.
"I always felt like I could've done more," says
Peterson, whose only athletic pursuit these days is golf.
"If I scored 25 points, I'd still walk away knowing it
should've been better. Back in high school I really thought
I was going to be a professional
athlete. It used to bother me that I didn't become one.
Now, I'm more at
peace.
—by Jeff PearlmanCover photograph by Rich Clarkson
Issue date: February 23, 1998
Past Editions of Catching Up With...
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