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Back in the game Former baseball player makes trip to Paralympics
Courtesy of WeMedia.com, Official Webcaster of the 2000 Paralympic Games By David Rosner SYDNEY, Australia -- At an age when every day is Old Timers Day, Norm Bass can no longer even grip a baseball, much less blow 100-MPH fastballs past future Hall-of-Famers. Then again, he hasn't had that stuff since his rookie season in the majors -- back before rheumatoid arthritis wrecked his arm at 22. Within three years, Norm Bass -- his fingers too gnarled, his wrists too locked and his elbows too crooked to throw a baseball or catch a football -- was forced into early retirement from not one but two big-league sports. "At 25, they said I couldn't play anymore because of 'an old man's disease,'" he says, shaking his head. "Now at 61, I'm one of the best athletes in the world playing against kids much younger than me." Nearly four decades after rheumatoid arthritis retired him to a rocking chair, Norm Bass is capping his comeback in yet another sport: table tennis. Or, as the Old-Timer in him insists on calling it, "ping-pong." The same right hand that once fired baseballs "harder than Koufax" now can't even grip a ping-pong paddle without first loading up on anti-inflammatory painkillers. In every other sense, though, the gray-haired Paralympic rookie bears a strong resemblance to the wide-eyed major-league rookie pictured on the tattered baseball card he carries around in his wallet. Just two months into his rookie season with the 1961 A's in Kansas City, Bass actually won a place all his own in baseball's Hall of Fame -- albeit on a list of the pitchers victimized by Roger Maris's record-breaking 61 home runs. "I served up home run No. 27 to Maris," he says as proudly as if he'd fanned the Yankee slugger. "It was a fastball low and on the inside part of the plate, my best smoke but right in his wheelhouse. I can still hear the crack. He hit that thing about 500 feet, man. Hit it so hard it went over the fence, over the outer wall behind it onto Brooklyn Avenue, and landed way on top of the barbecue place they had out there." At least he ended the season on a high note by earning his club-leading 11th win and a bonus from cantankerous owner Charles O. Finley for pitching the A's out of a last-place finish on two days' rest. Alas, it would be Bass's last full season in the majors. The next year, he found himself losing a few feet off his fastball, needing longer to loosen up, stiffening up between starts. Finley sent him to the Mayo Clinic, where doctors diagnosed a "sore shoulder" and shot it full of cortisone. The pain would soon return, and so would all the medical euphemisms from "bad arm" to "tired arm." In desperation, Bass turned to some sage advice from an old minor-league teammate: Satchel Paige, the legendary Negro Leaguer still pitching well into his 50s. "The first thing I asked Satch was, 'How were you able to pitch every day for so many years without having a bad arm?'" Bass recalls. "He reached right in the bag and took up a bottle of rattlesnake oil. And he gave it to me. He had a bunch of it. And he said, 'This is what I put on my arm.' I laughed so hard I fell off the seat." But when even Ol' Satch's Miracle Cure failed to work, it was no laughing matter. Bass noticed his arms actually becoming shorter and bent, the pain creeping into every joint in his body. "By '63, I knew I couldn't throw," Bass says. "They released me as just another player with a bad arm." He tried making a comeback the following spring training, but he was washed up at 25 -- a year before Satchel Paige would become the oldest player in major-league history by pitching for the A's at 59. His baseball career over, Bass tried returning to the gridiron for the first time since college, trying out for the Denver Broncos. On ankles so swollen he couldn't run, he downed 16 aspirin a day with a Maalox chaser and took cortisone shots from private doctors right on the sideline. He managed to make the team at defensive back, played one AFL game as the first black professional athlete to play two big-league sports, and was finished. By the time his rheumatoid arthritis was finally diagnosed a year later, he couldn't dress himself or hold a fork. And the arthritis wasn't even the worst of his problems. "When they told me I couldn't play anymore, I just died, mentally and spiritually died," he says. "I became depressed, bitter and evil. I was a bad husband, a bad father. I drove my wife away, got a divorce. My kids were afraid to come out of the bedroom. I was a cold, evil dude. I went through a bad 15 years. I wouldn't watch games, wouldn't talk to old teammates. I used to sleep with the glove, the ball -- now I threw my ball, my glove, my shoes, Satch's rattlesnake oil, everything connected to baseball, into the trash. Put them in the car, drove them to the city dump. Didn't even think of my son -- that he could use my glove ... "Here I was, a major-league athlete, and I couldn't even play catch with my son, couldn't shoot baskets with him like my father had with me. That hurt the most, worse than the arthritis. He'd run around the neighborhood bragging about his Uncle Dick [an All-Pro running back with the Los Angeles Rams] -- my own son didn't even know me as an athlete." Until now. Thanks to table tennis. "Until a few years ago I had never heard of table tennis, only ping-pong," he says. "One day, in the late '70s, I looked through a window in a rec center near my home in Inglewood, California, and saw a guy beating up a little-bitty boy in ping pong, slamming balls upside his head; so I went in and challenged him to a game. I beat him and said to myself, 'Hey, this is a game I can play.' I couldn't bowl, 'cause the ball was too heavy; I couldn't golf, 'cause my arm was bent; but I had to do something because I was an athlete, so I took up ping-pong." With his 1994 retirement from McDonnell Douglas as supervisor of computer operations after 30 years there, he could begin to take ping-pong more and more seriously. Never mind that his progressive arthritis had left him unable make a fist with his deformed fingers or bend either wrist or play without popping painkillers. "Without them, the paddle just falls -- it's too heavy," he says. "I play with a pitcher's mentality. More a junkballer than a fastballer. My opponents are faster and stronger, but I'm smarter. I play ping-pong -- they're playing table tennis." Call it what you will, Bass enters the Paralympics as the world's No. 7 player in his disability classification, which features the least mobility among all those who play standing rather than sitting in a wheelchair. "I feel like I got my life back again," he says. "I thought my playing days were totally finished. I'm getting a brand-new start again as an athlete. It's almost like I'm 19 or 20, because this is the way it started for me. "To have a chance to compete again, to stand up there in front of the flag and represent my country, it brings a little tear to my eye," he says. "I may be old, gray, funny-looking, but I'm not in Sydney just to be here. I'm here to kick somebody's butt." Batter up.
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