Mike Peterson, High School Phenom

Augusts 9, 1971

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."