End Of Innocence

Bruce Kison, the Pirates' 6'4" baby-faced pitcher, is hunched over the steering wheel of his Volkswagen, his knees jacked up around his ears, his eyes glassy and wide, his pink face pressed close to the windshield and splashed with the green lights and shadows shooting past. The car is traveling through the bowels of Pittsburgh's Squirrel Hill Tunnel at over 80 miles per hour in pursuit of a police escort that Kison has lost but whose sirens are echoing off the walls around him. "I've never speeded before," he says, sliding Santana's recording of Black Magic Woman into the stereo tape deck. The music is barely audible over the strung-out whine of the car's engine and the echoing sirens. Kison begins to sing, "She's a black magic woman and she's tryin' to make a devil out of me." His car runs up on the tail of a blue Galaxie. Without missing a note or stabbing the brakes, Kison jerks to the left. There is the shriek and smell of burning rubber, and the Volkswagen, tottering on two wheels, shoots into the left lane, cutting off a Cadillac whose driver nails a palm to his horn. Without looking back, Kison sticks his left hand out the window and extends the middle finger from a clenched fist. He raises the volume of the stereo to full blast. The Cadillac horn blows angrily. Kison sings louder. The sirens grow closer. The walls of the tunnel quake, rumble, seem about to fissure, and the noise so terrifies drivers up ahead that they swerve into the right lane and stop in order to avoid this possessed little Volkswagen hurtling by like a misshapen, misguided missile whose pilot, gone mad, is now—at precisely 8:03 p.m., Sunday, Oct. 17, 1971—33 minutes late for his wedding.

A few hours before, Kison had stood in the visiting team's locker room at Baltimore's Memorial Stadium, a towel around his waist, contemplating the chaos around him. The room was packed almost to a standstill with writers, photographers, baseball executives, well-wishers and players celebrating the Pirates' World Series victory. Television cameras were planted in the center of the room, their cables slung overhead like black clotheslines. On a brilliantly lighted platform Roberto Clemente, Steve Blass and Manager Danny Murtaugh were being interviewed by a sleek and nervous-looking Sandy Koufax. Behind them, players jostled for position to be the next interviewed. Photographers, with cameras held high overhead, paused where there were clusters of writers and aimed lenses down at the sweaty, grinning faces of the men being questioned. The reporters moved from player to player in a pack. They pressed their subjects against lockers and recorded in notebooks such comments as: "You can't take anything away from the Orioles. They're a hell of a team"; "Yes, I certainly do think the best team won"; "This is the greatest bunch of guys I've ever been with. The greatest, know what I mean?" The Pirate players not being interviewed or photographed, particularly those whose contributions to the win were negligible, seemed to celebrate the most exuberantly. They slapped open palms, hugged and tousled one another's hair and, when the champagne arrived, they doused anyone within range. Standing by his stall, Kison said to a friend, "I told you to wear old clothes in case we won. You'd better put your coat in my locker. It sure seems an awful waste. I'd rather drink it."

While the celebration swelled, Kison dressed and slipped out of the locker room. A police escort led him through a cheering crowd, across Oriole Boulevard, behind a brick high school to an open field where a helicopter waited to take him and his best man, Bob Moose, to Friendship Airport. There, a needle-nose Lear Jet, provided by Jack B. Piatt, a friend of Pirate Broadcaster Bob Prince and the president of Mill-craft Industries, stood ready to fly Kison, Moose and his wife Alberta, who was eight months pregnant, to Pittsburgh for Kison's evening wedding to Anna Marie Orlando. It was 6:30 p.m. by the time Moose reached the helicopter, weaving unsteadily. His gray baseball uniform was drenched with champagne and his Pirate cap sat on his head at a Howdy Doody angle.

The blades clattered as the helicopter rose slowly. It hovered above the ground and then began moving forward, blowing the tall grasses flat against the ground until they looked almost white in the late afternoon sun. The helicopter rose noisily over telephone wires, trees and houses, until it was above scooped-out Memorial Stadium. It circled the stadium once, twice, each time climbing higher, before finally spinning free of the stadium's orbit. The Plexiglas windows vibrated as gusts of wind buffeted the craft. With an agonizing but relentless slowness the helicopter moved toward the red-orange sunset.

The flight to Pittsburgh lasted 22 minutes. As soon as the jet was airborne, Jack Piatt, an immaculately dressed man with graying hair, opened the bar and poured drinks. He offered a toast to Kison's wedding. Then he asked what was happening back in the Pirate locker room.

"Nothing much," said Kison.

For the remainder of the flight Piatt extolled the virtues of his Lear Jet. "It only costs $800,000," he said, pouring second drinks for himself, Kison, Mrs. Moose and her husband, who was falling asleep against her shoulder. "It can climb at 6,000 feet a minute and it cruises at 525 miles an hour. There's no sense of flight in one of these babies." Outside, the plane hung silent and, it seemed, motionless over a field of clouds. The sky was a pale, diminishing blue. Shafts of sunlight hit the left wing and exploded into silver slivers that so blinded the passengers they were forced to draw the curtains and darken the cabin.

When the plane began circling Pittsburgh airport, Piatt brushed back his cuff and checked his watch—7:12 p.m. "God bless Millcraft!" he declared. Kison seemed unsure of the proper response. He thanked Piatt for the trip. "You ought to get one of these, Bruce," the executive said, gesturing toward the Lear. "It's the only way to go." There was not a trace of facetiousness in Piatt's remark.

Bruce Kison had arrived—in baseball if not yet at his wedding.

In the summer of 1970 Kison was struggling along with a sore arm and a 4-4 record in Waterbury, Conn, in the AA Eastern League when he happened to be picked by SPORTS ILLUSTRATED as the subject of an article (June 14,1971 )on minor league life. From the day of his first interview to the end of the 1970 season he did not lose another game for Waterbury. Last year, after being sidelined most of the spring with an infected tendon in his pitching hand, Kison won 10 of 12 starts with the Charlestown Charleys of the AAA International League. He was called up to Pittsburgh just before the All-Star break. At the time, the Pirates were four games ahead in their divisional race but suddenly their pitching talent (which never was very thick) had been thinned when Bob Moose left for military duty. Kison won his first two starts for the Bucs, the second a two-hit shutout. He was 3-2 after a month of starts, before running into a streak of bad luck during which he pitched creditably enough but managed only losses or no decisions. Kison finished the regular season with a 6-5 record, a 3.41 ERA. It was said the very tall, 178-pound sidearmer needed to develop greater stamina and another pitch before he would become a winner in the majors.