A False Spring

Those who had gone away had learned how to lose. And what they had lost was the first, the purest and the most glorious dream they would ever have. They had lost perpetual youth, innocence, the dream of playing a little boys' game for the rest of their lives as Spahnie did. No dream would ever equal that one, and so no future loss would ever affect them in the way that first one did. When they returned home it was with an indifference to loss and with the grace to shrug off failures in a way winners, and all those who had never lost the dream, could never do.

Thoughts—fears, really—of being given an unconditional release were not of my world in 1960. Such things happened only to others. Still, I checked the bulletin board every morning. All of us did—all, that is, except those 18-year-old youths who had been given a one-way bus ticket to Waycross (they would pay their own way home). They had signed a blank contract that, they were promised, would be filled out at the end of the spring. "After you've showed your stuff," the scouts said.

They all looked alike and they all arrived with a pair of spikes with plaid laces and a baggy gray sweat shirt with the name of their high school stenciled across the front. They gravitated to their kind and were indistinguishable from one another. The coaches and managers and scouts called them "Red" or "Lefty" or "Stud," and when they did, more than one head turned in response. Few of them ever made a club, and their contracts, which were never filed but just kept in a drawer in Dick Cecil's desk, were never filled out. At the end of each spring Cecil would take those contracts from the drawer, pull out one or two, stack the rest in a neat pile, thick as a telephone book, and rip them in half and throw them in a wastebasket. Most of those youths never expected to make a team in the first place. That wasn't why they had come. Their trip to Waycross was a spring vacation in the sun. They treated it as such, walking shirtless about camp so as to get a good tan. They treated their experience without the fear and reverence the rest of us did. They broke the camp rules, drank beer in the barracks, put shaving cream in one another's beds and were so loud and obnoxious that they were a nuisance to all of us serious athletes. Secretly, I envied their indifference, the freedom it gave them.

Breakfast was served from 7 to 8 a.m. I ate early. As I walked toward the cafeteria my ankles were brushed by tall grass still cool and wet from the mist that had blanketed the camp, but now at seven the mist had dissolved in warm sunlight whose heat would soon be oppressive. To my right, far down the road that cut through the swamp, I could see black women moving singly and in pairs toward the camp. They walked on the side of the road close to the swamp, wearing shapeless white dresses that reached almost to their ankles. They carried their lunches in brown bags and walked erectly so as not to topple the large bundles—brightly colored kerchiefs filled with laundry—balanced on their heads. Throughout the day those women moved about the camp. They swept floors, made beds, scrubbed toilets, dispensed food: they hovered, dark shadows, around our illuminated lives.

The cafeteria was a small, square room with picnic tables and benches on either side of an aisle that led to an open kitchen. It was almost deserted at 7 a.m. A few managers sat at one bench nursing mugs of coffee. Farm boys in their youth, they would never shake the habit of rising early. I nodded solemnly as I passed. At another bench sat some of the camp's Spanish-speaking players. Like the managers, they were used to rising with the sun. In their native lands many of them had spent all the daylight hours cutting sugarcane. They would be there still, in the hot fields, if one day a scout in a shimmering aqua suit had not offered them $125 a month to play baseball in the States. Life at Waycross was idyllic for them. They ate two and three helpings at each meal. One morning I watched in fascination as Rico Carty, resembling a massive black figure from a Communist mural of the '30s, heaped food on his tin tray, deposited it on a table and returned to the kitchen for three glasses of Kool-Aid. He lined up the three glasses in front of his tray—grape, lime, orange—and, satisfied, began to eat his breakfast. He never drank from those glasses, but with each forkful of food he looked up and smiled at their beauty.

Black women ladled food from huge rectangular aluminum pans. Except for the strong hint of aluminum, the food was tasteless: hot and cold cereal, limp pancakes, soggy toast piled in a heap, sausage patties, bacon that had been cooked the night before and reheated. And eggs. I always asked for my eggs sunny-side up and endured the extra wait as the women cooked them to order. Scrambled eggs had already been cooked and lay, watery, in one of the pans. My father, a traveler in his youth, had warned me against scrambled eggs in strange restaurants. They would be powdered, he said, and I wondered with what. There was a rumor in camp that the scrambled eggs had been sprinkled liberally with saltpeter, to channel our ardor solely toward a love of the game, I suppose.

Most of the players passed the time between breakfast and the 8:30 start of morning workouts in the recreation room of the main building. We played Ping-Pong, and then a few minutes before eight we would scramble for the dozen folding chairs facing the television set. Those who were unsuccessful stood behind the chairs. Precisely at eight, Debbie Drake, wearing black tights, appeared on the screen. Our bones ached from the previous day's workout, our stomachs were filled with too much breakfast, yet nothing could prevent us from watching Debbie Drake twist and stretch her supple body at eight o'clock in the morning. During a particularly interesting maneuver—Debbie would fling her arms wide, thrust out her chest and exhort the nation's housewives to breathe deeply—we would sigh in unison.

Only the veteran players bypassed Debbie Drake. They had already stood in front of that television set for more years than they cared to remember, and they preferred to play pinochle at a small card table at the other end of the room. They took the same chairs each morning—Archie White had a big easy chair near the window, Dave Eilers another easy chair, Mike Fandozzi a small deck chair facing the TV set, Bobby Stoiko a folding chair across from Fandozzi. They wore backless slippers and white socks, pajama bottoms and flannel shirts and smoked pipes mostly, occasionally cigars. They were in their late 20s and early 30s, married, with children. No longer expecting an invitation to the major league camp at Bradenton, they contented themselves with their springs in Way-cross and summers at Jacksonville or Cedar Rapids. They were organization men who often served as coaches, too, and waited patiently for an offer to manage a team someday (Fandozzi would be my manager at Palatka, Fla. in 1961), or scout, or in some other way cash in on their seniority in the system. Outside in the parking lot it was easy to spot their cars. They drove station wagons already packed to the rafters with utensils and boxes of goods they would need once their wives and children joined them at Cedar Rapids or Jacksonville. They talked frequently of gas mileage and looked with disdain on the young bonus players who went to the parking lot early each morning to wipe the mist and the sap from the pine trees off of their new convertibles.

The locker room across the road from the parking lot had the shape of a capital I. The black and Spanish-speaking players dressed at one end of the I, the white players at the other end, and the trainers' room was the stem between. The floor and the walls of the dressing room were concrete, the floor littered with chunks of red clay that had been dislodged from hundreds of pairs of spikes. The walls perspired and the entire room was dark and cold and damp, smelling of sweat and mildew from the hundreds of jocks, sweat shirts and uniforms hanging up to dry in narrow stalls. They never dried. When you put them on each morning they seemed colder and damper than when you had taken them off. The uniforms were cheap, gray practice uniforms that never fit, shirts billowing like sails and the pants like harem pants. Each player was given a number to sew on the back of his shirt, and they ran as high as the number of players in camp. There was something quite humbling about putting on a shirt with 217 on the back.

Upwards of 200 players would be dressing in that locker room each morning. The room was so crowded, with jocks and sweat shirts hanging in people's eyes and players jostling one another as they tried to lace up their spikes, that inevitably tempers got hot. Seldom did a morning pass without a few loud arguments and an occasional punch. One morning Carty, who was from the Dominican Republic, argued vehemently with a Cuban second baseman over the relative merits of Juan Peron and Fidel Castro as Latin American leaders. Carty, a 6'3", 200-pound former boxer, resolved the argument by flattening the 5'6", 150-pound Cuban with a single punch.