It's been a fun first week here at the Toy Department. Hopefully we did enough to convince you to stick around, or make you feel comfortable enough that you'll kick off your shoes and crack open a beer when you return. Part of the reason we started this blog was to break down the wall that exists between writers and readers, to convince you we're not the grumpy, bitter, failed novelists we're sometimes portrayed as.
To continue that mission, we're reprinting something that ran first on another Sun blog, The Life of Kings (R.I.P.) that we're going to try and turn into a semi-regular feature here. It's called my Greatest Day in Sports Writing. For better or worse, sports writing should be about emotion, whether it makes you angry, makes you laugh, or makes you feel like you were there. Sometimes the best moments of this job never make it into the newspaper, and they end up almost like deleted scenes in our notebooks. Hopefully this will be a place for them to find a home. To get us started, here is Kevin Van Valkenburg writing about playing baseball in the Dominican Republic.
Normally, we media types tend to shy away from telling stories about ... how we tell stories. My father, a prosecutor who also spent much of his life devoted to Montana politics, was always a fan of the folksy saying you probably know well: "Anyone who loves sausage or the law shouldn't watch either as they get made." Sometimes, I think that applies to sportswriting too. For the most part, people want to read stories about athletes, not read our memoirs (unless they're fellow sportswriters). We're not particularly interesting, when you break it down.
But there are exceptions, and hopefully the one I'm about to share is one. It represents my most rewarding day in sportswriting. And up to this point, I'd not written a word about it.
In 2005, just hours after the Orioles sent a bag of magic beans and four cracked bats to the Chicago Cubs for Sammy Sosa, sports editor Randy Harvey asked me if I wanted to hop on a plane to the Santo Domingo and write about what, if anything, Sosa still meant to his countrymen and women down in the Dominican Republic. It was a very cool assignment, and one that immediately made me wish I'd paid more attention during my four years of high school Spanish. (To this day, I can only conjugate Spanish verbs after two or three beers have loosened the cobwebs in my mind, and even then, it's not pretty.)
Having, up to that point, never traveled outside the country on assignment, I relied heavily on the kindness and courage of Sun photographer Liz Malby to guide me. Liz has shot photos in exotic and dangerous locations around the world during her journalism career, including multiple trips to Iraq, and if she sensed my nerves, she didn't let on.
For nearly a week, Liz and I drove through neighborhoods where houses are held together by little more than string, rusty nails and prayer. We sidestepped goats and petted mangy dogs. We got hugs from women so skinny, you wondered how long it had been since they'd had a real meal. It was heartbreaking. And beautiful, oddly enough. When you see third world poverty up close, and try to imagine the daily struggle some of those people endure just to stay alive, it's impossible for it not to feel personal by the time you leave.
One day, after seeing the tiny house that Sammy Sosa bought his mother after he signed his first professional contract ($3,000), we decided to just walk the neighborhoods of San Pedro de Macoris for awhile. We talked to neighborhood moms and waved hello to women hanging clothes to dry in the sun, until we came upon a group of kids, maybe 10 of them, playing baseball with a stick and a rolled up sock.
None of them was older than 11 years old, from what I can tell. Maybe one in three had shoes. I probably spent more on lunch today than they'll spend in a week on food. We sat and watched for several minutes, until one of the kids came over and tried to talk to me, laughing and speaking in rapid Spanish that I couldn't even begin to follow credibly despite my years of schooling. I remember he had big, sad brown eyes and a tee-shirt with holes everywhere. I can't say this for sure, but he looked like the poorest of all his friends. At one point, he ran inside his house, which was constructed of plywood and cardboard, and probably would have fallen over had I leaned on one of the walls, and when he came back out, he extended his hand and offered me two pieces of candy.
It looked like a Dominican Tootsie Roll. We sat on some rocks and chewed, smiling, as the other kids continued to play baseball. Mine tasted like burnt chocolate.
After several minutes, another kid -- a handsome, dark-skinned, lanky, raggedly-dressed 10-year-old with a huge smile -- came around the corner, glove in hand, and he saw Liz's big professional camera and smiled. She raised it up to take a picture of him, and just before the camera clicked, he flashed her the finger.
His buddies burst into laughter. I shook my head and smiled. Soon, the same kid who gave me the finger sat down next to me, and tried to explain in the most elementary Spanish how one makes a "beisbol." You take a piece of sponge, I gleaned, ball it up with string, wrap it inside an athletic sock, then tuck the sock inside itself. As I listened to this, a goat wandered through someone's yard to chew on some trash.
To my surprise, Bird-flipper bounced up from our talk and handed me a "bat", which was little more than a stick, broken off a tree, and stripped of bark. Several kids ushered me to stand at the "plate," (which is literally a dust-covered paper dinner plate) and the kid who gave me the finger ran out the "mound."
Bird-flipper, who I'll call Ace, crouched in his best Pedro Martinez stance. (It was uncanny how much he looked like Martinez to me that day, lanky arms and huge smile.) His friends sensed what was up, and began to chant, "Dominicano! Dominicano! Dominicano!"
I nodded to him, pretended to kick some dirt off my heels with the bat, and got into my best Manny Ramirez crouch. Ace wound up and fired a balled-up-sock fastball my way. For a second, it felt like the entire world had slowed down.
I took a gigantic cut, at least a half a second late, and whiffed like Reggie Jackson, nearly falling over.
The kids erupted.
They high-fived Ace, laughed and pointed, and I stood at home plate, sheepish, shaking my head.
"Dominicano! Dominicano! Dominicano!" they shouted.
Ace hollered to me to get back in the box, and this time he threw me something a little slower, clearly on purpose, the way you might take pity on a friend.
I swung (in balance this time) and, as luck would have it, crushed it. (As much as one can crush a sock, I guess.) Every kid turned to watch as the beisbol went sailing through the blue sky, high above the tree line, until it plummeted back to earth, onto the roof of a nearby shack.
Again, the kids erupted.
They high-fived me this time, and then urged me to run around the "bases," which were paper plates and ragged dish towels. When I touched home plate, they began to chant, "Americano! Americano! Americano!"
Ace was laughing. He walked over and gave me a high five as I touched home.
I thought about those kids the entire plane ride home. The Sosa profile I wrote was fine. My bosses liked it, but reading it now, it feels like nothing special.
But I still have that other piece of candy that the kid with sad brown eyes handed me, sitting on my bedroom dresser.
Sun photo: Liz Malby
