For a while, though, baseball became the be-all, end-all for me. I played a little harder after that moment when I snagged that major league ball from the White Sox game. I focused more when I played. I did my best to play the best I could. I tried to recapture that feeling I had when I knew that ball was mine. I tried to apply that focus to every hit, every catch, every throw. We had great coaches who talked to us kids like we were all champions in the making. Following their lead, absorbing all of that encouragement, over the course of a couple of years I became the best hitter on the team. I tried to emulate major league players in the way I stood at the plate, the way I wore my hat, the way I dove for the ball without worrying about getting hurt or getting grass stains on my uniform. My mom was always there to wash it for me anyway, drying it on the line so it would be spotless but stiff as a board when I went to put it on the next time. Man, did I love that uniform. I always looked forward to getting a new one, and especially that new hat, every year. That was a big deal.
My hard work and focus paid off, too, when I made the All-Star team. It felt great to actually get rewarded for my efforts. In fact, my memories of playing baseball are almost entirely good ones . . . at least until I was twelve or thirteen. Something happened as we moved up from Little League to PONY League. It became more about the competition and less about the game. Playing on that level, dealing with coaches who yelled at everyone and put you down whenever you messed up, just made the whole thing lose some of its shine. I learned a lesson about the value and importance of building a great team when we were playing for PONY League championship. If we won, we'd go to the PONY League World Series. I was so pumped up at the possibility, the other team could have put a grown-up major league pitcher on the mound throwing knuckleballs and I
still
would have hit 'em out of the park!
Unfortunately, not everyone shared that passion. I was playing one of my best games ever, but it was down to the final inning and we were down by one with two outs. I found myself on third base, waiting for the chance to run home and tie it up. I knew we could win this thing! My teammate got up to the plate, and I knew all he had to do was hit that ball and I'd score. I thought he had the same passion I did. I thought he saw the glory that was so close you could taste it. I thought wrong. The kid's body language was flat as he pulled the bat up and let it flop, lazily, on his shoulder. His posture said it all. He'd given up hope. He'd lost the fire. That one guy was about to blow it for the whole team. We all cheered him on, yelling, screaming for our chance at the World Series.
It didn't work. When he struck out without even swinging, I cried like a baby.
Assuming everyone on the team shared the same level of passion was a mistake. And seeing my young baseball career end on a down note was certainly not what I had dreamed.
But that's okay. It was glorious while it lasted. And the lessons I learned would serve me well as I headed into high school and turned my attention to another sport: football.
Growing up in the Midwest, you start hearing
about this place called Notre Dame before you can talk. It's a Catholic thing. You weren't even sure what college really meant, but the idea of it, the myth of it, the legend loomed large: if you were Catholic, you automatically had this dream of Notre Dame planted in your head. And if you went to Notre Dame, you were
somebody
.
The closest we ever got to that exalted place was listening to the voice of Lindsey Nelson as he broadcasted the Notre Dame replays on TV on Sunday mornings during football season. Watching those replays was like a second religion in my family, and for my dad, his passion for the Blue & Gold ran deeper than even his love of the Yankees. My dad always loved the underdog, and when you look at the kids who went to Notre Dame, they were ethnic kids like usâthe Germans and Polish and Irish who were raised at a time when that simple ethnic distinction made them underdogs in America, no matter how gifted or talented they were. Those were the guys who played there. Black-and-white visions of that stadium filled my head as a kid, as did images of “Touchdown Jesus,” the infamous, giant, skyscraper-size mural of Our Lord Jesus Christ with his arms held up toward heaven in a near-perfect reflection of a ref's touchdown signal, which went up in 1964. It was always visible in the distance over that stadium wall, above the tunnel through which those gods of the gridiron ran out onto the field for each game. They really did seem like gods too. They were bigger and faster than normal guys, and they showed more finesse and expertise with the ball than any normal human being had a right to.
In my mind, Notre Dame seemed like a far-off kingdom. As far away as heaven. The very idea of it was lofty and illustrious, almost mystical, certainly mysterious. For all of those reasons, the school and the football team resonated more like a fairy tale than something that could be found here on earth.
Because of my interest in football, and partially because my dad was so excited to finally have a boy old enough to play, I wound up attending the very same high school my dad went to. I could have gone to the brand-spanking-new Catholic school, Providence High (where all of my younger siblings would go), that had just been built across town, but when dad found out they were offering soccer instead of a football program, he marched me right in to see the priests at Joliet Catholic, housed in a big old brick building that used to be called De La Salle High School back when my dad attended.
Football was a major part of Joliet culture, in that “Friday Night Lights” way. High school teams played every Friday during the season (yes, under the lights) at Joliet Memorial Stadium on West Jefferson Street, the main road through town that's otherwise dotted with car dealerships and shopping centers. Traffic would back up with all the spectators trying to get in. And when our team won, Joliet Catholic would shine a light in the school's tower, basically the highest point in all of Joliet, since the school sits atop The Hill district. You could see that beacon for miles.
As the district name suggests, that old, somewhat ornate brick school was located at the crest of a hill right up off the west bank of the Joliet River, a stinky, polluted body of water that cut along the edge of downtown, which itself was sliced up by the overlapping, intersecting railroad tracks that dominate the landscape, some sweeping people in and out of Joliet Union Station and some carrying freight and coal. As we got older, we'd go cruising in that downtown area just past the school grounds, checking out all of the girls who seemed perfectly happy to walk around and be checked out. When we were fortunate enough to have saved some money from a car-washing job or mowing lawns (a dollar a day, if we were lucky), maybe we'd buy a movie ticket and catch a show at the beautiful old Rialto Theater, diagonally across from the library where we'd sometimes come to study. And, of course, every kid dreamed that someday they might have their name and picture painted on the side of the big train trestle, which someone turned into a “wall of fame” for Joliet athletes. (Interestingly enough, flashing forward a few decades, my brother Francis's picture is up there. He became a renowned weight-lifting champ. My picture is not. I'm not a champion athlete at all. And I'm okay with that. I'm great with it, actually! More on that later . . . )
Like any big town divided by tracks, there was a good side of the tracks and a bad side of the tracks in Joliet. It's something that persists to this day. The south side is some pretty rough territory, ripe with crime and poverty. And it's down past that bad side of town, just over the line into the town of Rockdale, where the power plants rise up like concrete cities, looming over the landscape, letting young men know there's a job waiting right there when they get out of school.
School for me didn't get any easier as I entered high school. In fact, I pushed back against learning even more than I had as a young kid, with good reason. Before I was enrolled, the school's principal, an educated Carmelite priest who was widely respected in Joliet and beyond, took one look at my entrance exams and told my father, “We've got to put your son in slower learning classes. Your son's not that smart.” He said it in the office while I sat right there, and he said it in such a way that it sounded to me like an unalterable fact. To tell my parents in private would have been one thing, but to say it in front of me like that? It hurt. It made me angry. And when you're told you're “not that smart” by an authority figure with that much power and influence, why wouldn't you believe it? It's no different than my father telling me my ears would fall off in church. When someone you look up to speaks, you tend to listen. You tend to take it in. And that can cause a whole world of hurt, which those authority figures may not even realize they're laying on you.
I don't blame that priest; in the same way I don't blame my parents. They weren't purposefully trying to hurt me. He wasn't doing it to be mean-spirited (at least I don't think he was). There simply wasn't the same sort of awareness of kids' feelings in those days that we have today, and speaking frankly about the rigors and expectations of education right in front of the child in question was just the way things were done in those schools.
The real problem comes after those words are spoken and a plan is put into action. Then the hurt gets worse. They put you in the slow classes, which leads to you getting picked on and made fun of, which leads to all kinds of self-esteem problems. Heck, I'd carry a science book in my hands on the way to wood shop so the other kids wouldn't know where I was going. I never understood this whole elite system of learning that teachers professed. How could I have any kind of a self-image when teachers all made it clear that the smart kids went to college? It confused me. No one ever pointed out the fact that we need good woodworkers, good electricians, good mechanics. It was downright embarrassing to be placed in shop class while everyone else studied science and math and set their sights on various universities. Why couldn't they have focused on my strengths? Focused on the stuff I knew how to do? Showed me how to make a career out of that? How to be inspired to learn more, rather than forced to learn less? I would sit there and cry my eyes out at times. “Why can't I learn?” It would just destroy me. And what does that lead to? Nothing but problems.
I wound up hanging with a tough crowd in high schoolâa group of guys who were reckless, who liked to get into fights. It gave me a sense of belonging, in that other students looked up to me, or feared me. I was one of the “bad boys” who would head down the hill by the Joliet River after school and get into a brawl with some kids from another school, usually from the south side of the tracks. There were probably only two handfuls of real fights I participated in, but two handfuls is a lot in four years!
Amazingly, my fighting rarely got me into trouble. I was scrappy and usually won. I came home looking no more beat up than I might have after a hard football practice. A black eye. Swollen knuckles. Yes, I played that hard! Football was an outlet for my pent-up aggressions, just like fighting. So mom and dad never noticed.
Strangely enough, the one time my dad intervened, he saved my life.
The guys I hung around with the most were named George and Ralph. Ralph was probably my best friend. We were both short and shared a similar sense of humor. I could pick on him, and he could pick on me, and it didn't mean anything 'cause we were so much alike. It was the essence of great camaraderie. I liked his family too, and so did my mother, who rightly didn't approve of too many of my friends in those days. Of course, none of them realized what a risk-taker Ralph was. He was just a real reckless guy, especially when it came to driving.
There was this one kid we hung around with junior year, a guy we all called Big Nick. And Big Nick got into a lot more fights than I did. Probably for many of the same reasons: he was a smart guy, but had problems. He didn't fit in. He wasn't a good student. It's the same cycle with almost every one of these types of kids, right?
One day Big Nick got drawn into a fight with a gang from another school. The whole thing was set up ahead of time, and he wanted me to come join him. “Come on! Let's go fight these guys! I'll pick you up!” he said. I couldn't tell my dad I was going out to get in a gang fight, of course, so I tried to sneak out of the house that particular night, and my dad caught me coming out of the window. For some reason, he happened to be right outside my window fixing something on the house when I stuck my butt out there.
“Where are you going?” he said.
“Nowhere,” I answered.
“Get yourself back in that house, right now!”
Big Nick went ahead without me. I remember sitting in school the next day when word started to get around. Somewhere in the middle of that brawl, another kid hit Nick in the head with a rock. Nick was dead. I sat there stunned, not only in sadness at the thought that this guy I palled around withâand was just hanging out with the day beforeâwas gone. Actually
gone
. But I was also stunned by the simple fact that it could have been me. I could have died too. If my dad hadn't been in the right place at the right time, my life could have ended right there. All because I was sneaking around and doing stuff I knew darn well I shouldn't have been doing in the first place.
If a sudden death isn't enough to stop you in your tracks, I'm not sure what is. But it didn't stop me. I kept hanging around the same crowd. I'd still go out cruising with George and Ralph, getting into whatever trouble we could find. By trouble, I mean like the time we got caught egging George's girlfriend's house. It was pretty innocent stuff for the most part. They were both good guys from good families. They really were. But we were all just filled with so much of that teenage angst, or whatever you want to call it. I guess it's to be expected. I wasn't old enough or experienced enough to pay attention to the signs that God was putting right in front of me.