Kid Comes Back (10 page)

Once in a close practice game a rookie first baseman, who had been one of Raz’s victims, tried to return the compliment. Razzle had made his first and almost his only base hit of their Florida stay, and came triumphantly to first. It was in the ninth, with the score tied, and he represented the winning run. In the box the pitcher went through various motions, picking up the rosin bag, tossing it carelessly to the ground. Then, standing off the rubber, he assumed his pitching pose, watching first base over one shoulder. Raz, however, remained anchored on the sack. At last he turned to the rookie beside him with scorn.

“You young busher, don’t you know Raz Nugent
invented
that play?”

R
OY SAT ALONE
in his hotel room reading the local afternoon newspaper which he had just purchased downstairs in the lobby. Flipping it open to the sports pages, he was suddenly attacked by a most unpleasant feeling.

Better count Roy Tucker out. With Swanson’s arrival in camp, Spike Russell has benched him temporarily. Besides being in a batting slump, Roy apparently has not as yet fully recovered from his army injury. It could be that the Brooks will be obliged to go through the season without their ace gardener; but judging by the first few weeks of practice here, it looks as if Lester Young will make the boys in the center field stands at Ebbets Field forget the Kid from Tomkinsville ever existed. Les will bat almost as well, will field better, and steal more bases in a month than Roy would in a year.

Count Roy Tucker out! He threw the newspaper across the room. Steal more bases in a month than I will in a year, hey! What a laugh! Now he knows that’s not true. Why does he say those things? They’re all the same, these guys, anything for an angle.

Then he began to think back a little; to recall incidents that were unimportant at the time, but might add up to something; Casey’s brief greeting the other day as he turned toward Young beside the batting cage; the newspapermen surrounding the rookie in the lockers every day after practice; the daily stories about him, his photographs spearing liners in the field, sliding into second, or batting against Raz. It did add up to something, and that something was not reassuring.

Roy rose in annoyance, his aching hip angry and protesting at the sudden movement. It seemed to be acting up worse of late. Slowly he walked across the room, stooping to pick up the newspaper on the floor. His position was exactly opposite the full-length mirror on the door of the bathroom, and suddenly he saw himself for the first time. Not Roy Tucker. Not the speediest man in the National League. But an ancient gent with an expression of pain upon his face, unable to stoop, bending over awkwardly toward the floor with a stiffness dreadful to behold.

Once again he leaned over and tried to pick up that newspaper, watching the mirror closely as he did so. Then he turned and sat down on the bed, trembling. The discouragement, this mind struggling in a body that was incapable of responding, seemed more than he could bear. He felt suddenly nearer the breaking point than any time since Fried Spratt had crashed in France.

Now he could feel their pity and understand it. No wonder! No wonder Casey and the boys all let me alone. Good grief, they see me as I am. This is how I look to other folks. For the first time he saw himself as he was, for the first time appreciated the extent of his physical handicap. He sat on the edge of the bed, quite unable to move for a long time, thinking.

Why, that’s how I seem, that’s the way I must look to the sportswriters and the other boys on the club. For the first time he realized what they must be saying about him. Poor old Tuck! There’s a guy trying to do something he isn’t fit for. They were all watching his struggle, anxious to help. Yet anxious also to say: “Brother, you can’t do it. Why not pack up?”

Roy hardly slept at all that night. Either the shock reacted in some way upon the angry nerve in his leg, or else it was getting worse, and rapidly. His hip ached steadily, so intensely that sleep was quite out of the question. Long before light entered the room, he had decided to go north immediately and get fixed up once and for all. As dawn broke, the pain up and down his leg was more than he could endure. Trying to get some aspirin from the bathroom, he discovered that he was unable to put his foot to the ground, and it was necessary to hop across the room on one foot like a cripple. Once he was in bed again, his tortured tossing woke Swanny, his roommate. At seven Swanny got worried and insisted on calling the house physician, who arrived half an hour later. By then, Roy was actually writhing in agony on the floor, with Spike Russell and Swanny trying vainly to do something to help him.

The doctor took one quick look, felt the leg gingerly, asked a few curt questions and then, stepping to the telephone, called the local hospital for an ambulance. The three men tried to dress him. It hurt too much, so they pulled his bathrobe over his pajamas and rolled him in a couple of blankets, groaning and protesting. The weight of the blankets, the slightest touch on his leg, sent spasms of pain up and down the nerve. When the stretcher came, it took the three men and two orderlies ten minutes to get him upon it. Then they took him downstairs in the freight elevator.

Through the veil of suffering which engulfed him, he saw the scared faces of his teammates in the halls, felt the agonizing jolting as they lifted him from the elevator and carried him along a corridor, out to the street where a small crowd had collected around the waiting ambulance. They slid the stretcher onto the racks, and rolled through the quietness of early morning to the Fisher Memorial Hospital.

Roy Tucker did not put his foot to the ground for over a month.

L
IKE THE WORLD
of France and the Gestapo, this was another and different world. All thought of the outdoors and baseball was as far away as the Army and Europe. Every bit of Roy’s effort and attention in that lonely hospital room was upon one thing: pain, enduring it, alleviating it, conquering it. The job before him was to conquer pain; the sooner he could start the struggle the better. The first day the doctor gave him some dope to permit sleep. Yet always, however he lay and whatever way he turned, pain was in the background.

“I’m going to try ultraviolet rays on your leg,” said the doctor. “Had some unusually good luck with it on several patients, and it certainly can’t do you any harm. Suppose you start with two minutes—that’s if you can stand it. Two minutes on your hip, your thigh, and then have it moved down to the calf of your leg. Nurse, I’d like you to get that lamp up the first thing tomorrow morning, please.”

So twice every day they wheeled the lamp into his room, twice daily the nurse stood timing him, turning the heat on his thigh, and moving it down to his calf at the end of two minutes. Far from stopping the pain, the lamp seemed to intensify it. At first he felt the agony was impossible to stand. And the treatment seemed to have no effect whatever on the constant ache he suffered during the remainder of the day. Then about the fourth morning he noticed that while the lamp was on, the pain was less intense, at least it did not start until after the first minute.

Progress. That was all he groped for, progress, progress of any sort, anything to show he was not going back. If only he could see some advance, if only he was sure he was not going backward, he felt he could endure the pain. He was told to increase the heat to three minutes on each spot. Under that burning torture from the lamp, it was necessary to lie with tight lips, clutching the steel bars at the head of the hospital bed, to summon all his strength and resolution to last out the daily ordeal. But the fact that he could endure it gave him confidence, a deep-seated something no pain could rock. He was determined to come back, he willed to come back, he knew he would, he must come back. In what way, he had no idea, but some way, somehow.

A sick athlete is a forgotten athlete, especially in professional sport. Only a short time before Roy had been news: a war veteran returned to the game, and therefore in the headlines. Now things were different. In this new world he was left alone. Here he was merely an occasional odd item at the bottom of some sportswriter’s daily file. “Roy Tucker continues to make slow progress in the Fisher Memorial Hospital here in town... Les Young had three for three in the practice game against the Reds in Tampa this afternoon... Two aspiring rookies showed up in camp today.”

Roy never read the sports pages now. Baseball had no interest for him. All that was in the other world, the world which no longer existed. To think about returning to the team was too fantastic, too far away even to consider; his energy and efforts were needed for something far more important—progress. First he had to learn to sit up in bed, little by little, slowly and painfully. A minute, a minute and a half, two minutes, then he would slump down again, the pain forcing sweat out upon his forehead. The dose of the lamp gradually increased, and the doctor, who said nothing and promised nothing, nodded with approval at each visit in the morning.

Only a few of his old friends on the club bothered to drop in and see him: Swanny and Fat Stuff and Spike Russell. Once Bones Hathaway, the star pitcher just out of the service, came in. Roy was pleased and touched. MacManus sent him a huge bunch of flowers and every week a large basket of fruit, but stayed away himself. So March passed, the sun grew warmer, and the final games of the Grapefruit League were held in Florida, as the teams prepared to journey north, playing each other in exhibition matches en route.

The last day of March was a big day for Roy. He sat up in a chair for the first time, only four minutes to be sure, but long enough to gobble a hasty lunch. This triumph was not accomplished without suffering; it left him gasping in pain on the bed afterward. Yet it was progress that could be seen, measured, which was all he asked. The pain he accepted. At least he was not going backward. Each morning the lamp was wheeled in. Baring his leg, he would turn over on his stomach and lie holding tightly to the bars at the head of the bed.

“Think you can stand it today? Can you take that extra minute this morning?” asked the nurse, watching his fists clench on the bars of the bedstead.

“Sure I can take it. Go on.”

Once he had wondered whether, if the Gestapo had tried anything, he could have endured physical torture. Now he knew.

In this different world he found it was necessary to learn to walk all over again. He was a baby and walking was a difficult, almost impossible task. At first he would hop to the bathroom on his good leg, then gradually the left foot came gently to the ground, one step today, two steps tomorrow, three steps the next day before that agonizing pain started creeping up his leg and thigh. And every morning the lamp, for fifteen minutes now, on leg, hip, and calf. It was the doctor one morning who noticed the steel bars at the head of the bed bent inward where in his agony under the intense heat of the lamp Roy had held to them.

By the middle of April, he was able and anxious to go north. The trip by car to Jacksonville and by plane to New York was exhausting, and sent him to bed on his arrival at the hotel where the club stayed. There he remained for several days recuperating, until at last he was able to hobble down to a taxi and so to the hospital to Dr. Davison’s office.

The surgeon in his long white coat sat listening intently to Roy’s story. He was concentrating on everything said, asked few questions, simply nodded occasionally, a frown on his forehead, his hands clasped, thinking. Then he rose. “Come into the next room.”

Again Roy lay on the now familiar table while the doctor examined him carefully. “I was afraid of this... yes... sore there? It is... h’m... and the hip too, here?” For a long while he went over his back, lifted his leg ever so gently. Then gravely he said: “All right. You can dress now.”

Roy dressed and hobbled back into the surgeon’s office, despair in his heart. Is this the end? Am I washed up? Am I through with baseball?

The surgeon looked straight at him. Bad news. Roy felt it in every gesture, in his glance, in his warm and sympathetic movement as he placed one hand lightly on his knee.

“Mr. Tucker, yours is an aggravated case, and I hardly know what to say. I can fix you up for ordinary daily life, but unfortunately you’re an athlete, which is quite different. It might be that after some more rest, after the inflammation in that nerve has subsided, another leg-stretching operation would help. But I wouldn’t be sure, I wouldn’t promise...” He leaned back, his hands behind his head, looking at the ceiling now.

“You wouldn’t promise to cure me?” The doctor nodded. There was silence, and the traffic noise far below came through the open window. Then this
is
the end. The end of it all, the finish. I’m through with baseball. “You mean I wouldn’t be any better after another operation than I was when I went south this spring?”

Again the doctor nodded. Then he rose. His hand went out, and his long thin fingers yanked nervously at the window shade. “Frankly, I’ve done about everything I honestly feel I can for you. There’s nothing more I would suggest at present.” He walked across the room. “Except one thing. This is only a suggestion, and you may not wish to follow it. There’s an Austrian doctor over here now, a Dr. Rittenbusch. He is called a bloodless surgeon; he works by manipulation. He studied under Lorenz, the famous Viennese, and escaped during the war. I’m told he had some amazing success with baseball players recently.”

“What players?” Roy’s heart leaped, and through the film of despair came a ray of hope. “What players?”

“I can’t quite recall their names—one pitcher who, I think, was troubled with bursitis. And then a friend of mine sent him a case much like yours, a boy named... Tonelli, I think it was.”

“You don’t mean Ray Tonelli, the second baseman of the Giants, do you?”

“Yes, that’s the one. He had the same trouble as yours, and nearly every doctor here in town had given up on the case. A bad sciatic condition...”

“I’ll see him,” said Roy, interrupting.