One Shot at Forever (16 page)

And thus, on the eve of the 1971 season, the Ironmen were complete: one coach, a girl scorekeeper, nine skinny kids who played, and five even skinnier ones who didn't.

12

No one was more eager for the season to begin than Steve Shartzer. On March 31, the night before the first game against Pana, he lay in his bed in Elwin, visualizing his future. He imagined himself blasting a home run and dominating hitters on the mound the next day, then repeating the performance over the weeks and months to come. He imagined record-setting high school seasons and a standout college career and then, in four or six or seven years, sitting in a dugout in some midsized American city and being told to report to the manager's office, whereupon he would be handed a phone. A gravelly voice on the other end would say, “Good news. You've made the Show, kid.” And only then would the journey be complete, the one Shartzer began all those years earlier while peering down at the older boys at Fairview Park and swatting balls in his backyard, the journey he'd planned on making from the time he was five years old, when he first began announcing to anyone who'd listen, “I'm
going to be in the pros someday
. Just you wait.”

The Shartzer mailbox had already begun to fill with letters from college coaches, and Steve knew more were coming. How could they not? So far, his junior year had been one long athletic tour de force. He'd racked up yardage during football season by employing a “crash-and-go” approach—lowering his head and obliterating would-be tacklers to get to the outside edge, then turning on the jets. In the winter, despite being a six-foot center, he'd relied on his quickness, tenacity, and shooting touch to dominate on the basketball court, scoring forty points in one game, pulling down fifteen rebounds in another.

And now baseball season was finally here. Others might have doubted the prospects of the Ironmen, but Shartzer was not one of them. He intended to take the team, and the town, to new heights.

The following afternoon, under dark skies in Pana, he took the first step. He allowed one hit and struck out ten while blasting a two-run home run
in a 13–1 win
.

The next week, Shartzer drove in six runs in a win over Moweaqua. Not long after, he pitched another one-hitter. By the third week of the season, he was hitting over .500 and at the top of the conference in home runs and RBIs, facts he was acutely aware of. After each game, when Trusner tallied the stats to call in the box score to the
Herald & Review
, his phone invariably rang. “Read me what you got,” Shartzer demanded.

“Three for four with two RBIs.”

“And the strikeouts?”

“I have you at nine.”

“Nine?! It was ten, Sammy. Make sure you get that right. Ten, got it?”

It got to the point where, as Trusner says, “I could set the clock to the phone call from Shartzer.” While the fact-checking exasperated Trusner, as did all the ribbing Shartzer directed his way, it never dimmed his respect for his teammate. As Trusner put it: “You wanted to slap him in the face every day, but you wanted him on your side.” It helped that the other players, especially Miller, gave Shartzer plenty of grief. “Steve, what's your average
now
?” Miller would ask during pickup games.

If the kids sometimes had to put up with Shartzer—Atteberry refers to him as “an amiable bully”—he made up for it with his fierce loyalty to friends and teammates, especially those he'd known for years. In the case of Jeff Glan, it was evident on the football field. Midway through Shartzer's time at Macon, Jack Burns had seen him launching deep spirals during football practice and pulled him aside.

“Boy, you can really throw it. You're going to be my QB,” Burns said.

“No Coach, I can't be,” Shartzer responded.

“You can't? What in the
hell
are you talking about?”

“Coach, Jeff
Glan has to be the quarterback
. I can play running back.”

Burns had glared at him, but as far as Shartzer was concerned, this was the only option. Growing up together in Elwin, he and Glan had pored over Chip Hilton books and fantasized about their athletic futures. The older they got, however, the clearer it was that the boys were born with different talents. Steve was tall, strong, and fleet-footed, seemingly good at everything that involved hand-eye coordination—the fastest shotgun draw, the best bowler, the most dominant Ping-Pong player. Glan, on the other hand, was small and neither quick nor strong. When it came to football, there weren't many positions he could play besides quarterback. So even though he possessed the stronger arm, Shartzer knew the only way his friend was going to be a high school starter was at quarterback.

That Shartzer was eventually able to convince Burns to consider the idea was not surprising, for he had a way of charming adults that bordered on magical. Despite being an average student, Steve was beloved by teachers, due in part to his wonderful manners. The same went for parents. In the case of Brian Snitker, all the usual family rules went out the window when he was with Steve. If Brian was going out with Shark he could do anything—miss curfew, drive to Decatur—it didn't matter. Says Snitker, “My parents thought he hung the moon.”

Shartzer's combination of talent, confidence, and charm was not lost on the female population of Macon High. He was renowned for always having “the hot cars and the hot chicks,” as friend Boomer Britton, son of Roger, puts it. Not surprisingly, Shartzer and Stu Arnold
monopolized the attention
of the girls, though in different ways. Arnold was an unusually sensitive young man, the kind who sang in the choir, considered some of his best friends to be girls, and
saw no shame in discussing one's feelings
. Steve was more elusive and brusque. When he was a sophomore, future homecoming queen Jane Metzger asked him to prom. Steve said yes, but it wasn't until he arrived at the dance that she truly believed he would show.

Then again, Shartzer had been warned. One day during football practice, a group of girls had congregated on the wooden bleachers, watching the team and giggling. Being teenage boys, the players puffed out their chests and acted as tough as possible. At which point Jack Burns—a man's man through and through, a Southerner by birth, and a footballer by trade—gathered them around.

“Now boys,” Burns said, in his most paternal tone.
“Those damn buzzsaws
are going to mess you up. You better get away from them.”

And then Burns walked over to the girls and told them, in no uncertain terms, to leave practice. When Burns walked back to the team, Shartzer spoke up.

“Coach, now I don't mean to sound ignorant,” he said. “But why do you call them girls
buzzsaws
?”

Burns nodded gravely, paused, then started making a noise.
“Buhhuzzzzzz.”
As he did, he mimicked those wooden bleachers being sawed in half. Then he stopped. “Boys, those are buzzsaws because those girls' snatches are eating that board up. You can damn near see the wood chips flying out the back.”

Burns looked around, as if addressing troops heading into combat. “Now I'm telling you, you don't want to mess with that. Because next thing you know, that buzzsaw is coming for you.”

At the time, this struck Shartzer as a dire fate indeed, and he took the advice to heart. Girls were merely diversions from life's priorities. Basketball, football, and baseball were what mattered.

One cool morning that spring, a month into the baseball season, a man in a full-length doctor's coat walked into the senior English class at Macon High. If the students hadn't been so accustomed to it, they might have blanched. Then again, they knew it was just Sweet being Sweet.

Over the past school year, Sweet had become even more experimental in the classroom. He lived to provoke reactions, whether it was wearing the doctor's coat, encouraging the kids to be loud on certain days—he felt it important to learn to “concentrate amid chaos”—or passing out an excerpt from
The Prophet
, a book by the Lebanese poet and writer Kahlil Gibran that was popular in the counterculture movement. Titled “On Teaching,” it touched on how, “If [
the teacher
] is indeed wise he does not bid you enter the house of his wisdom, but rather leads you to the threshold of your own mind.”

The point, as Sweet saw it, was that he was a guide, not a dictator. As such, he believed every student needed guidance of some sort, even academic stars such as Jane Metzger, the pretty cheerleader who'd dated Shartzer. Active in numerous school clubs, Metzger had earned Macon's coveted “Gold Hall Pass,” which was bestowed upon students who made the high honor roll or the National Honor Society and allowed its wearer to leave class without a teacher's permission. One afternoon, Metzger bragged to Sweet that, in four years of high school, she'd never once received a poor slip.

Not long after, Sweet called Metzger over after English class and, with a grim expression on his face, handed her an envelope. When she opened it, she was horrified.

In bold letters across the top, the paper read
D
EFICIENCY
R
EPORT
.

According to the sheet, Metzger was failing in not only English but also history, math, PE, study, and lunch. Her attitude, performance, lack of attention, and lack of effective motivation were noted. Sweet recommended after-school help five days a week, tutoring, and a conference with the teacher. Then, under
COMMENTS
, he'd written, “Jane is so stupid it's unbelievable—she has a poor attitude that makes things worse.” Then at the end he added: “She has bad breath, too.”

Appraising the slip, Metzger was paralyzed with fear.
My parents are going to be horrified!
Then after a minute she looked up to see Sweet wearing an enormous grin on his face. Finally, she exhaled.

The lesson was a simple one—
don't take life too seriously
—and Sweet reinforced it at every opportunity. One time, Metzger and some other students caught a ride home with Sweet in his Scout after an away basketball game. En route, Sweet detoured to the Steak 'n Shake in Decatur. When he did, Metzger noticed her white-haired, ultraconservative grandparents and their friends eating at a table next to one of the windows. At which point she made the mistake of saying, “Hey, there's my grandparents!”

Sweet perked up. “Let's go say hello!” he said, then drove the Scout up to the window and proceeded to honk the horn and wave like a goofball. When Metzger's grandparents looked up, they saw a strange-looking, long-haired hippie and four students grinning and waving wildly. Mortified, Metzger had ducked out of sight.

It took until the following week, when her mother relayed to her the story of some crazy man waving at her grandparents, for Jane to stop worrying about it. It took her years more to laugh about it.

When it came to the baseball team, Sweet saw no reason why he couldn't carry over his educational philosophy. So whereas many coaches might have responded to the unexpected success of the 1970 team by creating expectations and tightening the reins, by creating a
program
, Sweet did the opposite. He continued to let the boys run practice on occasion, encouraged them to make their own decisions in the field, and introduced elements such as “silent infield.” Before certain games, he'd signal the boys and, as one, they'd stop talking: no chatter, no joking, no calling out bases. The only sound was the crack of the bat and the
thwap
of ball meeting leather. Sweet saw it as akin to a moment of meditation prior to the game. While the stillness could be unsettling to fans and opponents, the Ironmen players came to revel in it. It was one more thing that forged unity—that set them apart.

Indeed, theirs was a remarkable transformation. Two years earlier they'd been a bunch of country boys. Now, as Dale Otta says, by the day they “became more and more like Sweet.”

The Ironmen's arrival at away games was particularly impressive—or peculiar, depending on your point of view. As the Macon bus pulled into the parking lot, the boys could be heard belting out “Yellow Submarine” at the top of their lungs. Then they piled out, one after the other, each looking stranger than the next. Craig Brueggemann, the center fielder for Mt. Zion, remembers seeing the Ironmen sprinting onto the field for an early season game with long sideburns while wearing hats that looked like they'd been purchased at a head shop. He remembers their coach, “who wore a Fu Manchu, dark sunglasses, long hair, and looked like Abbie Hoffman in a ball suit.” And he remembers Macon's scorekeeper trotting out wearing a baseball hat, a uniform top, and shorts and only then noticing—what's this now?—that the said scorekeeper had suspiciously shapely legs, pretty eyes, and brown hair flowing out the back of her hat.