One Shot at Forever (22 page)

So, in the fall of 1970, McClard had started filling out applications for graduate programs. In the spring of '71, he learned he'd been accepted into Ball State's education program, which is how he came to walk into Roger Britton's office and tender his resignation in March. For the sake of continuity, the move wasn't announced, and only a handful of people knew beyond Britton and the board. Sweet was not among them.

Now that McClard was moving on, perhaps he came to a realization of sorts. What was the point of staying mad at a guy like Sweet? Why should he be the only one who didn't get to have fun? Besides, McClard was a baseball man. He'd coached the game earlier in his teaching career, and had to admit, if grudgingly, that Sweet was doing an impressive job with the players. It was time to enjoy the ride.

So McClard packed up his stuff for a road trip. Macon's team—
his team
—was going to the sectional finals. He planned on being there.

15

On Friday, May 28, the Bloomington team arrived at McKinley Field with the full force of its thousand-strong student body, the members of which soon realized they faced a wonderful dilemma: Make fun of Macon for being hicks or for being hippies? In the end, the Bloomington fans chose both. From their bags, they pulled cowbells, which they rang incessantly. They taunted the Ironmen as “country rednecks” and shouted at Heneberry, “Where did you learn to throw that curveball, out behind the barn?”

The Ironmen had heard it all before. The difference this time was that, as against Potomac, the roar was almost as loud on their side. There in the bleachers were Bob and Scott Taylor and the regulars, now surrounded by roughly 150 of Macon High's 250 students. It sounded like every one of them was cheering.

On the far side of the diamond, the Bloomington players warmed up. As they did, one boy stood to the side, long-tossing. The ball exploded from his hand. Behind the Macon bench, Bob Shartzer squinted.

Son of a bitch
.

Shartzer watched a moment longer, then checked the lineup cards. He couldn't believe it. That was Robin Cooper. The same Robin Cooper who'd played for the Bloomington American Legion team against his son's Decatur Legion team the last two years and almost single-handedly beat it. One year Cooper pitched a shutout and hit a mammoth shot for the game's only run. And here he was,
still
in high school. It didn't seem possible.

Bob Shartzer knew what he needed to do. He made a beeline for John Heneberry.

Down the first base line, Heneberry was warming up and, as he was prone to doing, overthinking. He looked up in the stands and saw his uncle and his cousin. A little farther down, he recognized three other familiar faces. When Mike Atteberry heard the Ironmen had made the finals, he was working a summer job pouring concrete. After begging his boss to let him off work, he joined Brad Roush for the hour-plus drive in Brad's Dodge Polara. Standing next to them, back from Kaskaskia College, was Doug Tomlinson, smiling and clapping.

No
, Heneberry thought,
no pressure at all
.

Just when Heneberry had worked himself into something resembling a nervous wreck, Bob Shartzer appeared in front of him, looking agitated.

“You can't pitch to this kid.”

Heneberry looked at him, startled. “Which kid?”

And then Bob Shartzer explained about Big Coop, about how he'd killed Shartzer's American Legion team, which meant that Steve hated him with a deep passion, though that was beside the point. The point was that John absolutely couldn't give the kid anything to hit. “And whatever you do,” said Bob Shartzer, “don't throw him a fastball.”

Heneberry nodded. He might have been nervous before. Now he was both nervous and scared.

As he walked to the mound, Heneberry had the same thought as before the Mt. Pulaski game, the same thought he always had:
Don't start slow
. He dug a little divot to the right of the mound, kicking out the dirt. He adjusted his hat. He waved out Dean Otta and, in that slow drawl, said, “I need you to set up just a little more on that outside corner for me now; you set up out there, I'll thread the needle, baby.” He looked at his father in the stands and nodded. Then he peered in at Bloomington's leadoff batter, centerfielder Brian Burd, knowing the one thing he couldn't afford to do in a game of this magnitude, with all those people counting on him, was start the game off with a walk. He fired one right down the middle.

Crack!
Burd smacked a single. Then he stole second. Heneberry retired Bloomington's number two hitter, but now he faced Big Coop with a man in scoring position and the cleanup hitter, Mike Abfalder, on deck. Heneberry had planned on following Bob Shartzer's advice and pitching around Cooper, but now he was in a tough spot. If he walked Cooper, then Abfalder would come up with two men on and only one out.

Heneberry decided to try to start on the outside corner with an off-speed pitch. Only the ball drifted toward the middle of the plate, as if struck by a sudden gust of wind, and Cooper smacked it for an RBI single to left. Moments later, Abfalder doubled to bring in Cooper. Just like that it was 2–0 Bloomington. Heneberry trudged off the mound at the end of the inning, despondent. He'd done it again: put his team in a hole.

Compounding the situation, none of the Ironmen could get around on Bloomington starter John Adams' fastball. One batter after another went down: Miller, Arnold, Shartzer. Through three innings, the Ironmen remained hitless. Then, in a fitting metaphor for the afternoon to date, Macon's best bat, the thirty-four-inch Mickey Mantle, cracked under the weight of an Adams fastball in the third inning. It was the Ironmen's third shattered bat of the day.

For most teams, this would have been an annoyance. For Macon, it bordered on a crisis. Despite the team's success, the Ironmen were still operating on a tiny budget. Balls were hard enough to come by; bats were an endangered species. Since they cost five or six dollars each, the team generally had only three or four at a time, and usually at least one of those was donated by the parents. In hopes of preserving the team's lumber, Sweet had tried everything, including telling his hitters to hold the bat so that the burned-in trademark symbol—allegedly the weakest part of the bat—faced up when swinging. Thus the trademark ended up protected on contact with the ball. No one knew if it actually helped but, hey, it sounded good.

Usually, the Ironmen broke one bat per game. But never three. Now, one Mantle and two Nellie Fox bats were toast. All that remained was the second Mantle. Sweet turned to Trusner at the end of the inning.

“Sammy, I need you to get us some bats.”

“Me? But I'm the first base coach.”

Sweet mulled this for a moment, then looked down the bench. “Hey, Jimmy,” he yelled toward the end of the dugout, where Jimmy Durbin, the timid freshman with the jug ears, sat with hands on knees. “How do you feel about coaching first base?”

Jimmy looked around, as if there might be another, more experienced Jimmy sitting somewhere behind him.

“Yeah you, Jimmy,” Sweet said, smiling.

Jimmy nodded, if slowly.

There was another problem, though: Trusner needed a ride. Sweet walked over to the stands and explained the situation.

When he was finished, an unlikely voice spoke up: “I'll go.”

Standing there, sweating in the sun in his dress shirt and slacks, his hair a bit rumpled, stood Bill McClard.

Sweet nodded. “Sam, you know what we want, go with him.”

So off they went, Trusner and McClard, in search of bats. In the meantime Sweet told the Macon hitters to make a big show of taking their lone bat back to the dugout, then pretending to assess an unseen stock of choices before pulling the same one out of the bag, a subterfuge they took to with great enthusiasm. The last thing they needed was the Bloomington players knowing they owned yet another advantage.

By the fourth inning, Heneberry had settled down. His curve was snapping and his fastball was back under his control. Instead, it was Adams who now struggled, as if Heneberry's shakiness had been a communicable disease transferred between innings. In the fourth, with Bloomington leading 2–1 and Heneberry stepping to the plate, Adams loaded the bases. Sensing danger, Bloomington coach Bob Spahn signaled to his ace.

Over at first base, Robin Cooper nodded and jogged to the mound. In the on-deck circle, Heneberry watched as Big Coop sent one sizzling warm-up pitch after another into his catcher's mitt. If Cooper was worn out from pitching the semifinal two days earlier, he didn't show it.

Finally, Heneberry stepped in. It was the kind of opportunity boys either dream about or dread: two outs, bases loaded, one run down in the biggest game in school history. As Cooper looked in from the mound, it's safe to say he wasn't worrying about Heneberry's bat the same way Heneberry did Cooper's. No doubt Cooper would have been even less concerned if he knew the skinny kid at the plate was using a bat two ounces too heavy for him.

Around the same time Heneberry stepped in, Trusner and McClard raced through Bailey & Himes Sporting Goods store in downtown Champaign. At the time, sporting goods stores competed with hardware stores, and Bailey & Himes did its best to set itself apart with service. So when Trusner spoke to the clerk, a man named Rob Carlson, he told him the circumstances and exactly what the Ironmen needed. As Carlson hustled off to find the bats, Trusner worried that McClard might skimp on the bats. When the clerk brought out four, McClard eyed them up as only a former baseball coach can: a 35 Mantle, a 34 Mantle, and a pair of 33 Nellie Foxes.

“We'll take 'em,” McClard said. “Let's go.”

Trusner smiled. “All four?”

Aware of the situation, the clerk hustled them out the door, promising to send a bill to McClard. The total, paid out of school coffers later that month, was $20.40. It was the most the administration had spent on the baseball team all season.

The first two pitches from Cooper to Heneberry were pure gas. Heneberry fouled one off and watched the other go wide for a ball. From the bench, Shartzer yelled at him. “Keep it steady, Goose! Keep it steady!” When Cooper came back inside with another fastball, Heneberry took a shallow breath, cocked his elbow, and let it rip.

To his surprise, he made contact. The ball shot past the second baseman and into right field, deep enough to score a run. In the stands, the Macon students yelled as one. Tie game.

At the end of the fourth, the boys jogged back to the dugout, the game still tied. There, they were met by the smiling face of Trusner. He stood at the lip of the dugout brandishing four brand-new bats, including Shartzer's favorite, the Mickey Mantle K55.

As proud as Trusner was, one man appeared equally so. Behind the bench, McClard stood, arms crossed, wearing something the boys were unaccustomed to seeing on him: a smile.

With Heneberry on the mound, no inning was an easy one. In the bottom of the fourth, with the score tied 2–2, Abfalder came to the plate with runners on first and third and two outs. Instead of trying to jack one out of the park, though, Abfalder hit a perfect swinging bunt down the first base line. Glan charged the ball and, with no play at the plate, turned and threw as hard as he could to first. Unfortunately, Mark Miller had been playing deep at second and had to race to get to the bag, meaning the ball, Miller, and Abfalder all arrived at almost exactly the same time. Miller lunged for the bag while reaching back to spear the throw bare-handed. As he did, Abfalder, a rock of a boy who played fullback for the Bloomington football team, hit first at full speed. Instantly he transferred all that force into the small body of Miller. On the bench, Sweet cringed. In the stands, the Macon fans held their breath as Miller shot into the air and flew backward. Only, in a remarkable feat of coordination Heneberry would recount for decades afterward, rather than crashing to the ground, Miller somehow executed a perfect backward somersault and emerged holding the ball aloft in his right hand. The ump looked, paused, and then, with what Heneberry swears was extraordinary gusto, shouted “YERRRRR OUUT!” Macon was still tied.

Now it was the Ironmen's turn. In the top of the fifth inning, with Dale Otta on second base, Shartzer grabbed the K55 and strode to the plate. During two seasons of battling each other in American Legion summer ball, he'd come to detest Cooper for being so talented and confident. Now he stepped in and tried to time Big Coop's fastball. No luck. Cooper got two quick strikes on him. Shortening up on the bat, Shartzer fouled the ball off to stay alive, then fouled off another and another. He scowled out at the mound. One thought stuck in his mind:
That big bastard isn't striking me out
.