One Shot at Forever (33 page)

But it wasn't really that. By most accounts Shartzer had the talent but might have cared
too much
. To him, the game was sacred. What he couldn't overcome was the idea that when he came to the park every day, he was arriving at his job. He was a commodity being paid for his talents, surrounded by other commodities, some of whom didn't care about any one game or the team. He was supposed to pace himself, to think about the long term, to look out for number one. He couldn't do it.

Still, the game stayed in his blood. He went on to tour the country playing fast-pitch softball. He coached baseball for fifteen years, first at Huntingdon College in Montgomery, Alabama, then at Berry College in Mount Berry, Georgia, and later led a girls' softball team to the state final. They lost that one, too.

Along the way
Shark got divorced and fell in love with another girl. Her name was Melanie and she was younger, full of life. They had a daughter named Anna. Eventually, Steve and Melanie split up, too, while Anna grew up to become a star softball player at the University of West Alabama. Now, sometimes when he watches her play, so willful and aggressive, Steve sees himself. There's only one difference: Anna can let go of the losses.

It is the spring of 2010 and Shartzer's feelings about Macon remain complicated. Unlike his teammates, who revel in what they accomplished, he can't stop thinking about what they did not. “Probably the biggest disappointment in my career is losing the damn state championship,” he says. At fifty-six, he has a halo of gray hair and the hint of a paunch, but he retains that old intensity. More than any of his teammates, he can remember every pitch of that game, every opportunity missed. He remembers the ball he hooked just foul in the seventh inning, the one that would have been a home run—who cares that the reason he hooked it was probably the injury to his top hand or that he went on to hit a single in the same at-bat. He remembers those wild pitches, the balk.

He remembers it all even though he's been trying to forget it for forty years. The process began in the summer of 1971, not long after the state tournament, when he and Heneberry drove down to Virginia to go fishing on Wards Creek, off the James River. The two boys stayed at an old fishing camp with no power, running water, or bathroom, spending their days drinking beers, braving torrential thunderstorms, and, as Shartzer puts it, “catching the shit out of the fish.” On the last day, Shartzer decided it was time for a ceremony of sorts. His old eight-track tape deck, the one that had been on all those bus rides and on the bench for all those games, that had become the totem of their state tournament run, needed to be retired. So the duo rowed out to the middle of the creek and Shartzer stuck in the
Jesus Christ Superstar
soundtrack, cued it to the first song, and cranked it up as high as it would go. Then the two boys grabbed the tape deck—and with it all those memories—and they stood up and heaved it as far as they could out into the creek. Shartzer remembers how the stereo arced through the air, how it hit with a splash and gurgled for a moment, then disappeared forever.

And yet here he is, half a lifetime later, and the memories continue to surface. Even now, Shartzer still can't bring himself to face the people of Macon. In the last forty years he has been back three times: once for the reunion and twice for funerals. “My daughter is on me real hard,” he says. “She wants to go back this summer and meet John Heneberry and see these places and meet some of these people.” He pauses. “It's hard, though. They expected me to win that championship game, and I just didn't get it done. In a lot of ways I still feel like I let them down. There's a lot of people who probably think I could use some professional help, but I felt that strongly that I could win that game. I had the ball in my hands…” He trails off.

At first Shartzer hesitated to even discuss that season. He knows it's strange, but he doesn't want to constantly replay that game. “It's in my heart and soul,” he says. “And it will be to the day I die. I'd like a rematch.” He pauses. “I guess I'm still upset that we didn't win, and I'm not sure how to resolve that. Maybe old Coach will help me one more time.”

22

“Forty years later and he's still worried about some game?” Mark Wronkiewicz shakes his head, blows a puff of steam into the cold Chicago air. “C'mon man, get over it.”

A year has passed and now it is the early months of 2011, nearly forty years to the day since the state semifinal. Wronkiewicz is on his way to the annual Lane Tech baseball reunion. This year it's at an Italian joint on the north side of Chicago, where Wronk joins fifty-odd Lane alumni from as far back as the class of 1949. They eat pizza off red-checked tablecloths and drink pitchers of beer and Coke. When talk turns to the Macon game, some of the men have a hard time placing it.

“Was that the state tournament in '71 or '72?” asks one player.

“I think it was 1971,” says Jim Iwanski, the first baseman on that team. The confusion is understandable. After all, Lane Tech made it to the state tourney three years in a row. After losing in the quarterfinals in '70 and to Macon in the semis in 1971, the 1972 team went 27–2 and again arrived at the tournament as strong favorites before losing 1–0 to Kankakee.

Much of the 1971 Lane Tech team is on hand for the reunion. There's John Rockwell, the leadoff hitter who was drafted by the Royals out of high school. Next to him, talking loud and patting everyone's back, is Rick Wachholder. Short and wiry and full of life, he's the one who organizes these reunions, who keeps everyone coming back.

And then there's Wronk. At fifty-eight years old, he is tall and handsome, with a strong chin and great hair. He looks like a politician or the father on a TV show. After high school, he went to Illinois State, led the team with a 2.12 ERA in 1973, and pitched against Shartzer when the latter was at SIU. At twenty-four,
while playing in the low minors
, Wronkiewicz was cut. “It broke my heart,” he says, looking down into his beer. “I was paid the least and had invested the most.” His downfall? He never did adjust to the curveball.

As one beer leads to another, the Lane players' memories start to come back. It turns out they do remember the Macon game, quite well in fact. They especially remember what happened to their starting catcher. He wasn't injured, like most people thought. Rather, the poor bastard got too drunk the first night of the tournament and Papciak, forever old school, decided to punish him by benching him against Macon. Papciak thought he could “get by” Macon with his backup catcher, as the players remember it. What he didn't count on was the distant backstops of Meinen Field and the speed of the Ironmen. Even with all the errors, though, Wronk doesn't like to make excuses. “To be clear, they were better than us on that day.”

After the reunion winds down, the core of the '71 team moves to the Har-Hig pub at the corner of Harlem and Higgins, a small neighborhood bar where the regulars pay for beers with poker chips. Soon enough, shots of Jameson are sent down gullets and the Irish is rising in the boys. There is talk of going down to Macon, busting into the gas station, and liberating the trophy in order to reengrave it. To which Wronk quips: “Why would we want it? It's a second-place trophy.”

As the lighthearted boasts continue, it becomes evident that these men are not that much different from those down in Macon, at least not in the ways that matter. They still love each other and the game. They feel a sacred bond to what happened when they were seventeen and feel that bond is worth holding on to, no matter what it takes. They are teammates.

Finally
Greg Walsh
, a reserve outfielder on the '71 team and the most gregarious of the bunch, raises his beer and sends a message. “Tell the Macon boys we'll come down there and kick their fucking ass in a rematch,” Walsh says. Then he smiles. “And if we don't, then we'll drink beer with them.”

C'mon man, get over it
.

Shartzer is trying. Still, he
remains conflicted
. Preparing to talk about that season again, near his house in Foley, Alabama, in February of 2011, he calls Sweet for advice, expecting to hear how they're going to spin the media on this one. But instead Sweet says something strange:
It's OK, Steve. It's time to come to terms with this
.

So Shartzer gets up early, shaves meticulously, and puts on his matching softball jacket and hat. Then he heads to the local Waffle House, where he stations himself in a booth. Over the years, his body has betrayed him; he is now thick in the middle and walks gingerly. “I sit sometimes and I think where are those son of a bitches at now that told me how good I was, with two bad shoulders, a bad hip, and a bad knee,” he says, staring into his cup of coffee. “We didn't know what a damn concussion was. Burns would say, ‘Go out and ring that bell for me' and, buddy, we did, or we got our bell rung.”

After his second divorce, Shartzer bought
a beach house
in Gulf Shores, Alabama. Four hurricanes and a market crash later, he can't bring himself to sell it so far below value. He doesn't want to stay here, doesn't want to die in Alabama. But when it comes to Macon, as he says, “It's pretty hard to go back, those days are gone…”

Just talking about the team is still difficult. More than once he says he's only doing so “because Sweet and Anna got me to.” They told him to “have fun with it,” that everything doesn't need to be “serious and negative,” that he was a “positive force for a lot of people.” That he
deserves
it. Shartzer shakes his head. “Deserve what? We lost the damn game. Anna says, ‘They wouldn't have even been there without you.' But we were there. See, they missed that. We
were
there. And I
let down all those people.”
He pauses. “I know them boys are having a ball reliving this. I just don't.”

Sweet has been urging Shartzer to come back to Macon. So far, he has resisted, but he knows he must at some point. “I just really need to get over that thing,” he says. “I don't know why. I really don't. I don't have all the answers, I need to find them, though.”

A month later, in March of 2011, word comes from Sweet. It took some prodding, but Shartzer is on his way back home.

The following Saturday afternoon
, there they are, just like in the old days: Goose, Shark, and Sweet, all sitting around Sweet's large wooden dining room table. Shartzer is once again wearing his softball hat and jacket, and is in the process of rapidly evacuating a can of Bud Light. Sweet sips a Sam Adams from a plastic mug. Heneberry drinks only water, though not for lack of effort on the part of Shartzer, who made a spirited attempt to get his friend to imbibe that ended only when Heneberry finally made it clear, after repeated hints, that he'd given it up years ago.

The men settle in, talking about kids and jobs and, eventually, the 1971 season. Here, amid friends and outside of town, Shartzer is comfortable. Told that the Lane Tech players want a rematch, he roars in approval. “Tell them I said we'd beat them again,” he howls, slamming his Bud Light onto the table. “They couldn't beat Goose. They'd never beat me. Their ass!”

There is laughter. No, he is told, the Lane Tech guys are
serious
. They actually want to play. Now Shartzer frowns. “Maybe we got to split the game up,” he says, thinking of his bad hip and his busted shoulder.

Heneberry looks at him, surprised. “Split the game up?

“Maybe I go three innings, you go four. Put the ginzu on them, the hoooooook.”

Sweet nods. “John, that was the best pitching performance I've ever seen in my career.”

Heneberry looks touched. “Really?”

“Ah, hell,” says Shartzer. “Goose was great but want to know how we beat Lane Tech? They stayed out all night partying with the fans. They were so damn hungover and drunk, they couldn't play the next day. Ain't nobody told you that?”

There are startled looks.
How do you know?

“Shit, I could tell by the way they played that they were partying all night,” Shartzer says. “Plus, Miller and I sent a couple of girls over there to make sure they stayed up longer than they should. Those girls came back and said, ‘Shark, they don't need any help. They're throwing down over there.' So the next day we're thinking we need to make them work in that hot sun, let that bastard beat on that drum, and get you some of Heneberry's curveball, which is about the worst pitch to have to hit when you're hungover.”