One Shot at Forever (8 page)

Indeed, little about the man made sense to the people of Macon. Still, while there were plenty of words one could use to describe Sweet, “communist” was not one of them. So when the parent made his accusation, Britton pushed back. Addressing the parents, administrators, and board members, he reminded them how much the students loved Sweet. The man was just a bit progressive, that was all.

Later, however, Britton cornered Sweet to tell him what had happened. “L.C.,” he said, “you know that one of these times I really am going to have to fire you, right?”

Sweet nodded, then thanked his friend for having his back. He was aware of how McClard and the school board viewed him, but if anything he found it amusing. Sweet saw himself not as a troublemaker but as a catalyst. In his view Macon clung to antiquated views and part of his job was to introduce new ones. That's why he'd done away with the old English curriculum almost immediately; why he'd taken out the individual desks in his room and hauled in those round tables to encourage a flow of ideas; why he had his students read books that forced them to confront new concepts; and why he kept giving them assignments, like the obituary exercise, that encouraged the kids to think about life outside of Macon.

Getting fired? That didn't worry Sweet too much. After all, he was sure he could find another job if he needed to. Hell, he still got calls from the Chicago schools and from as far away as Alaska. What did he have keeping him in Macon, anyway?

6

Five days separated the Ironmen's season opener against Pana and their next game, at home against Assumption. For Steve Shartzer, they were five agonizing, interminable days. Most of the players had shaken off the Pana game after a night. Not Shartzer. After the loss, he'd thrown his glove in the locker room, then gone home to stew in silence. Each afternoon afterward at practice, he reminded his teammates that they just
could not
make those kinds of errors again, that they must
kick the shit
out of Assumption.

Sweet noticed this and it both impressed and concerned him. He loved Shartzer's intensity but it could be almost scary at times. At sixteen, Shartzer was in many respects still that kid chucking tomatoes, racing around the house, and trying to will his way to victory. Stronger and faster than the other kids, he threw as hard as he could during warm-ups, as if trying to impale Dean Otta with each pitch. His mindset, as he put it, was, “Here she comes, boys, right down the middle, the best I got.” He turned batting practice into a competition, endeavoring to make his line drives cleaner than the other boys', his home runs more towering.

Despite all his talent, Shartzer remained driven by a sense of inferiority, always trying to prove to somebody, somewhere that he was good enough. Growing up in Elwin, he strived to impress older kids like Doug Tomlinson. In Little League, it was the boys from Macon, which, though a small town itself, was a metropolis compared to Elwin. In Elwin, the Little League coach arrived at practices on a tractor with the baseball equipment perched on the back, and was often forced to recruit from lower age divisions just to field a team. Surrounded by inferior talent, Shartzer had spent much of his youth losing to Macon. These defeats infuriated him, not just because he detested losing in any context but because no matter how well he pitched, his defense often failed him. So while John Heneberry was backed by Mark Miller at second and Ottas at seemingly every base, Shartzer had a few boys who, as he put it, “couldn't catch a flu during cold season.” In all those years, Steve remembers beating Macon only once.

By the time he reached high school, Shartzer had stopped worrying about his immediate peers and shifted his focus outward. Now he burned to prove to kids from larger towns that he was more than just some hick from Elwin; he was a big-time player. As a freshman, he played three varsity sports and, in the spring, had been recruited for track when the coach, Dale Sloan, saw him play football. After watching in awe as Shartzer sprinted away from a gang of would-be tacklers, Sloan decided the cocky freshman might already be the fastest kid at Macon High. In truth, he was underestimating Steve; soon, Shartzer would prove to be the fastest kid in the
county
.

On the diamond, Shartzer hit over .300 as a freshman and drove in the winning run in the game that clinched the conference title. He practiced hard, beat himself up when he made mistakes, and took the game more seriously than the other boys.

In many respects, Shartzer and his new coach couldn't have been more different. Shartzer brimmed with energy, ready to go to war at a moment's notice. Of all the Ironmen, he enjoyed Burns' Patton speeches the most. He also didn't suffer fools kindly. When a new basketball coach took over the junior high team in eighth grade and began his first practice with a happy-talk demonstration about how
Look boys, two balls can fit through this rim
, Shartzer smelled bullshit and stood up to interrupt him. “What's your point?” Shartzer said. “Isn't the object to put the damn ball in this damn rim?”

“Well yes, Steve,” the coach said.

“Well when are we going to do that? That's what I came out here for.”

If Shartzer treated the game like a military engagement, Sweet seemed to see it more as a great adventure. Already, in only a month, he'd not only changed most of the team rules—who made practice optional, for god's sake?—but had, at various times, joined the boys during scrimmages, held home run derby during practice, and doled out nicknames to players.

Shartzer was wary. If this was coaching, it was unlike any he'd received.

The following Saturday, Tomlinson took the mound for the Ironmen against Assumption. The sun hid behind clouds, and the temperature again fell below forty, but at least there was no wind. The Assumption hitters probably wished there had been. Without it, they stood no chance against Tomlinson, who launched fastball after fastball. Assumption never got a man past second base and Macon won 8–0. The following afternoon, against Argenta, the result was even more lopsided. Shartzer and Atteberry crushed home runs, and the game was called at 13–3 on account of the ten-run mercy rule, which took effect after five innings.

The boys, and Sweet, could rest easy. They'd regained their groove. Granted, neither opponent had been in their conference, but wins were wins. A week later, the Ironmen's first real challenge loomed.

On April 15, Macon readied for its first road trip of the season, a forty-five-minute drive to Maroa High School, north of Decatur. As usual, getting ready was something of an ordeal.

Released from class an hour early, the boys hurried through the basketball gym, past the purple mats bearing
IRONMEN
in white letters, underneath the American flag, and into the tiny locker room. Narrow and cramped, it contained three rows of gray lockers, two skinny wooden benches, one toilet, and a communal shower. The boys crammed in and dressed as quickly as they could. It was uncomfortable but still better than football season, when the team gave up on the space entirely and erected black curtains on the basketball court, which some boys chose to selectively ignore—the better to show off their torsos for any teenage girls who happened to walk by.

Once dressed, the boys jogged out to the parking lot, where the long, yellow bus was already idling. Behind the wheel, beaming and welcoming them in a mock tour-bus tone, was Sweet. Unable to get funding for a bus driver, he figured he'd just do it himself.

As Sweet steered the creaky bus, bumping over two-lane country roads, the players laughed, joked, and tried not to get carsick. Toward the back of the twenty-odd rows of vinyl seats, one boy sat quietly. Hat pulled down over reedy brown hair, John Heneberry stared out the window, thinking about everything that could go wrong in this, the first pitching start of his high school career.

By far the least imposing kid on the team, Heneberry was neither tall nor strong. To the untrained eye, a good 40 percent of his body mass appeared to be elbows and knees, and his delicate features and thin face only added to the impression. He was the worst-hitting regular on the team, bereft of power or speed, and Sweet regularly batted him ninth. Especially following Tomlinson and Shartzer in the rotation, he looked like a JV pitcher summoned for a spot start. His fastball, if you could call it that, floated in at a leisurely pace, as if taking in the surroundings en route. As Shartzer liked to say, Heneberry had three speeds: “slow, slower, and slowest.”

The Maroa field, like most in the Meridian conference, presented unique challenges. The infield consisted entirely of grass and home plate sat at the intersection of a cow pasture and a cornfield. The left side of the diamond was also the football field, so batters hit from one end zone toward the other. In lieu of a left field fence, a tall row of apple trees buttressed the four-story brick edifice of the high school four hundred feet out. Pursuing balls in deep left required navigating a runoff depression that became so soggy during the rainy season that one football player is said to have almost drowned when opponents piled on top of him for too long. Right field, on the other hand, was a lefty hitter's dream, flat and exceptionally short, ending about 250 feet out where South Cedar Street provided an asphalt barrier.

As Heneberry walked to the mound for warm-ups, the Maroa hitters took casual swings and talked among themselves. Until, that is, they got a load of Heneberry lofting pitches toward the plate, each as soft and fluttery as the last, as if made of papier-mâché. One by one the Maroa boys turned and began to watch.
That's his fastball?
Within minutes, they were visualizing monster home runs, 4–4 stat lines, and the cute girls who'd be impressed by them. One even said it out loud: “We're going to rock this guy.”

On the mound, Heneberry could hear the Maroa players and it brought back bad memories. More than any of the Macon boys, he was a self-made player. From the time he was five years old, throwing dirt clods and walnuts on his grandfather's farm in Decatur, Heneberry had dreamed of being a pitcher. By the time he was seven, his father had fashioned a backstop out of a couple of steel posts and chicken wire, and the two played catch in the yard every afternoon, until the light got so dim that bats swooped around John's pitches. All that practice couldn't overcome a core problem, though: John just couldn't throw the ball very hard. During his first couple seasons of Little League, opponents teed off on his fastball, and one game after another ended with Heneberry walking off the field with his head down.

And now, for the third time in three seasons, John had to try to make a good impression on a new coach. And this time it mattered. He'd barely played during his freshman year and had lost his sophomore year to mono—not that he would have pitched anyway, since the Ironmen had Tomlinson, Shartzer, and a senior named Ray Martin.

The first Maroa batter stepped in, eager to get a crack at Macon's goofy-looking pitcher. On the mound, Heneberry knew how important this first pitch was; as someone who relied on finesse, he needed to have his good stuff right away or the game could spiral out of control. Beginning his slow windup, he kicked his leg high and twisted at the hip, as if all that motion might somehow generate more velocity, then released the ball. It sailed in, headed toward the hitter's chest then—bam!—fell right out of the air. The boy swung as hard as he could. He missed by a foot.

The next pitch never even entered the strike zone, but it looked so tantalizing that the Maroa hitter took another cut. When the third offering started nearly head high yet somehow looped in for strike three, the boy was pissed. He headed back to the dugout grumbling.

The next batter fared no better, nor did the next. All went up looking for fastballs; none saw one in the strike zone. Instead, Heneberry delivered a steady stream of junk. The breakthrough had come one night years earlier while watching the
Game of the Week
on TV. John heard Dizzy Dean refer to a curveball as “the great equalizer” and immediately asked his father about it. Knowing little about the pitch, Jack Heneberry canvassed his coworkers at the post office until he found one who'd played ball in college and could teach him a proper curve. That night, Jack returned home and took his son out to the backyard, where they practiced throwing hooks for hours.

It wasn't pretty at first. John had trouble gripping the ball and, even once he could, had no luck controlling the pitch. Errant breaking balls sprayed the Heneberry lot, some so far off-target that Jack considered building a bigger backstop. Slowly, though, John began to get the hang of it. Within a year his pitches were dipping and darting, sometimes even by design. By the fifth grade, after his family moved to Macon from Decatur, John felt confident enough with his new weapon to use it in a Little League game. At the age of ten, he threw his first no-hitter.