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Notes from a Boy @ The Window

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Notes from a Boy @ The Window

Tag Archives: Lenny Dykstra

“Glory Days”

25 Sunday Oct 2015

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, Jimme, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, music, My Father, New York City, Pop Culture, race, Sports, Youth

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"Glory Days" (1985), Baseball, Baseball Glove, Bruce Springsteen, Darryl Strawberry, Double Play, Dwight Gooden, John Tudor, Lenny Dykstra, Merit, Meritocracy, Modell's Sporting Goods, MVHS, Myths, Naivete, New York Mets, Single-Minded, St. Louis Cardinals, Talent, Varsity Baseball


There are times I wish I could have back the tunnel-vision naiveté I had to have during my Boy @ The Window years. The kind of naiveté in which I believed I could literally do anything, with hard work and talent alone. You know, that great old American myth of a level playing field, a meritocracy. It took me years to give this myth of an ideal up, despite the evidence of the lie all around me.

The American Dream Game cartoon, January 21, 2014. (David Horsey/LA Times).

The American Dream Game cartoon, January 21, 2014. (David Horsey/LA Times).

Three decades ago, I believed in it. I had to. If I hadn’t, I would likely not be here to say anything about merit or any other American falsehood or truth. Where my belief in the meritocracy was strongest was in sports, where literal examples of the level playing field abounded. I was coming off a year of watching my Mets win 98 games while missing the playoffs by three games, yielding the NL East to the St. Louis Cardinals. It was really one game during the next-to-last series of the year, against the Cardinals in St. Louis. Dwight Gooden won a pitcher’s duel against John Tudor while Darryl Strawberry and Lenny Dykstra hit timely or game-winning home runs in the first two games. But we couldn’t win that final game. As unfair as it seemed, the Mets had given me a great season.

So great that it inspired me to try out for baseball that year, out of all the sports I could’ve played. It had become my favorite sport, and knowing I had more of acumen for football and basketball didn’t distract me from my master plan. But first, I needed to learn how to play baseball.

My year slipped a bit in October and November as football and baseball provided distraction, which was why I had to refocus in early December. And not just because I spent my time watching TV. Richard P. — for me an almost unknown person — had invited me to practice with the varsity baseball team. He might’ve been in my gym class or friends with Suzanne. Richard P. was a senior and a star pitcher who’d been clocked throwing a ninety-mile-an-hour fastball — absolutely awesome! Of course I said “Yes” without thinking about my reality at home. I never owned a baseball glove, never played on any Little League team, and had only used a baseball bat during softball and gym class three times between seventh and eleventh grade. I had Jimme take us to Modell’s Sporting Goods store in the city and bought a $55 outfielder’s glove.

I still needed to break it in, which would be even harder with the crooked ring and pinky fingers on my left hand. With Richard P. and the other members of the baseball team, some of the breaking-in happened pretty quickly. I went to three of their practices in October and saw the difference that the years of athletic experience I didn’t have made in the case of the varsity players. Frank dived for a ball at his shortstop position on our indoor Astroturf practice field, caught it, got up, and gunned the ball to first base. His right arm had two purple rug burn marks on it. “There’s no way I’d ever want to dive for a ball like that,” I thought. The next thing I knew I was out there with the team taking grounders at shortstop and catching balls at first base. We were practicing double-plays. One grounder came up on me faster than I expected. I got down for the ball, got it in my glove, but then it popped out as I rose up to throw it to second. The ball popped out and went right to Frank at second, who then threw to first, a real double-play. I got cheered and jeered at the same time!

My first-base experience was less memorable. I caught several Richard P. throws to first in holding-the-runner simulations. Every time I caught one of his balls I wanted to scream from the pain. I needed to get calluses on my left hand fast if I was going to hang with these guys!

1980s-era Mets cap, October 25, 2015. (http://academy.com).

1980s-era Mets cap, October 25, 2015. (http://academy.com).

If given another year, with lots of practice, I probably could’ve made this baseball team. But to what end? I already had a plan for going to college, on the academic track, after all. “So what if the baseball team was stacked with Italian guys and I was better at basketball? I should be able to play what I want to play.” That’s what I thought at the time, at least.

Merit, even in sports, is never the only consideration. Egos, politics, the expense of playing a specific sport, and of course, race, all play a role in the paths that athletes take and in the decision-making of coaches as well. I was just too naive, too focused on one thing, too stupid at fifteen to allow myself to see that my raw talent was never going to be enough. Five months after that last practice, though, I did see the truth, if only for a moment or two.

 

“Dr. K All the Way…” & Other Fall Classics

28 Wednesday Sep 2011

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Jimme, Mount Vernon High School, My Father, New York City, Politics, race, Sports, Youth

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"Dr. K", 1986 World Series, Bryant Gumbel, Child-like Hope, Congress, Darryl Strawberry, Dwight Gooden, HBO, Jobs Bill, Lenny Dykstra, Mets Fans, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, New York City, New York Mets, Obama, President Barack Obama, Real Sports, Sports and Life, WHN-AM


Dwight Gooden, aka, "Dr. K," Shea Stadium, 1986. (Source/http://itsonbroadway.wordpress.com/2011/05/16/dwight-gooden-aka-dr-k/).

While the country waits to see whether Congress and the President will find a way to entertain us with political gridlock and endless compromises and capitulation, I realized this week that I have a twenty-fifth anniversary this month. It’s been a bit more than a quarter century since my New York Mets won the NL East division title (their first since ’73), one more brick in their World Series wall that year.

Those not-so-Amazing Mets were a juggernaut that year, having won 108 games and run away with the division lead by the end of June. Gooden was Dr. K., and, along with Ron Darling, Sid Fernandez, Bob Ojeda, and Jesse Orozco, led the pitching staff. While Darryl Strawberry was the straw that stirred the drink on offense, along with Lenny Dykstra, Gary Carter, Howard Jones and Keith Hernandez. God, I really loved that team!

Darryl Strawberry home run, Shea Stadium, July 2, 1988. (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan).

I really did. I imbued the Mets with all of my hopes and dreams, and saw their wins as a way to see myself as a winner. And whenever they lost a game or a series, I saw myself as having lost as well. I was aware of all of this on some level, that making my life circumstances a parallel story to that of a major league baseball team was, well, a bit childish.

But given my life since the age of eleven, I needed that outlet, that room to be a child, if only for two or three hours a day. In between watching my four younger siblings, washing clothes at the laundromat in Pelham, dealing with my alcohol father and my idiot stepfather, running back and forth to the store, applying to colleges, and facing the hell that was my senior year at Mount Vernon High School. Especially with three AP courses, a touch of senioritis, and a number of classmates at each other’s throats. Including my own.

As the season took forever to wind down (the Mets clinched the NL East division on September 17, more than two weeks before the end of the season), the pre-WFAN station for the Mets (WHN-AM, a country oldies station until the 24-hour group took it over in ’87 and renamed it WFAN) started playing their World Series-or-bust promo, “Dr. K All the Way! — Let’s Go Mets!” So silly, so goofy, so geared toward long-suffering Mets fans. “Is that the best you can do?,” I thought every time I heard the ten-second spot. Apparently it was, and it didn’t matter either way, because fans are usually too fanatic to sweat the goofy stuff.

I became even more involved in rooting for my team as they moved into the playoffs. I’d listen to games in class, between classes, even in between questions, it seemed, in my AP Physics class. To say the least, my grades suffered, and more than a few of my non-Mets-fan classmates berated me in the process. But how could I explain to them the psychic bond I felt to this team? A feeling that somehow, if they, the downtrodden Mets, could pull off the ultimate victory and win a World Series, that I, a nobody, could make my life a victorious one as well. My more affluent and too-busy-being-cool classmates wouldn’t have understood that. As it was, I barely understood it myself.

Fast-forward twenty-five years. I’m no longer a baseball fan, and have no intent to fall back in love with a game I find boring, and with an institution that represents culture and race in America that is so pre-Civil Rights Movement and twentieth century. Most of my Mets still have their rings, even if key players on that team have been or are in prison, recovering drug addicts, and have made and lost hundreds of millions of dollars speculating in the snuff and stock markets (see Lenny Dykstra ’09 HBO Real Sports interview excerpt via The Young Turks).

But I still have that child-like sense of hope and yearning. I just don’t place it in anonymous others anymore. I haven’t lived or died with a team since my Knicks came within a missed 3-pointer by John Starks of winning the ’94 NBA Finals in Game Six. But I do place it in myself, because between God and me, and the others I’ve met and befriended in my life, I’ve been able to move mountains.

Which is why it does and doesn’t matter if the job stimulus passes in whole, in part or even not at all. I need to take that same optimism, that same hope, convert it to more hard work, and find a way to infuse it in my son, so that he can run the race, even if and when I can’t. In the process, I hope he find heroes he can look up to in the fall, even if they are fleeting ones.

Boy @ The Window: A Memoir

Boy @ The Window: A Memoir

Places to Buy/Download Boy @ The Window

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