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Coulda, Woulda, Shoulda

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Today is the Home Opener for the Minnesota Twins. People who love baseball see this as a special, almost sacred day. At the beginning of a new season, the faithful need not apologize for their championship hopes – all things are still possible.

Although in their first series at Baltimore, the Twins have emerged as champions for a more stark reality, finding new ways to show us their limitations.

But don’t give up just yet. Things can change over the course of a long season. Miracles happen. Talents emerge. And fade. That’s sports. We hear a lot of complaints about the way elite athletes can overdose on self-esteem, but for each of them there is a reckoning not too far down the road. Once they lose a step or swing the bat a half second slower, even the greatest are pushed towards the exits. The pressure to perform and win is merciless. The greatest are exalted and given special status, but humiliation is also part of the package.

And then there are the rest – the vast majority of amateur players who love the game but don’t have what it takes to play professionally. They might dream big league dreams in the early going, but for reasons related to size, speed, and ability, they soon realize that learning to balance a spread sheet or sell insurance or be a radio engineer will ultimately do them more good than continuing to try to hit the curve ball.

A lot of fine athletes have walked this path. One of them was my friend, Tom Keith, who died suddenly and far too early last October of a pulmonary embolism.

Tom had a great career as a ballplayer, starting out in the backyard working on fundamentals. Here he is scooping up a grounder. You can see he’s having a great time with this. Even as an adult he would happily instruct anyone who asked (and many who didn’t) on the proper technique.

At Sibley High School he was a star center fielder. Not very fearsome a presence at the plate, he made up for it on the base paths. In one pivotal game he took four bases, propelling his team into the state tournament.

You can see him here, sliding into third with another steal.

I’m not surprised to learn that Tom was a talented and successful thief. Speed is only part of base stealing. Another crucial factor is the ability to observe the pitcher closely, understand his motion and find an opening. Tom was very, very good at picking up the odd cues and funny quirks of other people. He was an excellent mimic, and could play yourself back to you, capturing your way of speaking, your posture, your words and even the gaps between words.

Timing is everything in base stealing and comedy.

Tom went on to play a season with the University of Minnesota Gophers, but his inability to hit and his less than imposing size made it unlikely that he would ever wear a professional jersey on opening day.

He joined the Marines and later took an engineering job at MPR. The rest, as they say, is history. But he always loved baseball, and this was an important day to him.

What’s your high school sports story?

97 thoughts on “Coulda, Woulda, Shoulda”

  1. Thanks dale
    Toms story of adjusted realities is appropriate. My son has finished high school and gone to college with no sports in his life other than the memories of past trials and tribulations. We signed up for little league baseball basketball football hockey soccer swimming and karate as well as fencing acting show chior guitar cello trumpet and golf. This weekend he said he wanted to take up golf this summer. He’s never had time before and now he does. Yesterday before sundown he asked if I wanted to play catch a while. There’s a hole that needs filling when the dreams die.
    Mine was a 60’s version of the story. Baseball football basketball guitar wrestling and when I made the transition to the public school after doing catholic school for my grade school years all the doors were thrown open and art music theater as well as sports were introduced. We had soccer one year at catholic school before the program shut down and the presidents fitness badge was the extent of the program once again.
    I loved sports. I was a power hitting 3rd baseman, a quarterback on the football team an able wrestler, a 3 point shooter before there was a 3 point shot and then the hippy effect came into play. In 9th grade I started growing my hair and in wrestling it started to be a problem. Baseball with curly hair sticking bozo like out the sides was new to sports then, common now but not then. I wasn’t played because of an attitude different from other athletes in 1969. I got to high school with a beard to accompany the now shoulder length hair and my sports career was over, I got a call to be the singer in a garage band that played for proms and small festivals for a couple of years to give me time to adjust to life after sports but once it gets in your blood it’s there and today I will be deciding if I am going to the opener with tickets bought on stub hub at at bargain price or if I will wait until Wednesday for the noon game ( I love noon weekday games, the cubs would have been heaven like it was for steve goodman)
    I can hear jim Ed’s ticker and take me out to the ball game playing behind his daily reports for the next 162 game season. Time moves on. So must we all.

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    1. Yeah, I miss that change of seasons when we moved to “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” and its leading organ glissando then tickatickatickatickaticka…

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    2. tim, I’m sure you were the kind of player coaches love – the try anything, play full speed type of guy. The kind of player coaches love except for that thing you have about questioning authority. You would have enjoyed our baseball coach at Macon High School in 1973 – he was a long haired hippie, just like you!

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      1. My dad, in his 68 years of reffing and umping high school and college sports had the most trouble with parents and coaches. Baseball was always his favorite. He still loves a good baseball game. He’ll be 91 in June. When he was in New York City in 1942, watiing to ship out to England, he went with a buddy to a Yankees game. His buddy told him they would go the the Yankees’ locker room after the game. My dad was skeptical, but sure enough they did, as the buddy’s brother Tommy Burns, was on the team. Dad was thrilled.

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    3. If you go to the Wednesday game, tim, you better go in the evening, not at noon. Twins have the day off on Tuesday, evening game on Weds., and a noon game on Thursday.

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    2. In 5th and 6th grades, our country school had a girls softball “team.” I don’t remember any practices, heck, I don’t even remember the games. Everyone played, I never even learned that baseball teams HAD 9 players. The highlights of my softball experience were the rowdy, screaming/singing, looong bus rides over washboard dirt roads, all the girls vying for the backseats to see if we could catch a good bounce and hit our heads on the ceiling. And screaming at the driver to go faster, go faster down the hills so we could get that floating stomach feeling. I do not remember the adults or anyone telling us to be quiet, stay in our seats or to behave. Unbridled passion for play, passion for sports—not so much but we returned home dirty and exhausted and ready for our next away game.

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      1. Nan, that sounds like the cross-country team my brother was on in high school. They ran mostly for fun, and after the meet they’d challenge their opponents to a game of touch football. I think our team lost most of the time because all our runners left a little gas in the tank for the post-meet festivities.

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  4. Back when I was in high school in the old country, there were no sports teams of any kind affiliated with high schools. All sports where individual sports and were pursued in P.E. classes. Don’t know if that’s still the case today, but I have a hunch it might be.

    I always loved sports, and was fairly well coordinated and did well in them. The high jump, long jump, and 60 and 100 meter sprint were my favorite disciplines and I held my school’s record in each of them when I graduated.

    Outside of school I also pursued springboard and platform diving. I was never that crazy about the 10 meter platform, but loved the 3 meter springboard. I competed in the tryouts for the summer Olympics in Rome but fell short of making the cut when I cracked my head open on the springboard on my last dive; didn’t get enough distance from the board. Although the injury only required a few stitches and didn’t cause any major damage, it pretty much put an end to my diving career. Just couldn’t muster the courage to attempt some of the more difficult dives after that.

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      1. Well, talented relative to whom? Denmark is a small country and their Olympic athletes have not amassed large numbers of medals over the years. The Olympics in Rome were no exception. Two female divers, both team mates of mine, participated in the Olympics that year (1960), but neither medaled. For us it was more for the experience, we all knew that we didn’t have a chance at winning anything, but hey, a couple of weeks in Rome would have been nice. The Danish football team (soccer) did in fact win the gold medal that year, and I don’t think anyone was more surprised than the Danes themselves.

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      2. I’m impressed too, Plain Jane. I think having any amount of success at competitive diving makes you more than “fairly well coordinated.” I get a little dizzy just thinking about it.

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    2. Denmark does one particular alcohol extremely well, which on is it again. Fun way to kick your ow self in Ge back of the head Danish style

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    1. It’s always nice to think of our friend Tom, Julia. I love it that in the photo of him sliding into third base, you can TELL it’s him. I believe that one was published in the Pi Press back in the day.

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  6. Good morning to all. I played junior varsity basketball at a smaller high school and couldn’t make the varsity team when we moved and I went to a larger high school. I participate in track and scored very few points for the team as a high jumper when at the large school. At the smaller school I was able be somewhat competitive in both running the mile and high jumping, a strange combination in track.

    I think I probably had enough physical skill to do fairly well at sports, but I didn’t really have the right mind set to be a strong competitor. When I was out on the basketball court I knew what I should be doing in theory, but wasn’t able to completely get the job done. You don’t need to be a top student to be a good athlete, but you do need to use your mind as well as your body to be good at sports. I was a fairly good student but didn’t know how to use my head to be good at sports.

    That’s an interesting story about Tom, Dale. Apprently Tom did have a very good mind set for sports and, also, enough physical skill to do well, althought his physical skill was not equal to that of the top athletes.

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    1. He was also a very good golfer, Jim. Eye-hand coordination was key. And of course as a Scot, he had a natural affinity for plaid.

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  7. Thanks, Dale.
    As a former coach I can tell you that to excel at any sport, especially beyond high school, takes a complete suite of skills whereas most good HS athletes lack one or two of them, size often being an issue. Or speed.
    If you have ever been in the immediate presence of great athletes, I mean standing beside them, as they exhibit their skills in practice or competition, then you often know all that it takes.
    A rule of thumb with much truth which I often observed: the best actor/performers in high school are usually the smart athletes. God often grants ten talents. There is clearly something about athletic skill, such as timing, or grace or mental processes or something, which makes people such as TK, who were very good athletes excel at something else.

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        3. oops, posted that too soon. One time I said something about my lack of talents to an acquaintance and she said, “Oh, you have lots of talents!” So I asked her, “Like what?” and she got this blank look on her face and stammered, “Well….” I found that rather amusing.

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        1. heehee. Let’s declare it a tie and call ourselves the winners. Anyway, we’d probably get distracted and wander away from the judge who would call us both the losers.

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  8. Morning all. No sports stories here. Although my mother was a jock (and still is) and a Phy Ed teacher, none of her three daughters was ever interested in sports. Only one of her grandkids is a jock (the Teenager)!

    But I want to go back to Saturday’s topic… sorry I missed it. Did we find out if DC has a paypal account? I would be more than happy to cough up some coin to keep TBB ad free!

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    2. Thanks for the sentiment, VS. I’m not ready to take donations yet, however. My instinct tells me to try the ad thing to see how it works and how it looks. It might not be as bad as you fear, and we can always opt back out of the program at any time if it becomes too unsettling.

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  9. Title IX had passed by the time I started kindergarten, so girls’ sports–basketball and volleyball, IIRC–existed even in my pathetic little parochial school, but I loathed and avoided phy ed as much as I could. The highlight of my time on the playground was finding some tiny fossils (I thought at the time they were vertebrae, but I’m now fairly sure they were bits of the stems of crinoids aka sea lilies) in the pebble pits under the climbing equipment; since my school taught that God had put fossils in the earth to test our faith, I kept those to myself. Once, while being forced to play softball, I actually managed to get on base and then to home, but that was a complete fluke. In college I had one last phy ed credit to fill, so I took Women’s Self Defense (a lot more discussion and roleplaying than sweat) and was finally free.

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        1. Yes… there was the beginning class and then if you passed that one, an intermediate in which you learned to pass clubs, etc. It was the early 70s when every institution was trying to be liberal by offering choices outside the box. I took both classes, although juggling is definitely a skill that becomes rusty when you don’t use it!

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      2. No sports in high school, but my 4H club had a softball team. We all had to play. Then my college required two years of PE! I took a wonderful folk-dancing class (late 60s, after all), soccer, bowling, lacrosse, swimming, and “spaz” class – I got put in that one because I had flat feet, although it was really rather unrelated. I found out there were some things I was better at than others and it was good to know that I wasn’t horrible at everything.
        I enjoyed reading about Tom – the pictures are wonderful. Thank you, Dale!

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  10. Dale, thanks for the background on Tom. He must have graduated from Sibley in 1964, right? I graduated from there in 1967 and heard years ago that he went to Sibley and knew he was about my age. I have spent hours poring through the yearbooks I have (’65-’67) to find mention of Tom. I’d narrowed down my lack of success to 3 options; the class of ’64 theory, that he had been an uber introvert or that Sibley was Jim Ed’s school and Tom went somewhere else. I bet I “missed him by that much.”

    My sports stories are confined to those of an appreciator rather than participant. If you can find anyone more uncoordinated than I am, submit them to the Guinness Book of World Records!

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    2. Yes, Tom graduated from Sibley High School in ’64. He was involved in many different activities in school and was always well-liked.

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  11. No sports for me – not a sports-kinda gal. I suppose the attempts at fencing might count, but those weren’t team sports (I only took lessons, never competed), and it wasn’t at school. I did my bit in high school by playing in the pep band. The football team was not fabulous, but the basketball teams usually did well. First year of high school our team went to regionals and was head-to-head against our basketball arch rival to go to state (our school and theirs were the two teams that regularly went to state from Mpls in that era). We had a larger pep band than the opposing school and more kids who played outside of school band (also the regular band director wasn’t with us – only chaperones) also, our drum major was a senior with a lot of school spirit – so every time the opposing team’s band started to play, the drum major would raise his hand, give us a beat, and we’d start playing our school rouser, drowning out the other band. Not nice or polite, but sure was a ton of fun. We lost on OT, but it was a very memorable game.

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  12. I didn’t play high school sports, but I went to a school that had (and still has) one of the best athletic programs in the US, and I was able to watch future Football Hall of Famer Michael Irvin play for our team there. Then I ended up at college in Miami, where Michael also went, so I saw him in games as a Hurricane as well.

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  13. No high school sports story here. My high school had very few sports and I don’t remember if they had sports for girls anyway – probably just intramural teams – but that’s all moot because I would never have signed up for school sports anyway. The extent of my sports was playing pick-up softball games, mostly before I was high-school age, and I like to think I was pretty darn good, but that may have been because the competition wasn’t much of anything.

    Youngest daughter asked me a couple weeks ago what position I played when I played softball. I told her it was that “positions” in a pickup game are a lot different because you might be playing ball with just a handful of people. So I might play “outfield” one game and “infield” another game (where else could a left-hander play the infield?), or “pitcher-infielder” some times.

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  14. OT: My grandson would be very unhappy I told this story but you theater and performance arts folks will like it.
    My daughter, and her husband and their two kids read the creation story Saturday at a long (too long) Easter Vigil service. It took more than 15 minutes for their reading counting the organ pieces in between parts, My 7-year-old grandson and his mother were, fortunately in the pulpit so only his head and shoulders showed. He is temporarily on a medicine which can cause incontinence and he had an incident when he first went on it.
    So they go up to read, get in place. Just as they start to read, each reading in in turn, I could tell by his face what had happened. he said later he had no urge to go to the bathroom. It just suddenly happened. I think I’m the only audience member who knew. He stood there through it all, a smile on his face and read his parts out boldly and clearly, including two passages of four verses each right at the end. When they were done his mother walked him quietly out the back and drove him home. He was upset for awhile, but got over it before they were home. When asked, he said that no, there would never be a time that he would look back and think this was funny and yes he was eager to read again in church.
    By the way, before they left he insisted with his mother that if he was going to read in church he must wear a dress shirt and tie. And he did wear his tuxedo to church Sunday.

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    1. Atta way Kid. Above and beyond the call … so to speak… You just stick it out. And what the audience / congregation doesn’t know won’t hurt them.
      Tell him he handled it like a professional, even being upset for a while, that’s OK.

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    3. I feel for your grandson – such a trooper. I had a similar experience when I was a little older than him, without the cover of the pulpit (only the first three rows of the children’s choir to hide me). He may not laugh about it later, but the embarrassing sting will get better. Anyone with enough elan to wear a tux at seven should recover nicely, I’d think.

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      1. Tell him I hate it when that happens and that he should choose a hat to go with the tux. Measure his head and give me the size I’ll keep my eyes open

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  15. Morning!

    I’m right there on the sidelines in the band.

    I hurt my leg summer prior to 9th grade. Follow up surgery’s during the school year meant I got to hang out in the library with a kid whose heart conditions excused him from phy-ed. But we both had to go back for the session on dancing. Remember when they taught square dancing in elementary school? My kids didn’t get that course.
    I remember the 9th grade phy-ed teachers dressing up in their 50’s fashion for the ‘sock hop’ lessons; T-shirts with the sleeves rolled up, hair slicked back… still didn’t like the dancing but I remember the costumes.

    Sports still doesn’t do it for me. My son played Lacrosse and I’m at the game watching a red car go up the road and everyone else is cheering…

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        1. This blog really makes me realize how limited my exposure to American popular culture is.
          Had no idea who Margaret Farquar was, had to google it, as I’ve had to do so many other times when you baboons dig deep in the vast storage vaults of your collective memory. What I’ve missed out on!

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        2. I bet you and I are the only two who know who she is now. A very obscure piece of culture. I just happen to be very fond of that episode of Wonder Years.

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  16. I wasn’t involved in any team sports either. I wouldn’t have been even if they’d been available to girls. It seems that balls are always aimed at my face or my glasses and I can only duck with my hands over my head. I’m not the one you want on your team. We had a good girls gymnastics team and the usual cheerleading squad, but I wasn’t interested in those.

    I grew up on a lake and was a very good swimmer. I took scuba diving when I was fourteen and senior lifeguard training by the time I was fifteen. I might have been interested in a girls swimming or diving team but those didn’t exist. As it was, I ended up being the lifeguard for the boys swim team. There I was making sure the boys didn’t drown.

    Thanks for the nice insight into Tom, Dale. It’s nice to learn a little more about him. He was certainly a talented guy, wasn’t he?

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  17. Eye-hand coordination, nope. Interest in sports, nope.

    I have a few quick sports memories. The first was breaking my finger playing volleyball in gym. The teacher thought I was being a wimp and made me keep playing. When I came to school the next day with a splint, she was pretty embarrassed.
    Playing field hockey and soccer in gym, I was petrified that someone was going to drive a ball into my shins. Even shin guards didn’t keep me from running screaming from any approaching ball. Clearly, I didn’t understand that I should be able to manage the ball with my stick or my feet. Eye-feet co-ordination, nope.
    I went to a tiny private high school and every season, a sort of all-star team was selected from each class for an intramural play-off. For some reason completely unfathomable to me, I was selected for the basketball team one year. On a Saturday morning, I got up in my leisurely way and then realized that the event had been going on for over an hour, I was 40 minutes away. So I missed my one opportunity to be on an all-star team.

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    1. Lisa… I’m typing this slack-jawed. I also broke a finger playing volleyball in gym! I was in 8th grade… it was the very first week of school and the kid across the net was bigger and meaner than everybody else in class. I don’t remember if the gym teacher felt remorse the next day, but I remember thinking “yeah…. I don’t have to take gym for four weeks at least!”

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  20. No sports stories in my memory bank. You don’t have to have been a player, though, to feel your spirits buoyed by a home opener.

    The Twins may be off to a bad start, but they’re almost always pretty awful in April. Doesn’t necessarily mean the whole season will be that way.

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      2. Reminds of a day long past. I think it was Beth Ann hosting when Dale was out of town and something did go right. She ended up copying the whole thing into the day before’s post and we were off and running!

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