A Midwestern Sports-Playing Kid
In the spring of 1967, I stepped into the batter’s box to face a hard-throwing pitcher on the home field of the North Central Panthers, a very good Indianapolis high school team. I was the second baseman and leadoff hitter for the Madison Heights Pirates. Before the game, the plate umpire briefed the coaches on the “ground rules,” including the foul territory around home plate. A pop foul on the third-base side in one grassy area and the batter was out. But in an adjacent area, the ball was out of play and the batter stayed at the plate. Visiting spectators were unlikely to know this rule.
The pitcher threw a fastball over the inner half of the plate. I took a good cut but popped it up along the third baseline. As the ball faded into foul territory, the third baseman drifted over to make the routine catch. The umpire signaled out. Pissed I hadn’t gotten a hit, I grabbed the barrel of my bat and headed back to the dugout.
From behind me a loud voice called out, “Let’s be fair about this!” I stopped in my cleats. It was not the volume that froze me but the familiarity. Before I turned around and saw the man walking towards home plate, I recognized my father’s voice. He was on the field to question the ump’s decision and doing it in the middle of our game. An attorney in our hometown, he asked the umpire (the judge in this case) why the opposing player who’d earlier hit a foul ball near mine had not been called out, but I was. Kudos to the umpire who explained the ground rule with clarity and patience. My father thanked him and walked off the field, satisfied. My father would always do what he thought was right, regardless of personal embarrassment or mortifying his son on a baseball field. He did what was right when no one was looking, the essence of integrity.
Raised in the family and the community that I was, it’s not surprising I developed a keen sense of midwestern fairness. Growing up in Anderson, Indiana, playing sports was a given. Our General Motors town of 60,000 was a hotbed of youth, adult, high school and college sports. In Hoosiers: The Fabulous Basketball Life of Indiana, the first chapter is called “Basketball Town.” Phillip Hoose writes, “Anderson, Indiana, is the hottest basketball town on earth, the epicenter of grassroots basketball, where The Game has been celebrated — lived is a better word — on Fridays after sundown for nearly a century.” Basketball Town is my hometown.
My first basketball hoop went up in the yard when I was eight. My mother was a tomboy growing up, an excellent swim teacher who loved sports. At age ten or eleven on Wednesday evenings, I started going to the YMCA with my dad, where he played competitive volleyball well into his 50s. I’d watch a game then go upstairs to the “little gym” where I could shoot baskets and sometimes get in a game with the big kids. I played organized basketball from fifth grade through high school. I earned the coveted Madison Heights Pirate letterman's jacket with varsity letters in football, basketball, and baseball — a puny place-kicker, scrappy guard, and agile infielder.
Baseball was also very popular in Anderson.We had a homegrown major league star. Carl Erskine pitched for the Brooklyn, then Los Angeles, Dodgers. He pitched two no-hitters. In the 1953 World Series, he struck out 14 Yankees to set a single game strikeout record. I joined Erskine Little League when I was nine, played with and against his sons Danny and Gary in the Babe Ruth League (ages 13 to 18) and high school. Parents (mostly dads) volunteered to keep that Little League diamond’s grass infield in pristine shape while others (mostly moms) worked the concession stand. Carl was also instrumental in the founding of the Special Olympics.
Madison Heights showed how good a public high school can be. Excellent academics, sports (unfortunately only boys in the ’60s), music, theater, student newspaper. I’m grateful my teachers were first-rate and paved the way for me to go to MIT and medical school. But my coaches had more impact on who I would become as a person and athlete.
Great coaches are great teachers. They know how to encourage different players in different ways. Our coaches taught us the fundamental skills of each particular sport. They taught us to play hard every game and to be a good teammate. They taught us the fundamentals of fairness. There are rules, there are consequences for breaking the rules, cheating is bad. There is a right way to play the game. Hard work pays off, “You get out of it what you put into it.” Decades after high school graduation, I learned that my high school basketball coach Phil Buck had played a pivotal role in integrating Indiana University and Big Ten basketball in 1947.
Thanks to my family, our coaches, and our community, a deep sense of midwestern fairness has guided me in my medical career and public health efforts. Whether advocating for physical education for all Oregon kids or for needed recreation opportunities in low-income communities, it’s important to remember — “Let’s be fair about this!”
