Long Shot by Mike Piazza, Lonnie Wheeler Read Free Book Online Page A

Ches-Mont League tournament at two over par. On the seventeenth hole, the guy I was playing with said, “Man, you’re gonna win this thing.” I woke up, saw where I was, and choked it away. Went from left trap to right trap to left trap to right trap. Put up an eight. I was devastated. A teammate, Mike Bland, ended up winning the tournament and went to North Carolina on a golf scholarship.
    By then, golf was starting to rub me the wrong way. Literally. Needless to say, I had to do a lot of walking with the golf bag over my shoulder. The trouble was, I’d started to develop serious acne. It showed up on my face, of course—Dad accused me of eating too much sugar and called me “pimple puss”—but one day I got home after stomping around for nine holes withthat strap irritating me, and when I checked to see what the problem was I found nasty pimples all over my upper back. Before long, the pimples developed into that disgusting cystic acne and became keloids, almost like boils. I still have the scars around my shoulders.
    Years later, when I was playing professional baseball, I had the same sort of reaction when the strap of the chest protector rubbed against my shoulder and back. At that point, the team trainer offered to get me Accutane, but I declined because I’d read that it caused pain in the joints. I knew the ultimate solution was simply to outgrow the problem and cope with it in the meantime, which wasn’t encouraging: there are people in my family who’ve dealt with acne into their fifties. In high school, I took tetracycline, but that didn’t make it any less irritating when I carried my golf bag.
    Golf was a fall sport at my high school, and with the troubles it was giving me, I’d much rather have been playing football. Truthfully, I always wanted to play football. Never could. The coaches even wanted me to play, because I was big and had a good arm, but my dad simply wouldn’t let me. I had started pestering him about it long before high school. He told me, “The time you’d give to practicing football, you get in that goddamn cage and you hit!”
    As far as he was concerned, nothing was going to interfere with me playing baseball. He wouldn’t let me get my driver’s license until I was seventeen, because, of course, he didn’t want me straying too far from my pitching machine. Way back in grade school, he wouldn’t even let me play the trombone.
    Schuylkill Elementary had a nice little band, and I’ve always been interested in music. The director was a cool guy named Alan Philo, who played the guitar and rode a motorcycle, and as soon as our class became eligible for the band I talked my mom into attending Mr. Philo’s parents meeting at the start of the school year. When she found out that a trombone cost two hundred dollars, she took that information straight to my dad, whose response was, “No, no, no !” I’m sure the two hundred dollars had something to do with it, but maybe, in his divine sort of wisdom, Dad knew I might stick with it and didn’t care to watch me grow into another musician out of work. I won’t say that I hold it against him; but I truly wanted to read music and learn music and play music, and he crushed all of that.
    (Having brought up the ban on the band, however, I’d be remiss not to add that my dad, as rigid as he was on occasion, was extremely sensitive and affectionate. I don’t feel like I was really deprived of anything growing up . . . other than the trombone, that is.)
    Eventually my fascination with music took a different form. I distinctly remember listening to my first AC/DC record in the seventh grade—it was T.N.T. —and something happened; a hole inside me filled up. Right away, I drew “AC/DC” on all my schoolbooks, which at least gave them a purpose. A ninth grader noticed what I’d doodled and said, “Dude! Cool!” He was an art guy, so he grabbed my book and sketched in a few other little designs. I thought, man, look at me, I’m