The Wrong Stuff Page 3

  A lot of great players came out of SC. Guys like Freddy Lynn, Steve Kemp, Steve Busby, Rich Dauer, and Roy Smalley. Ron Fairley was a Trojan superstar long before I got there. After joining the team, I found myself on one of the best pitching staffs in college history. I was there with Jim Barr and Brent Strom. The three of us went to the majors. And for one season we had Tom Seaver. He had transferred over to USC from Fresno Junior College. Dedeaux loved him, calling him his “Phee-nom from San Joaquin.”

  Tom didn’t have much of a breaking ball back then, but he threw awfully hard. He was just starting to mature and was more of a thrower than a pitcher. His personality was strictly laid back, very Fresno. But underneath that placid exterior was a great competitiveness. He exuded confidence without opening his mouth. One look at him told you that he had a future of big cigars and long limousines. On the other hand, it was quite obvious to people who met me that I had a future of six-packs and canoes. And that after drinking enough of those six-packs, I would probably slip out of the canoe, fall into the water, and drown.

  Seaver pitched only one year for us—1965—but an extraordinary thing happened to him in that short time. When we got him, he wasn’t very big. Then he must have gotten exposed to some gamma rays, because he just suddenly filled out and got those big legs that resulted in that patented Tom Seaver delivery and turned him into a human dynamo. He had so much intelligence and adapted to changing speeds so quickly that you just knew he couldn’t miss. It was too bad he pitched with us for only one season. He got drafted to Cleveland, was stuck in a dispute over whether or not they had signed him illegally, and ended up being unable to play ball anywhere. He had to sit out a whole year. I felt sorry for him, but he ended up with the Mets and, by 1967, was the National League Rookie of the Year.

  When I first saw Jim Barr, he had a shaven head and a four-day growth of beard on his face. You couldn’t tell if his head was upside down or not. He looked like a twenty-eight-year-old Marine just down to play some pick-up with the college kids. I didn’t know he was only a seventeen-year-old freshman. When he took the mound he looked like a fixture out there; it was as though he had been pitching for about one hundred years. Brent Strom, who was a year behind me, ended up breaking all my records at SC. With guys like this around I felt privileged to get a start once in a while. It became obvious to me that the environs of Southern California were conducive to good pitching. I think the reason is all the good Mexican food available down there. I believe in it as a staple for pitchers. It puts a fire in their bellies and protects their arms from harm. You never read about Pancho Villa having a sore wing.

  By the middle of my first year on campus I had loosened up, become less of a loner. This made my academic life a little tough. All the drinking and carousing that was part of being one of the guys made it difficult for me to get oriented. But it would prove to be excellent training for the major leagues.

  I had geography class at night, and all the football players would attend it. You could tell who they were; they were the guys in the back with the girls on their laps yelling and screaming. It was really very hairy. Our professor used to show us slides of California geography, and every twentieth slide or so he’d slip in a nude to make sure the guys were awake. I started hanging around some of them. Big mistake for a naïve kid from Marin County.

  Mike Battle and Tim Rossovich were in that group. Battle was the guy who played on the Jets, hung out with Namath, and ate shot glasses to help him get up for a game. He used to challenge ski jumps with his motorcycle and would show up for scrimmages covered with cuts and scratches. Mike would get hurt more before practice than during it. Didn’t care though; he seemed to enjoy pain.

  Battle and Rossovich were the dynamic duo. Tim was worse than Mike. Stoned soul crazy. One afternoon he was with a girl who was a Kappa Kappa Gamma. They were upstairs in her bedroom in the sorority house when they heard the house mother coming up the steps. Tim jumped out the third-story window in his shorts and bare feet. Landed on the pavement like a cat, took off, and dashed through the parking lot to his frat house. Later that night we asked him if it was worth it. He said, “Not really. I had her Kappa Kappa off and was all set to grab her Gammas when we got busted.”

  On pledge night Tim and Mike headed an expedition to the Olympic Auditorium to watch the professional wrestling card. After two matches Tim started to complain that the whole thing was a fake. He got very emotional about it and started ripping out chairs from the ground. Then he ran up to the ring and creamed one of the wrestlers, knocking him on his butt. A free-for-all broke out. This was an excellent example of one of my reasons for not joining a fraternity. It didn’t seem as if it would be conducive to my maximum potential for survival. I still went to all their parties, though, and I would usually wake up the next morning on a beer-sodden couch with a pledge pin stuck to my chest. Not my shirt, just my chest.

  Rod didn’t go in for this sort of behavior. His idea of a wild time was to have rookies on the team walk through a crowded airport terminal while wearing inside-out blazers and red fright-wigs. I got that treatment once, but I foxed him. Instead of walking through the terminal I jumped on a baggage chute, slid down to a side door, and had a taxi drive me to the team bus. Nobody saw me in that getup except the cabbie.

  Aside from minor hazing, Rod was a stickler for discipline. But he was not omipresent. So when the team went down to San Diego to play in a tournament, it was not too difficult for several of the more enterprising members of the squad to slip across the border into the legendary oasis of sin and debauchery known as Tiajuana.

  The first place we would head for was the Blue Ox Cafe, the sort of place where you walked around with your hand over your drink. This precaution was necessary unless you wanted to spend the evening straining pubic hairs out of your beverage. It was really wild in there. One girl would be taking on a donkey, while another girl would move about picking up the coins that grateful spectators had showered onto the stage. And she never once used her hands. Talk about dexterity—she would have made a great shortstop.

  On one trip we almost lost a good part of the team. One of our infielders and I were coming out of the Ox one afternoon. We were fried. We were in the middle of a discussion on the finer points of the hook slide, when he decided to give me an on-the-spot demonstration. Racing up to the corner, he hurled himself into a perfect slide just as a cop was rounding the corner. My buddy took him out. The cop got up, brushed himself off, and arrested him before he had a chance to explain. I couldn’t understand why; I thought it was a hell of a play. I spent the next several hours scrounging up bail for him and was able to gather more than enough. Good thing, too, because when I got down to the jailhouse I found that one of our pitchers had also been locked up. He had tried to engineer our teammate’s release with words instead of money, and when he was rebuffed he protested the treatment of the prisoner by urinating in the police station parking lot. I got them both out, and I don’t believe either of them has been back to Mexico since.

  It was during this period that I first smoked marijuana. My first encounter with drugs had been with St. Joseph’s aspirin when I was four years old. Up until my second year at SC I hadn’t done anything much stronger than that. Marijuana was completely foreign to me; I had never even heard of the stuff in high school. It introduced itself to me one afternoon when I was sitting in a friend’s apartment and some people came over to listen to records. Somebody lit up a joint, passed it to me, and said, “Here, smoke this.” I gave it a hit and wasn’t very impressed. I had worked part-time as a janitor for the telephone company during high school and had started smoking Camels on the job. Woo! I used to have to sit down for twenty minutes after smoking one of them. That was the strongest stuff I ever inhaled. Marijuana never hammered me like a good Camel.

  After a few more tokes I did have to revise my initial assessment. I began to feel displaced. Something was definitely happening to me. I just sat around and did a lot of thinking. I would watch what wa
s going on around me and then my brain would start clicking into another dimension or time warp. None of my senses were distorted, merely highlighted. It was as if everything was in 3-D, and I could visually grasp all three sides at once. Aside from that, I didn’t get much of a buzz. It never incapacitated me or caused me to lose control.

  I believe the thing about marijuana that causes a stoner for people is that the majority of the population is right-handed. This means they think with the left side of the brain. When they get high they become aware that they are using the wrong side of their gray matter, and this tends to disorient them. But lefthanders, such as yours truly, are used to using the right side of the brain. The correct side. The smoke puts us totally in sync with nature, and we have no trouble handling it. A writer once asked me if marijuana was the only drug I experimented with in college. I don’t know what he meant. I never experimented with pot, I just took it. I didn’t sit down, do a few hits, and say, “Well, now my pulse is accelerating and the red lines in my eyes are being caused by the dilation of the capillaries.” I just passed around the pipe.

  We did not use greenies—the code word for amphetamines—on our team. Rod ran a very tight ship. But some of us did use DMSO, an anti-inflammatory that is well known now but was virtually unknown back in the sixties. It worked so well we wouldn’t tell anybody about it, especially Rod, figuring it just had to be illegal. There were rumors back then that if you used it you could go blind or become sterile. Or both. But you could throw a two-hitter with it, despite a sore wing, so nobody cared about the risks. Our supply came from Canada, and we used it for muscle injuries. All you had to do was rub it over the affected area. After a while it would start itching like hell, and it gave you oyster breath. On a ninety-five-degree day you were not the most popular boy on campus. You’d walk into the cafeteria for dinner and four hundred people would make a mass exit. It was great stuff if you didn’t mind dining alone. It got rid of the inflammation right away. Personally, I didn’t have much cause to use it. I never threw hard enough to get hurt.

  There wasn’t any sense in burning myself out trying to impress people with speed I didn’t have. I always saved something for the late innings. Strikeouts, from my perspective, are boring things. Nothing happens. They are fascist weapons. I prefer the ground-ball out and view it as the perfect symbol of democracy. It allows everybody a chance to get into the game, gives the crowds an opportunity to see some dazzling work in the infield, and has virtually the same effect as a strikeout. Only better. A ground ball can be converted into a double play, my idea of the ultimate two-for-one sale. Groundouts also take less of a toll on the arm than strikeouts. It’s a far, far better thing to get a batter out with one pitch instead of three. I’d never pay to see a big whiff artist like Nolan Ryan pitch. I’d much rather watch Larry Gura or Tommy John. Those guys are artists, like Catfish Hunter and Mike Cuellar were.

  Cuellar was the closest thing I had to a pitching idol. He was the great lefthander who played on those championship Baltimore clubs in the late sixties and early seventies. They used to bring him out to the mound in a sanitation truck and drop him out of a Glad Bag, looking like an Apache Indian chief in a baseball uniform. He was amazing. Once the game started he would begin serving up his garbage: “Here’s a grapefruit for strike one. Take a swing at this toilet seat.” You ever try to hit an empty beer can for distance? That’s what hitting his screwball was like. It was awesome. He’d win twenty games every year. Just when the batters figured they had his slow stuff timed, he’d rip a ninety miles per hour fastball at them and it would finish them for the rest of the game. That’s what I call pitching.

  It’s obvious that I’ve always had a bias for guys who could pitch with their heads. Dedeaux did, too. He taught me the geometric approach to pitching, pointing out that we had a spherical object and that there was this plate with corners. We had to be able to make the ball cross those corners at various heights and speeds in order to avoid having it intercepted by a round wooden object. He told us, “Throw strikes, Tiger. I hate walks.”

  During the ’67–’68 season we looked unbeatable. We also horsed around more than ever. During an exhibition game against the Army in Hawaii we had to sit through a rain delay. It got tiresome, so to liven things up, Strom bet me five dollars that I wouldn’t go out on the field and do ten pushups while wearing nothing but my jockstrap. Five bucks was two six-packs back then, so I grabbed that bet. Going out on the field practically naked in front of ten thousand people was no big thing. The hard part was doing the ten pushups. I had spindly arms, and it took a great deal of effort to lug my big ass off the ground. The real bitch of it was that I went out there almost balls-naked and nobody noticed. That didn’t say very much for my body.

  I don’t know if Dedeaux ever got wind of it. If he did, he didn’t say anything about it. I was going too good at the time. It was my senior year, and I think I ended up 14–4, with a low ERA. Everyone on the team was having a good year; we were tearing people up.

  When we made it to the regional playoffs—the first step to the College World Series—I was in the bullpen. I guess I had done something to get into Rod’s doghouse, but whatever it was, he didn’t keep me there for long. Barr was supposed to start the opener of the first tier of the playoffs against Washington State. They were a tough team and Jim wanted to get at them, but he had hyperextended his elbow and couldn’t pitch. Rod knew if he caged me up for any length of time that I would come roaring out, so he gave me the ball. I threw really well. Early on in the game this little bowlegged, gimpy guy got up to the plate, and I thought, Jesus, do they expect this guy to hit me? I threw him a slider inside. Boom! Double off the leftfield wall. It was Ron Cey. I watched him slide into second and thought to myself, Holy shit, imagine if this guy had two legs. I’d really be in trouble. He dragged his legs around the basepaths and eventually scored. We beat them anyway. After the game, we flew to Portland to play the University of Oregon. I started again and got the win as well as four hits, including a home run and a triple. Now we had to take two out of three from Cal State L.A.

  We were very cocky for that series. Everyone figured, “Hey, Cal State, no problem. State school, small budget.” They nearly kicked our butts. I beat them on a Friday night, which meant we only had to take one game of a Saturday doubleheader to win the set. They murdered us in the first game and were leading 4–1 in the ninth inning of the second game. Then they made a fatal mistake. They messed with the pride of the Houdini of Bovard. At the start of the ninth they had already started to pop open the champagne in their dugout. Dedeaux made a big show of pointing that out to us. He didn’t have to say anything; the message was clear: Let’s shove those bottles right up their asses. And that’s exactly what we did.

  I had been sitting in the dugout when Rod told me to get up and get loose. I had pitched nine the night before, so I didn’t want to leave too much behind in the bullpen. I threw four pitches and came into the game. I got to the mound, threw three more warm-ups, and proceeded to get the side out in order, striking out two and getting the final out on a comebacker to the mound. Then, it was our turn.

  The Cal starter got our first two batters. Chuck Ramshaw, our shortstop, was our last hope. He hit a line drive to right for a base hit. We followed that with a couple of walks, and then the dam burst: five straight hits, all with a two-strike count and all coming with two out. We scored four times to win the ballgame. Al Campanis, scouting for the Dodgers at the time, later said it was the greatest comeback rally he had ever seen. The Houdini of Bovard had struck again.

  Dedeaux really got us geared up for the College World Series. He put a tight lid on all forms of fooling around and imported a couple of hard-throwing freshmen to pitch batting practice to the regulars. One of them was this tall, gangly kid from someplace in Oregon. We had put him on the team toward the end of the year and had used him in the outfield. He was awful. I had never seen such an uncoordinated fielder in my life, and he was so big there was no place we
could hide him. He had a great arm, though, so Rod had him take the mound against us. The kid drilled all our right-handed hitters with a 100-mph sinking fastball in on their wrists. We’re going for a championship, and this kid is nailing our best hitters! Dedeaux went out to the mound, collared him, and said, “I don’t ever want to see you anywhere near the ballfield again. Ever!” The kid stalked off, really pissed. He stepped over to the batting cage, grabbed a bat, and hit a shot five hundred feet over the center-field fence. Rod watched it go out, turned to the kid, and said, “Not so hasty, son. Come back here for a minute.” The kid was Dave Kingman. He was incredible. He could throw hard, run like a deer, and was the strongest human being I had ever seen. Didn’t have a clue what the game was about, though. He just wanted to hit the ball over the wall.

  We won the Series that year with another patented Dedeaux miracle. It was getting monotonous. We played Southern Illinois in the finals and were trailing 2–1 in the deciding game. With two men out in the ninth and two strikes on what could be our last batter of the season, we had the opposition right where we wanted them. The batter worked out a walk. The next batter beat out an infield roller for a single, and then our first baseman, Pat Kuehner, tripled both runners home. Game. We went nuts! Everyone was grabbing each other and jumping up and down. That night we got two weeks of severe curfew out of our system.

  We had decided to go to the nearest town and party all night long. On the way in, one of our players jumped out of the car as we stopped near a Texaco station and started to drink right out of the self-service pump. High octane. I don’t know why he did it. I guess there wasn’t any beer left. Guzzling that stuff didn’t have any effect on him at all for the first few hours. We got to town and hit a few places. Around midnight he finally passed out on a table. One of the girls who had joined us looked at him and said, “Boy, is that guy ripped.” I said, “No. He just ran out of gas.”