[外電] Mark Fidrych: Crazy Stuff

看板DET_Tigers作者Westmoreland (Five Tools/Seven Skills)時間16年前 (2009/12/25 18:52)推噓1(1推 0噓 0→)

留言1則, 1人參與討論串1/1

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/27/magazine/27Fidrych-t.html?_r=1&ref=magazine 1954-2009 On a late June Monday evening in the summer of 1976, a 21-year-old Detroit Tigers rookie named Mark (The Bird) Fidrych pitched against the Yankees in a nationally televised baseball game. Even 13-year-olds who lived in homes without televisions — like me — found a way to tune in. Fidrych was becoming an American sensation, and everyone wanted to see him. Briskly and efficiently, Fidrych pitched all nine innings of a 5-1 Tigers victory that finished in less than two hours. On the mound, he frequently spoke to the baseball in his hand. He seemed to be encouraging it. Afterward, the fans of Detroit did the same for him, cheering and cheering until Fidrych returned to the field in tears to acknowledge them. This was one in a summer of what came to be known as “curtain calls,” and that Fidrych should receive them still makes perfect sense. No man ever seemed happier playing baseball, an exuberance that made those who only watched feel that way ourselves. By season's end, Fidrych had won 19 games and was voted Rookie of the Year. There are few things more appealing than a baseball rookie; every one offers the thrill of discovery, the potential for a bright, limitless future, the reassurance that things will go on despite what has been lost. All over America that Bicentennial summer, people wore shirts that said “The Bird Is the Word.” Fidrych threw precise fastballs and sliders that came in banking low and hard across the plate like ospreys over water, but it wasn't his pitches that won him his nickname. Fidrych was tall, with an eager ruff of light curls spilling around his cap, a substantial beak and merganser feet supporting sandpiper legs, and he had a way of moving around that struck all who saw him as ecstatically avian; he did not, of course, fly, but he didn't quite walk either. He bounded and he flapped. He also groomed the pitching mound with his bare hands, filling in the hollows and divots made by the opposing pitcher's spikes and smoothing the earth before he stood to throw. “Why go into someone else's hole?” he reasoned. He talked volubly to baseballs about “focus” and “flow.” After routine outs, he roostered around the mound in a brief, delighted strut. Fine defensive plays sent him racing across the diamond to congratulate the fielder. Whenever an opposing batter touched him for a hit, Fidrych blamed the ball and often requested a fresh one. He led the league that year in earned run average — and in most hands shaken after victories. Even opponents were fascinated, and while some of them tried his methods for themselves, inevitably they reported that balls — and bats — did not listen to them. This was the very beginning of free agency in baseball, when money and commerce were infiltrating the daily sports section. Fidrych, with his $16,500 salary and joyful emanations, seemed to represent some bygone era — that mythical, unspoiled America. In March, at his first big-league spring-training camp, he exulted over all the free bubble gum. When he made the Tigers' roster, he called his parents collect, asked after the dogs and then got to his good news. So frayed — and so denim and flannel — was his wardrobe that the Tigers sent him to a haberdasher with instructions to buy dress clothes for team travel. The three double-knit leisure suits he selected hung unused in an apartment where Fidrych said the dishes never piled up because he only owned four of them. “I don't want to get impressed with myself,” he emphasized after he beat the Yankees. He never had the time. A knee injury the following spring referred more burdens to a right arm that had thrown an astonishing 24 complete games the previous season. We knew less then about how to protect young shoulders and, if need be, how to repair them. After a couple of failed comebacks, Fidrych vanished from baseball. He went home to a farm in Massachusetts and hauled gravel and graded roads for his friend Joseph Amorello’s construction company. Amorello says that, far from regrets, there was “always a smile” on Fidrych’s face. “The rain, the snow — he was the first one on the job every day.” Life just seemed to satisfy him. While Amorello reports that “he didn't talk to his shovel,” Fidrych remained a guy in a flannel shirt who was happy “chasing dogs and kids around the living room.” We had sensed how well he understood childhood. I was not the only self-conscious adolescent who on a sad day decided to tell a baseball about it. Seeing an adult acting like a boy also made the promise of growing up seem attractive. That a man could behave strangely and be applauded led you to think that eccentricity might be a virtue. Any great athlete's career represents a life span in miniature, an early lesson in mortality. Fidrych’s allotted days were as evanescent as his baseball career. Last spring, at 54, while he was repairing his dump truck, his shirt got caught in the drive shaft and he suffocated. There is something particularly brutal about the pitcher who publicly played with dirt being killed by the vehicle he used to carry it, as there is about a man who died young twice. -- ※ 發信站: 批踢踢實業坊(ptt.cc) ◆ From: 118.160.67.210