Have Glove, Will Travel_ Adventures of a Baseball Vagabond - Bill Lee [36]
If anything, we should place all the blame on Tom. After all, he organized the trip. Tom Nickerson worked as a professor at the University of California at Davis, a tall, slouchy, soft-spoken man with a solid left-wing pedigree. His father had taught sociology at the University of Southern California while I attended classes there and had achieved some political celebrity on our campus as an expert on the Soviet Union. He was also the only faculty member with the guts to admit membership in the Communist Party at a time when the House Un-American Activities Committee still conducted witch hunts. I admired him profoundly for that.
Tom and I played college ball against each other back in the day. He impressed everyone as a heady competitor, well schooled in baseball fundamentals. I was delighted when he invited me to join a baseball team he had assembled for a series of goodwill games against opponents behind the Iron Curtain. After spending the six previous years pitching in every province of Canada and winning 90 percent of my starts, I needed a fresh challenge. Russia intrigued me; political differences had kept the country closed to most Americans for years. I wanted to discover just how much of what we had read and heard about the Soviet Union was true and how much was propaganda—ours as well as theirs. I also hankered to see just how much progress the Russian baseball program had made in the two years since its inception.
Tom gathered a team from a diverse mix of scholars, writers, lawyers, and other professionals. I was the only former major leaguer on the roster, but several members had competed in some form of organized ball. John Lehr worked as a high-octane California attorney who also owned the Visalia Oaks, a Class A minor-league team. He fit the role of our team’s Cary Grant, a bon vivant dripping with nonchalant charm and fashion savvy. Glowing skin, perfectly even tan, manicured fingernails, never a hair out of place. On him, the Gap wore like custom-tailored Alan Flusser. John had played some college ball as a left-handed catcher. He could not throw from here to there or hit your grandmother’s limping slider, but he proved himself a smart receiver who called a great game.
Bob Wagner, a land surveyor, had pitched for several minor-league clubs during the 1950s. He had recently turned sixtyfive, a tall, gray-haired man who walked with the loping strides of a natural athlete. A hard, round beer belly held the only fat on him. Bob wore jeans and hand-tooled cowboy boots with all the panache of a San Joaquin rodeo rider. He came across as a serious, focused man, but he also had these effervescent blue eyes that never stopped searching for a good time.
I took an instant liking to Jay Terwillinger; his name sounded so baseball. You could just hear it stretching from the lips of a stadium announcer: “Now playing shortstop for the Toledo Mud Hens, Jay Terrrrr-wil-ling-er!” At six foot one, Jay was lanky and rawboned and probably hadn’t gained more than a pound or two since playing baseball in college. He looked to be in his mid-forties, a high school counselor from northern Georgia who also worked with convicts in the local prisons. This probably made him better prepared than any of us for our journey into the land of the gulag.
Jay spoke in a slow, thoughtful drawl fresh out of a country hollow, and he continually demonstrated a knack for putting things in perspective. For example, one day during lunch in a Moscow restaurant, he noticed that most of the Russians in the place ate caviar. This was at the height of a severe food shortage, which prompted Jay to remark, “You see, here is the problem with this country