Have Glove, Will Travel_ Adventures of a Baseball Vagabond - Bill Lee [60]
“Nothing, Bill. Just lots of lights.”
“Now look in front of us. See any lights there?”
“No.”
“Right. That’s a clue, Gilles. When you see lights behind you and none ahead, that means you are heading out of the city. Not going toward it.”
“Oh, yes, Bill. I get it now.”
He turned around, and we reached the dinner just in time for dessert. A few weeks later Gilles drove us to a game in Saskatoon. Or tried to. As we entered the village of Yorktown, I looked out the window to my right and saw a golf course with grass greens. That was unusual. Most of the courses in this region had sand greens. Which means they were not green at all, but beige or brown or off-white or whatever the hell the color sand is. So why do they call them greens? Don’t ask, these are Canadians.
Gilles pulled into a PetrolCanada to stop for gas while we ate lunch. A few moments after we resumed our journey, I looked out the window again and saw another lush green golf course. Only this time it was on my left.
“Hey, Gilles, do you know how many golf courses they have in this town? It’s kinda small.”
“I am not sure, Bill. I don’t play golf.”
“Well, maybe you should take it up. Unless they have two only a block apart, we are heading back the way we came.”
Had I not glanced out that window, Gilles undoubtedly would have driven the bus to the tip of Nova Scotia and possibly beyond.
Frank Mahovlich and I occasionally sat next to each other on the bus and talked to pass the time during long rides. The Big M had visited the Soviet Union years before to compete in the Hockey World Cup and understood the paranoia that had nagged me during my own trip to that country. His entire time there, he believed the KGB was following him. One day he combed his hotel room looking for electronic bugs and other spying devices. Frank cleared out the closet, flipped over the mattress, unscrewed the lamps, and checked under the toilet. He finally pulled up the carpet and found a metal plate bolted into the floor. Aha! A listening device, cleverly hidden. Frank unscrewed the bolts. Soon as he finished, a loud crash resonated from the room below. He had unfastened a chandelier.
Our team was an offensive juggernaut; we often scored twelve or more runs a game. But we gave them right back on defense. Few of the hockey players could field with skill. Jean-Guy Talbot split catching duties with Hull, and he had this habit of trying to stop every ball thrown to him with his feet—an old hockey practice he could not abandon. After one week of playing, his toes ulcerated. We thought about sewing baseball gloves to his shin guards, but he retired midway through the tour, probably to ensure that he would be able to walk long into old age.
Players told me that if you ever prayed to God for a bigger prick, Eddie Shack appeared on your doorstep the following morning. He displayed surprising range for a 250-pounder whenever he played third base. Too bad Eddie had Jennifer Lopez’s throwing arm. Our other infielders were content to block balls with their bodies rather than make clean catches. Massive Angelo Mosca turned his back on hard-hit grounders and let them ricochet off his stonewall behind to another fielder for an assist. I finally called a meeting to tell the boys those leather things on their hands were gloves, not oven mitts, but they never quite got it.
These men were tough competitors, grittier than any ballplayers I knew. We had just started a game in Winnipeg when the tail end of a hurricane deluged the field. I asked the umpire to call a rain delay. The hockey players overruled me. They thought we’d be wimping out if we let “a little drizzle” make us quit. None of them cared that every base rested under six inches of water.
In the fifth inning, I hit a grounder that was waterlogged by the time it reached the second baseman. The ball squirted out of his hand as he pulled back his arm to throw. He picked it up again and threw past the first baseman into right field.
As I ran toward second,