Chapter 50
Goodbye, Soldier
My father told me that a determined path in life is like a boat in the water. When you move in a direction, any direction, two important things will happen: some people will climb on board with you and help you steer, and everyone else will fall into the wake you leave behind. I have found this analogy to be true, for the most part, but I have also found a third result.
In a lifetime spent in baseball I’ve met hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people. Most passed by the wayside like the ripples of a boat’s wake. People like Bradley Sing. Others were with me no matter where I went. People like Gwen and the Squires. Then there were people who appeared with a regularity that couldn’t have been coincidence. They came and went with a significance I didn’t fully understand until I sat down and tried to put my long tale onto paper. People like Lino Lopez and Steve McCammon. People like Dave Guevara and Clifford Tyler.
People like Theo Garner.
The loss to Baltimore was tough to take. I may have been young at the time, but it was not lost on me that I had been very close to a championship more than once. To be beaten like we were was difficult to reconcile, especially with the talent we had, but to be outmaneuvered by Theo Garner was worse. It seemed like Theo’s presence was imprinted on every significant event in my career. And the strange arrangement of having once been one of Theo’s players only for him to return as the GM of the team that eliminated me from the playoffs was nothing short of surreal. It was a head-shaker, to be sure.
But Theo’s presence was a formidable force, so I guess it’s understandable. Looking back, and especially today as I write this, I should have been more thankful to have him around than I was. As a young player, Theo was really the best thing for me, for all of us, though we didn’t realize it at the time. He showed me a game I was unfamiliar with. He showed me the baseball I thought I knew was nothing like the baseball I needed to know. He did more than teach me the game, he taught me how to act like a ballplayer. A professional.
At the time it seemed pointless, but I was eighteen and a lot about the adult world seemed pointless.
Why should I polish my cleats with a t-shirt and not a towel? Why am I supposed to take five seconds to throw the ball back during warm-ups? Why do I have to have a bottle of whiteout in my locker? What difference does it make whether my pant legs hang down over my shoe tops?
Theo molded us. He guided, challenged, berated, praised, coerced and embarrassed us. He yelled, screamed, whispered, cajoled and bellowed. He woke us up from the dream we had been living and set us down in a new nightmare. He drove the warm thoughts of home from us and inserted images of chalk lines and shoe polish and broken fingernails and the frayed red seams of misshapen practice balls and dirty buses and chain link fences and dusty batter’s boxes and the lukewarm pot roast from all-night diners.
“Don’t ever let me see you snap your glove at a fly ball!” he would yell at our outfielders. “Your glove is a bottomless well, not a flyswatter!”
“Never argue strategy with a fan,” he would say on long bus rides through the pitch dark woods of the South. “Even if you’re right, you’ll still come off like an asshole.” He broke this rule himself many times.
But he also fought for us. He fought for us like no manager I’ve ever had. He may have insulted your parentage or ability, but God forbid anyone else tried it. That was his exclusive province. He was protective of us in that way. We were his guys and that was that. He was in the trenches with us and we knew it. We didn’t always know what he was trying to do, but we knew that whatever happened we were in it together.
Sure, some guys didn’t like the way he did things. They told him so, when they finally got up the courage. He relished those moments. I really believe that. Guys would march up and down the locker room, working themselves up, getting all their arguments in line, then bolt into his office and get in his face. He’d sit there with a snarly grin, taking it all in and loving every moment. I realized later that’s exactly what he was trying to do; get us invested in our own careers, get us personally involved in our games.
He was teaching us to fight for what had come to us so naturally all of our lives. He knew we needed that, and especially me. It may have been because I was a white first rounder from an upscale area. I don’t know. Theo sensed that I needed to find a real desire, a deep down desire – not just a wanting. Wanting is for kids. Only professionals know true desire.
The first time I faced him down was like a rite of passage. Every time after that was a mark of my growth, like sharp black lines on a doorjamb. When he was done with me he kicked me out of the nest, shipping me to a place where I could grow some more, someplace where I had to do things on my own, without guidance, where I could fly for the first time. I resented it at the time, as I have written. Now I know why he did it.
We didn’t part on good terms. Those terms didn’t improve either, as we ran into each other here and there around the country. He seemed to want to talk to me, but couldn’t bring himself to do it. Even when I saw him for the last time at that card show in Cleveland we couldn’t muster a normal conversation. There was something between us and I was never quite sure what it was until I started to write this book.
There was always distance with Theo. He maintained an emotional moat around himself. There was so much banter and bravado from him all the time, after a while you weren’t sure if his quiet bus stories were a reflection of the real him or some calculated move to elicit a specific reaction. It was like he couldn’t function without some kind of tension in the room, like he did his best thinking during arguments, so he made sure to argue with everybody. Theo Garner held the world at arm’s length.
Seeing him drunk that night in Hinesville was the closest I ever got to seeing what was really inside him. That night he wasn’t angry, arguing, hard-smoking, strip club patronizing Theo Garner. He was just another human being who had a dream that slipped away. Maybe I saw what he had kept from everyone for so long: That he was human. Maybe that’s why we couldn’t talk to each other.
But what I saw the summer of 2010 was a remarkable accomplishment. For Theo to go from manager of a big league franchise to the Hinesville Gents in less than two years, well, many would see that (as Jimmy Caliel of the New York
Trumpet wrote) as “one of the most tragic and well-deserved declines in sports”. But then to get hired on (as a favor, it turned out) to scout for Baltimore, then become Head of Scouting Ops, then GM in less than five more is amazing. Then to make two crucial trades down the stretch and make the playoffs, amazing. Then to have his one great gamble, the recently injured Don Cally, beat the team he was traded from, well, many would call that (as Russ West wrote in the Dallas
Tribune) “a stunning and historic turnaround”. Then to win the CBA Championship the same year, well, many would call that (as Yed Bakesian wrote in the Washington
Sentinel) “one of the most incredible success stories of the last fifty seasons”.
But you know what? It was just Theo.
Anybody who spent any time with him would tell you, as I’m telling you, that all that stuff: the ups and downs, the struggle, the fights, the arguments, the arrests, the fiasco with Terry Ruddy, the time he called Kellinger to fight for me – putting his career on the line to do it – all of that was only Theo being Theo. A lot of people have asked me if Theo was always like that. “Like what?” I would say. “You know”, they would say, “an asshole.” “No,” I would reply. “Sometimes he sleeps.”
Theo Garner died this week. Four days ago, to be exact. He had a massive heart attack at his desk right before a game. That’s right, before a game. At 77, CBA baseball was done with Theo, but Theo wasn’t done with baseball. He had quite a winding path to his final resting place, fired as he was by Baltimore, then re-hired, then quitting altogether. He tried retirement but it didn’t work, and why would it? He was Theo; he couldn’t sit still when there was talent out there still to find. His bad knees and his slowly increasing weight made it impossible for him to travel as a scout, so he took a job as head baseball coach at Pasadena City College, not 10 miles from where I grew up.
I hadn’t seen him in nearly ten years, but I went to the wake. There weren’t many people there. That didn’t surprise me, and it wouldn’t have surprised Theo. But there were a lot of other people who hadn’t seen Theo for years. Dave Guevara was there. Lance Wilderman was there. Pete Thompson was there. James Jaffe was there. Steve McCammon was there. And his players at PCC were there. All his players spoke.
From all accounts, he remained unto his death the same Theo I have described here. One of his pitchers spoke about seeing Theo rumble toward the mound at him after he walked the bases loaded and brought the tying run to the plate. “I thought he was going to kill me,” he said. “But he just glared at me. I said, ‘Sorry, coach.’ He said, ‘Don’t be sorry. That was the gutsiest performance I’ve seen in two years. Now give me the ball and let your teammates win this thing for you.’ It made my entire year, him saying that.”
So my story takes a detour in this chapter. It wasn’t intended. It wasn’t part of the plan. I wasn’t really thinking of jumping forward to the present like this, but it couldn’t be helped. Once again Theo Garner has appeared in my life and challenged me to think, to face things, to redefine what I desire. Even death could not stop his influence on my life.
He has become for me the embodiment of the third result I described at the beginning of this chapter. He may have been in my life for a far shorter time than most others, but I am feeling his influence more strongly now than perhaps I ever have. After the wake I walked up to Steve. I extended my hand.
“Dave Driscoll. Shortstop.”
He paused for a moment and I wasn’t sure what would happen. Then he took my hand.
“Steve McCammon. Catcher,” he said. “I’ve heard of you.”
“I’ve heard of you, too,” I said. “Good to meet you.”
“Good to meet you, too,” he replied.
Theo Garner is buried at Forest Lawn Cemetery in Burbank, California. The Baltimore Steamers paid for the funeral. His plot is at the bottom of a gracefully sloping hill, right near busy Forest Lawn Drive. It’s not near a path or road; you have to walk a ways if you want to see him. Typical. Theo always made you work a little harder. But it is near a chain link fence, and that should make him feel at home.