The Thursday class will focus on writing long features for newspapers and magazines. We will discuss handling and organizing material.
I’m posting a selection of my sports features for discussion. I’ll point out decisions I made in reporting and writing these stories.
A cigar with the oldest living major leaguer (TheTyee.ca, March 4, 2011)
(Selected as one of the 100 notable sports stories of the year by Best American Sports Writing)
http://thetyee.ca/Life/2011/03/04/OldestMajorLeaguer/
Never to be forgotten (The Globe and Mail, November 11, 2004)
http://www.mcgill.ca/channels/news/1938-mcgill-football-champions-never-be-forgotten-212860
Larry Kwong beat long odds (The Globe and Mail, January 23, 2008)
http://tomhawthorn.blogspot.ca/2008/01/larry-kwong-beat-long-odds.html
Extra Innings (Victoria Times Colonist, December 20, 2000)
Versions of this article also appeared in the National Post and the San Francisco Chronicle
VICTORIA
The call came at 2:24 a.m. Possible drug overdose. The address was 1176 Yates St., just a few doors downhill from the fire station.
Seconds later, the four-man crew of Engine 1 pulled up at Danes Court, a flophouse they had visited before. They found an unconscious man on his back in the second-floor hallway. His shirt was open, his breathing laboured.
The brown hallway carpet was ratty and stained, the air stank of old cooking and stale urine. A red exit light shone in the dim light directly above the unconscious man.
As the crew looked him over, the man stopped breathing.
His pulse was rapid but weak. The crew worked feverishly.
Residents stood in their doorways to watch. The crew’s lieutenant went around to see if he could find out who it was lying on the filthy carpet. He came up with the name Frank Williams.
The name sounded familiar to Mark Perkins, one of the firefighters working on the man.
Then it hit him. Frank Williams was a baseball pitcher. A good one, too. A major leaguer.
And here he was dying of a drug overdose on a flophouse floor.
Perkins had seen the man pitch, but had never talked to him. They were separated in age by eight years and lived oddly parallel lives. Both attended the same small American college in Idaho. Both were right-handed pitchers for the college baseball team. Both moved to Victoria after their playing days were over.
Yet their differences were far greater. One was aboriginal and abandoned at birth, the other Caucasian and born to an umpire who steeped him in the lore of the summer game. One made the majors, the other fell far short. One was in danger and the other was sent to save him.
Later, those few desperate moments on May 4 would seem to Perkins to have been fated, as if two lives had followed long paths destined finally to bring them together. What happened that night in the suffocating and inhospitable hallway would invigorate one man’s faith and offer the other a chance at redemption.
Frank Lee Williams had been born 42 years earlier on Feb. 13. His mother, Mary, had tuberculosis and another seven children at home and could not care for any more mouths. She left the hospital in Seattle without her twins. The hospital staff named the boys Frank and Francis, as if coming up with two different names was too taxing.
They spent their first four years in a series of foster homes. Both remember one cruel family that so underfed them that the boys stole dog food from the cupboard. Before their fifth birthday, however, they were rescued from a Dickensian fate by being sent to live with the McCullough family in the middle-class Seattle suburb of Kirkland.
Dick McCullough was an engineer at Boeing. Though he was born with a withered right arm, he wanted all his children, both natural and foster, to play sports. One spring morning the Williams boys were each given an Easter basket containing a baseball and a glove.
Kirkland bills itself as Baseball Town USA. Frank was a star pitcher and Francis his catcher in the Little League hotspot. With their copper skin and moon faces, the boys didn’t looked like their teammates. They were foster children who carried the family name of a birth father they had never met.
“We didn’t even know we were native,” Francis Williams said. “We knew something was different. We had wavy hair and afros. We knew we weren’t white.”
Boys who shared an uncertain ancestry found an identity on the baseball diamond. They were top-notch jocks in a town where athletes, especially baseball players, are revered.
When it was time for them to strike out on their own as young adults, the pair made a solemn pact.
“We shook hands,” Frank said. “Whoever makes it looks after the other.”
Frank was lured to Lewis-Clark State College in Lewiston, Idaho. Warriors baseball coach Ed Cheff remembers Frank as an exceptional athlete who could have pursued a professional career in basketball, football or boxing. “He had an outstanding arm, a real whipping, live arm,” Cheff said. “And he was a real competitive kid.”
When Cheff tried helping him get financial assistance, he discovered his prodigy’s family history to be as elusive as a knuckleball. Finally, Frank and Francis learned, at last, that they were aboriginal. They inherited an extended family, with roots stretching to Vancouver Island.
Frank could throw a baseball slightly faster than 90 m.p.h. He also threw a nasty curveball. An unorthodox grip on the ball caused it to move like a combination slider and curve. Sportswriters called it the slurve.
In 1979, the San Francisco Giants of the National League picked the untutored pitcher with a funky sidearm motion in the 11th round of the amateur draft. He spent four seasons in the minors in such exotic locales as Great Falls, Mont., Fresno, Calif., and Shreveport, La.
The pitches he threw did not always come in over the plate. Williams led the Pioneer League in hit batsmen (nine) in 1979, led the California League in hit batsmen (18) in 1980 and (13) in 1981, and led the Texas League in hit batsmen (13) in 1982. That adds up to 53 bruised batters and one intimidating, if somewhat wild, pitcher.
The Giants called him up in 1984. They made him a relief pitcher, a fireman in baseball terminology, the fresh arm called in to extinguish the batting team’s rally. It was Frank’s job as a middle reliever to clean up other pitcher’s messes before stepping aside for the club’s closer, the glamorous relief job that earns fatter paycheques.
In his lone start in a six-season major-league career, Williams threw a complete game shutout. You can’t do much better, but he was never given another start.
The third season in San Francisco proved to be his best. Williams pitched 52 1/3 innings in 1986 and surrendered just 35 hits, none of them a home run. He appeared in 36 games and was scored upon in just four. His earned-run average was a miserly 1.20. Hardly anyone noticed. “He had as quiet a great year as any pitcher alive,” noted Bill Mazeroski’s Baseball, a respected annual.
In the off-season, San Francisco traded Williams to the Cincinnati Reds for Eddie Milner, an outfielder who turned out to have a cocaine problem.
Williams was a workhorse for the Reds, going 4-0 and appearing in 85 games, more than half that the team played. Mazeroski said he was “one of the best-kept secrets in baseball.”
He was rewarded with a $442,500 US contract for 1988. He made more than a million over three seasons. It was a lot of money for someone who still had some wild ways.
Cheff, his college coach, remembers watching in disbelief as Williams brawled in Tough Guy competitions in Lewiston during the winter, beating bikers into submission by slugging them with his million-dollar pitching hand.
Reds manager Pete Rose was blessed with a superb bullpen in Williams, Rob Murphy and John Franco. “We were an awesome trio,” Williams said. Some games they were a 1-2-3 punch, Franco given the honours of closing.
But all was not well in the Reds organization. Investigators hired by Major League Baseball would later uncover telephone records and betting slips indicating Rose was betting on his own team, which led to his lifetime suspension from the game on Aug. 24, 1989.
Williams said he saw too many suspicious types hanging around Rose’s office. “They weren’t baseball people, but they were around constantly,” Williams told reporters the day Rose was suspended. “I knew it was only a matter of time before he got caught. It was out of control.”
By then, Williams was pitching for Sparky Anderson’s Detroit Tigers, an aged club in desperate need of a rebuilding program. He was 3-3 with an ordinary 3.64 earned-run average.
The end of his career came as suddenly as a line drive. He and his wife were in a car wreck in Idaho following the 1989 season. Frank’s face smashed into the windshield. He broke a bone in his neck, endured plastic surgery to repair his face. A thick scar is still visible over his right eyebrow.
He needed to mend his body and, with his marriage collapsing, decided to move to Vancouver Island. His birth father, Walter Williams, had been a member of the Tseshaht First Nation in Port Alberni and Frank had been welcomed like a long-lost son when he made his first visit to the reserve during his playing days.
By 1992, he was ready to attempt a comeback. He put on the uniform of the amateur Victoria Selects, the city’s name in Coca-Cola script across the chest, his number just below his heart. He wore No. 47, the same number he wore in the majors. Only now he was pitching at Lambrick Park, not Tiger Stadium.
Between innings, he signed his baseball cards for kids who came to him in the dugout.
The comeback fell far short, and Williams kicked around, working construction and house painting.
“I’ve succumbed to being up here and being humble,” he said.
Francis followed Frank to Victoria, but a cycling accident five years ago damaged the cords inside the spinal column, leaving him with limited control of his limbs. “I can’t even play catch with my brother,” he lamented.
Francis lives in a $425-a-month apartment at the Danes Court. His brother was coming to see him the night he overdosed, but he only got as far as the second floor hallway.
An ambulance crew arrived about seven minutes after Engine 1. Paramedics gave Frank two shots of Narcan, the silver bullet cure for overdoses.
Frank stood up, walked down the stairs with help, and was taken to hospital.
Six months later, Williams lives a contented life with his girlfriend and her four-year-old son in a townhouse development in Langford where deer nibble on the grass.
He stands 6-foot-1, tips the scales only a few pounds over his playing weight, and still boasts the Popeye forearms you see in pitchers. He watched some of the World Series, cheering on former teammate John Franco, who won a game for the New York Mets.
For the first time in his life, he is surrounded by aboriginal people. They are teaching him a culture and a tradition about which he knows little.
The neighbourhood kids often come around to play. “I’m like Mr. Santa Claus around here,” he jokes.
The night he ended up on his back with strangers scrambling to save his life seems far away.
“I got in the wrong crowd of people, partying, staying out all night, doing something stupid,” he said.
“It was me being a stupid drunk at 3 o’clock in the morning saying, `I want some coke,’ and they give me down. With alcohol mixed with it, boom, it just knocked me to the ground. They were supposed to give me coke and they gave me heroin.
“Killed me. That’s what it did. Killed me.”
It is the middle reliever’s burden to be pulled before the game ends. On that night, it was not yet Williams’ time to go.
Perkins, the 50-year-old firefighter who recognized Frank’s name, is a fireplug of a man with a grip that could squeeze sawdust from a bat handle. His family history is steeped in the summer game. He is the son of Gordon Perkins, a 77-year-old former umpire who worked the Pacific Coast League. Mark’s own son, Vince Perkins, an 18-year- old pitcher, was drafted by the Toronto Blue Jays in last summer’s amateur draft.
Perkins had pitched for Lewis-Clark, just like Williams, but the closest he got to the majors was the semi-pro North Battleford Beavers of the Northern Saskatchewan League. He had followed his fellow alumni’s baseball career, which was how he was able to recognize him in the hallway.
A few days after the overdose, Perkins returned to the flophouse with Walt Burrows, the Canadian supervisor for Major League Baseball’s Scouting Bureau. Burrows slipped a business card under the door to Francis’s apartment. Perkins slipped one of his Frank Williams baseball cards under the door.
Frank called Burrows that night and was put in touch with the Baseball Assistance Team, a charitable group that aids former ballplayers in distress.
Coincidences and what-ifs nag at Perkins. What if it had been his night off? What if the flophouse wasn’t just three doors down from the firehall? What if the lieutenant hadn’t learned Frank’s name? Why was it the one man who might actually have ever heard of Frank Williams was among those who held his life in their hands?
For Perkins, a man of quiet Christian faith, the answer, in the end, was simple. It was a miracle.
“He’s got another chance,” Perkins said. “I hope he can use it.”
Some day, Perkins would like to meet Williams; two old pitchers from Lewis-Clark State, one of whom reached a low familiar to all too many and a sporting high achieved by so few.
“You’ve got to fix me!” (The National Post, June 22, 2001)
B.J. MacPherson played hurt, finished his checks, took his punishment in front of the net. He came out of the corners with more bruises than he had going in. His coaches loved him for it.
He played hard during the game and he partied hard after the game. His teammates loved him for it.
The scouts could say he lacked the talent to make the National Hockey League, which was the case, but they could never say he lacked the will.
The 27-year-old MacPherson bashed his way through seven seasons in the minors on six teams in four different leagues, earning the captaincy of his latest club, the San Diego Gulls.
The Gulls play in the West Coast Hockey League, a minor league to a minor league. The circuit boasts nine cities, stretching from tropical San Diego to arctic Anchorage with stops in such exotic locales as Boise, where fans of the Idaho Steelheads celebrate the home side’s first goal by tossing plastic fish on the ice.
The crowd at the Bank of America Center still had their toy trout in their laps on May 4 when MacPherson jumped on to the ice for what would be his final shift.
Three Gulls skated hard across centre ice, facing two Steelhead defencemen. On the right side, MacPherson gave his opponent a subtle hook at the ankle. The defenceman was left in a heap at the blue line, victim of a veteran’s legerdemain that went unseen by the referee.
The Idaho goalie made a save, leaving a rebound.
MacPherson fell on his back as he stopped at the right edge of the crease. He sat up and reached back over his left side to swat at the loose puck with his stick.
The defenceman he had tripped, Adam Borzecki, a Polish-born tough guy whose 23rd birthday was just hours away, finally caught up to the play. He cleared the puck before dropping to the ice. His left knee, covered by the hard plastic shell of a shin pad, drove into the back of MacPherson’s head.
Borzecki (pronounced bore-JEN-ski) then pounced on MacPherson, giving him a taste of leather as he shoved a gloved hand into his face. Pay back for the trip, delivered according to hockey’s brutal and unwritten code of conduct. It turned out to be mere insult to grievous injury.
The defenceman got up and skated away. MacPherson lay on his back, the No. 28 of his orange-and-blue Gulls jersey immersed in slush. His brain said “Get up,” but his body refused. He couldn’t move a muscle.
“I’m lying there,” MacPherson would later recall, “thinking of Christopher Reeve.”
At 5:44 of the second period of Game 4 of the West Coast Hockey League championship series, MacPherson’s life as a hockey player came to an abrupt and violent end. A professional athlete was reduced to helplessness in a moment as quick as a referee’s whistle.
MacPherson was about to learn that an entire life’s work can be mere practice for a challenge far more exacting than any offered in a hockey game.
He had already known his share of tragedy and heartache. His father, William MacPherson, a contractor from Cape Breton, died when B.J. was still a boy. William MacPherson left a widow, a coal miner’s daughter from Glace Bay, N.S. Peggy MacPherson was a hard- working woman. She filled orders on the night shift at a Sears warehouse in Toronto while carrying her fifth child. He was named William Joseph, but the other kids called him Billy Joe, or B.J.
His mother signed him up for hockey at age 5. The boy enjoyed skating in practice, but would not take part in games. After 10 weeks of sitting on the bench, he finally agreed to play. When the whistle blew after two minutes to signal a line change, B.J. refused to come off the ice. He had found his calling.
B.J. spent the 1982-83 season with the Weston Dukes, a Class AA atom team in the Metropolitan Toronto Hockey League. The Dukes played 45 games — and lost every single one. The Dukes were so bad that reporters from the dailies wrote about the Grade 5 students who found camaraderie in defeat.
“I think we’re getting used to it,” a nine-year-old B.J. told a reporter after loss No. 42. The Dukes scored just 31 goals that season, yet B.J. managed to record 29 points.
B.J. dreamed of someday playing in the NHL, as do so many boys. He played left wing for the Oshawa Generals and the North Bay Centennials of the Ontario Hockey League. He skated for teams in such hockey hotbeds as Worcester, Mass.; Greensboro, N.C.; Toledo, Ohio; and Las Vegas. He once found a summer job with a professional roller-hockey team. The closest he ever got to the NHL came three years ago, when the Long Beach (Calif.) Ice Dogs of the International Hockey League called him up for four games. He made the most of his chance, scoring a goal and adding two assists, before being returned to the Gulls.
The Gulls may be a Double A hockey team, but they are the class of the league. MacPherson earned more than $900 a week once a housing allowance was included. The club even let their captain use the allowance to cover the mortgage of a San Diego condominium. The club’s No. 3 all-time scorer was putting down roots.
And now his 6-foot-2 frame was stretched out on the ice in Boise, 210 pounds of muscular flesh suddenly immobile.
Gulls trainer Bill Taylor hopped over the boards. The 43-year- old former defensive back for the San Diego State University Aztecs had become a trainer after tending his own long list of injuries accumulated as one of the “sons of Montezuma.” Not much older than the players, Taylor was as hirsute as Wolfman Jack. As he slipped across the ice, he prepared himself for the worst possible scenario.
He straddled MacPherson, gently touching the back of the neck with the fingers of his right hand. He could feel that there was no bone where bone should be.
“Billy, I broke my neck, I broke my neck! I can’t move!” MacPherson said, fear in his voice.
Taylor tried to calm him. By talking, MacPherson was moving his jaw and by moving his jaw he was in danger of damaging the spinal cord. MacPherson had a tingly sensation, but no motor control. Touch my leg, he demanded. Touch my hand.
“B.J.,” Taylor ordered, “you’ve got to stop talking.”
Teammates had gathered, gawking at their injured captain. Taylor shooed them away. He was joined on the ice by two emergency medical technicians. The trainer needed to keep the player’s head immobilized even as he was freed from the shell of his hockey equipment. MacPherson rested like a lobster on a bed of ice.
One of the EMTs used a medical scissors to fillet MacPherson’s sweater. The straps for the shoulder pads were cut. The hockey pants were cut. The laces of the skates were cut. It looked like an old Jerry Lewis routine.
The trainer tucked MacPherson’s arms in and helped log-roll him on to a spinal board. The board was placed atop a gurney and the captain was wheeled off the ice. The crowd of 5,479 gave him an ovation. Twenty minutes had passed since the collision.
Mark Stitt and Mark Woolf of the Gulls were waiting at the boards as the stretcher carrying their teammate was lifted off the ice.
“Go win this one, boys,” MacPherson said.
The ambulance raced to Saint Alphonsus Regional Medical Center. At a house not far from Saint Al’s, a tired neurosurgeon was having little success putting the children to bed.
Christian Zimmerman was born in Buford, S.C., the son of a Marine. Perhaps the peripatetic nature of military life had an effect on his own medical training, as Zimmerman pursued his studies from the University of Maryland to the University of California to the University of Oregon. He held a fellowship at the renowned Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix. He had moved to Boise nine years ago, attracted by its natural beauty and the honest, hardworking character of its residents.
At the hospital, he was told that the patient was a hockey player injured in that night’s game. He had expected a car wreck victim. After looking at the X-rays, he had a quick diagnosis — dislocated neck — and a quick verdict. “We’ve got to go and we’ve got to go right now,” he told the surgical team.
But first he wanted to meet the patient.
“You’ve got to help me,” he remembers MacPherson telling him. “You‘ve got to fix me. You’ve got to make me better.” And he also remembers him saying: “I’m scared.” MacPherson had reason to be.
The bones in the neck are numbered C1 to C7, separated by disks and attached by a complex network of ligaments. Borzecki’s knee knocked MacPherson’s block off, like a toy Rock ‘Em, Sock ‘Em Robot. The skull and the first four bones of MacPherson’s neck were pushed up and forward. They didn’t snap back into place on the spinal column. Instead, the C4 bone came to rest in front of the C5 bone, an injury every bit as gruesome as it sounds.
“The blow basically just lifted his head off the spine,” the doctor said. “If you put the X-rays in the paper, the readers would cringe.”
The player was wheeled into surgery at about 10 p.m. and placed on a striker bed, which allowed him to be gently flipped over. Zimmerman cut a four-inch opening in the front of MacPherson’s neck, later making a six-inch incision in the back of the neck. A disk was removed and the dislocation corrected. The spine was fused front and back with plates.
The dislocation had also caused the spinal cord to be pinched, like a garden hose with a kink. Zimmerman eased the pressure.
At 1:30 in the morning, nearly 3 1/2 hours after entering the operating room, Zimmerman snapped off his gloves. Following the intense concentration needed for complex neurosurgery, all the doctor could do was wait for the patient to awaken.
Forty-five minutes later, MacPherson opened his eyes in the intensive care unit. He waggled his left foot. He was not a quadriplegic, at least.
Because his mouth was filled with a tube connected to a ventilator, he could not speak. Trainer Bill Taylor, who came to the bedside after the game, tried to read his lips.
“His first question to me was: ‘Did we win?'” Taylor recalled. “Then his eyes welled up with tears.”
The Gulls had scored four consecutive goals after their captain was carried from the ice. They won 4-3. The players were not told how badly their cocky, wisecracking leader had been injured until the final horn. Prayers were said in the dressing room.
For the next game, Gulls equipment manager Matt Mitchell, a superstitious man like many in hockey, set out MacPherson’s equipment in his locker just as if he was there to play. He patched together the remnants of the sweater that had been cut from his inert body. The torn road uniform hung from a hanger behind the bench during the game.
The Gulls, who penned 28s on the left shoulder of their sweaters, won Game 5 and returned home to play the rest of the series in San Diego.
Their fallen captain held a press conference from his hospital bed in Boise.
“I just want to start things by saying I hold no grudges about what has happened to me,” he said, his throat wrapped in thick bandages. “I know this is the toughest thing for [Borzecki] to go through, as well as me. I let him know I don’t think he did it on purpose. I just wanted to put his mind at ease.”
The Polish defenceman had come twice to hospital, but had been turned away. On one aborted visit, he spoke with MacPherson’s mother.
“I felt bad for him,” she said. “There was remorse. I told him if I’d’ve seen him on Friday night or Saturday [after the hit], I’d have shot him. But I told him it was all right now.”
After a week, MacPherson flew to San Diego by air ambulance. He demanded to be taken to the arena prior to Game 7. In his last act as captain, he spoke to his teammates from his stretcher. He planned to watch the entire game, but his blood pressure dropped precipitously and he returned to hospital after the first period.
The Gulls won the deciding game 4-1 to claim the Turner Cup. Fans waved orange No. 28 rally towels, which were sold for $1. The proceeds went to B.J.’s Fund, which raised more than US$60,000 for a man who would no longer earn a salary on skates. The elated Gulls draped MacPherson’s sweater over the cup before parading around the ice.
MacPherson’s personal triumphs are measured in less spectacular fashion. He lifted his left leg off the bed. He flexed his chest muscles. Two weeks after the collision, he took his first assisted steps. Four days after that, he took 100 steps with assistance.
Two weeks ago, he took his first uneasy steps on his own. Ten days ago, he checked out of the San Diego Rehabilitation Institute, returning to his condominium in time to watch Game 7 of the Stanley Cup finals.
MacPherson faces further rehab and a future uncertain except for this. At the Gulls’ home opener this fall, the club will hoist a championship banner to the rafters. They will also hoist a banner honouring the retirement of uniform No. 28, the same sweater that not long ago rested in slush, its proud owner fallen, but not defeated.
Sports Writing 2.0 