This is an event in my life that I want to create into a telling story. I’ll begin it today and as the days go on I will continue to elaborate on the event. When I am done, I will look back at it and revise it to mold it into a tellable story. Should I keep it my personal story? or fictionalize it with other characters? Any thoughts would be appreciated.
I played softball for in the local community recreation league for over 10 years. It was a very friendly league. No umpires, batters got 3 swings, coaches on first and third made the calls, etc. The team I played on was made up of a bunch of middle-aged teachers and friends. It was a fun league that had teams from high school/college kids ranging in age from late teens to early 20s, to the Boys of Summer team that was made up of men in their 50’s and 60’s for the most part. Age-wise we fell somewhere to the right of middle nearer the oldest group.
We struggled for years to come up with a name for our team. I believe we started out as the Flying Dutchmen. Of course I was the only player on the team that had any clue to the fact that the Flying Dutchman was a cursed ship of legend. I thought it was an appropriate name for a team of softball misfits. That team name only lasted a couple of years, before we decided to change our name to the Wizards. We were improving as a team though our record still seemed to be less than what we expected. Our big rivalry was always against the Boys of Summer. My guess was since most of us knew each other and we were the closest two teams in terms of age.
As the Wizards we decided that our team needed t-shirts. We purchased these dark blue shirts with a wizard on it. It was pretty cool having the whole team show up in the same uniformed t-shirt.
My t-shirt only lasted a few years. In 1985, I managed to break my collarbone before one of the games even started. The other team hadn’t shown up yet (I’m not sure they ever did, we won on forfeit). We had taken the field for warm-ups and I was practicing at shortstop. Carl was behind the plate while batters were hitting practice grounders to all of the position players. After two plays to short where I made some pretty good catches, Carl screamed out, “Harvey, he’s an animal out there!”, pointing out to everyone that I was catching everything.
Big mistake. I of course took that to my head, so that when the next grounder was too far away from me to stop, I decided to try anyway and show-off my animal self. After all I’d seen professional players dive for balls many times on TV making spectacular dives to catch balls. Something that professional players have that I didn’t have at the time was skill. As I dove to catch the ball I put my right arm down to cushion the fall (my mitt being on my left hand). It was at that point that my collarbone went snap. I was 34 years old. This is the first bone that I had ever broken.
Continued on part 2 http://www.hdhstory.net/Storyblog/?p=14
