One Shot at Forever (12 page)

The call came over Macon High's loudspeaker on Wednesday, May 20, the morning of the regional finals.

“All Macon baseball players and Coach Sweet, please
report to the library
to see Principal McClard.”

John Heneberry was in class at the time, and he felt a tingle of excitement. Breezing down the hall, he entered the library expecting a good old-fashioned pep talk—perhaps a blustery pronouncement of how proud McClard was of the boys for “representing the school, God, and country,” followed by a send-off.

After all, what else was there to talk about? Though the nation was in turmoil—the front page of that morning's Decatur
Herald & Review
featured a South Vietnamese army tank churning through a mud-choked stream in eastern Cambodia—in Macon, the world had narrowed down to one game: the Ironmen versus the Running Reds. The boys would load onto buses in the early afternoon to make the trip to Johns Hill School in Decatur. A group of parents and students planned to caravan behind them. Even board president Merv Jacobs was considering making the trip. In less than two weeks, the Ironmen had gone from local curiosity to a genuine source of civic pride.

And now McClard was going to rally the troops, or so the boys assumed. Only, instead of doing so, McClard began talking about Macon High in general, or maybe it was athletics in general, no one much remembers. He continued on like this for about fifteen minutes. Finally, he came to his point. “I want all of you whose names I'm about to call to raise your hands.” And then McClard began to read from a roster: “Mike Atteberry, Jeff Glan, John Heneberry, Dale Otta, Dean Otta…”

When McClard finished, he'd read fourteen names. He looked up at the boys. “Is there anyone whose name I didn't call?”

In the back, against the wall, Brad Roush raised his hand.

McClard frowned, then looked down at the paper in his hands. He walked over to Sweet and they had a brief discussion in the hallway After a moment, the two men returned, McClard looking serious and Sweet angry. Then McClard announced that he had bad news: Mr. Roush was not on the official postseason roster that Macon had sent in to the Illinois High School Association prior to the playoffs. He had to report this.

Heneberry waited for McClard to smile. It had to be a joke, right? Instead, the principal dismissed the boys. Then McClard called Hal Prichard, the Athletic Director at Stephen Decatur, who in turn called the Illinois High School Association (IHSA). Two hours later, the IHSA called back with its decision: Since Roush's name hadn't been submitted prior to the playoffs, Macon had won with an ineligible player. The school had to forfeit its victories and exit the tournament. Stewardson-Strasburg, the team the Ironmen had just beat, would face Stephen Decatur in the regional finals that afternoon.

Sweet gathered the boys and broke the news. He knew it was his role to be diplomatic, to take the school line, but he couldn't help himself.
“This,” he said, “is absolute horseshit.”

Doug Tomlinson felt like he got hit by a truck. Heneberry was stunned into silence. Shartzer flew into a rage, demanding answers. It was one thing to lose a game, but disqualified? It wasn't like Brad Roush was some ringer who had just moved to the district. He was a senior honors student who had played baseball his first three years at Macon High. How the hell could a kid like that be ineligible?

Sweet felt disgusted and betrayed. He knew he'd updated the roster and filed it. What he didn't know was where along the bureaucratic ladder the roster had stalled, whether it was with Phil Sargent—the school's well-meaning athletic director—or perhaps at another administrator's office. He also couldn't help but wonder about the timing. Why would McClard decide to recheck a logistical item on this, the morning of the team's biggest game, then report it himself? Sweet was pretty sure he knew why.

Sweet felt the worst for the seniors. That evening, he drove to Doug Tomlinson's house, near Elwin. For two hours, he, Doug, and Doug's parents sat in the kitchen, commiserating. Sweet told them how sorry he was. How he felt like it was his fault. How he felt powerless. All of them were angry, but none knew how to channel that anger. When they'd said all they could, Sweet took his leave.

Meanwhile, across town at the Jesse house, Jeanne was standing in the kitchen with her mother when one of her sisters came running into the house, crying. It was Lou Ann, who was dating Shartzer at the time. “The team's been disqualified,” she sobbed, then sprinted upstairs to her bedroom. Jeanne's heart sank. A couple hours later, she heard the throbbing of a motorcycle engine outside the house.

Jeanne walked out into the night to see Sweet on his Triumph Bonneville, looking strangely vacant-eyed.

“Wanna go to Decatur?” he asked. “I need to get out of here.”

It was the first time Sweet had invited Jeanne to his place in Decatur. She knew he must be taking it hard.

They roared through the darkness, past the silhouettes of cornfields, until they reached Decatur and the small, run-down house where Sweet was renting a room. He dropped his stuff and then slumped into a chair. There, he told her what had happened: how McClard had delivered the news, how crushed the boys had looked. Jeanne remembers Sweet as “reeling” and “inconsolable.”

She suggested they go see the Shartzers or the Glans—maybe getting the team together would make him feel better. He said he couldn't bear to. She suggested going to a bar but that held no allure, either. So there they sat. No music, no drinks. Sweet was the most joyful, lively person she knew. Now it was like the light had been drained right out of him.

What was there to do? In the days that followed, the parents held an emergency meeting in the cafeteria at school, then urged Sweet to help them find a culprit. They wanted to take their case to the board. They wanted to bring down McClard or Sargent. Sweet declined the parents' entreaties. It wouldn't change things, he said. They still wouldn't get a chance to play Decatur.

Still, the disqualification gnawed at him. The following week he descended to the equipment room in the basement to organize all the gear and file an end-of-the-year inventory. Only, instead of doing so, he dumped everything in a pile and left it there. Then, when he saw the players that afternoon, he told them to keep their uniforms. The school didn't deserve them back anyway. Besides, if McClard was suddenly so interested in the team, let him buy new ones.

Sweet knew this wouldn't go over well, but he didn't care. He was too angry. Not just for himself but for the boys. He'd watched them come together and seen their pride in the team and the confidence they'd gained. Usually, he felt there were important lessons that came from losing. He didn't see much of a lesson here.

9

Sweet needed to get out of Macon. After graduation, he headed to Champaign and got a job painting houses with two buddies, a world away from small-town politics. Some nights, he jumped on his Triumph and cruised the fifty-some miles to Eastern Illinois University, in Charleston, where Jeanne was living in the Delta Zeta sorority house. In the hope of graduating early, she'd petitioned the school to take twenty hours of summer classes. When Sweet visited, the couple spent evenings driving around the country, he cracking jokes and she giggling. At the end of each night, she walked into the sorority house and he climbed to the top of it, ascending the fire escape to the flat tar roof. There, on a wool blanket, he lay down under a canopy of stars, marveling at the new turn his life had taken.

As Sweet was busy clearing his head and falling in love, the Ironmen players were spending their summer trying not to dwell on the disqualification. For those who remained, an unspoken pact was formed. To get better. To play tighter. To return to the postseason and advance to sectionals the following season. In the thick Illinois heat, the returning players gathered for impromptu games at the old elementary school just north of the Macon Library. Brian Snitker rolled up on his bike, and Heneberry walked from his parents' place on Front Street. The Ottas arrived in Dale's midnight blue 1964 Chevy Impala, the one with the bucket seats Dale was so proud of. Some days they played over-the-line, other times it was home run derby or a full-fledged scrimmage. If only two boys showed up, the pair took turns hitting balls against the brick façade of the high school, the crack of the bat followed by the thud of ball on mortar.

At night, the boys cruised out to Mile Corner listening to Led Zeppelin. Gas was thirty cents a gallon, and nobody ever put in more than a dollar's worth at a time—for a dollar was a lot to the boys back then, and few had more than two or three in his pocket at any given time—so a trip to Decatur was only for special occasions. Other times, they'd sit at the Country Manor and tell lies. Each night, it seemed, a different parent hosted dinner. One evening you could have shown up at the Shartzers' house and found three sweaty kids scarfing down chili and dumplings; the next the house was empty because they'd all be over at the Snitker place, eating chicken.

Of all the boys, though, Shartzer and Heneberry bonded the most that summer. As the two returning pitchers, they knew they would form the team's backbone in 1971, but it went beyond that. John was an only child and Shartzer had only an older sister. In each other, they found something of the brother they'd never had.

Sports formed the foundation of their friendship, but they rarely discussed them. Instead, once a week or so during the summer, the duo borrowed either Bob Shartzer's cream-colored Ford Fairlane 500 or Jack Heneberry's white Ford Fairlane and drove to the southeast leg of Lake Decatur, a sprawling man-made lake twenty minutes from Macon. There, on grassy banks thick with shrubs and shadowed by sycamore trees, they set their fishing lines with crawdads, minnows, or, if those proved too expensive, pieces of dough. Where they could along the banks, the boys tied extra lines to trees that overhung the dark green water, using the branches as makeshift poles to troll for “grays,” the long-whiskered, spotted channel catfish that lurked near the banks. If one of your tree branches came to life and started thrashing, you knew you had a cat on the line.

Since channel cats prefer to eat in the dark, the boys usually settled in for the long haul. Some nights they brought blankets and pillows and slept under the stars, just as Sweet was doing sixty miles away on a sorority roof. Other times they stayed up till dawn, reveling in feeling young and invincible as the sun's first rays colored the water. Always, they communicated through the language of boasts and jabs, Shartzer bragging about how many fish he intended to catch while Heneberry, whose slow drawl sounded to many like a Southern accent, announced each of his bites with great drama. “Shaaarrk, I got one and I'm playing with it over here.... You know, he's going to take it here, gonna go
dowwwwwn
with it.”

The fishing trips weren't a competition, at least not explicitly, but of course on some level they were, as everything was with Shartzer. So each boy kept an unspoken tally of the number and size of catfish caught, then stored the information for future reference.

Once in a while, when the conversation did turn to baseball, it usually ended up on Sweet, for the boys shared a deep admiration for their coach. For Shartzer, Sweet provided a counterbalance to his own demanding father. For Heneberry, Sweet embodied the promise of a larger, wilder world. Neither boy could imagine playing baseball at Macon without him.

Usually, special meetings of the Macon school board weren't called until during the school year, when unexpected issues arose. Thus it came as a surprise to the board members when word came that one was scheduled for September 3, 1970, the start of the semester.

That evening, all the usual cars pulled into the Macon High parking lot. Presently, they were joined by one rarely seen at the school that late at night.

At 7:30
P.M
. in the small school library, new board president Bob Glass took roll call. Former president Merv Jacobs was there, as were Dick Snitker and Don Craft, along with Neal Lentz, Scott Towson, and Roy Roush. Joining the board, as always, were Bill McClard and Roger Britton. Also present, for the first time since being hired by Macon High, was, as the minutes recorded, “Mr. Lynn Sweet, a teacher in the Macon Schools.”

Glass stood up and announced that the purpose of the meeting was disciplinary and the employee in question was Mr. Sweet. Then, for what felt like fifteen or twenty minutes, various board members described what they believed to be Sweet's unbecoming conduct. First to speak was Roush, a conservative man who, while a cousin of Brad Roush's father, was not much of a baseball fan. He spoke of how Sweet drove around town in his red Scout, a four-wheel drive jeep that most considered outlandish. Roush said it reflected poorly upon Macon High when the Scout was parked outside bars at all hours. Sweet's mop of hair was also a topic of conversation, as was his laissez-faire attitude with the students. Most troubling, however, was the way he'd handled the end of the baseball season the previous spring. Not collecting the uniforms was bad enough, but criticizing the administration could only be construed as willfully disrespectful.