One Shot at Forever (26 page)

Normally, a postgame presser lasts only a few minutes, but in this case the reporters only crowded closer. This was gold. For his part, Sweet appeared to be enjoying himself. His teaching style? Why, yes, he had something to say about that. “It's a carryover from my classroom procedure. I can't make a kid do anything, but I can suggest an alternative.”

“Has there been any backlash?” one of the reporters asked.

“Sure, I've gotten a few letters from some of the members of the community,” Sweet said. “Let them talk about how we look, but I don't think they could find one kid on this team that doesn't have around a B average and isn't aiming to go to college. It's all theater to us. We're togetherness.”

And, finally, the line that really cracked up the players the next day, in response to how the farm boys from Macon practiced: “I'll come out and say, ‘I think we ought to have a practice today,'” Sweet said. “If there are six or seven kids who don't want to practice, we call it off. Most of the time, though, they want to practice. It isn't that the kids are lazy or anything. But somebody might have to go to the dentist or somebody else's pigs might be out. So we'll go chase pigs.”

A pig-chasing coach? The reporters couldn't get back to their typewriters quick enough.

While Sweet entertained the media, a number of the boys lingered at the field to watch the start of the Lane Tech game. This turned out to be a poor idea. In the span of twenty minutes, the boys witnessed two things they'd never seen before in high school. First, during warm-ups, the Lane Tech right fielder, a boy named Richie Coleman, unleashed a throw from deep in the outfield that sailed so far it put a dent in the top of the backstop at Meinen Field. Then, on the first pitch of the game, Lane's John Rockwell crushed a home run to left field that soared over the fence and onto Highway 74, the road that arced around the field. Those present later estimated the ball traveled more than 400 feet. Heneberry remembers watching it and thinking he'd never seen a ball hit that far in high school. He remembers feeling like Macon might be in deep shit. And he remembers realizing that, if Lane did win, he would be the one to face Rockwell and company the next morning.

A few minutes later, the boys and their parents headed back to their respective hotels to get some rest. As they did, a thin, quiet man carrying a small yellow notepad stayed behind. He had work to do.

Back at Jumer's, Trusner was on the move. Going room to room he collected and marked each player's uniform, then rode the elevator to the lobby, headed for the Laundromat.

As he stood in the elevator, a bundle of dirty uniforms in his arms, a woman stared at him. It was one of the Lane Tech mothers.

“Why don't you just wear your other set of uniforms?” she asked.

Trusner looked at her. “Ma'am, we don't have another set. This set doesn't even match.”

It was true. That they even matched as closely as they did—the colors a pastiche of purple and other hues—was due to Trusner's lastminute run to the sporting goods store before the tournament to pick up more pants with black pinstripes. He figured those looked the most purple.

Across town that same afternoon, Bill McClard no doubt couldn't believe what had happened. He'd finally jumped with both feet into this baseball thing. He'd driven up to Peoria on Wednesday and stayed at a hotel along with Burns, Stringer, and a bunch of others. (Though he'd made sure to charge the twenty-four dollars in travel to the school expenses under “principal travel, baseball tourney.”) He'd slugged back beers and talked and laughed. Then he got up early Thursday morning and headed to the Nashville game where, to his great surprise and delight, the Ironmen actually won. Caught up in the moment just like the rest, McClard cheered and rooted as he sweated right through his dress shirt. And then it must have hit him: The win meant the Ironmen would play again the following morning in the semis. If by some miracle the boys won that game, they would play in the finals at 4:30 on Friday, June 4.

This would be wonderful. It would bring glory to the school. It would also give him a headache. A week earlier, when planning Macon High's end-of-the-year school schedule, McClard had slated graduation for the evening of June 4 at 8
P.M
. At the time, he couldn't imagine any possible conflict.

Now, he began to worry. That is, until he received the news: As expected, Lane Tech had won its first game in the tournament over Piasa Southwestern, which meant Macon would be facing the best team in the state of Illinois in the second round. Graduation would not be an issue.

17

In home after home in Macon, people began packing and making calls: “Macon is playing Lane Tech!” If you didn't know better, you'd have thought a hurricane was bearing down on the town, so frenzied was the activity. Those who hadn't already gone up to Peoria started finding ways to do so. Farmers closed up their barns, business owners stuck C
LOSED FOR
T
OURNAMENT
signs in their windows. Cathy Schley, who worked as a nurse at a hospital in Decatur, started thinking of what excuse to use when calling in sick for work the following morning. After some thought, she decided on diarrhea. No one argued with diarrhea.

To the students at Macon High, Lane Tech was so exotic-sounding it might as well have been the capital of a foreign country. A school in Chicago with fifty-two hundred boys? Who knew such a thing existed.

Indeed, the two schools could scarcely be more different. Founded in 1908 as a training school for boys, Lane Tech at first offered courses in cabinetmaking, foundry, and welding. By the twenties, it had broadened its curriculum considerably. Its music program was designed by Chicago Symphony Orchestra director Frederick Stock, and the Lane print shop turned out a daily four-page paper and a monthly fifty-six-page magazine. By the late thirties, Lane had moved to a new campus, and at nine thousand, the student population was so vast that classes had to be held in shifts.

From the start, Lane dominated Chicago sports. To walk its halls is to see row upon row of plaques, the spoils from hundreds of city championships in a variety of sports. Its most famous athletic alum was Johnny Weissmuller, who won five gold medals over the course of two Olympics, set sixty-seven world records, and later went on to star in the Tarzan movie series. Lane's football program turned out pro players, including Fritz Pollard, who was later inducted into the NFL Hall of Fame as the league's first African American head coach. The athletic department's crown gem, however, was baseball. The program produced over twenty major league players, won dozens of city titles, and was a regular at the state tournament.

Whereas only a handful of new players came out for the team each season at Macon High, baseball was survival of the fittest at Lane. In the spring, prospective players were judged like prime livestock, run through a variety of tests under the watchful eye of the seniors. The competition was staggering. Greg Walsh remembers being handed a tag that read 431 when he came out as a freshman. Next to him, a boy named Richie Coleman received 432. Walsh was taken aback. He turned toward the man doling out the numbers. “We thought these were only freshman tryouts,” he said.

“These
are
freshman tryouts,” the man responded.

As opposed to Macon, where the boys grew up together, the Lane Tech team was essentially a Chicago-land All-Star squad pulled from a host of feeder schools, and most players had never met until the first day of practice. If it was too wet to go outside, the players ran in the hallways, which were so vast that the track team was said to occasionally hold the 4 × 100 relay inside.

Lane's head coach was Ed Papciak, a large bespectacled man with a pendulous gut. Though able to both instill fear and command respect, Papciak was not the most strategic of coaches. He had only one sign, a brush down his left arm to tell a player to steal. (At one point, one of his players said, “Coach, maybe you want to mix it up, use an indicator,” prompting Papciak to do just that. But since he still only had the one sign, only now preceded by an indicator, opponents eventually figured it out and began pitching out upon seeing the indicator.)

Not that it mattered. With so much talent, Papciak didn't need to employ much in the way of strategy. So dominant was Lane that it routinely won city league games by a dozen runs. Even so, Papciak was a notorious griper—about his field, his players, and his resources.

There wasn't much for Papciak to complain about in 1971, though. In this, Lane's record-tying tenth trip to the tourney, the team was as talented as ever. Its lineup was full of major league prospects, all of whom were excellent dead fastball hitters, their timing honed from summers playing on semipro teams. Ranked first in Illinois entering the year, Tech had started slow, going 6–4 to open the season. Then team captain and star pitcher Mark “Wronk” Wronkiewicz held a players-only meeting, after which the team went on a tear. By the time of the semifinal against Macon, Lane boasted a 32–5 record.

Now, after an unexpectedly tough 2–1 win over Piasa Southwestern that had infuriated Papciak—“we hit like a bunch of minis out there today,” he told reporters—Lane was two games from fulfilling its destiny. The only team the players viewed as a threat was Waukegan, which was in the other bracket. It's fair to say that Macon, with its hippie coach, tiny roster, and number two pitcher slated to take the mound, did not. Even that hippie coach appeared to know what he was in for. As Sweet was quoted as saying in the Thursday afternoon
Herald & Review:
“Lane Tech will have to go to sleep for us to beat them.”

It was not the only time Sweet appeared in the papers that afternoon and the following morning. The Tech-Macon semifinal may have been a monumental mismatch, but that only made it irresistible to reporters, who couldn't get enough of Macon and, in particular, Sweet. Phil Theobald of the Peoria
Journal Star
wrote that Sweet “wouldn't stand out in your local commune.” Another scribe said that Sweet “picked up his coaching methods from the L. C. Sweet Coaching Manual, with contributions from Dave Meggyesy, Rennie Davis, and Timothy Leary.” Another went even further, describing Sweet as “a pinch of a bad Mexican hombre, a fun-loving Joe Pepitone, and a collegiate peacenik,” as well as a “liberalized, long-haired, mustachioed thinking pinko” who if he “ever got too close to a police van at a protest mop-up … would find himself in need of a lawyer.” Others just ran a virtual transcript of Sweet's comments the previous day.

Sweet read the coverage and smiled. He was amazed at how well his little press conference had gone over. His immediate goal had been to draw attention away from the players. He didn't want them bothered, becoming anxious about the media or having to answer for the hats and hair. He also knew that all the ridiculous coverage—and the feelings it engendered among rival teams and coaches—would galvanize his kids.

On a larger scale, Sweet delighted in using this relatively grand stage as an opportunity to tweak the coaching establishment. Just as he'd thrown out the English curriculum at Macon High and been successful with his own methods, now he had a chance to prove that there was more than one way to coach a successful high school team. He looked around and saw fifty- and sixty-year-old war vets with flattops who ran their teams as if they were still in the Army. Sweet was pretty sure that regimenting young men to the point where they're not thinking for themselves wasn't a good way to get the best out of them. Though he was too modest to say it, he really thought what he was doing was in some small way revolutionary. He'd gone into the hardest, most doctrinaire corner of the scholastic experience and proven that a team didn't need a dictator to win, that a coach could put the emphasis on the experience—on fun and cooperation and the kids—and also win.

While most of the press was having a ball mocking Sweet, one reporter had caught on to what he was doing. It was Bob Fallstrom, the
Herald & Review
editor who'd received Sweet's survey all those months earlier. Now he penned a column for Friday's paper that had a different tone. Called “Sweet Ignores Coaching ‘Rules,'” it compared Sweet to Vince Lombardi. Wrote Fallstrom: