Wherever I Wind Up (13 page)

Newspaper sports sections report all about this oddity. The tabloid TV shows call to do a segment on me. So does
Strange Universe
. The bizarre tale sweeps through baseball. Did you hear about that kid the Rangers took on the first round? Can you believe there’s a pitcher who doesn’t have a UCL?

We drive back to Nashville and I hole up in the Bartholomews’ house. I don’t want to see or hear from anybody. I don’t know where I go from here. No team is going to touch me after Dr. Andrews’s MRI. I guess my best option is to go back to Tennessee for my senior year. I can finish up my degree. Maybe if I have another strong season, a club will decide to take a chance on me, UCL or no UCL.

The phone rings in the house one afternoon. My future mother-in-law, Vicki, answers it, and a few moments later, from the next room, I hear her voice and anger rising. She sounds as though she’s going to start cussing.

Vicki Bartholomew never cusses.

How could you do this to this young man? Do you know how cruel this is, to take his dream and rip it up in his face? Do you have any heart at all?

I walk over to Vicki to try to get her to calm down. I don’t know who she’s talking to. I appreciate her speaking up for me. I wonder who’s getting the earful. She hands me the phone.

It’s someone from the Rangers. I think his name is Nolan.

No, it couldn’t be. Could it? Don’t tell me that Vicki just dressed down a Hall of Famer and my hero. Please don’t tell me that.

I take the phone.

Hi, this is R. A. Dickey.

Hey, R.A. It’s Nolan Ryan. I can see y’all have some people there who are upset about things, and I don’t blame them. I was just calling to tell you I’m sorry the way things happened. I sure hope you stay with it and things work out for the best for you.

Nolan is good friends with Lenny Strelitz, the Rangers’ scouting director. I’d gotten to know Lenny pretty well. I’m sure he is the person who asked Nolan to call.

Nolan goes on to tell me that he pitched the last five or six years with a messed-up ulnar collateral ligament. He talks about all the people who doubted him when he was a young pitcher who couldn’t throw strikes.

We talk for five minutes and I tell him how much I appreciate him calling, and apologize that he got an earful when he was just trying to do something nice.

Don’t worry about it, he says.

A week passes and the semester is beginning at Tennessee. I re-enroll and pick my classes. My senior year begins the next day with a 9:00 a.m. class in nineteenth-century American literature. Melville and Hawthorne await me. Once I step foot in that classroom on the UT campus, then I am committed to school and can’t sign with a pro team until the following June. I get my books together and start trying to wrap my head around
Moby-Dick
when my agent calls, telling me he has just spoken with Doug Melvin, my personal Captain Ahab.

Doug has been rethinking my situation. He called his own father and asked for advice. His father tells him: You can’t just cut this kid loose and not give him anything. You owe him something—even if it’s nowhere near the eight hundred you were going to give him.

Melvin thinks,
My dad’s right. I broke this kid’s heart. I have to do something.

My agent tells me: The Rangers want to sign you if you’ll take $75,000.

It includes an invitation to big-league training camp. It is a take-it-or-leave-it proposition.

Mark and I don’t have to talk long. The UCL, as of this moment, has officially cost me $735,000. Their offer is more like fifteenth-round money than first-round money, but in the Rangers’ mind that’s about where I am.

I accept the offer, sign the contract, and withdraw from Tennessee, then hold a press conference at Montgomery Bell Academy so I can go through the whole mess and not have to answer questions for weeks on end. I roll out every platitude I can think of about adversity and about how champions are people who rise above it. I say that I am not sad and not discouraged about my big offer being pulled, both naked lies.

I am sad and I am discouraged. I just don’t want to say so publicly.

I use the money to buy Anne’s engagement ring, pay off my Lloyd’s of London premium, pay the taxes on the bonus, and take care of some of my father’s debts. I don’t know how he ran them up, but he is in some financial trouble and I have to help him out with it.

I have $7,000 left.

In early October, I borrow a white Dodge Ram and drive fourteen hours to Port Charlotte on the Gulf coast of Florida, where the Rangers have their instructional league team. I pull into the complex and walk into the clubhouse and see a man standing there. I have no idea who he is. Turns out he is Reid Nichols, the former big-league outfielder who is a Rangers minor-league executive.

I don’t introduce myself, don’t ask him his name, either. I’m being rude, but I don’t really care.

Can you tell me where the weight room is? I ask.

Nichols points to his right and I go off and lift for a solid hour. This is how I begin my career in pro baseball—beneath a stack of iron plates. I am defiant. I am going to outwork every human being on the planet.

I am going to do whatever it takes to make it.

This is the face I am putting on for the world, but the truth is different. I’m ready to work my tail off, for sure, but I also am more insecure than I have ever been in my life. For as long as I’ve been in sports—as a pitcher in baseball or a forward in basketball or a quarterback in football—I’ve never had anybody tell me I couldn’t do something. I’ve lost games and missed shots and thrown interceptions, of course, but mostly I’ve succeeded and delivered, again and again, and gotten applauded for it. Now, for the first time, somebody—the Texas Rangers organization—is doubting me.

Doubting whether I can overcome my missing ligament and whether I can ever help them as a pitcher.

I stare at the ceiling in the hotel where all the Rangers’ instructional players live and think:
What if I can’t do it? I think I can, but what if I can’t? What will my life be like if I can’t play pro baseball?

I go back and reread some of my old press clippings from Tennessee, read about big games I pitched and won and being named an All-American. I am trying to convince myself that I am the same guy, capable of the same success.

I look in the mirror. I am the same guy, R. A. Dickey. Six feet two inches, 215 pounds, from Nashville, Tennessee. Throws right, bats right.

You are the same guy, I keep telling myself. You can do this. You can show the whole world that UCLs are way overrated.

It is a tough sell.

CHAPTER EIGHT

MINOR ACHIEVEMENT

L
ike any prospect, I want my time in the minors to be as short as possible. Succeed, advance, and say good-bye to bus rides forever. That’s my career game plan, and after all the emotional tumult of 1996, I try to believe in myself and put it into place. But first there is a little detail to take care of first:

I want to ask Anne Bartholomew to marry me.

From the time I met Anne ten years earlier, I knew in my heart I wanted to be with her. Now that I’m out of college and pitching pro ball, there’s no reason to wait. I start by visiting an independent diamond dealer in Arkansas. My agent knows him and tells me I can trust him. I don’t trust easily, but as a man who would have a hard time telling the difference between the Hope diamond and dime-store zirconium, what choice do I have? I pick out a rock and the setting, and pray that it’s not a fake. When it’s all finished, the dealer mails it to me in Tennessee.

It is almost Thanksgiving. The Bartholomews have invited my mother and me to have dinner with them at their home in Belle Meade. My mother has five years of recovery behind her now and is becoming a whole new person, and I’m so happy she’s going to be able to share this moment with me.

I start things in motion a few days before, when I ask Sam, Anne’s father and a former West Point linebacker, if I might speak with him in his office, an elegantly paneled room with an antique wooden desk and keepsakes from a lifetime. The wood is so rich in Sam’s office it seems three feet deep. We’re sitting in two plush armchairs in front of his desk. I am very nervous and he knows it.

Sam, I’d like to ask Anne to marry me, and I’d like to ask for your blessings in doing that.

Sam stands up and I follow his lead.

So you’re finally ready to get serious, are you? he says. I was wondering when we were going to have this conversation. He gives me a hug and smiles.

I hope you are not expecting a dowry. I’ve always looked at you as one of my sons and I’m honored that you want to marry my daughter.

Sam’s words mean so much because he’s someone I’ve leaned on and sought counsel from, a man who has been a constant paternal presence in my life. I look around at the handsome desk and panels and three-foot deep wood. I am starting to lose it. I do not want to lose it, part of me being afraid that if I start crying I might never stop.

I hold it together.

Thank you, Sam.

The Bartholomews have a Thanksgiving tradition in which each person at the table speaks for a few minutes about what they are thankful for. Sam asks Anne to start and then they go clockwise around, meaning that I will go last. Sam knows just what he’s doing. Sam and Vicki give their thanks and so does my mom. Next are Anne’s brothers, Bo, Will, and Ben. As they go around I take the engagement ring out of my pocket and put it in my right hand and slightly inch my chair back from the table. My hands are sweating so much I’m afraid the ring might slip out; I keep my grip on it tight. Finally it is my turn. Everybody in the room but Anne knows what is about to happen.

I begin by thanking God for the bountiful provisions and for the chance to be together and then thank Sam and Vicki for having my mom and me to their home. I turn and look at Anne, gazing intensely into her green eyes.

Anne, I am so thankful for you and for our relationship, I begin. I met you one afternoon in this very house ten years ago, and I loved you from the moment I laid eyes on you.

I inch my chair back a little more. My eyes remain locked onhers.

I cannot imagine my life without you, I say, and then I am off the chair and on my knee, with the ring between my thumb and index finger, more slippery than ever, Anne’s eyes already glistening.

Will you marry me, Anne?

She brings her hands up to her face, and now she is crying and nodding, not even able to speak. I slip the ring on her finger; with all the moisture, it slides on as if I’d coated it in WD-40. Anne pulls me closer to her and holds me, my head near her waist.

I love you so much, she says. All around the table there are hugs and handshakes and an abundance of gratitude. Nobody has more of it than me. I am engaged to Anne Bartholomew.

MY FIRST
full year as a professional ballplayer doesn’t follow my script. It ends after eight appearances, six starts, and thirty-five innings in the Florida State League, cut short by bone chips in my right elbow. They’re painful but not particularly serious, and after I get an arthroscopic cleanup—totally unrelated to the absence of a UCL—I am ready to rock.

A
NNE
A
ND I GET M
A
RRIED
on December 13, 1997, in Nashville before an intimate gathering of five hundred people, including Winfield Dunn, the former governor of Tennessee, and Lamar Alexander, another former governor and a 1996 Republican presidential candidate—the type of men who my new father-in-law, a prominent Nashville lawyer, moves with. Two months later we’re off to Port Charlotte for our first spring training. Late in camp, a Rangers player-development executive pulls me aside and tells me the organization has an experiment in mind.

We want to give you a look as a closer, he says.

This is just a couple of days before the season starts. I say nothing and report to the bullpen, same as I did at Tennessee. If that’s where they think I can help, that’s where I’ll pitch.

I take to it well and save thirty-eight games and make the all-star team, moving up to Double-A ball in Tulsa in 1999. I learn a valuable lesson along the way:

If you want to get by on a minor-league salary, you need to watch every penny and look for any way you can to supplement your income. Anne and I get by with one car and start our married life by sharing an apartment with another couple so we can split the $650 rent. Anne gets a job at The Limited and is teaching aerobics too. Sam and Vicki help us from time to time, but we want to make it on our own. I aim to further boost our cash flow with a business venture that I start with my friend Jonathan Johnson, another Rangers pitcher and the best man at our wedding.

Our apartment in Port Charlotte is a short distance from three golf courses, all of which have ponds and lagoons all over the place. Jonathan and I play the courses whenever we get a chance, and after I lose my third ball of the day in a lagoon on a par-five hole on one of the courses, I say to Jonathan, Can you imagine how many golf balls there must be at the bottom of this thing?

Hundreds, maybe thousands, Jonathan says.

Don’t you think that if we could somehow fish the balls out of there, we could sell them and get a pretty good business going?

You may be onto something, Jonathan says.

I briefly ponder if this is how Apple or Starbucks got started, with an innocuous, spur-of-the-moment brainstorm. I don’t take the argument too far, turning my energy instead to the challenge of getting the golf balls up from the bottom—and doing it discreetly, as there are houses lining every inch of the course. We invest in fifty feet of rope and two golf ball rakes with little baskets at the end that allow us to scoop up about sixteen balls at a time. We buy waders, buckets, a couple of gallons of bleach, and a scrub brush for the cleaning operation, and lift a few dozen bundles of sanitary socks from the clubhouse.

Our overhead is low, our start-up costs only about sixty dollars, key factors in any new venture.

We are almost ready to plunge the rakes in the water when we realize we haven’t accounted for one factor: