Beep. David WanczykЧитать онлайн книгу.
dozens of well-meaning TV segments on people with disabilities. No one is a possessor of secret wisdom just because of blindness, no one’s a Yoda-like caricature spewing maxims about perseverance.
Instead, Ethan is a charming patroller of the hot corner who sometimes talks like he’s had a media-preparedness lesson from Crash Davis of the classic baseball movie Bull Durham. “You’re gonna have to learn your clichés,” Kevin Costner’s Crash tells Tim Robbins’s Nuke LaLoosh, the rookie pitcher, and Ethan’s learned his. He talks about giving “110 percent” as an athlete, believes that you can’t worry about the past, and thinks “things happen for a reason.” We should almost expect him to say that he’s going to help the Colorado Storm any way he can, that he gives all the credit to his teammates, and that he takes it one game at a time.
So even though his past doesn’t always insert itself into the conversation, his love of sports lingo does, and that steady language of competition has been an education for Ethan. He’s learned that the physical world, the one he’s heard about on SportsCenter and experienced on the beep ball field, can be rewarding, too. In one of his first World Series appearances, he delivered a game-winning hit against the Boston Renegades and was mobbed by his teammates. They carried him off the field, and Ethan felt like he was flying in that moment, like he’d experienced some of the joy he’d heard on Cardinals’ radio broadcasts.
He wants that joy again, wants a job as a radio announcer so he can jaw about sports all day long, but by some measures the unemployment rate for the blind stands at around 70 percent, and Ethan’s in that majority. He’s had a few bites, but nothing steady, and he’s especially motivated to find work so he can help support his family back in Ethiopia, which he has improbably reconnected with.
“My mom right now lives in a grass hut, so I’m trying to get a job to put her in a stable house. My priority is family, and then beep ball.” On a recent trip back to his Ethiopian village, he displayed those priorities. As he held hands with his long-lost sister, and as he greeted a large extended family, he wore his Beep Baseball World Series T-shirt.
A year before that reunion, Esubalew “Ethan Johnston” Truneh had listened to the MLB World Series from his apartment in Colorado. That was the series in which David Freese came to the plate in game six, representing the Cardinals’ last chance. When he was down in the count, 1–2, Freese took a 98-mph fastball deep to right for a two-run, game-tying triple. In the eleventh, he homered to win the game, and the Cardinals, Ethan’s Cardinals, came back to take the series in seven. Ethan screamed and jumped around his apartment. He’s since memorized Shannon’s radio call: “Get up, baby, get up. David Freese has done it again!” he says.
“No one gave us a shot,” Ethan said. “But that’s the thing about baseball. You never know what’s going to happen until the last strike, the last out.”
Ethan thinks every new year could be Colorado’s year. He wants that ring. And it could happen, if Colorado gets all the bounces. But as I watched Ethan circling the beep ball and gathering it up, I only thought about the difference between the little boy begging for coins in the big city and this leader of the Storm, lunging for another kind of sound.
Charlie Fairbanks never met Ethan, but he would have liked him. They’re both Colorado guys, both unassuming. And Ethan doesn’t live far from Fairbanks’s old house. In fact, he often eats at an Ethiopian restaurant on Fillmore Street, only six houses down from where Fairbanks created the first ball. Mr. Fairbanks died the year Ethan found beep, but if he could have seen what his invention has done for the younger man, he would have whistled a tune and cracked one more lopsided smile.
“Well,” he would’ve said. “That worked.”
• • •
Ethan Johnston’s biography is singular and devastating, but the pattern of slow, consistent success following a trauma is a familiar one in the beep baseball world.
The man who’s known as the first beep baseball player, a brash Minnesotan named John Ross, had limited sight as a small child and endured multiple surgeries to maintain it, but he was also a rambunctious kid, “as healthy and as active as a curious jack rabbit,” he wrote in his memoir, Feeling Sports. During one period of recovery, in the 1940s, little John Ross, age seven, had his head stabilized so that tissue around his eyes would heal. But John, who would eventually marshal dozens of blind athletes and help create a new sports subculture, couldn’t stay out of a neighborhood football game.
For a few quarters, he did sit dutifully on the steps of the family house, but he just had to break his parents’ rules and carry the ball. Running left to the front corner of his lawn’s end zone, he veered toward some rose bushes that marked the sideline, and after one of his friends gave him a hard two-hand touch, Ross tumbled into the bushes. He felt a thorn pierce his good eye.
Hearing the commotion, Ross’s mother rushed onto the gridiron, into her garden. Ross remembered that “her face was becoming so red,” and as I read his account I imagined a flushed, anxious parent. What the little boy actually saw was much worse. “Her features,” Ross wrote, “began to disappear in an ocean of brilliant crimson.” He was, in fact, bleeding to blindness. He clung to his mother, but just like in the iris shot at the end of an old melodrama, the color closed in on her face and the film ended.
The Rosses were stricken, but instead of placing their son under a cone of protection, his parents made every effort to raise a self-reliant young man. Johnny had a paper route, and he participated in many sports, eventually and improbably playing offensive guard for his high school football team. In an Associated Press article from 1954, his father, Don, remembered the bittersweet feeling of playing catch with his boy: “Finally, my heart became so heavy I couldn’t stand it any longer and I excused myself. I went inside and watched him through the window. John was playing an imaginary game of football with himself, acting as if he were throwing the ball up and catching it. That was a thrill. I knew then my boy had something on the ball.”
“At that time, the blind were put in a corner and expected to make baskets,” Kevin Barrett, historian of the NBBA, told me. “But John Ross did all sorts of things that blind people don’t do.”
Ross did all sorts of things that almost no person does. His life story is a catalogue of uncanny Americana, including the old tale of the blind man driving and the not-so-old tale of the blind man waterskiing professionally. But it’s as a journalist that John Ross first flashed onto the national scene. When he was eleven, the boy who would eventually popularize baseball for the blind was among the very last people to interview Babe Ruth.
At the time, in 1948, the Babe was on a publicity tour through the Upper Midwest, but he was also suffering from the final stages of throat cancer. Because of his limited energy, he’d decided to cancel the slate of interviews he’d previously scheduled in the Twin Cities, but he didn’t cancel on John Ross. So, with the seasoned beat reporters eating their hearts out, Johnny took his place on Babe Ruth’s lap and tossed him some softball questions. The Minneapolis Morning Tribune, writing about the unlikely interview, called Ross “perhaps the city’s No. 1 sports enthusiast” and “a cheerful young fellow who sees all the big sports events here even though illness deprived him of his eyesight a few years ago.”
In the best moment of the interview, John Ross asked, “Would you sooner pitch or play the outfield?” “I’d like to be in there every day,” Ruth replied. “That’s how much I like to play. I think that tells you, Johnny.” Ruth was only fifty-three, but Ross remembered that his voice sounded like it was being dragged over broken glass that night. Nevertheless, everything the baseball legend said was a pearl of wisdom for the aspiring blind athlete and sportswriter. Like the Babe, Ross liked to be in some kind of game every day, and he wouldn’t let his blindness keep him from competition.
“Had I not lost my sight, I would have tried my best to become a professional baseball player,” he once wrote. Little did he know at the time of his high-profile interview that he would become the Blind Bambino, the Sultan of Beep.
• • •
Not long before John Ross’s heart-to-heart