Member-only story
You Don’t See Color?
I hear color…
At age eight I had two heroes, Galileo and Willie Mays. Galileo appealed to my science geek side; he discovered the craters of the Moon, the rings of Saturn, the moons of Jupiter. Maybe there was still more out there for me to find. Willie was the greatest baseball player I had ever seen, would ever see. I modeled my stance and swing after his but I never dreamed that I could play like him. I would have have “gone down to the crossroads” and sold my soul just to don a Giants uniform, just to walk as a player onto that impossibly green Candlestick field. Maybe I could make it as a utility infielder like Jose Pagan.
I could aspire to be a man like Willie though. I could strive to play whatever game that life granted me with style and elan, I could learn to respect my rivals even as I tried to crush them, could learn to let critics bounce off my smile like it was a force field. Other greats refused to tip a hat, talk to a sportswriter, others took the whole pageant so seriously. But Willie seemed to find as much joy in the game as I did, even though it was also his job.
We hated the Dodgers, laughed as they twisted themselves into knots trying to smack a Stu Miller “butterfly…
