LITMIR.BIZ

3

       THE BUMPY ROAD TO THE PROS

      MY ADOLESCENCE WAS FURTHER FILLED WITH FRUSTRATION, resentment, and anger because my high school basketball coach was a prick who resented how good I was, and that I was a lot smarter about basketball than he was. I also felt a deep frustration in baseball because as a sophomore in high school I had trouble throwing strikes. Then, when I was a junior and my control improved, I was kicked off the baseball team when I deliberately hit a kid in the head with a pitch. For some reason, my coach wasn’t too happy about it.

      I could throw the heck out of a baseball, but my first love was basketball. As a sophomore I was six feet tall, a solid 180 pounds, and I could shoot and dribble the ball like Meadowlark Lemon.

      My sophomore year I started on the Woodrow Wilson High School varsity team.

      Before my first game, my father, who himself had been a basketball star, wanted to talk to me in private. He told my mom he wanted to take me to the game. Dad and I drove the five miles to the high school, and as I started to get out of the car, he grabbed me by the arm and said, “Son, I’m only going to give you one piece of advice: If somebody whacks you, whack him back harder.”

      I took his words to heart.

      My junior year, against New Britain High School, one of the New Britain players stole the ball from me and drove in for a layup. On the next play a pass came to me close to the basket, and a New Britain player by the name of Dave Rybczyk slammed me into the padding three feet beyond the end of the court. I grabbed him, and we started swinging before cooler heads broke up the fight.

      Another of my dad’s sayings was “Don’t get mad. Get even.”

      I did both.

      I’ll get even, I swore to myself at the time.

      When baseball season came around I was on the mound facing New Britain, and in the first inning, who should come to bat but Dave Rybczyk. My first pitch was a fastball that hit him squarely in the head. Rybczyk went down. I had no remorse. My feeling was that since he had started the fight in basketball the previous season, he had it coming to him. It was part of my Catholic upbringing, because it says in the Bible, “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” I settled for a broken helmet and a concussion. I stood over him and shouted, “I told you I’d get you, you son of a bitch.”

      My baseball coach, Gene Pehota, was standing behind me, and he heard what I said, and he kicked me hard in the ass, removed me from the game, and kicked me off the baseball team.

      A day or so later, my father and I asked Coach Pehota to let me back on the team.

      “I can’t have Bill doing this,” he said to my dad. “As hard as he throws, he could kill somebody. We can’t have him throwing at people. He’s not going to play the rest of the season.”

      And so I, one of the best pitchers in Connecticut, had to sit out my junior year of high school. I had to wait for American Legion ball to start during the summer to play ball again.

      I like to say I got my temper from my grandpa, James Denehy, a fine Irishman and an alcoholic. He was once the head of public works in Middletown. I never met Grandpa Jim, but his wife, Anne, once told me that when a new mayor was elected, Grandpa was fired. According to Aunt Anne, after getting canned, Grandpa walked a block to the Elks Club, proceeded to get snockered, then headed back to his office in City Hall, where all the maps containing the locations of the sewers and water pipes in Middletown were stacked. Grandpa collected them, put them on the concrete steps of City Hall, and set them ablaze in a public display of spite and malice.

      “Unless you have copies of these,” said the new mayor, “we’re going to put you in jail.”

      Some copies did exist, but not all, and every so often there’d be a leak in a water pipe or a sewer, and no one would know what to do because there weren’t any maps of it.

      Addiction is in my genes. Like my grandfather, I wasn’t afraid to pull the trigger. And like Grandpa, I didn’t have any remorse.

      I rejoined the Woodrow Wilson High School baseball team my senior year. I could bring it, and the rest of the team was a nose-to-the-grindstone bunch of overachievers, but we had no idea we would be state champions at the end of the season.

      Getting thrown off the team for hitting Dave Rybczyk didn’t curb my sadistic tendencies. The coaches didn’t know that my teammates and I devised a sick, potentially deadly game. A number of our players bet a dollar for the chance to pull a number out of a hat. The center fielder was position number eight, and the player who picked the number eight out of the hat won the pot. My job was to drill the center fielder of the opposing team with the ball. For me, it wasn’t much different from the dunk tank game you played at the state fair, only in this game I was hitting my target with the ball. We did it twice. Both boys I hit ended up with bad injuries, so we talked it over and decided to stop.

      In one game against Southington High School, I retired the first eight batters; the ninth batter was the center fielder, and I nailed him in the arm but good. “What the hell was that for?” Coach Pehota wanted to know. He had no idea the kid writhing on the ground was the batter designated to get drilled.

      Somebody once said, “You could kill someone.” I said, “When I put that uniform on, I’m here to win the game.” I was once asked by Don Lombardo, a close friend, “What would you do to win a game?” “Fuck the rules” was my answer.

      I dominated my senior year. I pitched 151 innings and struck out 288 batters, only fourteen strikeouts shy of striking out two batters per inning. I finished the year with a seven-win-and-two-loss record, helping Woodrow Wilson High win the 1964 Connecticut High School State Baseball Championship. Then I had a perfect record of nine wins and no losses in American Legion ball for the Middletown, Connecticut team. None of this gave me much pleasure, though. I was a perfectionist and wasn’t able to throw strikes as easily as I wanted.

      I threw real, real hard, and I didn’t let up; but I was wild. If anyone was going to see potential in me, it was from pure velocity.

      In my first high school game, as a sophomore, I pitched against New Britain. I faced nine batters; seven walked and the other two batters got hit.

      Against Middlefield that same year I faced five batters; two batters walked and the other three got hit. My coach came to the mound and asked my catcher, “What kind of fastball does he have?”

      My catcher, Tom Serra, who would later become mayor of Middletown, replied, “I really don’t know. Every one he’s thrown has either hit the backstop

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