A holiday memory well worth memorializing
- Mike Dewey: Life Lines
- May 24, 2025
- 96
Memorial Day weekend 1966 was unseasonably chilly in my little town, which made it perfect for playing Little League Baseball.
I mean if you’re going to play 12 innings, you’d like it to be cool.
No pun intended.
Before I get into the particulars of that specific contest, let me state at the outset that my memory isn’t perfect, and knowing that some of the folks reading this are liable to correct my version of perhaps the greatest game in city history, hey, I’m just going to do my best.
That, after all, is the most important lesson I learned from all my years in competitive sports and one I’ve tried to carry on.
There’s a flip side to that apple-pie logic, one that stresses that, win, lose or draw, the main objective is to simply have fun.
This, of course, is patently ridiculous.
In my 70 orbits around the sun, the one immutable truth I’ve embraced is losing is not fun, which undoubtedly accounts for the fact I’m no longer welcome at games of Trivial Pursuit.
Or miniature golf … or Scrabble … or bocce ball … or Ping-Pong.
As Mom always said, if they’re keeping score, the object is to win.
I remember the bicentennial summer when, home from college, I landed a job as a playground counselor for the parks and recreation department, a gig for which I was paid a princely $2.30 an hour.
That didn’t bother me as much as the fact that the kids I was charged with instructing in the fine art of friendly competition lacked a certain — how should I put this? — winning instinct.
“Listen, guys,” I said, gathering the boys — the girls had their own female guiding force — around me there on the playground. “Fun is one thing, and we’re going to have plenty of that, but for the next couple of months, we’re going to do anything we can to win.”
“Anything?” a kid asked, raising his hand a little bit tentatively.
“That’s the whole idea,” I said. “We play to win … every time.”
The baseball team I assembled from the neighborhoods was a good one, but it got even better when, on game days, I had the fellas knock on the doors of guys who weren’t, shall we say, regulars.
Call them ringers, call them imports, call them questionable subs, but whenever they came out of the woodwork, that team was a beast, not to be trifled with and, obviously, very tough to beat.
I know what you’re thinking.
“Um, Mike, don’t you think you might have gone a little too far?”
It’s a fair question and one that deserves an honest answer.
Allow me to quote Barry Goldwater, who, during the 1964 Republican Convention in San Francisco, said, “Extremism in the pursuit of liberty is no vice,” though something’s lost in the translation when it comes to one young man’s playground tactics.
All I was trying to do was win games, not overthrow democracy.
Faithful readers might recall that from the years 1963 through 2000, I played some kind of organized ball. That’s 38 straight seasons.
Over all that time, there’s one game I’ve never forgotten.
Which brings us back to Memorial Day 1966 … I was 11 years old.
The team I was playing for had won the city championship the year before, which meant we were already good, but this one was better.
Not just because I was now a starter, having been a benchwarmer for most of my 10-year-old season, but we had two incredible pitchers, who had distinctly different approaches to the game.
One was pure power, firing fastball after fastball, impossible to hit.
The other featured finesse, changing speeds and arm angles, always thinking ahead, setting up a pitch that no one expected.
Between them, it’s a small miracle we ever lost, but that evening they would outdo even the most outrageous expectations.
Ever hear of a 12-inning no-hitter? Well, now you have. On that bracing evening at Miller Field, those guys were exquisite. Owing to a league rule that limited the number of innings anyone could throw in a ballgame, they both worked through six apiece, neither one surrendering as much as a scratch single or a dying quail.
From my vantage point at second, I could only marvel at their command and control, all the time hoping I didn’t make an error to mar the masterpiece they were painting. We won it by a 1-0 score.
Just before Christmas last year, one of them died. Last weekend the other one spoke at his Celebration of Life. It was quite moving, and I couldn’t help remembering that game so long ago and the way that, between them, they brought out the best in each other.
We’re all going to lose the game of life — no one gets out alive — but along the way, there’s comfort in winning whenever we can.
Mike Dewey can be reached at Carolinamiked@aol.com or 1317 Troy Road, Ashland, OH 44805. He invites you to join him on his Facebook page, where kindred spirits are free to celebrate winning.