Читать книгу Rage. The Legend of "Baseball Bill" Denehy онлайн

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At age twenty I was carefree. I had been a high school pitcher and a star athlete with one hell of a fastball. I was six foot three, 200 pounds, and in American Legion ball I had almost thrown two perfect games in a row. It was all so easy. I just had to rear back and throw, and if the ball found the strike zone, the batter usually didn’t stand a chance. I was clocked somewhere in the neighborhood of ninety-five miles an hour, but I had an easy motion, and batters told me it seemed the ball went much faster. When a pitcher throws a ninety-five-mile-an-hour fastball to the hitter, the hitter has to decide in 44/100ths of a second whether it’s a ball or a strike, whether he should swing or “take” the pitch, or whether to hit the dirt.

At age twenty I drove to spring training in St. Petersburg, Florida, certain that I was going to make the big leagues. I had the same feeling of invincibility that I found from taking the laughing gas at the dentist and drinking the wine in church. As I drove my Oldsmobile Cutlass convertible down I-95 from wintry Connecticut to balmy Florida, I was just north of Jacksonville when the disc jockey on the radio said that he was about to play a song by the Rolling Stones called “Let’s Spend the Night Together.” He said, “It has been banned by the FCC.” The Rolling Stones were in sympathy with the devil; the Vietnam War was raging; it was the winter of ’67.