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

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After the game ended I was so pissed off we had lost that I kicked a soda can down the middle of the road all the way home, holding up traffic. It was an early indicator of my proclivity toward rage, and while I was raging, I was out of my gourd. I had no idea what I was doing, no sense of how I was affecting anyone else around me.

Aunt Jody, who watched me kick the can right by her house, later said to me, “Bill, you have a terrible temper, and you ought to know better than that.”

I didn’t have the words to explain it, but I couldn’t accept losing. Losing made me crazy.

When I put that uniform on, I was there to win. I was going to do anything I could to win, and if I didn’t win, I was not a good sport about it. From a self-esteem viewpoint, winning was good and losing was horrible.

Nobody ever said to me that the joy of the competition was what was important. If I had to hit you in the head with the baseball to win the game, that was okay, so long as I won. If you got hit, you should have gotten out of the way. If you were standing at home plate, and I could either slide around you or run over you, I ran over you. It’s the way I played the game.