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

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Just about every player on the team and many of their parents went to Coach Pehota and told him his reasoning was bullshit.

“We’re playing for the state championship,” they told him. “You can’t do that.”

Nevertheless, Coach Pehota stuck to his guns. But it rained on game day, the game was postponed until the next Monday, and I was named the starter.

Seymour High was located somewhere in the Naugatuck Valley, about fifty miles away. We had never played them before. I only knew about one player they had, a fine outfielder and left-handed pitcher named Milt Cochrane. I struck out the first ten batters I faced. Once I did that, it was just a question of whether we were going to score. Seymour didn’t have a chance. We walked away champions of all the Class B high schools in Connecticut.

After the game we drove the bus past rival Middletown High blasting the horn, and we kept blasting it all the way down Main Street. No one expected us to be in the championship game in the first place. My great disappointment is that, to this day, our team has never gotten the acclaim that the 1964 Middletown High School basketball team got when they won it all. There was no parade and no celebration. Our team isn’t even in the Middletown Hall of Fame.