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

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The man had a concussion, and two other men helped him make it the rest of the way home. One of his buddies carried his gun. Another carried his equipment.

We started at nine o’clock in the morning and arrived at our barracks at six o’clock at night. It was brutal, but we got everyone back. We covered roughly twenty-five miles in nine hours.

My four months of National Guard training ended just in time for me to go to spring training. In fact, I had exactly one day to report for the first day of spring training at the New York Mets’ camp in St. Petersburg.

By 1966 the Mets had shed their most notable flakes and characters, including Choo Choo Coleman and Marv Throneberry. But that year they did feature first baseman Dick Stuart, a power hitter who played first base as poorly as, or even worse than, Throneberry had. Stuart’s nickname was Dr. Strangeglove, and the irony was that Stuart’s lousy attitude had been the reason I hadn’t signed with the Red Sox, and here he was playing with us.

We had a weigh-in, and I was waiting in line behind Dick. We had to strip down and get on the scale, and when trainer Gus Mauch saw how much Stuart weighed, he slapped him on the rump and said, “Holy shit, look at the size of that ass.”