If we only had an ocean...

 

Three quarters of a century is in the books for this old man and I look at the image to my left and realize that my walk along the Pacific Ocean lasted 45 minutes -- less than one hour out of my 77 years.

I guess we all ask ourselves why we didn't do more of one thing or another. Why didn't I travel the Seven Seas or take a journey to every Major League Baseball stadium in this great land of ours?

Why didn't I tour Yosemite Park, back when the beauty would take your breath away -- long before Northern California turned into a tender box?

Why didn't I take a train to Nashville, no matter how many stops were required along the way? Why didn't I head for Memphis and search out a speakeasy that played nonstop Blues to wee hours of the morning?

Why didn't I? Well you get the picture. The photo left is worth a thousand words. Just like they say.

"Life is about choices," someone once told me. So, do we go north, south, east or west? I've spent a lifetime walking too or from something. The coolness of the water, the feel of the sand in between my toes -- not so much.

What would it have been like to sit in a box seat at Fenway Park or Yankee Stadium and watch Carl Yastrzemski or Mickey Mantle send one high and deep? What would it have been like to be in Chicago and witness Gayle Sayers weave his way through defenders and scamper eighty yards for a touchdown?

As a retired sportswriter, I have thoughts about such things -- things I will never see, instead I spent years as a community newspaper reporter, a freelance writer at times, a struggling author, to be sure, with hours and hours of microfilm stored away in the closet of a library somewhere in downtown Phoenix -- documenting the stories I did write.

Like the time I met a 16-year-old football player after a JV game in the middle of a Thursday afternoon. 

A man among boys as he took a handoff and galloped for touchdown after touchdown. Back at the paper, my headline read: Remember his name: Terrell Suggs.

My Job: "Go find a story, Danno," they would say,  and boy could I find them. I covered a story about a female high jumper who could leap her height as a sophomore in high school in Gilbert, Arizona. She was six feet tall! Her family said her older brothers were all track stars and mother and father had spent hours and hours at track meets all across the Phoenix area.

They now had a daughter to raise. Just maybe a reprieve from those long-lasting prep track meets, which usually ended about the same time as the setting sun. Nope. Not so fast. Along came their daughter who could clear a saguaro cactus if she was so inclined.

I covered games when Mike Bibby was a point guard at Shadow Mountain High School, when Todd Heap was a tight end at Mesa Mountain View High and when Adam Archuleta played high school ball at Chandler High School, went on to Arizona State University, where he started three years as an undersized linebacker and was drafted by the Rams in the NFL in 2001. 

I knocked on the door of a family in Gilbert, one afternoon in the summer of 1997. The father answered the door and led me in to their den and offered me a cold drink. The father was smiling from ear to ear. His son appeared and shook my hand and his father said: "This is, Shane."

Shane had just signed a Major League contract with the Detroit Tigers and he went on to pitch in the Majors for the Tigers, the Anaheim Angels and the San Francisco Giants. He had Tommy John surgery in 2013. He retired from baseball in 2015 and became a minor league pitching coach for the Arizona Diamondbacks in 2017.

Shane Loux (photo below) is now 42.

I can still see all their faces in my mind as if it were yesterday.

I ventured away from Arizona from time to time, but I always found my way back. I guess it was my spot to be in all along.

My newspaper stories are all gathering dust on microfilm somewhere, but they are not lost...not yet. I can still recall them all.

What do I do now? Well, I'm the historian for the 60-and-over Tucson Old Timers -- an amateur baseball organization that has been around since 1968 and is currently in its 54th season. And yes. I continue to write.

We have a shed at Tucson Udall Park, near the third baseline, where we store all of our equipment to keep our field neat and tidy. In the shed, on the top shelf, are a bunch of binders, gathering dust. All containing stories involving the old-timers who play the game of baseball.

And yes, they are somewhat forgotten. If you would dust off some of the pages inside of the binders, you'd find articles on a bunch of old men who play baseball for the love of the game.

It's what I do...and what I have always done.