King of the Mild Frontier: An Ill-Advised Autobiography Read online

  Just after Coach turned in his batting order, he called me in, put his hand on my shoulder, and said, “Chris, Charles forgot his glove tonight and we don’t have anyone here to go get it. It’s a lot more important to have a glove on second base than in right field, so I want you to give him yours just for this game.” I stood speechless. I don’t think Coach knew the glove was new or had any idea what was happening inside me. “Stand farther back than usual,” he said. “You can always run up on a ball faster than you can go back to get it. Don’t worry about catching the fly balls; you haven’t been too successful at that anyway. Just don’t let anything get behind you.”

  Charles Boots stood waiting for my glove. I handed it over and turned to hustle to right field so no one would see the tears streaming down my face. I stood way, way back, almost to the jungle gym; Julio Bilbao or Gary Hirai couldn’t have put one behind me. I stood there, hating Charles for being so stupid as to forget his glove, imagining he knew mine was new and that Coach would let him use it if he left his dried, cracked, no-pocket, no-autograph piece-of-shit glove on his back porch. I vowed to become a famous athlete and come back to this town and sign not one autograph, except for the next poor schmuck they stuck in right field because he couldn’t catch a cold, much less a fly ball. I hated everyone: Charles for being stupid, Coach for taking the glove, my parents for letting me buy it in the first place. But mostly I hated myself. I hated myself for not being good enough to play where I’d need a glove. I ached to be good.

  Fact is, in baseball it was not to be. I never had the reflexes for it and could never redefine a hardball as anything other than a hard leather projectile launched to hurt me. By the time Ellen Breidenbach batted out my teeth at fourteen, I’d had enough. But I didn’t shine all that much at the other sports, either. Determination and temper turned me into a pretty good hitter on the football field by the time I was a senior, but I never had the speed or agility for high-school basketball, and only shone at track when the fast guys graduated.

  I never lost that ache. In college I joined the fledgling swim team and turned my body over to the G. Gordon Liddy, the Bobby Knight of swim coaches, and used the memory of my athletic embarrassments to push me until I gained respectability on desire alone. During the two years I taught in a public high school, I befriended the basketball coach, a fabulous athlete named Randy Dolven, who had played basketball in Europe after college, and let him coach me as he might one of his high-school players, picking up skills I would have died for back in my teens. I took those skills to the outdoor court, playing three-on-three basketball at least five days a week on the concrete courts of Berkeley. My grandmother’s and mother’s obsession with counting each and every calorie that passed your lips, coupled with the demand to clean every crumb from your plate, kept me running and/or swimming daily from the time I graduated college until this very day. It was the only way to burn off the calories. If you burned more, you could eat more. Somewhere in time, accelerated heartbeats and sweat-soaked T-shirts simply became habit. I’m nearly fifty-six as I write this and am probably still three times the athlete I was in high school.

  But sometimes on the court, or three miles out on a run, or ten hundred-yard freestyle sprints into a set of fifteen, I allow myself to become young again, to let my imagination create an arena where I’m Jack Hull or Julio Bilbao or Gary Hirai, where some young kid is standing in awe of me as I pull on my helmet and sprint back to the huddle, where I call the play. I can never tell that hero’s story, however, without also telling the story of the young, ungifted ballplayer, his imagination full of wishes, pedaling down the dusty backstreets of Cascade, not knowing necessarily that they’ll take his glove, but that they might.

  For every bit of humor and compassion I put into a story, I put in an equal dose of anger. The athletic backdrops to my stories are significant to me because of the struggle athletics has always provided. I look back and wish my athletic mentors had been able to present a larger picture and had celebrated the sport relative to the ability of the individual athlete. I wish they had made it clean, wish they hadn’t made it patriotic, religious, moral. A sport has its own built-in integrity, doesn’t need an artificial one. Athletics carries its own set of truths, and those truths are diminished when manipulated by people with agendas. So, in my stories, I let my characters try to find the purity, the juxtaposition of mind, body, and spirit that I discovered in athletics at a much later age.

  There is as much missing from this autobiography as there is written, but I suppose that’s the way it has to be. Random chance as much as anything else dictated what I was thinking each day when I brought myself to the keyboard, and who knows what forces dictated its direction from there. What I know from writing it is this: As predictable as life seems, as many times as I have done things over and over and over, hoping for a different result, it is, in fact, not predictable. In my youth I could never have imagined seeing my name on a book unless I had carved it there with a sharp instrument, could never have predicted the nature of the humans who would turn out to be my friends or my enemies, those who would teach me or those who would hold me down. And I could never, never have imagined that in the last half of the decade of my fifties, I would own a genuine coonskin cap.

  An Ill-Advised Photo Album

  I’d be a better cowboy if they let me get rid of the bib overalls

  Alone with “The Lone Ranger”

  Getting ready to “do something neat”

  Future triathlete on his balloon-tired Schwinn one-speed

  123-pound offensive guard, striking fear into all who would oppose me

  Senior players on the 1963–64 Cascade Ramblers eight-man high school football team

  So the football thing didn’t work out—how about swimming?

  1966–67 Eastern Washington State College savage swim team

  Headed for the 1960 National Boy Scout jamboree, posing as a real Boy Scout

  1964 high school graduate and future business tycoon—it didn’t quite work out

  King of the Mild Frontier

  About the Author

  CHRIS CRUTCHER is the critically acclaimed author of seven young adult novels and a collection of short stories, all of which were selected as ALA Best Books for Young Adults. Drawing on his experience as a family therapist and child protection specialist, Crutcher writes honestly about real issues facing teenagers today: making it through school, competing in sports, handling rejection and failure, and dealing with parents. The Horn Book said of his novels, “Writing with vitality and authority that stems from personal experience…Chris Crutcher gives readers the inside story on young men, sports, and growing up.”

  Chris Crutcher has won two lifetime achievement awards for his work: the Margaret A. Edwards Award for Outstanding Literature for Young Adults and the ALAN Award for a Significant Contribution to Adolescent Literature. He lives in Spokane, Washington.

  Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.

  ALSO BY CHRIS CRUTCHER

  Whale Talk

  Ironman

  Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes

  Athletic Shorts

  Chinese Handcuffs

  The Crazy Horse Electric Game

  Stotan!

  Running Loose

  Credits

  Cover photograph courtesy of Chris Crutcher

  Cover © 2004 by HarperCollins Publishers Inc.

  Copyright

  Memory is selective and by nature faulty. That statement is probably doubly true for my memory. Add to that my penchant for exaggeration and the fact that I have changed some of the names for obvious reasons, and you have a memoir that may not stand up to close historical scrutiny. So be it.

  —C.C.

  KING OF THE MILD FRONTIER: An Ill-Advised Autobiography. Copyright © 2003 by Chris Crutcher. All photographs courtesy of the author. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, y
ou have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  Adobe Digital Edition July 2009 ISBN 978-0-06-196844-0

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