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My eyes must have been big as saucers. The air somehow wasn’t reaching all the way down to my lungs. Sweat was coming in such waves the wooden stick was sliding to and fro in my hands. And my little heart was banging against my chest cavity.
Ray Cunningham was a twelve year old giant! And he wasn’t smiling. And you can not imagine how big he looked standing on top of that pitcher’s mound! It was my first at bat EVER in a real, organized, “hey, we’ve got uniforms” Little League baseball game.
I didn’t actually see the first pitch. I did distinctly HEAR it buzz alarmingly close to my chin. I had dreamed about this very moment. But in my dreams I always SAW the ball! And I hit the first pitch EVERY TIME over the J. A. Abernathy Hardware sign in left center field.
Dreams are dreams. Reality is reality.
And this was way before I found out that Ray Cunningham was one of the truly all time nice guys. The second pitch must have been somewhere over the plate, the umpire called it a strike.
Folks, I did the only thing an overmatched eight year old rookie could do. I stepped back, pretending to knock some dirt off my tennis shoes, and prayed to an almighty and, hopefully in this case, a benevolent God!
And let me tell you something, I didn’t pray that perfunctory “God make everything all right” prayer, I didn’t recite “Now I lay me down to sleep…” and I didn’t sing about those multi colored children being precious in His sight. I BEGGED God to help Ray’s aim!
I didn’t want my first at bat to be my last at bat!
It was pretty much the same rolling off that high cliff down by George Sexton’s house. I’d ball up inside a worn out tire we’d borrowed from behind Bill Argo’s Gulf Station and Yogi would shove me down the hill.
As the tire picked up speed all I saw was ground and sky, ground and sky... The only possible way to stop was a crash landing into a tree if I was lucky or into the big ditch at the bottom if I was not. Between bouts of nausea, I prayed as hard and sincerely as I possibly could for a miracle landing!
The year before Leon was legally old enough to drive, he slipped the car out of the driveway and we made a beeline to the clay pits. He barreled down that narrow, crooked country road like Richard Petty sliding through the fourth turn at the Daytona 500.