CHAPTER 1

Rain Delay

Rain delay. Just minutes before, the grandstands had hosted a cadre ofNAIA officials and spectators willing to brave the elements to watchthe championship game. Now those same grandstands stood motionlessagainst the elemental onslaught, their previous tenants having abandonedtheir vigil and retreated to drier locales. Ballplayers from both teamsheld their ground, huddling in their respective dugouts ... to wait. Andwait they would. It was the biggest game of their lives. They weren'tgoing anywhere until a winner was determined.

CHAPTER 2

Spring Fever

Wind and rain defined most of Whitworth's 1960 baseball season,dating back to early April. The Pirates hadn't gotten outside to practiceor to scrimmage as a team, nor had their pitchers thrown a single pitchoff the mound, before they headed to Seattle for their first games thatspring. When they did hit the road, their coach, my father, wasn't withthem. Instead, Ross Cutter, the newly hired men's tennis coach, steppedin and accompanied the team on their first road trip.

Ross was an energetic sprite of a man, a California native, muchmore acclimated to the warmth and sunshine of the Bay area than thecold dampness of a Washington spring. He made quite a spectacle. Hislong black rain coat flapped like a landlocked raven in the unrelentingwind and rain as he paced outside the dugout or around the third basecoach's box, his oversized galoshes providing further testament to hisdiscomfiture on the field. Not wanting to appear totally useless, CoachCutter had flapped out to the pitcher's mound during one of those firstgames when it appeared that Spike Grosvenor, Whitworth's youngstarting pitcher, was losing control.

"Are you worried, son?" he asked Spike.

"I'm okay, but ...," the end of his thought trailed off as Spike kickedthe rubber and cast an anxious glance toward the opponents on base.

"Hmmmm, well, the seven of us on the bench are mighty worried,"Coach Cutter proclaimed as he turned and flapped back to the visitors'dugout, leaving Spike to work his own way out of a bases-loaded jam.And all the while, my father remained homebound.

Dad had spent much of February and March in bed with pneumonia.It was a tough case from the beginning, probably because the coachdidn't know how to "take it easy." Finally, he was given no choice. Iremember those days and weeks clearly; he on the couch in the livingroom while I or my two younger sisters entertained him or sat withhim in front of the old black-and-white television set, watching varietyshows or whatever else happened to be broadcasting. But he lived for thenews, when he could catch up on the scores and highlights from gamesand sports that were not adequately covered by our local newspaper. Inthose days, the Spokesman Review's sports page was just that—a page,two at most.

Not being the most compliant patient and wanting desperatelyto be on the field with his players, it was necessary to find an activityto occupy both my Dad's mind and his time while he was virtuallybedridden. That activity turned out to be stamp collecting. I was tenyears old at the time, and being the eldest, it was an endeavor that I wasable to share with him. I reveled in every minute of it. Professors andadministrators at Whitworth would save stamps off of envelopes comingfrom all over the world and package them up for delivery throughthe campus mail. At home, we would open bulging manila envelopescontaining hundreds of stamps of every denomination and every color;from countries I hadn't even read about in school. He would pick outthe stamps he wanted to mount in his massive collection book and,with feelings of great importance, I would take them to the bathroomand soak them carefully in the sink or bathtub until the stamps pulledaway from the envelope to which they adhered. As the stamps dried ontowels spread out over the bathroom floor, I carefully kept them flatand unharmed until I returned them to my Dad to mount in his stampbook. It was, perhaps, a poor substitute for being at baseball practiceand accompanying the team on their first road trip, but sharing thatkind of time with the coach was unusual for me, and once...