The Goat…..

With Tom Brady about to make another Super Bowl appearance I’m reminded of what I believe is the greatest sporting performance of all-time. It took place forty-six years ago on the hallowed kickball fields at Our Saviour’s and I’m proud to say I was a part of it.

My first year at Our Saviour’s Grade School (OSS) was in 1974 and I was entering the fourth grade. Earlier that summer my parents were asked by the Superintendent of Public Schools in Jacksonville to make other arrangements after an incident (one that I won’t go into now) involving Franklin Elementary’s principal Ross Foley and his annual year end hand stand that didn’t go off as he planned.

My four previous years of public school gym class had me prepared somewhat in duck duck goose and red rover but left me lacking entirely in what mattered most at OSS. At OSS kickball is life. Your kickball playing ability, and that alone, established your standing at OSS and possibly whether you would get into heaven according to some of the nuns.

Kickball follows a lot of the rules in baseball except at OSS you played until the playground bell rang signaling time to go back into the school. Whether both teams got equal chances to be on offense did not matter. The only thing that mattered was when that bell rang. A game could be 10 minutes or 10 hours. Just depended upon when the bell rang. I learned later that the nuns would bet on the games and most of the time the nun in charge of the bell would ring it when it allowed her to win the bet. I heard rumors of a game lasting 3 days. No joke. The nuns betting, ala Pete Rose, appears to be the main reason why there are currently no Dominican Nuns in any major sport hall of fame. Sad really.

There were two titans of the fourth grade. One was Danny Riggs. He was a country boy with the only forehead that could rival my own drive in movie screen sized forehead. He also had a blue Goretex type winter coat with red and white stripes on it. You know. The kind all the girls liked. The other titan was Mark Pine. Mark was a few inches shy of eight feet tall in the fourth grade. Oddly, he would graduate at five foot, ten. Along with being the biggest, he was the strongest, occassionally the meanest and most of all the best kickball player.

There was a division in the fourth grade between the city kids and those who lived out of town. Since OSS was a private school it was able to have kids from all over. Though they easily could, OSS never bragged about having students that had been kicked out out of some of the best schools in the tri-state area.

The stage was set for a showdown between Danny and the country kids versus Mark and the city kids. Unfortunately for Mark, my family had not yet moved out to the wilderness as we would two years later and I was on his team. I was by far the worst player but like most sports movies I ended up coming through in the end.

Jim Watson was the first boy at OSS not afraid of my huge cranium and the first to be nice to me. It was his doing that allowed me to come through for my team. He offered to switch places batting (kicking) with me which made it possible for him to come up in my spot and he was able to get a huge two run triple that put our team ahead. It would have been a three run triple but Sr. Mary Alice’s leg seized up rounding third and she was out by a mile at home.

With two outs and Danny Riggs on second base it appeared the game would probably come down to this next play. Since it was almost pitch dark and we had been playing for about seven hours it was obvious that Sr. Theresa Marie (who was in charge of the bell) had money on Danny’s team. Coming up was Mike Prillmeyer, a ringer from Cuba, that Danny had brought in because Mike supposedly wanted asylum. Mike had not made an out since he had come to OSS. Never proven, but it was speculated that he was thirty-six years old. Most likely Mike would get a home run driving in Danny and the bell would ring.

Mark placed me deep in center field about three times as far as a person could humanly kick a ball. Analytics had determined that my not being involved in a play would lead to the best outcome for our team. Mark was the pitcher because kickball rules required you to put you best player in charge of rolling the ball to the opposition.

Mark pitched the ball towards Mike. Mike connected with the ball and it sounded like a cannon had fired. The ball pierced the night horizon like a Tiger Woods drive. It was coming right at me. For some reason the normal crippling fear I normally feel when playing was gone and a strange confidence appeared. I was going to catch this ball. In my mind I already had. I could feel the others admiration for winning the game. Then I slowly started to realize that the ball was about six hundred feet above my head. There was no chance I would catch it. Danny raised his arms in victory and started running towards third. Sr Theresa Marie gave the signal to ring the bell. The game was over.

Or so they thought. Mark, who just moments before had pitched the ball, had covered the yardage of three plus football fields and pushed me out of the way and played the ball off the convent wall like Carl Yastremski off the Green Monster. He spun and fired the red rubber ball back towards home. One step from home, with Danny’s arms raised and as the bell rang in the background, the ball connected with the back of Danny’s head and he fell face first into some trash cans placed oddly close to home plate.

We won. Thanks to me.