The Best Sports Writing of Pat Jordan by Pat Jordan

Author:Pat Jordan
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781504033664
Publisher: Open Road Media

Tom Seaver & Pat Jordan

The Best of Friends

(from People, the New York Times, and Newsday Sunday Magazine, 1978–1988)

PROLOGUE

Tom seaver and I are friends. Not best friends. Not intimate friends. Just friends. We used to live only a few miles from each other. I would call him now and then, when he was pitching badly, to give him advice.

“Tom, you’re throwing too many breaking balls.”

“You really think so?” And then, “What the fuck do you know?”

We have a lot in common, Tom and me. We are both in our early forties. Big men. Six-one, two hundred pounds. We are both athletes. Pitchers. Bonus babies. Tom signed with the Mets for a $50,000 bonus when he was twenty. I signed with the Braves for a $50,000 bonus when I was eighteen. We both threw hard. I threw harder, of course, but Tom will never admit to that. He had better control than me (at least I will admit to that) and a longer career. His lasted twenty years. In the major leagues. Mine lasted three years. In the minor leagues. The low minor leagues. And then out. Back home to Connecticut. At twenty-one. Married. Lugging bricks and mortar up a rickety scaffold for a Lithuanian mason.

Over the years, I passed through all those stages most people do in the course of their ordinary lives, while watching, from a distance, Tom Seaver pass through the stages of his extraordinary life. His extraordinary career. My career! That was my life he was living! Why him? Why not me?

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