Life as Jamie Knows It by Michael Berube

Author:Michael Berube [Bérubé, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8070-1932-0
Publisher: Beacon Press
Published: 2016-08-10T04:00:00+00:00

So much for Jamie’s amateur diving career; he is not a Special Olympics diver. But before I get to the thrilling tale of Jamie’s spectacular debut as a Special Olympics swimmer, in 2009, I have to explain how Jamie became competitive in the first place. And that explanation will take us through Challenger League baseball and the annual Geri Ryan Track Meet, held in Penn State’s indoor track facility (the very locale in which Jamie almost got a foot crushed in a track practice). The Geri Ryan meet was established in 1992, after Geri Ryan, co-manager of Centre County Special Olympics and mother of a child with Down syndrome (Rebecca), died of cancer. Jamie started participating in the Geri Ryan meet in 2005, when he was only thirteen. Challenger League baseball is emphatically noncompetitive. And yet Jamie learned from those experiences to push himself physically—and, crucially, to have fun in doing so.

For me the story starts on Little League baseball opening day, April 2004. I was sitting cross-legged on the grass on the third-base side of the field. Jamie, twelve, was sitting on my lap. Jamie was technically a Little Leaguer, and was there as a member of the Challenger League, a Little League division for kids under twenty-one with developmental disabilities.

Jamie started playing Challenger League in 2002, and over his first two years I’d been struck by how pleasant an experience it was. Up to that point, he had never played any form of organized sport. And of course, Little League baseball in central Pennsylvania can be deadly serious business. Every summer we host the Little League World Series at a baseball complex that sits at the end of an unassuming residential street in a quiet part of Williamsport, a small town in coal-mining and fracking country. Jamie and I have been there a few times: it is a genuinely weird experience, driving down a tiny side street that somehow opens on to a hidden world where thousands of people are watching—and ESPN is televising—a competition that involves children from around the world.

And for many years, Little League has been notorious for eliciting aggressively bad behavior among coaches, players, and (most of all) stage fathers, who seemed determined to live their sports fantasies vicariously through their children. Youth baseball, I thought, was a world in which parents threatened and assaulted umpires, where coaches threw temper tantrums and water bottles . . . and threatened or assaulted umpires. In 2005, in a western Pennsylvania children’s league, a coach actually paid a seven-year-old player twenty-five dollars to injure an autistic teammate in pre-game warm-ups so that the team would have a better chance of winning. The young hired gun, after striking his teammate in the head and the groin with a ball, eventually told police of the arrangement (after the victim’s parents had investigated their child’s injuries), and the coach was arraigned on a variety of criminal charges. The league president, Eric Forsythe, a friend of the coach, told the press that the incident had been “blown out of proportion.

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