When Hippies become Baseball Coaches. Part 2

Our coach finally waved his hand in the direction of the gravel parking lot beside the practice field where we played baseball. They both emerged from a smoking 72 El Camino running like it needed a valve job, chrome side pipes trying the best they could to keep that thing from sounding like a logging truck and slotted mag wheels with miss match white-lettered tires. It sported a paint job that had all the earmarks of a blind guy applying it in a hurricane, more than likely an "Earl  Sheib" fifty dollar special, 'cept they'd roll down the windows before they sprayed so the painters wouldn't get any on them. A giant crack in the middle of the windshield rounded out the short list of high performance options. The two dudes slowly exited the half truck/ half car looking like they had been dropped in Siberia rather than a rural baseball park. I noticed they both carefully made their way to the field, looking in the trees like they might be spotting a sniper, heads low and approaching in a criss cross pattern. It was 1973 so it was totally possible they were both Vietnam Veterans or just left over hippies fresh out of stuff to protest with nothing else to do but smoke dope and eat Cheetos. The crunchy kind though, not the cheese fart puffs that only gave you half a belly full.

They both wore Army Issue coats that hung just below the waist and baseball hats, pulled low over the hair that hung nearly to the middle of each’s backs. They were in white bread baseball land, far from Piedmont Park, The Mellow Mushroom and “The Great Speckled Bird” handed out by topless women doing blotter acid in the enormous park in the center of Atlanta. It's important to know, the first real pair of boobs I had ever seen, besides walking in on my Aunt at a family reunion, was a doped up hippie woman outside Piedmont Park handing out newspapers when my Mom and Dad took a wrong turn and stopped near a group of blitzed out hippie chicks with a semi nude paper route. I told that story a few thousand times to all my elementary school buddies after it happened. You’da thought I was James Bond or Captain James Tiberius Kirk and scored with some foreign lady spy or some green Klingon woman with a giant set of hooters and a Cro-magnon forehead big enough to scare even the horniest Space Captain into retirement. 

It was great.

When our coach introduced us to his replacements, we all sat staring at the two men, speechless. I immediately thought the phrase “Stay away from the brown acid” shouted at Woodstock, was intended for these two. Heck, as far as I knew, one of  em probably did the shouting himself. The “head” coach introduced himself and was actually quite articulate, forming compound sentences and walking upright. His brother, on the other hand, was a total doper, smelling like he’d smoked a lid of pot on his way to practice. We called the head coach “Cheech” and his brother “Chong”, names neither one them appreciated…well, at least Coach Cheech didn’t, but his brother, well, I guess he just didn’t get it or care much. 

It took a little time, but we all eventually settled on calling them” Coach Man and Coach Dude”. They got those names based on the way they protested when one of us screwed up. If an infielder would miss a grounder, the head coach always said “Man!”. If one of our outfielders dropped a ball or over threw a runner, the assistant coach said “Dude!!”

It was going to be an interesting year for us all on and off the diamond.

After a few of the parents got wind of the last-minute coaching change, most came to check out the new additions and when the conservative Christian crowd got a glimpse of the two Easy Rider brothers with their long hair and Army jackets, baseball caps pulled down low so you couldn’t see their eyes, was when the whispering began and the rumors cranked up among the parents who had nothing better to do. All my buddies, Max, Mike, Kirk, Kent, Bobby and numerous other Anglo-Saxon named young men actually got to like and even appreciate the brothers for their laid back style of coaching. If you did something wrong or screwed up and were told to run a lap, you could store them up like a credit. If you did something good on the field in a game, you offset the practice screw ups and laps were eliminated. The downside was you “made good” on your laps at the end of every week, so the system had a way of working itself out to where you’d get better at the game and practice, or you spent a whole practice running to repay your debts. If you were running, someone else had your position and that was also a screw up at practice adding more laps to you account. This method was decided by vote among players, after we sorted out the two new coaches and vice-versa, a first for us as far as democracy went. We had all grown accustomed to blatant dictatorships as far as coaches were concerned so this was indeed a breath of fresh air and one we all thought we’d take advantage of initially, but grew to appreciate as it was all on us. 

At 13 years old, we wanted independence and these two offered it to us and the majority benefited from the experience. We always had time set aside to talk for a few minutes at practice time between our two unorthodox type coaches and ourselves. It was a new concept for us all, seeing this was now “Our Team”. It became more than that just our coach’s way of busting the chops of a bunch of punk kids passing through to puberty and more complicated lives. 

This was different.

I'll wrap Friday, but you knew that.