Chapter One
LAKE CITY
I was born on May 10, 1930, with a bum leg, into a family broken beyond repair. My parents separated while I was still in my mother's womb, and from what I would gather later, it was just as well. They wanted no part of each other, or of me.
I'd entered the world with not only a "club foot" but with my entire right leg twisted backward. Despite this inauspicious beginning, my life soon turned around and I enjoyed a very blessed existence, at least from a certain male perspective. It might have been an entirely different sort of life had my guardians just given up and left my poor defective leg alone. That was definitely a consideration. In rural Lake City, Florida, treatment options were limited and risky at best. But Dr. Harry Bates, a general practitioner, offered to try a new procedure that involved breaking my tiny contorted leg, turning it around, and resetting it.
There wasn't much hope that I'd be able to walk normally, even if all went well. They expected my right leg would always be shorter than the left one. I'd likely have a limp for the rest of my life. Still, Dr. Bates said, if something was to be done, it had to be while my little bones were still malleable. So my mother, Cristelle, consented, and a few days later, in our town's modest Lake Shore Hospital, Dr. Bates went to work to straighten me out.
As my aunt and uncle later told me, they were very worried about the experimental procedure. Since I was still an infant, only time would tell whether the operation had been successful. I spent the first six weeks of my life in a cast.
When the cast finally came off, Dr. Bates was amazed; I had turned out better than he'd dreamed possible. With therapy and a little luck, the doctor said, it was possible that someday I might walk with only a slight limp. He doubted, however, that I'd ever be able to run or play sports.
Maybe it was the breakup of their marriage prior to my birth, or maybe it was the sight of my twisted leg after I was born-for whatever reason, my real mother and father never embraced me as their child. I had no bond with my father, George Allen Summerall, who was not much of a father even when he was around. My mother took care of me for my first three years, then announced one day that she could no longer handle the responsibility. Eager to get rid of me, she'd already made plans to take me to an orphanage. To my lasting gratitude, her sister and brother-in-law, Clarice and Floyd Kennon, stepped up and offered to take me into their family, which included a built-in brother, their son, Mike, who was not quite a year older than I.
Mike and I were close in age and size, and since the Kennons were Irish, our similarities inspired references to Pat 'n' Mike, the fictional buddies whose shenanigans-which often involved drinking-were the basis for a series of popular Irish jokes in that era. The result was that, although I was named George Allen Summerall at birth, I became forever known as "Pat." The name worked out well, and so did my patched-together family.
The Kennons provided a family for me so that I never really missed having my own. My mother remarried while I was still a toddler, and she and her new husband took me back for a while, but they fought and I didn't fit into their plans. I must have blocked out most memories of my time with them, though I do recall a couple of beatings with a water hose from my stepfather.
When it became clear that I could not stay in that household, my paternal grandmother and the Kennons agreed to share responsibility for raising me. I spent a lot of time playing with Mike and hanging out at the Kennons, but mostly I lived with my widowed grandmother, who poured her love into my sad and battered bucket.
She was a classic Southern lady with a classic Southern name, Augusta Georgia Summerall. My grandfather, Thomas Jefferson Summerall, had died years before, so Grandma, who had been around children most of her life as a teacher in a one-room schoolhouse, didn't mind sharing her one-bedroom house at the corner of Seventh and Duval streets with me. We also shared her only bed, sleeping side by side all through my grade-school and high-school years in Lake City.
Northern Florida was a wonderful place to grow up, surrounded by scores of springs and lakes and rivers and swamps and woods. Lake City was originally settled near a Seminole village with a name meaning "Alligator Town." It is still an Old Florida sort of town; its thick canopy of live oaks are draped in Spanish moss, and their swooping limbs make great climbing.
We were just thirty-five miles or so from the Georgia state line. Bordered by the Suwannee River in the north and the Santa Fe River in the south, Columbia County has been referred to as "South Georgia" because of its slow-moving and genteel Southern orientation. Both rivers provided a boy with great venues for canoeing, fishing, and exploring; the surrounding Osceola National Forest was a two-hundred-thousand-acre playground of pine woods, marshes, tropical "jungle," and cypress swamps.
I don't have any idea how old my grandmother was when she took me in. She always seemed very fragile to me. She was a gentle and kind person who mothered me without babying me. I was expected to do my share of household chores from an early age. I washed my own school clothes every night because I only had two decent shirts and two pair of school pants. It was also my job to keep the coals burning in the potbelly stove that warmed the house in those chilly North Florida winters.
A GRANDMOTHER'S VOICE
I never knew my grandfather, but my grandmother often told me stories of him and other ancestors while we sat on the open front porch of her house, which served as my grandmother's neighborhood broadcast booth. I never got tired of her stories, which were frequently interrupted by greetings and conversations with people walking by. Everyone knew her as "Aunt Georgia."
These were the war years, so gas was rationed and people walked most places. It always struck me that nearly everyone who came by our house in Lake City-in fact, nearly everyone I knew-had not one but two surnames, such as Maggie Bell or Jimmy Charles.
When she wasn't chatting with passing neighbors, my grandmother would tell me the same stories about my grandfather or other ancestors over and over again without much variation, though I never grew tired of hearing them. She told me of her own childhood and memories from the Civil War era. Florida's biggest Civil War engagement, the battle of Olustee or the battle of Ocean Pond, took place just a few miles to the east. Nearly ten thousand Union and Confederate soldiers fought within just a few miles of where her family lived in the deep woods with only two other families nearby.
Since most of the men were called to war, my grandmother and her girlfriends would hide when Union soldiers came walking through. Some of the older, more aggressive women would hide in the brush, lure stragglers off the road, and then hit them over the head and steal their clothes and weapons. My grandfather, who was older than she, was captured by Yankees and imprisoned in Fort Delaware; he had to eat rats to stay alive until he became a trustee and got a job in the officers' mess hall. Then he'd steal food and hide it in the lining of his coat for himself and the other prisoners.
My grandmother's Civil War tales always mesmerized me. She'd also tell me stories of growing up in the woods with only a few other families nearby. She and her girlfriends would bathe in their old-fashioned swimsuits in a huge, hollowed-out log filled with rainwater because they had no plumbing.
My boyhood mirrored that of most Southern kids from families of limited means. My grandmother was a member of the First Methodist Church of Lake City, where I dutifully attended Sunday school until the seventh grade or so. I was supposed to attend church in high school but mostly I skipped out with friends and hit the soda fountains at the DeSoto Drug Store or the Lake City Pharmacy. The concept of God was at best an abstraction for me. Even when I did go to church, I remember wondering, What is this all this about? I wasn't an atheist, but faith and religion sounded like adult concepts to me. They just accounted for a very long hour or so once a week if I made it to the church at all.
By the time I got to high school, my grandmother did not have the strength to demand that I go to church. But she was a loving presence in my childhood. I grew up to the soft rhythms of her voice and to those on the radio of Fibber McGee and Molly, Amos 'n' Andy, and news and sports broadcasters from stations in Atlanta and across the Southeast. The military battles and bombs dropping in Germany, Japan, and Korea were not on my radar all that much. Like many boys my age, if I wasn't playing sports I was tuning in to a game on the radio. Even when I worked in the DeSoto Drug Store as an eighth grader, I gave most of my dusting attention to those shelves within earshot of the radio and whatever game was on.
My grandmother and I also listened to the radio as we shot marbles together on the rug. She had game, and she sometimes indulged my passion for sports in ingenious ways. She'd even haul an old straight chair off the porch, plant it in the front yard, and sit in it so we could play catch. I got to be pretty accurate throwing a baseball and football since Grandma didn't have a lot of range in that old chair. Most of the time, she'd flip or roll the ball back to me. So to practice my catching I'd find other kids, especially my cousin Mike, or I'd toss the ball up on the roof or against the house and let it bounce back. I'd do that for hour upon hour, yet Grandma never complained about the constant pounding against the house.
ALL SPORTS
My love of sports must have been part of my genetic makeup-courtesy of my mother. My father disdained all sports as a waste of time and energy, but my mother was an athlete who played basketball in high school long before girls' sports received much attention.
Yes, as long as I was bouncing or throwing a ball, I was happy. By the time I started school, I'd forgotten that my right leg was supposed to keep me from running or playing sports. The other kids never knew it either, especially since I proved to be bigger, faster, and more agile than all of my classmates-most of the older kids, too.
Though I didn't play any organized sports until the seventh grade, I spent nearly every waking hour playing or practicing or reading about sports. I had a job delivering newspapers on my bike, but my customers often got their newspapers late because I'd get absorbed reading the sports pages when I was supposed to be folding my papers for delivery.
Oddly enough, I became an avid Yankees fan, which was an strange allegiance for a Florida cracker kid to form. But the Yankees made headlines and the radio news, so I knew the Bronx Bombers line-up forward and backward. I kept up with the exploits of Joltin' Joe DiMaggio and Phil Rizzuto until they both went off to war.
When I began my freshman year in the fall of 1944 at Lake City's Columbia High School, I was determined to play every team sport they offered. Since grade school I'd been following the high school's athletic program through every season, and I couldn't wait to be a Tiger. It's a good thing I made the freshman football team, because they would have had a hard time keeping me off the field if I hadn't. At first they put me at center, though I probably weighed all of 150 pounds in full pads and helmet. Eventually they saw that I had good speed and hands so they moved me to end, both on offense and defense.
ATTITUDE ADJUSTMENT
I didn't really hit my stride as an athlete until my sophomore basketball season. I was growing fast, and for a while it seemed like I couldn't do much except stand around and watch. I was a little goofy, and I tended to be more of a spectator than a participant even when I was in the game.
The basketball coach, Jim Melton, jolted me out of my lethargic approach with a shot of tough love. He was already agitated because of a string of locker-room thefts, so when I walked into his office one day wearing a pair of gym shorts with another kid's name on them it set him off.
"Where did you get those shorts?" he demanded.
I told him I'd found them on the floor. That earned me a slap in the chops.
"Get those shorts off, Summerall," he said. "And while you're here, I wanna talk to you about something else. You're the tallest guy I've got, and all you do is pass the ball and stand around. I need somebody who can shoot the ball and stick it in the hole-and I need somebody to start getting rebounds. Step up your intensity and change your attitude, or you'll spend every game on the bench."
That brief moment would probably result in school board hearings and lawsuits today. But with that single slap and a few sharp words, Coach Melton turned a spectator into a player. I went from being passive to demanding the ball and controlling the game. It was as if Coach Melton had flipped a switch that connected my love and knowledge of sports with my natural instincts as an athlete. It had seemed like I didn't know what to do with myself before our little talk. After his wake-up call, things began clicking for me, and my confidence grew almost as rapidly as my body.
SELF-TAUGHT ACE
During my freshman and sophomore years of high school I concentrated on team sports in school, but a sports sideline that I picked up in the neighborhood also helped my athletic development. Tennis wasn't exactly the game of choice for most poor, small-town Southern kids back then, but my grandmother's house was close to Young's Park, the town's only public park. It had two tennis courts, and when I was about ten years old and bored with bouncing the ball off the house, I started wandering over there to watch people playing tennis.
It wasn't a big sport around town-mostly older guys trying to get some exercise. Sometimes they'd show up alone, hoping to find someone to hit balls with them, and I'd come running out of the house to volunteer. Usually I had to borrow a racket. The high school didn't even have a team, and there were only a couple of other kids who could hit the ball over the net with any regularity. But it was a sport and it involved a ball, so I was up for it.
If I wasn't playing sports I was reading about them in the newspapers or listening to them on the radio, so I picked up some knowledge of tennis that way, too. I read about Don Budge and Bobby Riggs and other top players of the day, and I checked out books on tennis at the library to learn the finer points. I tried to drag my cousin Mike onto the tennis court, but he wasn't interested. So I played the older guys and gave them all they could handle; I was speedy and I had a strong serve. My junior year I got to be so good that my school entered me as their sole participant in the conference tournament. I was paired against guys who had played the game much longer than I, but I breezed through the tournament anyway.
There wasn't much tennis competition in northern Florida. Most of the higher-ranked players in my region were much smaller than I, and not especially quick. The bigger, faster kids generally stuck with the major sports where there was more glory. I played every sport I could; if I'd had a pony I probably would have tried polo and steeplechase, too.
HITCHHIKING RACQUET
I was so competitive and focused on sports that, after winning the conference title, I hitchhiked 360 miles to the state tennis tournament in Fort Lauderdale. Everybody thought I was nuts for even going because there were a lot of serious tennis players in southern Florida, but I was determined to go. There was no school bus to take me, and my grandmother couldn't drive me, so I packed up my stuff and stuck out my thumb with a tennis racquet tucked under my arm. Hitchhiking was more common in those days of gas shortages and fewer cars. People were also more willing to pick up hitchhikers, which was a good thing for me. I managed to get rides quickly, and a couple of the drivers even fed me, too.
(Continues...)
Source: http://wyld-about-books.blogspot.com/2012/02/bookdaily-genre-sampler-sports-and_27.html
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Gotta be honest, though, and say that the icing on the cake for the day was having besfrinn Cameron at the shower. If you follow my blog with any regularity, you know that she?s the sister I never had and I love her like mad. If Miss Bebe is anything like her Aunt Cameron, I can assure you that all will be right with the world.
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Edited 10 months ago Thank you for your help!