The Boy from Owlsfield, Kentucky
The Boy from Owlsfield, Kentucky
By Robert L. Penick
The fire occurred the day before Kurt Garry’s graduation and destroyed the high school. The ninety-year-old wooden structure burned like a witch’s broom. In the local paper, a photograph showed him being awarded his diploma while still in his hospital bed. The Associated Press picked it up and the boy from Owlsfield, Kentucky became a national hero, a symbol of bravery and selflessness. In the photo, he looked pale and a little Christ-like, his virgin goatee dark on his chin. More photos. Kurt meeting with the girl’s family, then with the girl herself. Charity was unconscious when he found her and likely would have died of smoke inhalation without him. She stayed by his bedside as his recovered from the skin grafts. They married that summer. Newspapers in the region carried announcements in bold type.
A legendary status followed him throughout his life. First to college, where he anchored the baseball team’s pitching staff, then to the major leagues. His hands were so badly scarred that fans marveled at his ability to even grip a baseball, let alone lead the majors in strikeouts his rookie year. When asked by a reporter which brought the most satisfaction, winning the National League pennant or carrying the injured girl down the steps of his burning school, Kurt pointed out that baseball was, “after all, just a game.”
* * *
Game Four of the World Series should not have been a defining moment in baseball history. The small-market Cincinnati Reds were down, two games to one, to the New York Yankees. Kurt had lost Game One despite giving up only one run in eight innings. In Game Four he faced the same opposing pitcher, a man who’d won the American League Cy Young award twice. Each man had only given up a single going into the seventh inning. Then, after giving up back-to-back homers, the Yankee pitcher hit the showers. Kurt Garry finished the game with a one-hitter that would be talked about for decades.
In the ninth inning, he balked. A stupid mistake only a nervous rookie would make. There was no reason for it; a slow-footed designated hitter he had walked was on first base. For a moment it looked like the young sensation might implode. But he paced a bit, conferred with his catcher, and ascended the mound with runners now at first and second. The score was 2-0 and the next batter up had hit 46 home runs during the regular season. Kurt gunned him down on three pitches. The final two batters struck out on a total of eight pitches. At the time it was only the sixth one-hit game in Series history.
Kurt first distinguished himself playing high school ball. Awkward, gawky, he received the nickname “The Goat” from his teammates. It did not stand for “Greatest of All Time.” It had to do with the way he moved, his lurching movement throwing the ball. He was not popular with the team or with his classmates. His acne grew so bad in ninth grade his father, a taciturn coal miner and church deacon, finally consented to take him to a dermatologist. With tetracycline and a restricted diet, it took over two years for the pustules to completely disappear. Leaning in to read the catcher’s sign, he could hear the catcalls. Usually from the opposing team. Sometimes from his own. He worked through it with stoicism and lack of apparent resentment.
In college, the heckling would continue, though the content changed. In the final game of his college career, Kurt faced Mississippi State for the championship of the Southeastern Conference. A few State fans held up signs saying, “Burn, Baby, Burn.” Not until the fifth inning did officials remove them.
That was the afternoon that punched Kurt’s ticket to the big leagues. Allowing three hits, he walked two and struck out thirteen. Fanning the last batter, he was mobbed by the rest of the team. Finding an alley through the bodies, he sprinted to the home plate umpire and requested the ball. After holding it above his head for the fans and alumni, he turned and fired it into the midst of the Mississippi State contingent. Sports Illustrated called it “the best rebuttal ever.”
* * *
Straight from college he went to the major leagues. The “Goat” tag was gone, but the rookie struck his new teammates as a bit strange and remote.
“He was as polite as could be,” recalled Thom McDade, a reserve infielder for three years with the Reds. “A polite Christian sort of person. I think he was a little scared of folks. Maybe that fire did it to him. He prayed before every game.”
Kurt burned up spring training, going 3-0 with an earned run average of 2.25. Evenings, while other players gathered and caroused, he spent hours on the phone with Charity. She made the move to Cincinnati a month after he made the team.
“He was really devoted to his wife,” equipment manager Mike Hessig said. “I never saw a guy spend so much time on the phone. Not with his wife, anyway. ‘Course, I never saw a guy call his teammates ‘sir,’ either.”
Thinking back to the week of their high school graduation, a classmate recalled Kurt being “Happy. Happier that week than he’d ever seemed before. It seemed like he’d put the past, the name-calling, the thing with his face, all behind him.”
Julie Montano was another student injured in the blaze. She suffered minor burns and smoke inhalation when she tried to rescue her yearbook from her locker. “It was so sad,” she said later. “He’d won his baseball scholarship and you could tell he was gaining some confidence. He’d actually look at people and talk to them. Then that fire, and those horrible burns on his hands from pulling Charity out. It was awful.”
Indeed, her sentiment was echoed by the citizens of Owlsfield, Kentucky, baseball fans and anyone who embraced Kurt Garry as a humble ideal.
Today, Kurt is fifty years old and living in Boca Raton, Florida. He has been out of baseball twelve years, after compiling a 199-126 record over sixteen seasons. At his induction into the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame, he cited Christ, Nolan Ryan, and his wife as his great inspirations. Charity had been killed in a traffic accident the year before, along with their only child, fifteen-year-old Kurt, Jr. The six-time All-Star took the opportunity at Cooperstown to thank them for being “my family, my friends.” For once, the unbreakable façade cracked. There, at the podium, Kurt Garry cried.
He still remembers the good times, the cheers of the crowd, the autograph seekers, flashbulbs going off as he left the field. The nights with Charity. Kurt Jr.’s fifteen birthdays. The series one-hitter. The college league championship. The scholarship euphoria. The major league draft.
High school. The stare of girls passing in the hallway, awed by his on-field achievements, yet repulsed by his face. The catcalls, the dermatologist appointments, the smell of the kerosene as he swung the can, how the auditorium curtains grew dark with the fuel. The white magic of the kitchen match, and the hot electric static as the flames caressed his hands.
Robert L. Penick‘s poetry and prose have appeared in over 100 different literary journals, including The Hudson Review, North American Review, Plainsongs, and Oxford Magazine. His latest chapbook is Exit, Stage Left, by Slipstream Press, and more of his work can be found at theartofmercy.net
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