The Errors of Memory

The Errors of Memory

By Michael Ward

For a brief moment in my life, I was a child actor. I was eleven, and I had no interest in acting—didn’t know the first thing about it—but I had a mother who did. That’s how one Saturday in the early 1990s I joined hundreds of kids in a suburban Dallas high school auditorium to audition for a role in what would become one of the most popular baseball movies of that decade. It was my first audition. It was also my last. That is, if how I remember it is how it really happened.

I, like many American boys born before soccer gained any sort of popularity, began my sports career with T-ball. From there, I progressed through several years of the whump and eerie consistency of pitching machines. These were hours spent on tawny dirt with my dad and volunteer dad/coaches, fielding scuffed balls with ill-fitting gloves. Collecting baseball cards and searching through the Beckett to discern their value made up weekend afternoons. It was a time when movies like The Natural and Field of Dreams had imbued the sport with a new sense of fantasy and mythology. But what I did not know or understand then but know and understand now is that my heart was never in the game.

At about the same time, my mother was searching for something she could put her heart into. Like many other women of her generation, she worked until she had kids and then became a stay-at-home mom. Then when I started sixth grade and began to learn ratios and long division, she went to community college to finish her bachelor’s degree. Warm light would spill onto the kitchen table in the evenings after she had taken me home from baseball practice. And there she was with thick books of college algebra and statistics. Higher education was never designed to fit a parent’s lifestyle, and unfortunately, my mother never finished her degree.

She leaned toward extraversion and soon was getting work as an extra on shows like Walker, Texas Ranger. One day, Chuck Norris, the famed action star and eponymous “Walker,” ambled onto the set. My mother’s eyes grew wide at being so close to fame. When the day-long shoot was over, she returned home with memories and the buzzing excitement that comes with an imminent appearance on broadcast television.

At some point, my mother’s agent informed her that a baseball movie was in production with several roles for adolescent boys. I, of course, played baseball; and I, of course, was an adolescent boy. Even though I had no inclination toward acting, I was roped into thinking that this was a role for me. I put on my little league uniform: Yankee pinstripes with our team’s local business sponsor “Birdsong Electric” splashed across the back. Now was my opportunity; Hollywood was calling.

Auditions for the unnamed film were held at a local high school. Thin echoes of murmurs reverberated off the formica floors and locker-lined walls. The casting call had brought in kids well into their teenage years. Would-be child stars towered over me, my head just reaching the top of their crisp white baseball leggings. I had never been inside a high school, much less to an audition. I was called into an auditorium with a group large enough to fill half of the front row. There, the casting producer handed out part of a script and asked us to take turns reading the lines.

The script looked as familiar to me as my mother’s algebra textbook. My throat clenched.

My breathing quickened. I held the pages in my trembling hands and began to mutter, misread, and mangle the lines so badly that the crew must’ve thought I was in the wrong room. I knew immediately, without a glance at the disappointed faces of the casting team, that I was not getting the role. I put the script down and hung my head as I slunk back out into the hallway with all the other future child stars. In that corridor hung the stench of embarrassment and fright. So painful was the experience that I bawled from the auditorium door to the parking lot, bathed in the same abominable sunlight that engulfs you as you step out of a movie theater at midday. My mother did her best to comfort me, and I still remember the lines I tried to read.

All this came up at a dinner with my wife and my parents some months ago. My wife had known this story for a while, but I had never spoken about it with my mother in thirty years. As I retold it, my mother squinted her green eyes and cocked her head slightly. When I finished the part where we walked to the car while I was crying, my mother simply said, “I don’t remember that.”

“You don’t remember me crying?”

“I don’t recall taking you to any audition,” she said.

A formative experience remembered by only one of the two people who were there felt like a betrayal. This was an event that, in my mind, we shared. What we remember and how we remember it is personal. An actor remembers her lines because she’s paid to. I remember my

lines because of a mild form of childhood trauma. But to learn my mother had no memory of any of this happening was tragic. An insidious notion, then, crept into my mind: did it really happen at all?

There is at least some evidence in my favor. About a year or so after my audition, I was sitting in a movie theater. There, with technicolor celluloid flashing at twenty-four frames per second, I heard the words that I had read, the words that had caused me so much distress. The movie existed and the lines were performed, thankfully, by a much better actor.

In the dark, my heart skipped. Not only had I unknowingly auditioned for The Sandlot, which turned thirty this year, but I had also been up for the role of what Hollywood called at the time “the chubby kid” when I was the skinniest kid in school. Patrick Renna, who won the hearts of the casting team over all those thousands of other boys around the country like me, portrayed Ham.

As it happens, Renna (again like me) flubbed his line. The dialogue as written—and what I read in that auditorium—was: “You kill me, Smalls.” Only during filming did it change to the iconic version when Renna misspoke during a take. It was, to put it simply, an error.

An error is both a subjective statistic peculiar to baseball and the bane of memory. And, as others have pointed out, such an error can disproportionately affect good players. To commit an error, one must have been in the right place at the right time, but the stat doesn’t take that into account. So whereas I completely blew my audition—an error—baseball wouldn’t give me credit for getting to that auditorium and giving it a shot. Paradoxically, Renna erred in reciting his lines, but it actually made the movie better. The error, after all, is what was remembered.

What if my greatest error is holding onto the memory of something that never happened?

My mother doesn’t remember any of this audition. There is a possibility, remote though it may be, where I have misremembered everything. In this version, I was never there. I made it all up only after seeing The Sandlot in the theater. There are other errors, too.

The Sandlot, which I always remembered being a box office hit was not, in fact, a box office hit. Nineteen ninety-three was a stellar year for Hollywood. Jurassic Park, The Fugitive, The Firm, and Sleepless in Seattle each opened and together grossed nearly a billion dollars. The Sandlot didn’t break $40 million. Even Rookie of the Year, another baseball film from that year, grossed almost twice as much as the feature film that was to have been my Hollywood debut. I remember nothing about Rookie of the Year.

Baseball is a sport that wants you to remember. Take the scorebook. A nineteenth-century invention, it allows fans to take notes about the game and thereby reconstruct each inning. Like chess notation, it’s a blueprint for narrating a memory, a shared history. What it does not show— what it cannot show—is whether, for example, Babe Ruth called his shot in the legendary 1932 World Series or simply gestured to fans. That particular event, more magical than any pitch count, run, or error would have lived only in the subjective minds of the thousands of fans who were at Wrigley Field that day. The late Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens famously claimed to have been there as a twelve-year-old and said Ruth called his shot. I say the eleven-year-old version of me auditioned for The Sandlot. As far as I know, however, I’m the only one who remembers that.

The act of remembering is itself a kind of performance and, as such, subject to certain embellishments. When we perform memory, then, we open ourselves up to accessing not only a version of the truth but the ghosts of everything that’s not. What I mean here, specifically, is nostalgia. Perhaps nostalgia itself is an error. An 18th-century neologism conjured from Greek, it means “a return home.” The indefinite article “a” is key. How often do we find only one way home? Instead, the routes are sometimes clear, sometimes cluttered, and sometimes lies.

Sometimes we choose the path; sometimes the paths are chosen for us.

Just as Rocky isn’t really about boxing, The Sandlot isn’t really about baseball. A work of fiction, it’s a frame story about a man recalling a version of his childhood. It drips with nostalgia for a time in his life that was fleeting and yet no less vivid. It’s about moments of camaraderie and friendship set at precisely the moment in a young person’s life when things are about to get physically and emotionally awkward. The characters in the movie, of course, don’t know it yet.

But the rest of us do. And because we do, we look back at our own lives and dare to remember and misremember.

When I revisit this episode from my own childhood where I auditioned for a role as a baseball player, I know the game itself, ironically, had become performative for me. I was losing interest in the catching and the batting. In the 1993 season, I had a perfect fielding percentage— not one error—but only one measly hit. The players were getting bigger and more aggressive.

High school teams and scholarships were around the corner. But not for me. For me, 1993 will always be the year I quit baseball and the year I watched my Hollywood “career” flash before my eyes.

How strange it is, then, to think back to the ten minutes I spent in that auditorium and realize that some of those other kids were excited and enraptured by the experience of auditioning and the possibility of acting. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn some of them have gone on to become performers in Los Angeles or community theater in cities around the country. They are the extras of my memories (protagonists of their own), who briefly entered my life faceless and exited the same. I know they don’t remember me, but without them there that day, my experience somehow feels less meaningful, less shared.

Long after my purported audition, my family gathered to watch my mother’s performance on Walker, Texas Ranger. The intro credits began rolling. Chuck Norris—superimposed over the Dallas skyline—Western hat, duster, carbine in hand, stoically looks off into the distance contemplating how he will take out that week’s bad guys. We sat through the entire episode only to discover the producers had used a roundhouse kick to my mother’s scene, leaving it on the floor with that week’s villainy. But she still remembers Norris walking into the room. Or was she even there?

Michael Ward‘s work has appeared most recently in The Pinch and DIAGRAM. He lives in Dallas with his wife, daughter, and a furry Maltese. You can find out more at www.michael-ward.com.

Sam Williams is a cartoonist, comics publisher, and baseball enthusiast based in Bournemouth, UK.

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