My dear old dad never had time for sports, and now his time is up.
It’s not like he wasn’t good at the leisurely pursuits. Rick Campany was as celebrated an athlete as General Brown High School ever had even though he quit the school before his senior year because he got my mom pregnant. Defending a wrestling championship meant little back then when faced with setting a little boy up for some kind of success.
My father died last week, leaving behind a thousand memories. My first recollection was of the 1976 World Series, when I was 7 years old and had already made it through my parents’ ugly divorce. Johnny Bench was at the plate, which had my mother’s attention for obvious reasons. Not even the dude in the seedy motel could compete with the best, and most handsome, catcher of his generation.
I told my mom, “Dad is here,” and she thought I was seeing ghosts or something until my father burst through the door and announced that he was taking the boy. My mother’s new friend produced a pistol, but that didn’t go very well, and the next thing I knew I was driving a Pinto through the Adirondack Mountains while my father slept. I don’t know how I reached the pedals, but we all lived happily ever after when I called my mother from Lake George and told her that Dad said I would be home in a week.
I once asked him if he knew Bench was at the plate at that pivotal moment in time, and his reply was “Who the hell is Johnny, and why is he on the bench? He needs to work harder.”
After his work was done, he knew a thing or two about traveling. In his later years he dragged my stepmother around the continent to follow the NASCAR circuit in a recreational vehicle. Like me in the Pinto, he slept and tended to his multiple sclerosis while Ma drove.
He was kind of a legend around my tiny high school — his football coach was my football coach and his English teacher was my English teacher. That’s what happens in a small town. After I graduated from Marine Corps boot camp in Parris Island, South Carolina, I got to chat with our old ball coach. I used to buy the school’s No. 6 baseball jersey every year to have my number retired and went to see Steve Fisher to pick it up.
He apologized for transgressions incurred during physical education class that included a few smacks to the head that were common at the time, explaining that he wanted me to become everything Rick was supposed to be. As much as people say we are basically the same guy, I am no Rick. Not even close.
The future American Football Association Hall of Famer went on to tell me the most incredible stories about one of his favorite athletes. He said that my father was the only kid in his 43 years of coaching who never attended a practice.
That’s right, he had the best of both worlds. His father was a farmer and the boy had the duties associated with it — milking cows and putting in hay until the lights came on for the football game or wrestling match. Practice was non-negotiable for my grandfather, but that was fine with the young coach. Fisher said my father was doing more at home than any of his teammates were doing in the wrestling room anyway and that scheme didn’t matter compared to the force of the young man’s will. My dad once scolded me for walking past a pipe suspended from the ceiling in the barn without doing a pull-up, telling me that one simple exercise becomes thousands. One pull-up at a time. That’s all it takes.
And then it all ended for him. Fisher told me that he was absolutely sure he could get my father into a “big-time” college if he only competed his senior year. Two generations of Campanys were having none of it, though, and my father went straight to work at a dairy plant and set on the business of raising a son.
I did get to ask my father if he had any regrets, and he said his only regret was being too busy working to attend one of my high school baseball games. He told me that all he ever wanted was for his children to do better than he and his new bride did. He would call being the first in the family to get a high school degree a success, but when comparing eras I think I come up short.
But I am not alone. Everyone comes up short compared to that simple farmer.
