#bornagaintexan

For Love of the Game 

Actor Kevin Costner as Billy Chapel, Kelly Preston as Jane, John C. Reilly, Jena Malone and Brian Cox

Described as legendary Detroit pitcher Billy Chaplin has always been better at baseball than at lovers, just as the character “Jane”.

The film opens with the sound of stadium roar of the crowd transitioning to childhood memory pictures and of 8 or 16mm film for the opening credits. 

It helps lead us to our narrative. The credits state this is, of course, based on a novel.

John C Reilly's voiceover is past catcher. The movie later shows the relationship between the two. Kostner’s character, Billy, only wants Reilly’s as a catcher. The movie was interesting in showing how one game plays his whole story of meeting Jane and how his loss of her and other players in his life. The only relationship besides baseball that stays with him is his “catcher.

In Act one, he gets hit with everything, a great monologue of changes in the game of baseball, and how he's getting released, and has to choose to retire or play in New Yew York.

Jane shows up and says she's leaving him, and says goodbye basically in the lobby. 

 He goes to New York, playing as a Tiger, and meets a kid who's just come up to the “show”. The young boy reminds Billy that he was his bat boy, and Dad played with Billy all within the first two minutes of this film. It’s a reminder of how great a career can be and what an inspiration a struggling athlete to has to retire.

It's interesting how they use Billy's last game pitching as No-hitter with the Detroit Tigers, a team that is his identity, to tell his story of his history with Jane and his past other players that have transferred to New York and are now playing, batting against him.

Personally, I can relate to how hard it is to fight to come back, and yet you will never be the same.  Loss is hard. In my recovery process and journey, many friends didn’t stay with me. 

Billy’s catcher is his true friend, who has been his friend through everything. Billy gets tired in the movie, and it's like my own muscle tiredness and lack of recovery to get back to full self. The  40 year old pitcher makes a note as he signs a ball, the film audience doesn’t know what it says.  Tell him, though, for the Love of the Game, since Billy Chapel.

Personally, I saw history with Nolan Ryan as a Texas Ranger in Milwaukee. My family’s connection with baseball brings love. To have my father take us to see Nolan Ryan’s 300th win in Milwaukee was amazing. We drove back up North an hour the next day to get a certificate. I need to remember resiliance. 

Like Billy’s No-hitter win, things are never enough often for me, and the scene where he's alone in the hotel after the game, the quiet of a hotel, many of us now, can be hard. He has won. He has also lost. His only relationship has stayed with him and thanked him.

Bull Durham was released in 1988, and "For the Love of the Game" was released in 1999, yet Costner has taken on a screenplay that shows the relationship one has with the pitcher and the catcher. I have moved from professional to watching College Baseball, but still wonder what the connection is on and off the field. This movie swaps Kosner from a Mentor catcher to a struggling pitcher, yet the offense connection being that pitcher Costner will only work with one catcher, and in For the Love of the Game.  In For the Love of the Game, there is dialogue of how the catcher coaches him and reminds him it’s a team. Everyone is there for him. Defense. But maybe it is also the fans, the roar of the crowd. That sound is the one thing many players- especially those who go to the show talk about. 

The first time I moved, I was ten, going on eleven. I was leaving Texas. It was fun to ride bikes under the 18 wheeler moving truck, but it wasn’t fun to see your bedroom empty and how small and quiet it really was. We said goodbye at the DFW airport, my uncle was the chauffeur.  I always saw him as a grownup, even though he’s only 13 years older than me. In my memory, it’s been the only time I saw my uncle cry. I was astonished he wept since after this moment, both my grandparents passed and it was their funerals where he kept composure and even had a sense of humor. His eyes were red and full of quiet tears as he said goodbye at the gate. My mom on the other hand cried all through the safety check presentation and at the end of it, a flight attendant asked it she wanted an aspirin.

What she really needed were some of the kitty valium the vet had given her the day before to sedate our two cats for the journey. We were leaving Dallas and moving to Chicago. My brother was excited that a limo picked us up at the airport. He continued to be excited through out his life, acclimating and assimilating, losing his accent and eventually marrying a midwestern girl and buying a house north of where we were to live. I was made to suffer through giving up rock star status and my leadership role as a safety officer at my last school to being in a place where kids would ask me to say words like “tea” and then laugh because I talked funny. The day I turned eleven was the day our furniture arrived. Happy frickin’ birthday. Shortly after that, my internal countdown to senior year and 18 years of age started.  I child brain thought that was the beginning of adulthood. Obviously I had some things to learn.

Inner voice was strong in saying “as soon as I turn 18, I’m outta here.” In later years, mostly in high school,  this was often said with a view of my bedroom ceiling. I don’t remember being a rebel without a clue kinda kid. When people ask, my honest answer is that I remember being alone in my bedroom often, door closed, lying on my bed, trying to carve out a bit of quiet in a household of four and thinking it’s only a matter of time and then my life can begin.

Little did I know that it would take close to twenty years to return and hopefully be one on my last moves.

The last time I moved was about a year ago.

When I tell people where I’ve lived people ask if I’m a military brat but all my relocations have been in my adult life, always seeking a place where I think I belong. A place to hang my hat. I have possessed mailing addresses in Dallas (suburbs), Chicago (suburbs), Normal, Minneapolis, Los Angeles, Savannah, back to Los Angeles, Oxford (Mississippi) and now Austin, including long summer stock work stints in Daytona Beach, Durham, and Flat Rock, North Carolina.  Many of these places are now very special to me and it’s interesting to not be a tourist and not be a local. Every time I visit Savannah, someone asks directions and as the retail turnover in the historic district can be yearly, it’s always a 50-50 chance if I can answer. The same odds applied when I went back to school in Oxford. As a graduate student, I didn’t have to use or know as many buildings when people asked me where something was. Oddly, this same feeling happened on a reverse engineering for Austin.

I decided a few years back I wanted to relocate to this city. Oxford was a detour and a friend once commented that “I missed,” if only for a short period of time. Through friends of friends and social media, I cultivated a group of people I would visit every time I came to Austin. I had cousins to stay with and I was one of “those” people that invaded the city for their version of March Madness known as South by Southwest. After staying with my generous cousins to relocate, I’m finally here. In Austin. Looking for where the next chapter will take me. I’m claiming my birthright, exploring as a born-again Texan. I was drawn to this city because it feels like art school in a way. There is an excitement and a spark to the people living in this town. Although coming up on a year, I still look to explore the things that were big sellers on my decision: get on the water and row again, get involved with the film scene, enjoy the music and the culture, figure out how to do more radio.

Why Austin? Over the last nine months or so, I have found that a now typical first time talking point or question. First thought is this is weird. No one ever asked my why LA, why Savannah? Ok, maybe a few outsiders asked why Mississippi but just like any place in the South or secret gem, I let them keep their preconceived notions, tell them it is special to me and hope they will visit, enjoy and not ruin the good thing that it is. Every year for the past five or six years that I’ve visited friends and family during South by Southwest, I overhear of someone complaining that folks visit, have a great time, decide to move here, and are RUINING it! 

It depends on where I am and what the situation is if I am in a group of native Texans or recent transplants. I always stress I was lucky to be born in Texas and it took many years and hard work to return to the great state... I may be an infultrator, but I am one many years in the making, claiming my birthright after so many years. Like many families of the 1980s, we were transferred to another state and region. A place where words and slang were different, accents worlds apart and a place where I was teased and asked to say certain words as a set up for laughs. Vowels are important, and after so many decades and living in many places, there are vowel sounds that will be lost after grannies and pawpaws pass away. 

It's a very homogenized world, and I fear that Austin is the next Atlanta in being a Northern or perhaps West Coast city in the South. Even that statement will be challenged as I spent the last two years at Ole Miss in the Southern studies masters program, debating what states and regions quantified and qualified "the South". Usually if Texas is included, only North and East Texas make the cut, but since I was born and now know I'm third generation Dallas, I guess I count as "Southern".