I had waited for this. At last, the manila envelope had arrived. Days earlier, my search for a hard copy began after reading an Internet message-board post, a simple “Hey! Look at this!” on a sportsjournalists.com thread that praised the Kansas City Star’s latest baseball preview section. It was spring 2003, less than a week before Opening Day. A passion was about to be born.
I clicked on the link. I read:
“On the road to Villa Vasquez, Tony Pena cried, not for the first time that day and not for the last.”
***
At the time, I was searching for myself. I was about to complete my sophomore year at Dodge City High School, located in my boyhood home of southwest Kansas. I carried large but unfocused ambition and earned quality marks, especially in English courses. I became active in the school newspaper, the Dodger, and the novice debate squad and intramural basketball program; I had always enjoyed sports, particularly college football, but I was never good at playing them. At age 16, I did not have the slightest idea of what I wanted to be when I grew up. But I knew I wanted to be involved with sports. I wanted to be great.
After my freshman year, I had studied United States foreign policy and political oratory during a program for high school students at Yale University. Given my family’s isolation – Dodge City is located about a 2 ½-hour drive from Interstates 35 and 70 and about six hours from Kansas City and Denver – my parents, Brad and Marcia, decided it would be best if I challenged myself in an unfamiliar environment. Both were raised on rural Midwest homesteads, and they encouraged me to dream.
That summer, I arrived in New Haven, Conn., along with peers from prep schools in New Jersey and Massachusetts and other cosmopolitan locations. I wanted to prove to them and to my professors that I was more than an ignorant country bumpkin. I told myself I would work harder than any person who strolled the manicured quads of that venerable campus. I told myself I would do well.
The experience shaped my want to make a difference more than any other. But I was still directionless. At summer’s end, I flew from New Haven’s lush rolling green hills with a pair of “A-pluses” and overcome with possibility. I carried faith that any dream, especially one for a young boy who had viewed more grain elevators than glittering skyscrapers in his lifetime, could be realized with work ethic and vision. I carried hope.
That fall, I returned to the wind-swept plains of southwest Kansas changed. Soon, I discovered what I was meant to be.
***
The following spring, about seven months after the Yale University program, I became so impressed after reading the Kansas City Star’s baseball preview online presentation that I picked up the white telephone in my family’s kitchen. I dialed the newspaper’s circulation desk to request a hard copy. Dodge City was located far outside the Kansas City Star’s coverage zone, but I had to pinch the piece of art between my fingertips. When, at last, I tossed the manila envelope upon my bed I leafed through stories from Latin America about the region’s growing influence upon Major League Baseball. I read with feverish pace.
The experience was like reading an Ernest Hemingway novel for the first time; suddenly, the world outside my predictable existence leaped from the newsprint as untamed, exotic. With each word from a Joe Posnanski takeout, life beyond the prairie outside my bedroom window breathed:
On the road to Villa Vasquez, Tony Pena cried, not for the first time that day and not for the last.
“No,” he said. “Not that story. I will not tell that story.”
His Mercedes raced through dust and bugs and waves of heat, past emptiness.
Nobody lives on the road to Villa Vasquez. It is too hot and too dry. They say that when revolutionaries were killed — in the Dominican Republic, revolutionaries were often killed — their bodies were buried here.
They say that at night, you hear ghosts.
I wanted to write those words. I wanted to write with heart. I wanted to use sport as a lens through which to investigate human triumph and trial, and the personalities that make them possible. There on my bed sheet, I had discovered my calling; I wanted to be a narrative sportswriter. I wanted to bring life to foreign worlds for readers as Kansas City Star sportswriters had done for me.
All afternoon, I read. The manila envelope lay to the side, empty.
