The Day God Saved Me Through My Hero

A boyhood hero is God's unlikely instrument in Kevin Wells' improbable writing career. God does indeed work in mysterious ways.

From Crisis

By Kevin Wells

The slow, silent and mostly invisible hand of God working in our lives sometimes punches through the veil to let us know, "I AM always with you."

A man from the Midwest named Joe introduced himself to me the other day and said he had something for me. Since we were surrounded by a gathering of Catholic men, I assumed he was about to hand me a rosary or a pamphlet about a ministry.

Instead, he reached into his pocket for my childhood hero.

He placed Eddie Murray in my hands—a figurine who had just swung a bat. I stood there, speechless, looking at it like a kid again. Joe was grinning from ear to ear.

He knew I’d once covered Major League Baseball—and, somehow, that I had grown up idolizing Murray, one of the game’s greatest all-time switch hitters.

The gift cemented a fast friendship. But I liked Joe even more when he started talking baseball: the upcoming season, his playoff predictions for his beloved Cincinnati Reds. He spoke the language without clichés.

I asked him a question.

“Hey Joe, will you let me tell you how Eddie Murray saved me—or at least saved my life as a writer?”

Joe: What do you mean?

Me: So Joe—I’m not a supernaturalist who goes around telling strangers how God does special things for me—but since you are one of the few people who seems to know of my love for Eddie, I will tell you that I have no doubt God stuck him in my life at the exact moment I needed help.

I would not have written a book or single article on Catholicism, or even a word about the faith without a providential spring training day in 1994. Without it, I would have spent my entire working life with our family’s three-generation masonry contracting business.

Joe: Eddie Murray made you a Catholic writer?

Me: One hundred percent, he did.

Joe: Tell me the story.

How Heroes Take Root

In the late ’70s, on August vacations in the New Hampshire mountains, I would join my older brother Danny in the front seat of our family’s wood-paneled station wagon to listen to the radio broadcast of Baltimore Orioles games.

As moonlit Lake Winnipesaukee’s crickets and bullfrogs harmonized, we fiddled with the radio dial with a watchmaker’s touch until managing to pull the crackle of Baltimore’s WBAL flagship announcers Bill O’Donnell and Chuck Thompson, who sat in a small radio booth 520 miles south of us, bring to life the play-by-play polyphony of Orioles baseball games. We often lost contact as their voices detoured into the traffic of other nighttime radio programs, but we sat like eager purgatory souls—fiddling, fiddling, fiddling—until their faint baseball voices came back like a three-days-dead Lazarus.

In a particular way, I awaited the moment when Memorial Stadium’s blue-collar symphony serenaded my hero with its riotous sing-song hymn of adoration—Ed-die!, Ed-die!, Ed-die!—which ricocheted off the narrow Waverly row houses that wrapped around the old neighborhood ballpark like a protective mother bear.

And Murray seemed to always oblige fans by waving a bat and sending a baseball to a part of the field no one thought to cover. I used to imagine sleepers all over the quiet city enclave being awakened when Murray, the greatest clutch hitter in the game at the time, thrilled a stadium by finding a way to deliver in a late-inning crisis once again.

From fifth grade through college, I watched Murray grow into one of baseball’s greatest players. As a kid, I would’ve grown his Afro if I was able. It’s embarrassing, but one of the main reasons I chose to attend Loyola University in Baltimore was its location—just five minutes from Memorial Stadium, where I could watch Eddie play in his prime with the Orioles.                                     

The Move South

After college, I got a job covering high school sports for a respectable weekly newspaper in Baltimore, but my ambition was to become a sportswriter at a major daily. Editors at The Washington Post and The Baltimore Sun made it clear that they wouldn’t hire me until I had proven myself on deadline at a major daily paper.

I lined up interviews with seven daily newspapers and set out on a two-week trip through the Deep South. The job I wanted least was at the Winter Haven News Chief, due in part to what happened after my interview. When I asked the sports editor where I could find a place for dinner, he suggested a restaurant “downtown.” I drove around looking for it for a while, but I never found what I considered downtown—only to learn later that I had passed right through the heart of it.

The paper in that small country town was the only one that offered me a job. I knew it was time to grow up and take a leap as a 24-year-old, still green, but eager to prove myself. I broke up with my girlfriend and said goodbye to city life, my four roommates, and our downtown row house across the street from Oriole Park at Camden Yards, where I had spent so many nights watching Orioles games.

I drove through the night—16 hours in all—before pulling into the parking lot of the News Chief for the first time as an employee, my little teal Toyota still ticking with heat and stuffed with everything I owned. My new editor greeted me with these words: “I thought you were going to be here yesterday…And don’t spend any time with the girls in Classifieds. The last guy was let go because of that.”

A reprimand and a warning were the first words spoken to me as a Florida resident.

Then my new boss, Willie, sent me to cover a volleyball match in Frostproof—a godforsaken town in the middle of nowhere and an hour south of Winter Haven—also a town I considered in the middle of nowhere, just a little less so. He handed me a reporter’s notebook and a sheet of handwritten directions. I climbed back into my tired little car to extend my 16-hour journey. That afternoon, I saw that Frostproof had a population of a single person to every ninety or so orange groves.

After filing my story that night, I hurried in the dark to find a place to live. The next day, I landed at the Brandywine Apartments, a cluster of a dozen or so freshly scrubbed brown trailers dropped onto a barren patch of earth on the poor side of town. My narrow one-bedroom unit sat between an unnamed lake, yet another orange grove, and a convalescent center. The median age of my neighbors was that of Moses.

Trapped

It took me two days to realize I had made a monumental mistake. I’d broken into a daily—something I told myself would serve as a temporary stepping stone—but it was a paper scorned by the small community it served. Many townsfolk referred to the News Chief as the News Thief because it was known for stealing much of its news content from The Ledger, the region’s respected daily.

I was looking for a way out within a week. I knew the Miami Herald, Orlando Sentinel, The Tampa Tribune, and all other Florida dailies did not hire future beat writers from a newspaper tagged by the locals it served as “the fish wrap.” These editors also knew that the News Chief was known for its large color illustration of an Indian warrior on its masthead and its warpath of typos and errors that bled into the pages that followed.

Around town, it was hard for me to ever catch anyone reading my paper.

Because I worked nights, I hadn’t formed any real friendships, and within a month I was aching for the Orioles, my row house and my old girlfriend, who had begun dating a man named Patrick.

I had just missed my first Thanksgiving with my family and instead spent the holiday at the country home of a newspaper clerk named Cynthia. At some point, a fistfight erupted in her small front yard; two quarrelsome men in Wranglers and creased NASCAR caps traded punches while the rest of us stood with paper plates of half-eaten hot dogs and cranberry sauce. The evening wasn’t a total loss; the brawl gave me something to write about in the paper.

After two months, when I saw no way out, my dreams of writing for a major daily began to sink into a full-scale dilapidation of spirit and ambition. One image from that time remains: I had written a 20-inch column—“Wells Tells”—about a mosquito infestation at a baseball game, and I realized it was the best thing I’d written in weeks. In that instant, my obituary as a major-daily beat writer could have been written.

I gave myself a year. If I didn’t land a job at another paper, I’d move home, hoping for a spot in the family business.

Laundry-room Cell

The luxury of despair is how sharply God’s presence becomes felt. In the winter of ’94, I hungered to be lost completely in Him. With my failing career, I lay in His lap in prayer. That was the easy part. What made the time truly profound was what came alongside my prayers—The Great Silence.

Because I was poor, I had no TV or stereo system—just an old clock radio picking up a few country and bluegrass stations I rarely listened to. I woke in silence, ate in silence, went to bed in silence. For the first time, I felt the otherworldly embrace of solitude. At first, the Cistercian quiet was unsettling; but I gradually grew used to it, and the silence became a powerful tool.

Within that stillness—and honestly, the loneliness, discouragement, and isolation that were in that brown trailer with me, too—I discovered the mysterious presence of God through prayer, always at the side of an outdated, monstrous personal computer.

Before work each day, I wrote to God on an old IBM that hummed constantly in my narrow, washer- and dryer-less laundry-room office. In front of that 1980s monitor, I poured out letters to God—slowly drawing open the curtains of awareness and revealing the life I had carved for myself.

I began to see that the small daily paper might be the right place for me. My writing, reporting, and interviewing were unspectacular. Major dailies weren’t hiring amid a lingering recession. And at 24, I still had a long way to go. Christ had a history of moving things along slowly, I knew.

I told God on my keyboard that I knew the only reason I was reaching out to Him was, really, because the silence made me aware of His gentle push to draw me to Him. In the quiet, it was easy to assess my failures, target my recurring shortcomings, chart my course for the following day, and, finally, welcome in any small measure of hope.

A truer picture of my daily life unfolded on that screen, which had become a quiet stretch of contemplative highway prayers. I began to pray and write like a contented trailer-park hermit, and I had come to accept that the “not yet” of my career might never arrive.

Lord, I’m lonely and alone in this country town. You know I’m in trouble here. Write your story into mine. I want to be an instrument of your will in this dry time…I know you’re not my personal genie; You’re my Shepherd. You’ll work out my life in Your own way.

The ticking time bomb of my career didn’t pound so loudly when I laid my dilemma in His hands. Although every door to a bright future seemed closed, I knew in my depths that they were open—no matter what spun out of my circumstances.

Hope became the theme. The more I wrote, the more I seemed to hope in Him. “The Spirit too comes to the aid of our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit itself intercedes with inexpressible groanings” (Romans 8:26).

Yes, I was in the heart of the proverbial desert—and Winter Haven could be called one in a literal sense, too—but within that hermetically sealed solitude, prayer became a mini-paradise of self-awareness. In the stillness, I began to understand that only patient trust in His Providence was necessary.

In my loneliness—by far my greatest trial—I found His embrace, surrendering my frustration, hopelessness, and impatience to His care. All I had was faith; and at the time, that felt like an awful lot.

Quiet Man Rides Into Town

The wire story came across one night in the dead of winter, which didn’t seem like winter because temperatures were in the low 80s and Santa Claus was wearing red shorts in the Winter Haven Mall: “The Cleveland Indians announced the free agent signing of veteran first baseman Eddie Murray today.”

Oh, man.

My childhood hero was coming to my country town. The Indians’ spring training home was in Winter Haven, and it was my job to cover Murray and his teammates: all-stars Albert Belle, Kenny Lofton, and the cocky rookie Manny Ramirez. For 45 days in February and March, the winds of change were coming. Eddie Murray was coming to town. Man. The luck.

The pendulum had swung since the days when I used to summon “Murray-courage” to wrap my arm around a girl’s shoulder in a theater. Once a beguiling, charming prankster, Murray had developed into a veteran skeptic of all reporters. He had been criticized by an Orioles owner in an article in the mid-80s, which opened the door for media members to nitpick.

Thereafter, he initiated an unbending stonewalling of the press. Catchwords—“lazy,” “clubhouse cancer,” “surly,” “self-centered”—began to append themselves to him; all the while, he was evolving into one of baseball’s most feared hitters.

His best friends, one of whom I knew, said Murray’s derogatory tags were entirely unjustified. He told me Murray was a kind, quiet individual who loved the game of baseball but had been mischaracterized simply because of his firm decision to wall himself off from the media.

His friend also told me that Murray wouldn’t speak with me. He hadn’t spoken to a reporter for six years.

So, on the opening day of spring training, I approached him with a reporter’s notepad. It was February, and gusty winds were whipping off a lake beside the Chain O’Lakes cloverleaf baseball fields. He seemed in good spirits. He had just finished a morning workout, his first as a member of the Cleveland Indians. He was walking back to the clubhouse when I called out to the man I used to sketch in my grade-school notebooks.

“Eddie, if you wouldn’t mind—do you have a few minutes?” I asked. “I’m Kevin Wells with the local paper.”

“No. I’m sorry,” he said politely as he continued toward the clubhouse.

“I promise if you give me a minute or two that you’ll see that I’m not here to knock you,” I said.

“I’m sorry,” he said with a smile. “I’m just not talking to you.”

And he walked on.

Day Two

“Hey 33,” I said in the same location a day later.

“Man, what’s up with you?” he said with a bemused look. Murray stopped this time, though.

“Eddie. I know more about your career than any baseball writer in America. I believe I can say that with confidence. All I want to do is profile you for our spring training magazine that comes out next week. It won’t be a hammer job…I mean, c’mon, I’m with the local paper.”

He smiled. “How do you think you know me so well?”

I could have told him that he awed me as a child. I could have told him how I used to pantomime his crouched, cobra-like batting stance in my pajamas while listening to WBAL (the primary radio station serving Baltimore, Maryland) in the dark. I could have explained that I used to sketch him in his batting stance in notebooks and that I chose to attend a college where I could see him play. I could have mentioned that I would have grown his Afro if my hair grew that way.

“I grew up in Maryland as an Orioles fan,” I offered. “I know how you play the game. I’ve followed your career.”

“I’m sorry. I just don’t speak with you guys,” he said.

“Eddie,” I said. “As a kid, believe it or not—you were my favorite player.”

“Oh man,” he said in his famous high-pitched laugh. “What have I got myself into here?…Your parents should have told you to like somebody else—like Cal [Ripken] or somebody.”

“Yeah, you’re probably right,” I said with a smile.

“Sorry, Kevin,” he said.

“Eddie. Look. I’m with the local paper. Even if I write something terrible about you, maybe a dozen or so people will even see it,” I said.

“You’re not gonna give up, are you?” he asked.

“Eddie. I live in Winter Haven,” I said. “What else have I got to do?”

We went back and forth for a while until he finally said it: “All right. Meet me in the clubhouse in 10 minutes.”

We spoke for a memorable hour at his locker. He discussed his poor Los Angeles childhood, his enormous love for his large family, and learning how to hit curveballs by swinging at Crisco lids as a kid. He talked of “the Orioles Way,” the damning quotes, his hurts, his friendships with former Orioles teammates, and his regret that he was no longer in Baltimore, a city he had come to love.

I remember walking into the media room after my interview and Paul Hoynes, the Indians beat writer for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, pivoting from his laptop and saying, “How in the %$#* did you get Murray to talk?”

As the spring moved forward, Eddie and I established a short-lived friendship—discussing the NCAA basketball tournament, Baltimore restaurants, old Orioles stories, and the baseball minutiae of the day.

After the long article on Murray was published in our magazine, the executive sports editor from The Tampa Tribune, Paul C. Smith, called to say he had read my piece and that he wanted to find out how I managed to get Murray to talk. “You seem to really know baseball. A well-done piece,” he said.

A few months later, he hired me.

Two years later, Mr. Smith named me the Tribune’s first beat writer for the Tampa Bay Devil Rays Major League Baseball team. For the most part, I’ve written ever since—and I believe it’s all due to God working through Eddie, who came through in the clutch, once again.

Pictured: "Steady" Eddie Murray, former first baseman & DH