just for me.
The highlight of my childhood was playing in Little League. In Middletown, Connecticut, when I was growing up, players were typically from ten to twelve years old. Ten-year-olds sat on the bench for most of the game. At age ten I would bug my coach, a man by the name of Roy Huffman.
“When can I pitch? When can I pitch?”
Finally a game was well out of hand, and Coach Huffman let me pitch. The batter stepped in, and my first toss hit the top of the backstop. I was nervous at first, but I settled down and got out of the inning. The following year I began pitching regularly. I had grown and put on weight, and no one threw as hard as I did. I was the best pitcher in the league, leading the Jaycees to the city championship.
In the championship game, the Jaycees played a team coached by a former high school coach by the name of Ed Collins. Ed’s son, Pete, was one of my close friends. Every time we moved a runner into scoring position, we squeeze bunted, and were successful every time. After the game, Ed Collins complained that Coach Huffman “wasn’t playing real baseball.” It’s what a lot of losing coaches say after they’ve been beaten by a squeeze bunt. We didn’t care. We won.
Winning is the most controversial word used in youth sports. Are young players supposed to have fun playing the game, or are they there to win?
Go to any Little League game and ask the parents that question; you will automatically start an argument that may well break out into a fistfight. That’s how strongly each side feels about the issue. The parents of the less talented players always opt for fun. The parents of the best players always opt for winning. My dad made it clear that the Denehys were there to win.
My dad and his brother used to reward me for winning. If I won, Uncle Amos would give me five bucks or my father would buy me a hamburger or a chocolate milk shake. Or maybe he’d say I didn’t have to mow the lawn that week.
If we lost, the story was “Losers get nothing.” The tone was soft, but what stuck in my adolescent brain was that winners were good and losers were bad. There was never a time, in any sport that I played, where playing fair and square was a consideration.
In one game I was playing catcher and a batter named Paul LaBello hit a home run to beat us. My first thought was that our pitcher fucked up, that though I had given him a target inside, he had thrown it right down the middle and had lost the game for us.
After the game ended I was so pissed off we had lost that I kicked a soda can down the middle of the road all the way home, holding up traffic. It was an early indicator of my proclivity toward rage, and while I was raging, I was out of my gourd. I had no idea what I was doing, no sense of how I was affecting anyone else around me.
Aunt Jody, who watched me kick the can right by her house, later said to me, “Bill, you have a terrible temper, and you ought to know better than that.”
I didn’t have the words to explain it, but I couldn’t accept losing. Losing made me crazy.
When I put that uniform on, I was there to win. I was going to do anything I could to win, and if I didn’t win, I was not a good sport about it. From a self-esteem viewpoint, winning was good and losing was horrible.
Nobody ever said to me that the joy of the competition was what was important. If I had to hit you in the head with the baseball to win the game, that was okay, so long as I won. If you got hit, you should have gotten out of the way. If you were standing at home plate, and I could either slide around you or run over you, I ran over you. It’s the way I played the game.
If I had trouble controlling my temper, my time at St. Mary’s Catholic School didn’t improve my disposition. In fact, how I was abused by the nuns only made me more resentful and angry. I don’t really know why I was even there but for the fact that my grandfather was one of the school’s founders.
For disciplinary purposes, the nuns would put a dunce cap on you, make you stand in the corner, or beat you with a ruler.
They tried to humiliate you. A friend of mine told me about the Catholic school he went to. He said the nuns would make him kneel down on upside-down bottle caps and say the rosary. Today they would be arrested and thrown in jail. But back then, well, people tended to look the other way as long as the children received a good Catholic education. If you were punished, you probably deserved it.
When I was in the seventh grade I was given an IQ test. The nun-teacher presented me with a dozen pairs of words. For instance, one pair of words might be basketball and arena. Or another pair might be book and library. I had to read the twelve sets of words and memorize them, and the nuns would discuss another topic for five minutes. Finally, after five minutes, I was asked to recall the twelve sets of words from memory. I was tested three times. I couldn’t remember one damn word.
The second part of the test consisted of listening to a three- or four-paragraph story about two people meeting, and after talking about something else for five minutes, the nun asked, “Where did they meet?” I’d think hard and have to say, “I don’t remember.”
The third part of the test consisted of a number of pictures—a family at a picnic, a mother holding up a sweater at a department store—and I’d be asked to study the pictures. That part I was able to do. But as for the other parts of the test, I wouldn’t be able to answer correctly, and the nuns would always make fun of me.
I always got the feeling that I was somehow stupid. I felt shame and humiliation, because I couldn’t keep up with the class. I internalized that shame. That feeling would remain with me throughout my life. If someone made the mistake of saying, or even implying, that I was stupid, that person would soon regret it.
I remember the nuns beating me and trying to make me cry. This was a Catholic thing. Christ suffered on the cross, and you had to suffer too. I grew up during a time when my father said, “Big boys don’t cry.” So whenever the nun hit me with a wooden ruler, I would grit my teeth, but I would never cry. I was determined to take the pain. You could whack me, but I wouldn’t give them the satisfaction of crying.
After a beating the nun would say, “If you go home now and show off your swollen hand, your parents are going to want to know why, and once you tell them, they’re going to beat you too.” This was a secret I was forced to take home with me. As a result, I would keep my hands under the table during dinner. I will always remember the fear and guilt I felt. The anger I felt at being physically abused was great, and the thought formed in my mind that I wasn’t about to take any shit from anybody.
One time I was class monitor and slugged a student after he refused to say the rosary. I was sent to Sister Superior’s office. “You’ve been in trouble a lot,” said Sister Superior. “Take down your pants, bend over the desk, and I’m going to give you a few whacks with the yardstick.”
“No, you’re not,” I said, and I began to run around Sister Superior’s long desk. I grabbed her lunch box sitting on the desk, and I fired it at her. My control wasn’t very good, and the lunch box sailed through a window, shattering the glass.
The next thing I knew, I was sitting in the priest’s office with my father. The priest told me he’d give me one more chance. I could stay at St. Mary’s as long as there wasn’t another incident. I told my father we should leave.
I left St. Mary’s emotionally scarred, and it wasn’t until years later that I understood the toll those beatings took on my psyche.
Later, when I went to public school, a group of kids who enjoyed fighting came after me.
I enjoyed fighting at first, but I wasn’t very good at it, and I used to get the piss beaten out of me. I didn’t have visible bruises and cuts; I could cover up my face. But one time my clothes got ripped. When my mother told my father about the ripped shirt, my father took me down to the YMCA the following weekend to meet Willie Pep, the boxing champion.
Willie was from Middletown, and my father knew him. He introduced me to the champ.
“Would you say a couple things to my son so he can defend himself a little better?” asked my dad. Willie said