Ethan is blind Sherlock.
Ethan doesn’t really know a lot about Charlie Fairbanks, even though they share a state and a game, but Fairbanks, who died in 2007, would have wanted it that way. In the words of his former boss at the phone company, Will Sinton, “Charlie didn’t ring his own bell.” Neither does Ethan Johnston. He hit .600 in the 2013 Series, but he laughs off some of his accomplishments.
“Blind people crack me up,” he told me. “They think they’re great athletes, but if it wasn’t for the pitcher and the spotter, they would suck.”
That may be partly true, but Johnston is impressive anyway, with a sweeping uppercut swing and a calm demeanor in the field that helps him rack up close to a third of his team’s putouts.
Ethan wears the white and blue of the Colorado Storm proudly now as he tracks the ball, but at his first practice in 2007, he showed up in a Kobe Bryant jersey and mesh shorts. He wasn’t sure what to make of blind baseball then, didn’t think it was realistic. Basketball was his game, as long as he played in natural light so he could make out the square above the rim. But after he threw himself around at beep ball practice, he changed his mind. The bruises made it feel real, and baseball became a possibility for him in spite of (or because of) his sore hips.
Born Esubalew Truneh, Ethan grew up poor in a remote village in Ethiopia during that country’s civil war and shortly after a widespread famine that left nearly four hundred thousand dead. I say that he’s twenty-something because Ethan doesn’t know his actual age, but sometime when he was still a little boy, his mother left him in the care of two men—“typical skinny-ass Ethiopians,” he described them—who promised to take him to a school in the capital city, Addis Ababa. On the way, the men attacked Ethan with sticks and a chemical, conniving to blind him so he’d be a more pitiful and successful beggar for their crime syndicate. In place of school, he received his education on the hectic streets of the capital.
Many of those streets, Ethan’s old confines, are named after the countries of Africa, so on Chad Street he’d be instructed to hold onto the back rail of an open-air bus until the riders tossed him a few coins; he might hear the money pinging into the gutter. Sometimes he’d be dragged by the buses. Though starving and alone—“they keep you separate so you can’t plot,” he told me—Ethan stayed positive, and he was propped up by one old woman who sometimes fed him traditional Ethiopian stews.
Finally, somewhere near Sudan Street, near the U.S. Embassy and the Children’s Hospital and the Sheraton, Ethan encountered a couple in a café who ran a blind school in the city.
“My guide took me in and this couple—the wife could see, the husband was blind—they heard me begging. The wife saw me and gave me ten cents.”
The two tried to coax Ethan and his criminal handlers to come to their school’s neighborhood, but his handlers were suspicious and forbade further contact. Coincidentally, though, Ethan ran into the teachers again on a bus, and they helped him get off at their stop. His handlers followed. The couple tried to make a deal, offering to adopt Ethan.
“That’s when my guides said they weren’t going to let that happen,” Ethan told me. An argument erupted, and the couple called for the school’s guards, who flashed their guns. Ethan doesn’t believe they ever intended to shoot, but the show of force got the attention of the handlers and they scurried away, pursued on foot by the good guys. For Ethan, mercifully, there wasn’t going to be any more following the pinging sound of tossed coins. He was safe, and after his rescue he received treatment for the tuberculosis he’d contracted. Unfortunately, the little boy had mostly forgotten the village he’d come from; so instead of going home to his mother, he was relocated through the work of adoption advocates to the town of Ashland, in central Missouri. Ethan had been begging for two and a half years.
“At that time,” he told me, “I thought America was a small town in Ethiopia that I’d never heard of.”
After thirteen operations, Ethan’s vision was still poor, but he could see a little bit more, and he settled in. Sports played a big part in Ethan’s understanding of the culture of his new small town, America. He took to calling himself the eleventh draft pick of his family because he was the eleventh of twenty-one they adopted, and basketball terminology was his first fluency. Aping the call of an arena’s public address announcer, Ethan described himself as “a four-foot, eleven-inch forward from East Africa. Eighty-six pounds. Mini-Shaq. Ethan Johnston!”
Now Ethan has a decent low post game for a guy who sees in shadow, and before many of my conversations with him, he’d just been on the court. He told me that if he was taller than five foot seven he’d be the first blind man to dunk, no doubt. But even during his early sports frenzy, baseball remained an unacquired taste.
“I thought it was boring,” Ethan said, “partly because I’d just learned English. Learning the language and the terminology and how the game is played was the big change.” Ethan thinks the Cardinals won the first game he went to, and maybe that made the difference. Either way, the voice of radio play-by-play man Mike Shannon (KMOX-AM 1120) became his company. “I love them now,” he said. “Us Missourians are very diehard Cardinals fans.”
It’s a long way from following the Cardinals to playing organized baseball, especially for a guy with an artificial cornea, but that’s where Charlie Fairbanks’s and Ethan Johnston’s paths run parallel. After a move to Denver to take part in a program at the Colorado Center for the Blind, Ethan met Demetris “TwoLegs” Morrow, a veteran of the Colorado Storm, and TwoLegs asked him if he wanted to come check out beep baseball. Ethan’s first reaction was doubt. “He was pretty suspicious about a lot of things back then,” said TwoLegs, who got his old-timey nickname when a troublesome sciatic nerve that limited his play in 2012 improved in 2013. “Yeah, when I was first telling him about it he didn’t think I was serious.” But because of TwoLegs’s insistence and Fairbanks’s imagination, Ethan eventually found that his new country had an exciting (modified) pastime.
A few years down his long road, it’s Ethan’s goal to be one of the best athletes in the league—he already has a defensive MVP award from 2010—and he desperately wants to win a series. Though Colorado is a top-tier team, they’re unlikely to win the title anytime soon, and so Ethan has thought of moving on. “There are a few teams that want to recruit me, but I’m loyal,” he said. “Unless we don’t have a team. And then I’ll skip to Taiwan.” He likes Homerun’s speed and their intangibles. “They win with dignity and honor and respect. I’m always rooting for Taiwan.”
Maybe it’s Ethan’s cosmopolitanism that leads him to favor Homerun. They come a long way from Taipei, he’s come a long way from Addis Ababa. But what really connects him is a personality trait he shares with a lot of those guys on that team. He’s almost always composed, blessed and cursed by a sense of proportion he had forced on him at a young age. How could a beep ball loss really get him down for too long?
In the perennial fight between Taiwan and Austin, meanwhile, Ethan sees a battle between understated mastery and bluster. He’s not a rowdy guy, not into what he calls “hooplah-rah nonsense,” and he tries to lead with quiet preparation. As for the Austin Blackhawks, he likes those guys, but he wouldn’t want to play for them: “They talk a lot of trash. It is a sport, you know. But I like when a team plays with dignity.”
It was around this point in one of my conversations with Ethan that I made a blunder. I’d been looking forward to talking to him for weeks because his story—violence, enslavement, and, finally, sports success—felt almost impossible to me. So through some mental trick, I expected Ethan to be devastated and haunted, but in a mythical way, a Magic Blind Man. I expected him to teach me something beautiful about sports, suffering, and the interplay of the two.
“Pardon me for saying this,” I stammered. “But . . .” And I didn’t know how to continue without insulting him. I started to tell him I was surprised he could be an everyday guy, chatting about the Broncos and about his regular route on the D Line in Denver from Oxford Station to the downtown Chipotle. (His order is corn salsa. Extra cheese. Emphatically no beans. Caramel macchiato at Starbucks, too.)
Shouldn’t