‘I FEEL VERY HONORED’

Medina native in ‘Field of Dreams’ carries mantle of countless fathers

The man standing in front of Dwier Brown in the produce section at the grocery store clutched a box of corn flakes and cried. h Brown is fairly used to that. h The Medina County native and Ashland University graduate, who this fall will be inducted into the Highland High School Distinguished Alumni club, played the ghost of Kevin Costner’s father in the iconic baseball movie Field of Dreams.h That’s why last week, as Major League Baseball held its first official game in Iowa at a field adjacent to the one built for the movie set 33 years ago, Brown found himself in a grocery store with a line of people waiting for his autograph — and to tell him about their dads.

The man holding the cereal — a new line of Field of Dreams cornflakes, the box designed by Brown and a portion of the sales benefiting a camp for children who have lost a loved one — was having Brown sign the box for his brother. He teared up telling Brown their dad died when they were kids.

The 1989 movie, a tale of fathers and sons and regrets of things unsaid, ends (spoiler alert) with Kevin Costner’s Ray Kinsella reconciling with the ghost of his father, John, played by Brown, and asking him if he’d like to have a game of catch.

“People come up to me and [tell] me it changed their lives, their relationship with their dad, or they changed jobs because of the movie,” Brown said.

Hauling emotional baggage for multitudes

For many, Brown has become the symbol of their own relationships with their father, whether it was a loving one or not, whether their father is still alive or not. He takes every such interaction seriously, he said, and is always ready to give a hug when needed.

It’s a heavy emotional weight on Brown — a movie actor from Ohio — to be “a priest of father confessions,” as he calls it. But it’s a weight he is proud to carry.

“I feel very honored to be put in that position,” he said.

Brown, who now lives in California and had a lengthy acting career with credits through 2016, was able to return to the cornfields last week for the game, reuniting with his on-screen son, Costner.

Another dream sprouts in renowned cornfield

Like any other fan deeply attached to the movie, Brown was skeptical of the idea to erect a Major League Baseball stadium at the Iowa site where the classic was filmed.

There’s a pureness to that site that comes from the simplicity of a baseball diamond and a single white house amid the corn.

Would a real ballpark ruin it?

“An MLB stadium is so huge it was hard to imagine it being there without being very intrusive and without spoiling the energy of the field,” Brown said. “To my surprise, they did a remarkable job.”

Not one bit of the magic was ruined by the game’s production, he said, and the field, surrounded by stalks of corn and 8,000 fans on a beautiful summer night, was a sight to see.

“It was chilling, in the same way that I felt when I first saw the field the very first day on the set back in July 1988,” Brown said.

It didn’t hurt that the game itself was one for the ages, remarkably meeting the expectations of the highly hyped moment with the White Sox winning on a Hollywoodesque walk-off home run in

the bottom of the 9th. For those hours, Brown was just a fan.

But in the days leading up to the game, he was Dwier Brown, the man whose single scene in a movie 33 years ago is liable to cause tears just by mentioning it.

The weight of the scene was not lost on Brown when he was filming it. His own father died just 36 days before filming began.

He also sees that scene now as a dad himself, and has witnessed the magic of the Field of Dreams in his own family.

Poignant moment for father and son

Around the 25th anniversary of the film, Brown wrote a book, “If You Build It...” about his life and the movie, and went on a multi-city book tour that included

a stop in Dyersville, Iowa at the movie site.

He brought along his own son, Woody, who was then 15. The tension between father and son was high at the time, Brown said, a byproduct of the teenage need to chart one’s own path.

Most of his Hollywood career was behind him by that time, Brown said, so his children hadn’t seen firsthand the draw of their dad to complete strangers. But as they pulled into the Field of Dreams, where thousands were waiting for him, Brown’s son saw a different side of his dad.

Brown spent a full day signing autographs and playing catch on the field with anyone who asked, Woody lurking in the bleachers and just watching.

Back in their book tour RV for the night, Woody quietly approached his dad, and said he noticed he spent his whole day playing catch with other people.

“You never played catch with me,” Brown remembered his son saying. “It practically brought me to tears.” He promised to fix that.

“I was just so touched by that, that at a time that there was nothing I could do to impress him, he observed this interaction and was courageous enough to ask me to share it with him,” Brown said.

The next morning, they woke up at 6 a.m., and on the Field of Dreams field, father and son had a catch.

Contact reporter and baseball fan Jennifer Pignolet at jpignolet@thebeaconjournal.com, at 330-996-3216 or on Twitter @Jenpignolet.

ZACH BOYDEN-HOLMES/DES MOINES REGISTER Orange hues paint the sky duing the game between the Yankees and the White Sox near the Field of Dreams movie site outside of Dyersville, Iowa, on Thursday.

COURTESY OF DWIER BROWN Medina native Dwier Brown took this photo of the beginning of the Field of Dreams game in Dyersville, Iowa, on Thursday. Brown played John Kinsella in the 1989 movie.

COURTESY OF CALE GLENDENING Dwier Brown, left, and Kevin Costner reunited last week for the Field of Dreams game in Iowa. Brown, a Medina County native, played Costner’s father in the 1989 movie.