THE OLD HAND

THE RANGERS WERE THE FINAL STOP IN THE MAGNIFICENT CAREER OF NOLAN RYAN, ONE THAT BROUGHT HIM TO A PLACE WHERE THE NATIVE TEXAN COULDN’T HAVE BEEN MORE AT HOME

Tminutes of Texas twilight have arrived. The day has been gray anyway, cool, and now the colors begin to fade even further as the unseen sun dips toward the trees at the edge of the pasture. The birds know that night is coming. Hear them squawk? The horses have to be fed. They stand in a group, five of them, behind a brown three-board fence. Waiting. A car passes on the road in the distance. Another. Men coming home from work. Women bringing their children from late practices and meetings at the high school. “Curveball,” Nolan Ryan says.

He stands in the middle of the pasture. This is farmland. The horses have galloped across it, and tractors and trucks have been driven across it, and the grass is all knobby and clumpy, certainly unmowed, and yet . . . he is at the base of a little grass-covered mound. Mound? His neighbor Harry Spilman, chewing a touch of tobacco, is crouched behind a patch of white that shows through the grass. A patch of white? Nolan tucks his left leg into his chest

HE LAST 45

and accelerates off his right leg and throws the baseball. Harry does not have to move his mitt.

“Good one,” Harry says.

There is a rusted chain-link fence, 12 feet high, a few feet behind Harry. Fence? There is the 12-foot-high fence and the patch of white in front of Harry and the mound in back of Nolan and . . . yes, sure. The mind and the eye simultaneously bring out the recessed image of a diamond, as if they were solving a puzzle in the Sunday comics. “I built it for my son when he was in Little League,” Nolan says. “Little Leaguers never have a place to practice. I built it, and they used it for a couple of years. Then I let it all go back. Watch where you walk.” He fingers the baseball in his hand. “Straight,” he says.

Nolan’s three dogs are fanned out in what could be loosely called an outfield alignment. That is Buster in left and Suzy in center and fat old Bea in right. The fourth dog, tied in the back of the pickup in the driveway, the dog that is barking, is Harry’s dog Sarge. Sarge simply can’t control himself. Let him loose and he becomes too excited. He chases the ball wherever it goes. He tries to

grab it straight out of Nolan’s or Harry’s hand. Sarge has had a million second chances. Had one just today. Can’t control himself. Back in the truck.

“There was something on that pitch,” Harry says a second after the ball arrives. “It was traveling.”

The first time Nolan was in this field, let’s see, he was with the Girl Scouts. Camping with the Girl Scouts. His mother, Martha, was a troop leader, and she wasn’t going to let her youngest child, 7 years old, stay home while she was taking those girls for a night of outdoor adventure at Mr. Evans’s ranch. This was back in 1954, when the bayou over there wasn’t straight, before the widening was done and the lake was formed at the other end and the tract development came. Let’s see. There were more trees then. The road out there wasn’t even a road. There was another road. Yes. Another road. Smaller. A back road. A further-back road. “Changeup,” Nolan says. He still is here. How many years later? The land now is his, acquired 13 years ago in a straight trade, a new house that Nolan owned for Mr. Evans’s old house and the land. This is a Tuesday, late in February. The game of pitch and catch has been taking place almost every night for a month. Same time. Same place. Training camp is eight days away, and the fastballs are becoming faster and the curveballs are becoming curvier. A stranger, out on the road, might look and squint and see a couple of middleaged guys in the middle of nowhere trying to find a few Absorbine Jr. memories, but there really aren’t many strangers out there on the road. These are familiar people. A horn honks. Another. There’s old Nolan, tossing with Harry. Getting ready. “Looked good,” Harry says. “I don’t know,” Nolan says. “That one might have got hit.”

The shades of gray darken, and old Nolan is working just a little harder tonight. He has to miss the workout tomorrow. Has to go to the White House. To see the President. Up there in Washington. He will be back in Alvin, Texas, on Thursday.

“I don’t know how he does it,” says Kim Spilman, Nolan’s secretary and Harry’s wife. “The letters, the invitations, the demands. The businesses. There always is someone who wants him to be a grand marshal in a parade, to talk at Career Day. Something. The White House. How do you stay normal with all of these people pulling at you all of the time? And yet he does it. God, he does. He’s everything a person would want to be. He talks with my kids and he’s just so nice. They’ll ask me, ‘Is he supposed to be famous or something?’ That’s just how he is.”

The drumbeat of celebrity always has been there in

office Nolan has rented in the Merchants Bank in Alvin to handle the increased demands on his life. “It’s funny how that works. As soon as he gets here, the phone starts ringing off the hook. It’s like people have antennae or something to tell them he’s here. I took the call, and the message was something like, ‘Please stay on the line for the President of the United States.’ I was so excited I ran into the bank to tell everyone that Nolan was being invited to the White House.”

Ihow it is in the rest of the country,” Jim Stinson, Nolan’s longtime friend and business partner, says, “but in Texas he is bigger than John Wayne right now. And you will wear out a truck finding someone who’s nicer than Nolan Ryan.” John Wayne?

“I talk with ad agencies about him,” says Matt Merola, Nolan’s longtime agent from New York. “They will say, ‘Well, can he talk?’ I will tell them if they’re looking for Sir Laurence Olivier, they’d better go to Central Casting.

DON’T KNOW

But if they’re looking for someone who is honest, who is sincere, who can talk about things in his way— Jimmy Stewart. If they are looking for Jimmy Stewart, they want Nolan. He is someone who is really real.” Jimmy Stewart?

In the tie-a-yellow-ribbon Americanism of the ’90s, Nolan somehow has become the perfect oak tree. The fact that he still can compete with the young and wildeyed millionaires of his game and still can make them look silly is only the beginning. He is Citizen Ryan, a total package. Tired of the fatheads who spend their first paychecks on sports cars that run on airplane fuel? Seen too much of the substance abusers and the late-night carousers and the uncoachable prima donnas? Here is a family man. Here is a businessman. Here is a cowboy. Here is Nolan Ryan.

After 23 years, the man still is married to his high school sweetheart, and Ruth remembers when a big date simply was watching him take target practice with his .22 pistol. They still live in the same town, and their kids attend the same schools they attended. A big night still is a trip to Baskin-Robbins for ice cream. A big Saturday night still is dancing the two-step with friends at Eddie’s Country Ballroom. Pretty good two-step, too.

A workday is a workday. Vacations still are mostly for other people, although there were three days at the end of last year in Las Vegas for the National Finals Rodeo. There is no real “off” in the offseason. Nolan is a rancher. Nolan owns three ranches. The biggest, China Grove, in Rosharon, near Alvin, has 550 mama cows and 33 bulls and as many as 1,100 head, total, at the end of calving season, which is just about now. Relaxation is riding a horse and penning the calves and doing a cattle rancher’s hard work.

“He’s a hands-on owner, for sure,” Larry McKim, the ranch manager, says. “When he comes here, he gets right into it. He helps us castrate the steers, dehorn ’em, everything. Nothing fazes him. I’ll see him reach into the chute with that million-dollar right arm and I’ll say to myself, Are you sure you want to do that? But he’ll never buckle. He’ll go right in there.”

“Nolan is as good a cattleman as there is in the state of Texas,” Stinson, a partner in China Grove, says. “He’s stride for stride with all of ’em. If he’d never picked up a baseball, he’d still be a great success as a cattleman. He’s been doing it all his life. I remember his mother telling me once how he saved up enough money when he was a kid to buy four calves. He lived in town, so he had to raise ’em in the garage. Fed ’em all from a baby bottle.”

The banking business is another long-term affair. Nolan made news last year when he purchased the Danbury State Bank, about 10 miles from Alvin, but he

here, because under the bank’s charter he can expand anywhere in the state of Texas. Nolan knows what he’s doing. He has what I’d call country smarts. Nolan has great country smarts.”

Ntalk while they throw the ball back and forth in the pasture. Harry is not exactly the average next-door recruit, some accountant who bought himself a baseball glove just to help the famous pitcher get ready. Not at all. Harry played, too, 12 years of scuffling on the fringes of four different teams in the major leagues and six in the minors. He is 36 and will be working this year as a roving hitting coach in Cleveland’s minor league system.

“So Roger Clemens is getting five million dollars,” Nolan says, shaking his head. “If Roger’s worth five million, what’s Wade Boggs going to be worth?” Straight fastball.

Splat!

“What about Jim Deshaies?” Harry says. “He’s making two-million-something. He won seven games last year. Seven games and he’s making two million. Isn’t that something?”

Curveball.

Splat!

“I know one thing,” Nolan says. “I’d like to be about 25 years old now and have about 5,000 innings ahead of me.” Changeup.

Perfect.

OLAN AND HARRY

of their seats. Nolan threw a slow, lazy curveball that bounced about a foot and a half in front of the plate. Bench swung so hard that the temperature must have dropped 5° in the ballpark. A curveball! Beautiful.

Tstaying in Alvin never really came to debate. Why not stay? Isn’t this where everyone we know always has lived? The idea of staying married never came to debate. Why not? Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do? The idea of raising a family was ingrained. Wasn’t that what our parents did? Raise families? One year has led into another. Last year, Nolan and Ruth went to the 25th reunion of the Alvin High class of ’65. Everyone hung out at Dairyland on Friday night, the way they had in school. There was a dance at the country club on Saturday night, a picnic on Sunday.

“He is the one who has kept everything together,” Ruth says. “Him. It would be so easy for him to go off, to just say, ‘You take care of the kids while I go do this business.’ He never says that. He always tries to make us a part of everything. He is going to Abilene on business this weekend. He could just go. He doesn’t want that. He wants us with him.”

“I think you learn so much more from your parents than you ever thought possible,” Nolan says. “It just comes through. I find it comes through again and again.”

The lessons of long ago do not leave. How can he go to the gym early every morning of the year, to the free

HE IDEA OF

father as a boy. His father had two jobs. Nolan would get up at 1 o’clock in the morning, roll the papers for an hour, then deliver them around the back roads of Alvin, 55 miles of traveling, until 4. Then he would go back to bed for a few more hours of sleep before school. Every day.

“You had the feeling that people were counting on you,” he says. “If you didn’t get up, they weren’t going to get their papers. You just did it. You had a sense of responsibility. I guess I never lost it. There are a lot of mornings where I’d just like to keep my dead butt in bed. I just get up.”

His so old that he remembers when baseball wasn’t the fast road to wealth that it has become. He says he made $7,000 in his first major league season. When the Mets won the World Series in ’69, his share of the winnings tripled his basic salary. He bought his first house. For 10 years, playing baseball was an economic struggle. He remembers installing air conditioners in the offseason. Pumping gas. There weren’t always ranches and banks and endorsements.

He remembers a time when there was no television in his house, when he would stand in the dark of Dezo Drive and look through neighbors’ windows at this miraculous invention. He remembers his grandmother had outdoor plumbing. Man walking on the moon? He remembers long before that. A bus was taking him to play some game in eighth grade in Houston. The coach pointed out the window and said that a thing called NASA was going to be built in a vacant field they were passing. Cows were in the middle of the field. NASA.

“You think sometimes about all the stuff that has happened,” he says. “I was reading somewhere the other day that the Rural Electrification Act is 50 years old. Fifty years ago, people were just getting electricity. Thirty years after that, man was walking on the moon.”

He says he has no goals for how long he will pitch. The last few years have been a wonderful bonus. He will pitch this year and see what happens. His wife has a hunch that this will be his last year, but it is only a hunch. His friends think he will pitch as long as he is healthy and successful. Rangers pitching coach Tom House thinks that Nolan is pitching as well now as he ever did and will pitch as long as Nolan wants to pitch, as long as he wants to make the physical sacrifices to fight the aging process.

“His age has brought him all this attention,” Ruth says, “and I really think he has earned it. I think people looked past him for a long time. I remember being really aggravated back in ’73 when he didn’t win the Cy Young Award and I really thought he deserved it. I remember hearing some mean things that people would say. About him being just a .500 pitcher. He would always say that everyone is entitled to an opinion. I would get mad. So now I get a lot of satisfaction from the accolades he’s getting. He deserves them all.”

E SAYS HE

11

Seasons that the franchise played in Washington as the Senators before moving to Texas for the 1972 season.