line drives from the father
…when bullets fly too close to the heart…
John Ivanovich Malloff – 2002
Grand Forks, BC
There is something special about baseball diamonds, otherwise known as ballparks. Unlike hotdogs, they nourish inter-generational connections, allowing youth to catch-up with their elders while letting adults relish in sharing this living tradition.
My generation slid through the remnants of a community that once honoured baseball above all of the other competitive team sports like hockey, basketball and soccer. My father’s generation were the people seduced by the legends of baseball’s golden era, hall-of-famers such as Babe Ruth, Joe DiMaggio, Willie Mays, Ted Williams, Jackie Robinson and other gods of the diamond’s pantheon. In the 50’s and 60’s baseball was the poetry and the politics for the masses.
Our fathers understood a connection to baseball that we could only appreciate from a distance stretched out by swing of time. John Malloff loved baseball as much as he loved horses. When he was ten years old his mother had a job sorting apples at Dawson’s Packing house. My babushka would take her young son with her to the packing house while she worked. Inside the packing house there was a battery powered radio blasting away. That is when John become a Yankees fan, thanks to Jolting Joe DiMaggio and Yogi Berra. Characters who defined something larger than the heroics of the sport itself. These men went on to become cultural icons of American society.
John’s fondness for baseball further lead to his penchant for statistical recall. His friend Lawrence Popoff had a job as a paperboy. My father would have Lawrence give him the sports section from the daily newspapers. In those days, the papers printed the entire box scores of all the Major League games. My father said he would pour over the box scores every day, burning the line items into his memory to fuel his visualization of the action. He told me it was a like an endless codex he could use to feed his imagination. He was his own smart phone.
In 1950, at the age of thirteen, dad’s older brother Steve organized a neighbourhood team comprised of a gang of boys from the village so that they could challenge the teams in the city. In the early days of spring my babushka said that John would play baseball until dark. She said that on Sundays her boys would drive to the Kootenays for triple-headers. They would usually play the Ootesheniye[1] team first, then they would haul over and play the Slocan Valley team and wrap up against the Thrums team. Baba said that Steve and John would get home well past midnight and stay up until two in the morning to finish their homework.
I asked, ‘why would he do his homework?’
Baba replied, ‘…because he loved books even more than baseball and horses.’
When John was a teenager he played on four different baseball teams, the Elks, the Outlaws, Carson Corner and Sawmill. He told me baseball was the key that opened the door to his first job. He recalled that in 1953 he needed a job. By this time, he had a reputation for being a fantastic defensive catcher with the best throwing arm in the Kootenays. The local sawmill was owned by a man named George Grey. My dad asked George for a job.
George asked, ‘Will you play on our baseball team John?’
‘Of course, Mr. Grey.’
‘You got yourself a job then,’ he confirmed, tossing John a baby blue uniform with one simple word embroidered across its chest, Sawmill.
Baseball was even responsible for finding John the love of his life. If it wasn’t for a long high foul ball there is a chance that my sister and I would never have been created. It was around 1965, my dad was catching in a softball game. He had solidified his reputation as the premier catcher in the valley. The grandstand was full of people, as baseball and softball were hugely popular spectator sports in Grand Forks. Apparently, there was a sky-high pop-up and my dad rushed to the railing near the backstop to catch it. As he leaned over to reach for the foul ball he noticed my mother in the crowd sitting with his cousin Mary from the Koochin Village. The ball dropped then bounced away.
‘Mary who is your good-looking sidekick?’ He asked.
The rest as they say, is history.
John and Steve played on a slow pitch team called the Grand Forks 99’ers. The 99’ers were the rage of the Kootenays, people would come from all around to watch this team play. John would write colourful play-by-play articles for the local newspaper, the Grand Forks Gazette. People would race to buy the paper, as John’s colourful nicknames for the ballplayers and his raucous play-by-play accounts would entice the local crowds. People would travel from Republic, Curlew, Castlegar, Greenwood and all the Doukhobor Villages scattered across the Kootenays to watch games. It wasn’t unusual for the stands to be filled with several thousand cheering fans.
During my elementary and high school years my father gave himself endlessly while teaching my sister and myself the secrets of proper technique and solid baseball fundamentals. Most spring days after school Kolina and I would lug our bag of bats, balls and mitts out to the south shed, past the cherry trees and apple orchard, just behind the barn. We used the south-facing wall of that shed as our back-stop. With one’s back to the shed, home plate faced the open hay field of our property. The far reaches of our field was skirted by Coryell Road and immediately after the road was the American border. The thin barbed wire border fence beckoned at us to try slug one into the States even though the physics prevented anyone from ever knocking it anywhere close to the States. All of our lessons focused around a shabby makeshift mound properly measured out to 66 feet and 6 inches and our home plate marked by a flat piece of weather pine. This was our core unit, our Osatka Village battery, engulfed by a rectangle field the size of ten diamonds. The grasses and alfalfa growing in the field were of random and varying lengths. When freshly cut, the sharp yet loosely spaced stocks prevented any barefoot sessions as they would tear up our feet. Sometimes when the grasses got overgrown they easily reached waist high, the field took on a dream-like quality then. During such times we would race to recover lost doubles and triples before the sun set on our practice session and we would lose our baseballs to the teeth of the field combine.
Grand Forks is a small town that punches way above its weight when it comes to amateur baseball tournaments. It is the home of the Grand Forks International (GFI), North America’s largest invitation baseball tournament. The GFI was the creation of a man named Larry Seminoff. He attended school with my mother. At its apex, the GFI evolved into the epic one-off tournament, the 2002 World Baseball Challenge (WBC). This event brought in eight international teams and inspired the MLB’s World Baseball Classic in the following years. The World Baseball Classic has since forced the Olympics to yield to its presence. It just so happened that I got heavily involved with this tournament and became the Marketing Director of the event. I was solely responsible for raising $590 000 dollars in sponsorship revenue. More importantly I organized the participation of the Cuban National Baseball Team, the best amateur baseball team in the world. I remember taking on this project as a tribute to my dad. I hoped that this project would satisfy his love for baseball and win me accolades in his good books.
During the start of the tournament, we were sitting together in the beer garden, enjoying a lager and chewing sunflower seeds while watching the Russian national team play an exhibition game against the Cuban national team. It was an exciting low scoring game. The Russians had a left-handed pitcher who was stymying the fastball-hitting Cubans with his amazing change-up and slider. The game was a 2-1 thriller going into the 7th inning. I suspected the Cubans were giving it thirty percent effort in recognition of the home crowd’s dominant culture.
Next to us sat an older gentleman from Kelowna, he had just turned 88 years old. He and my dad were talking about the good old days, reminiscing of an era when ball players were more than just athletes. I went to fetch them a beer. When I returned the conversation had switched to another of my father’s favourite subjects, the railways. They began talking about the Kettle Valley Railway, one of my dad’s all-time fascinations.
‘You know John, I used to work up at the Phoenix mine site,’ said the old man, as he held his beer with both hands, slowly bringing the glass to his lips. ‘We would take the Kettle Valley Railway into Midway for supplies or sometimes down to Grand Forks for the weekend.’
‘What did you do up there?’ Dad inquired.
‘Logging mostly.’ Then he began to reminisce, ‘It was the early thirties, the glory days of the copper mine were long over, most of the buildings from the town site had been torn down and reassembled in Greenwood or Republic, but we still ran a pretty good logging outfit out of the area.’
My dad gave this older man his full attention, taking both eyes off of the action on the field.
‘There were a small crew of guys who’d come up to the bush and fall and buck up timber,’ he looked over his left shoulder, towards the northwest as if to acknowledge the direction of the camp. ‘Used to work with this Doukhobor man, goodness me he was a hard worker. I’ve never seen somebody work so damn hard in my life. One time we were supposed to be home for Easter, it had been raining for five days straight, we were fixing to break camp, then our foreman, comes up and says we need another five cords.’ He took another slug from his beer while shaking his head. ‘Five fucking cords and the sun was going down, you gotta be shitting me! So, I start screaming at this son of a bitch as I got a gal in Greenwood waiting on me and such.’
All of a sudden, I heard the crack of the bat and looked to home plate just in time to pick up a line drive foul ball heading right for us. I reacted to shield my dad and the old man from the incoming ball, it just missed the three of us and ricocheted of the bleachers behind us.
‘That was close,’ he said, ‘That would’ve been the end of me.’
‘So, did you split that last five cords?’ asked my dad.
‘Hell no, my partner tells me to catch the wagon home and he’ll do it, he said he needed the extra money and it was his pleasure.’ He turned his head checking out the commotion in the stands that the foul ball had caused. ‘Hardest working man, I ever saw, man he swung an axe like Paul Bunion himself.’
‘What was his name?’ I asked.
‘Ah shit kid, what was his name… he was a Russian,’ he paused looked down and then quickly out of his lips, ‘Malloff, John Malloff that was the guy.’
I gasped in amazement not expecting to hear what I just heard.
My dad had a look I rarely saw before. It was almost a religious sort of look, like he had received a gift that was beyond any material value. He looked at the old-timer straight into the eyes. There was something special and everlasting that hung between them.
Dazed but what he just heard, dad said, ‘That was my father.’
[1] Doukhobor settlement in between Castlegar and Nelson BC.