Big Bang Theory : Northridge Businessman Backs Slo-Pitch Team for Sheer Enjoyment and the Trophies It Wins

To get to Broken Drum Insulation company, says owner Don Webster, make a right under the railroad overpass and a quick left down an alley. Enter a Northridge neighborhood of auto repair garages and light industry. At the end of a cul-de-sac, drive through a small gate into a sprawling yard. Go past warehouses filled with fiberglass building insulation. Find the nondescript office. The trophies are in there.

Three dozen of them. Mostly for first place. Gold and silver trophies. Trophies constructed of hardwood. Trophies about which every weekend athlete has fantasized. Not the ones they hand out at summer camp. This is a major fantasy. The trophies are as tall as the ceiling and decorated with life-size metallic bats and topped with statues of softball players. Monster trophies too big for one man to lift.

The trophies overwhelm visitors to Webster’s small office, which would be cramped even without all the hardware.

“We’ll pay you to take some of them out of here,” Pat O’Rourke says to a visitor. The visitor says he has never seen a grander trophy collection outside Cooperstown. But wait, says O’Rourke, a long-haired yard man for Webster, there’s more.

“If you think this office is bad, wait’ll you see the employee’s room,” he says. “You can hardly walk in there.”

Indeed, there are more trophies in the employee’s room than in the office. The only difference is that the trophies are even bigger in the employee’s room. They’re the Empire State Building of trophies. The kind King Kong could have scaled. The kind awarded to a slo-pitch softball champion, or to “the best team west of Mississippi,” as Webster likes to tell people.

Webster arrives. Or, more accurately, blows through the yard like a small, squat tornado. Webster, 56, is the owner of all those trophies. He loves every one of them, but he just can’t seem to get them out of his thinning gray hair. Four dozen more are stored in his garage at his home in Chatsworth. Ten sit inside the house. More than 50 were destroyed in a fire 10 years ago. Everywhere he looks, he sees gleaming monuments to the achievements of his teams, which have played in the United States Slo-Pitch Softball Assn. World Series 12 times in the past 14 years.

Small businessmen like Webster, who owns seven insulation yards in three states, are the corporate sponsors of amateur sports in this country. They put up money so teams can afford uniforms and equipment, and all they usually want is their company name on the backs of the uniforms and a choice seat on the bench.

Trophies are the only material return on a sponsor’s financial investment. Sponsors get to display them in their showroom window and brag to their customers. But they don’t make a cent. Since sponsoring his first sports team in 1963, Webster has spent an estimated $1,000,000, most of it on his open-division slo-pitch team. He also has sponsored Little League baseball teams and Amateur Athletic Union basketball teams in addition to owning a world-class roadster.

What makes Webster do it? “He’s a sportsman, no other reason,” says Ron Whittleton, the softball team’s pitcher-manager.

Others get equally effusive about Webster; outfielder Mike Cellura calls him “a philanthropist.” But it is hard to make Webster get mushy about his generosity. He parries sentiment by saying his involvement in amateur sports has been a marvelous tax write-off and good publicity, but he will finally admit, “It’s nice to give back to the community. I enjoy that.”

Webster is the ultimate easy touch. When a business partner, Bill Brandenburg of Calabasas, asked Webster in 1980 to kick in on the roadster--a 1927 Ford Model T with a 255-cubic-inch engine--Brandenburg gave him an impassioned sales pitch on the pleasures of owning a car that could whistle across the Bonneville Salt Flats at 243 m.p.h.

“He fell for it,” Brandenburg says with a laugh. “It was easy to convince him.”

Webster had been sponsoring Little League teams since 1963, sending off checks for a few hundred dollars a year but not getting involved in the wins and losses. In 1973, however, an officer at a local bank asked Webster if he would like to sponsor a slo-pitch team in an L. A. City recreation league.

“I didn’t even know what slo-pitch was,” Webster said. But he shrugged and said why not. The first year, he spent $400 on his slo-pitch team, which was then called Capitol Insulation.

At the end of the next year, he was approached by his manager, Dave Trader, who had ambitions that went beyond anything that Webster had envisioned. The team in the recreation league was at the low end of class-C softball. Guys in the final stages of athletic rigor mortis, playing on memory. Trader wanted to know if Webster would be interested in acquiring a team of wall-bangers and moving up all the way to A division, which at the time was as high as a team could go.

“Those teams were loaded with giants, guys who could hit balls 370 or 380 feet,” Webster says. They were teams known for their prodigious home run hitting. Twenty in a game. Seven or eight in a row--18 consecutive is the record. Webster was intrigued, but he knew that the ante would go up. To attract the best players from Southern California without paying salaries, Webster would have to guarantee them glamour and excitement. Top players want trips and big tournaments. Which means air fare, motels, ground transportation and entry fees without a percentage of the gate.

Webster sent his team to a Milwaukee tournament that first season. He went along, wore the team uniform during games and discovered that he enjoyed the experience. Since then, Webster, described by his employees as “always in a good mood,” has become the team’s road secretary. “We like to go where we can have the most fun,” he says. “I pay all the bills, decide where we eat and find all the girls for the guys.” In other words, Whittleton says, “All the important stuff.”

Aside from having a good time, Webster’s teams have won 91 tournaments and nearly 1,100 games while losing 300. This season, the Valley-based team--which became Broken Drum Insulation this year--will play in nine tournaments from North Carolina to Northern California, but it will not play in the Valley because of the absence of fenced-in softball fields.

The most fun, Webster says, is a tournament in Hendersonville, Tenn., called the Conway Twitty Invitational. One year, he recalls, the Mandrell Sisters handed out the trophies.

But the tournament the team is gunning for is the USSSA World Series, which has been taking place two weeks after Labor Day every year since 1971. The USSSA (pronounced U-triple-S-A) is slo-pitch’s major leagues. It has high-profile teams like Steele’s Sports of Grafton, Ohio, and Howard’s Western Steer of Denver, N.C., and high-powered home-run hitters like Bruce Meade, who holds the World Series record with 18 homers in eight games.

Webster’s team qualified for the 16-team, double-elimination tournament in 1974, its first year of competition. But despite a dozen appearances in the series, the team has never won the championship. In 1985, Capitol placed second behind Elite Coating of Gordon, Ga., in the open division, which has superseded class A. Whittleton, Ron Parnell, Dean Olson and Denny Jones made the “all-world team” that year.

Going from class-C players to all-world stars was an unexpected bonus for Webster, a self-described “gym rat” who grew up in Hollywood but was too small for varsity sports.

“I had no idea I would be part of something like this,” says Webster, whose teams also have featured USSSA hall of famers Whittleton, Cellura, Hank Kosmala and Elby Bushong. “Everything turned out to be a surprise. Who would think we wouldn’t have a player who didn’t hit the ball under 300 feet? I’m amazed at how many good athletes are around.”

Webster estimates that he will spend $75,000 this season on the team, which will play more than 100 games, all on weekends. But he is getting off cheaply. Some sponsors, like Steele’s Sports, play full time and spend as much as $500,000 a year on their team, Webster says. Two of his stars, Ron Parnell and Ken Dain, jumped to Steele’s a couple of years ago, lured by the prospect of making money--top stars get as much as $20,000 a year.

Last season, Parnell and Dain each hit about 500 home runs in more than 400 games for the men of Steele. The home run is the raw appeal of USSSA games. Crowds--as large as 25,000 at big tournaments--come to see the softball driven into the night sky and out beyond the horizon. Broken Drum expects to hit a lot of moon shots--its lineup includes players who are 6-7, 260 pounds. Last year, Cellura, a medium-size player at 6-3, 225, hit 138 homers in the 82 games in which he played.

Webster was upset that Parnell and Dain abandoned his team. It brought back bad memories. In the mid-70s, after his AAU basketball won the national title, a few of his players were “stolen” by the National Basketball Assn., Webster says, and sent to play in Europe. So Webster stopped sponsoring basketball teams. But he has no plans to get out of the softball business.

“I really like it,” he says. And the expenditures don’t bother him? “If I didn’t spend the money on the team,” he says, “I’d spend it on something else. Like a 450 SL.”

Which would probably be customized and quick and win a lot of big trophies.