When the Cheering Stops . . . : Is This Heaven? No, This Is Florida--Where Aging Ballplayers Get a New Turn at Bat

Professional athletes die twice.

“It’s so,” said Lee Lacy. “When you are told the only life you know and love is over, it’s the same as telling you you are dead and gone.”

For 16 years Lee Lacy ran and threw and slid with joyful abandon on three major league baseball teams, including the Dodgers. Today, at 41, he retains his athlete’s physique but has gained, or so he said, a middle-age maturity. Even so, he refuses to accept a death sentence.

Few athletes do. Especially, perhaps, prizefighters, whose overdue decisions to hang ‘em up often are only slightly less painful to faithful fans who avert their eyes in sorrow at the ultimate ignominy.

But denial extends to less brutal pursuits as well. Arthur Ashe, the former tennis champion, offered an explanation and insisted that “a little like dying” is more than metaphor.

“We have defined our masculinity in terms of our athletic prowess,” he once wrote, “and retirement can only mean we are thereafter lesser men.”

Lesser men. At an age that most adults consider the prime of life.

Laying aside the artifacts of their prowess, their spikes and gloves and rackets is not all they leave behind. Athletes have taken over from cowboys and movie stars and even astronauts as America’s most glamorous heroes, certainly among the highest paid. What they leave is more than a game, and the leaving is thus more painful than for mere mortals.

“It’s the nature of the adulation,” football star Jim Brown recently told an interviewer. “It’s so overwhelming, the thrill you get, the cheers you hear, the life style you can afford. Your head gets bigger without your even realizing it.”

The years seem to pass without their realizing it as well. Many athletes, notably those who play team sports, argue that their ability to go just one more inning should determine their longevity, not the presence of some younger hotshot on the bench.

“Why should there be a cutoff date?” asked Toby Harrah, whose 17-year baseball career included four all-star games.

Harrah, lithe and leather-tough at 42, recalls the words of Satchel Paige, whose playing days, some guessed, stretched into his 60s: “How can you tell how old you are if you don’t know?”

“You have to remember,” said Harrah, “that our careers began not when we got out of college or even high school but back when we were 6 or 7 years old. So when you’re told you’re through while you still feel fit and confident, it’s like being hit by a train.”

Toby Harrah and Lee Lacy are two among 200 other former major league baseball players who also had once been pronounced dead on arrival--at spring training camp, as in Lacy’s case--or when they came up with a bum leg or a sore arm or a slow bat.

Naturally, none of them accepted the verdict as final.

Instead, all of them heeded a siren’s song inviting former major leaguers 35 and older to come to Florida, land of the Fountain of Youth, and play baseball once again, this time in the Senior Professional Baseball Assn.

The league, its first three-month winter season just ended, was the brainstorm of an entrepreneur willing to bet, as were his aging recruits, on baseball philosopher Yogi Berra’s pronouncement that the game ain’t over till it’s over.

Like Harrah, Lacy insists that “that’s something a ballplayer ought to be allowed to decide for himself,” acknowledging that such a notion probably is a pipe dream. “Well, why not? Playing in the majors was a dream come true in the first place,” he said.

One of the senior league’s luminaries, ex-Yankee Graig Nettles, is also a dreamer. Said Nettles when he joined the league, “If I can stay in baseball, I may never have to grow up.”

Lacy and Harrah both played for the West Palm Beach Tropics, who wound up winning their Southern Division title but losing in a championship game to the St. Petersburg Pelicans. Perhaps you missed it.

The Tropics’ theme song was a Steve Winwood tune, “Back in the High Life Again.”

Its promising words--”I’ll be back in the high life again, All the eyes that watched me once will smile and take me in . . . “--had a forlorn and ironic ring, however, blaring over the loudspeaker before every home game, echoing across rows of empty seats in a small-town ballpark that real major leaguers used only for spring training.

Lee Lacy loved the major league high life, all right, what ballplayers call the Big Show.

He traveled first class and slept on fine linen and left wake-up calls and dined at tables with tapered candles and, oh, how he savored the cheers, cheers of sellout crowds in three World Series and in the Pittsburgh grandstands in 1984 when he led his league in fielding and finished second in batting.

“My, my, my,” Lacy said, his face cradled in a smile of sweet memory.

Then, last year, after 1,523 major league games, 4,549 times at bat, 1,303 hits, 91 home runs, the Baltimore Orioles read the last rites over Leondaus Lacy, outfielder.

“Somebody just told me, ‘Sorry, Lee, goodby,’ ” Lacy said. “All he left out was, ‘May you rest in peace.’ ”

But Lee Lacy found no peace in the valley, a valley as dark as his prospects for greatness had seemed back in the Oakland, Calif., housing project where he was reared.

At age 7, learning from older guys, he took a match to a tennis ball and burned off the fuzz so it resembled a baseball. What he had lit was a career that would blaze in glory and, at a time other professionals consider their prime, end just as unexpectedly in ashes.

“I couldn’t get over the shock of that,” Lacy said. “I couldn’t accept it. I moped around. I felt lost. I was not a pleasant person. My wife and I started a little telephone answering service, something to do, to feel worthwhile.

“But every night I prayed. I said, ‘Lord, if there is any chance, any chance that I can play baseball again, let it be.’ ”

Lacy reflected on his fate one evening in late January just at nightfall, his long legs stretched out in the aisle of his team’s charter bus making its way across southern Florida. Out the window he saw no bright lights, just a weary landscape of flat brown canebrakes and dark flat swamps along arrow-straight roads.

Was the answer to his prayer, then, really a minor Epiphany, a deliverance from the Stygian twilight into one more moment in the sun? Or was it a cruel prolonging of the inevitable agony?

“When they let me go, I knew in my heart I could still play baseball,” Lacy said. “Now I have proved, to my own satisfaction at least, that I was right. When the time finally comes to toss it in I will know what to expect and will accept it.”

Accepting it apparently is more difficult for the superstars than for journeymen athletes.

Brooks Robinson, who dazzled a nation of fans with his play at third base, discovered, on retirement at age 40, that “the only thing worse than being down and out is going up and down and out.”

“The big thing is that you don’t know what you’re going to do or where you’re going to go,” he said. “The single hardest thing about leaving is that you’re leaving a love, a passion. It was my whole life.”

A few years later Robinson discovered another agony of a vanished hero.

On a visit to the Oakland A’s clubhouse, wearing a suit and tie, he was asked by a clubhouse boy: “Who are you?”

“Brooks Robinson.”

“Do you play ball?”

Most athletes try to hang onto the fringes of their sport, coaching, scouting, selling equipment. Robinson and Harrah and Al Hrabosky, another big name on the Tropics, got into broadcasting. But many of the former players, lesser lights, put aside jobs as truck drivers or beer salesmen or telephone answerers, to rush headlong to the senior league.

Pete Broberg is a rarity. After pitching eight years in the majors, he went to law school in 1978 at age 30 and began a new career. He took a leave from his practice in West Palm Beach to join the home team “so my children could see me play the game I love so much.”

“Most players realize it would take them 20 years to learn to do anything as well as they know how to play baseball,” Broberg said.

“Most other professionals, lawyers, doctors, brokers, at age 35 or 40 are just beginning to feel they are competent, at the top of their game, so to speak. The same is true of athletes, at least mentally. Yet that’s the age (when) athletes are told they’re through. That’s hard to cope with. That’s the sadness.”

Rick Wolff, the director of sports books for Macmillan, did a master’s thesis on the problems athletes face at career’s end. He has developed a counseling program that leads the athlete through the phases of denial, anger, bargaining, depression and, finally, acceptance.

If the program sounds familiar, it is because it is based on the model for terminally ill people from the book “On Death and Dying.”

At least one line from the Tropics’ anthem “Back in the High Life Again” is as true, it seems, as a called strike:

When you’re born to run, it’s so hard to just slow down....