The Game’s Not the Same : Palermo Impatiently Going One Step, One Day at a Time After July Shooting Incident

In the early hours of July 7, 1991, umpire Steve Palermo was shot in the back after chasing several men who had attacked two waitresses in the parking lot of a restaurant in Dallas. Today is he recovering after initially being paralyzed from the waist down.

His father took the boy to the ballpark and the boy, whose name was Steve Palermo, saw a wonderful place. He could hear their voices. If they moved toward him only a little, he could touch them.

This was 1961 at Fenway Park in Boston. The boy was 11 and even today, all these years later, he remembers two ballplayers in their snowy white uniforms. They were rookies, boys themselves. They played catch on the first base side and Steve Palermo could hear the baseball hit their gloves. Their names were Carl Yastrzemski and Chuck Schilling.

Suddenly a ball bounced loose.

And Steve did what boys do at the ballpark.

He leaned over the low railing at Fenway Park and scooped up the ball.

He looked at it in wonder and cradled it in his hands, the way you care for a precious thing. It was a real, big league baseball. He told his father he would put it on the mantel at home. He rubbed his hands around the ball, as if by touching it he could learn from it. He would never take this ball out of the house.

Boys often make promises boys can’t keep. This doozy lasted six days. Someone got up a game at the corner and Steve took along the big league ball. A week or two of this and the boys had knocked the cover off of the ball. So Stevie wrapped white tape around the exposed gray yarn and in time that tape turned dirty and fell apart and the genuine big league baseball was history.

The father took the boy to the ballpark so many times that in 1976 it was the boy’s turn to take the father. By then Steve Palermo was a big league umpire. He worked his first game at Fenway Park. That day, he took his father with him into the umpires’ dressing room above the Red Sox clubhouse. And when it came time to walk to the field, Vincent Palermo stood at the top of the stairs.

“Dad, come on,” the boy umpire said.

Amazing. That’s what the father would say years later. Amazing. His boy was in the big leagues. This was Fenway Park. The father said he stayed at the top of the stairs because it was a moment he wished would last forever.

It was two years later, in the 1978 American League East playoff game, when Bucky Dent of the Yankees hit a home run to left field and broke Boston’s heart. Vincent Palermo had a question for his son, the third base umpire that autumn day in Fenway.

“How could you call that ball fair?” he wanted to know from Steve.

“Dad, it was 20 feet from the line,” the son said.

“But how could you call it fair?”

Boys and their fathers come to Fenway Park and, in the summer of 1991, a boy about 11 put his glove on the railing along the first base side. He had printed his name on the glove: Ethan Kerr.

Suddenly, an umpire snatched the glove away.

“Is there an Ethan Kerr here?” the umpire shouted.

“Me,” the boy said.

“You have any identification? A driver’s license?”

The boy shook his head.

“How do I know you’re Ethan Kerr,” the umpire said as he walked toward left field carrying the boy’s glove.

Ethan Kerr called out, “My father’s here. He’ll tell you.”

And Steve Palermo gave the boy his glove and the boy noticed something right away. He opened the glove and there it was. The umpire had given Ethan Kerr a baseball. A real, big league baseball. The boy held it in his hands. It was precious.

THE SIDEWALK

Before it happened, Steve Palermo had become a great umpire. Still a young man, 41, he worked a game as smoothly and enthusiastically as anyone ever had. He moved with the authority of a man born to his work. Smiling, he talked to players, fans, ground crewmen, anyone who would listen and (thinking here of Earl Weaver) some who wouldn’t. It was Steve Palermo’s world and he loved it.

His first mentor, Joe Linsalata, told him good umpires are like boxers. You get down. You move. You jab. You get out of there. Palermo says the challenge is to be perfect. For every routine fly ball, you get out there as if it’s the toughest play you’ll ever call. The rules are 15% of the job. The game is what matters and rule 9.01 (a) says, “The umpires shall be responsible for the conduct of the game. . . . “

The first time he was paid for umpiring, Palermo, then 13, got $2 a game five times a week. But he hadn’t umpired in five years when someone asked him to help out in a Little League all-star game in his hometown of Worcester, Mass. That day, an umpire scout handed the kid a business card and set in motion events that would take Palermo to umpiring school and, at 26, to the big leagues.

Palermo worked Dave Righetti’s no-hitter in 1983. He was behind the plate when the ’83 World Series ended. One autumn day, he ran under Dent’s fly ball. He once took a Nolan Ryan fastball on his hip and cursed the catcher, who in turn cursed Ryan for crossing him up.

Though an old umpire told Palermo a good umpire could miss 12 ball-and-strike calls in a game, Palermo said, “If I miss 12 calls a month, I’d jump off the World Trade Center.”

It’s the heat that Steve Palermo likes.

“Give me the heat of a big game,” he says.

Larry Bird wants the last shot. Steve Palermo wants to be behind the plate when the game means the most. He went jaw to jaw with Earl Weaver so many times that on his living room wall there is an oil painting of Palermo in full rhubarb with the man he calls “the militant midget.”

For Palermo, the umpiring has ended, perhaps temporarily, but maybe forever. It ended in gunfire the morning of July 7, 1991.

The shooting happened near closing time for Campisi’s Egyptian Restaurant in Dallas. At 1 a.m., after working a Texas Ranger game, Palermo sat with four or five buddies.

As bartender Jimmy Upton opened a door to leave the restaurant, he saw four young men attacking two waitresses. One woman fell under the weight of a mugger. Upton shouted into the restaurant, “The girls are being mugged!”

Everyone piled out, Palermo, restaurant owner Corky Campisi, former Southern Methodist defensive lineman Terance Mann, and three other men took off. For three long blocks, they chased the muggers down East Mockingbird Lane.

As he ran, Palermo had a thought: “This might not be the smartest thing we’ve ever done.”

But they were into it. Their friends had been attacked. The muggers had made it personal. Palermo kept running.

The chase came to an end in front of Mrs. Baird’s Bakery at 5630 East Mockingbird Lane. Mann tackled one thief. The three others had vanished.

Then, as Palermo stood on the sidewalk outside Mrs. Baird’s, the umpire noticed a car come up from behind the crowd.

He saw three men in the car.

He saw one raise his hand.

He shouted to his buddies, “Look out, he’s got something--a gun.”

Palermo heard five shots. He remembers the sounds. Four quick explosions. Then one more.

A .32-caliber bullet entered Palermo’s right hip and cut a path through his body before exiting the left side. Along the way it hit the umpire’s spinal column, breaking a vertebra. It also left the spinal cord frayed. He was, at that instant, paralyzed from the waist down.

Jimmy Upton saw Palermo on the sidewalk outside the bakery. He thought the umpire was dead because he lay there so still. Coming closer, he saw Palermo’s eyes were open and he heard Palermo say, “I’ve been shot. My back.” The umpire tried to roll over on his side to relieve the pain.

But Upton, knowing the danger in moving a patient with a back injury, wouldn’t allow Palermo to turn over. He put his chest against Palermo’s. He slid a hand under the umpire’s back. There he felt moisture and didn’t know what it was until he withdrew his hand and saw it covered with blood.

Palermo said, “Jimmy, my legs are hot. My back is hot.”

Upton said, “Just lay still, Stevie.”

Palermo saw ambulance lights turning red against the night. He saw police cars there.

“Maybe I’m going to die,” he said.

Upton said, “There won’t be no dying done here. We ain’t got time for dying here.”

THE POOL

Palermo and his wife, Debbie, live 10 minutes from the Mid-America Rehabilitation Hospital in Overland Park, Kan., a suburb of Kansas City. Monday through Friday, she drives him there for therapy that begins at 9 a.m. in a pool of water warmed to 92 degrees.

The first week of December, five months after the shooting, Palermo sat on a ledge in the pool while therapist Joy Hermesmeyer did her work. He had a little smile when he said, “Torture time.”

Hermesmeyer stood in the pool, took Palermo’s right foot in her hands and raised the left high to stretch the hamstring. She did this for 10 minutes with each leg while Palermo clenched his teeth against the pain.

He wants to be well again. And now.

“I am an impatient patient,” he says.

He has said he will umpire again. Laughing, he calls the therapists “terrorists.” He wants to walk.

“And I don’t mean walk OK. I don’t mean walk acceptable. I want to walk great.”

A doctor told him it was a good thing the bullet came from a .32-caliber gun. The way it passed through his body, Palermo would be dead had the bullet been a millimeter thicker.

So if giving up your body to “terrorist” therapists is not as nice as working third base at Fenway, there is this to be said for it: It is better than being dead on a Dallas sidewalk.

During the trial that put the shooter away for 75 years, Palermo described what the gunshot did: “I felt myself going slowly to the ground, melting into the pavement. Sort of a warm numbness came over my legs. I touched them and it was like touching a limb on a tree. There was nothing there.”

His first week in a hospital, Palermo could not move either leg. He had movement only in two toes of his right foot. When a doctor told Debbie Palermo that her husband would never walk again, the young woman--a bride of less than five months at the time--told the doctor she wouldn’t deliver any such mistaken news.

She said to the doctor, “You go tell him that.”

The doctor told Palermo it was “highly unlikely” he would walk.

In September, Palermo said his paralyzed lower body made it feel like he had a suitcase inside him. Everyday acts of living became so difficult that he despaired at the prospect of taking a shower.

In the months since the shooting, Palermo has made progress. The progress comes in increments so small as to be invisible day by day. The umpire is often left exhausted and frustrated. At those moments, Debbie Palermo adds up the increments and tells him the total is “unbelievable progress.” She even made up a sign that reminds him. “Inch by inch, life’s a cinch.”

One of those of moments occurred early in December. Palermo sat on the pool ledge and told Hermesmeyer about a pain along his right shin bone. “A shot,” he said.

“Steady pain at all?” Hermesmeyer said.

“A shot.”

Pain means the nerves, once traumatized into paralysis, are back at work in some way. Which is good, or, as Palermo said with a wince of pain, “A bad good.”

The morning of the shooting, Debbie Palermo got the telephone call at 4 a.m. By 8 o’clock, she had flown from Kansas City to Dallas and stood at her husband’s bed in Parkland Hospital. In the five months of therapy, she has been with him all but two days. Steve Palermo said people seem to think he is a hero. He says if there is a hero here, it is Debbie.

“Steve’s in a hurry,” she said that morning at the pool. “I’m afraid he’s going to try too much too soon and break an arm or something. That’ll set him back from where he is. And where he is now is not where he’s going to wind up. He has to measure himself against the time he could move only two toes, not before that. He’ll get where he wants to get. It’s just going to take time.”

The pool comes first every morning. Hermesmeyer is there, smiling.

She says: “The idea of therapy in the pool is that anything the patient can do in water, he will be able to do on dry land.”

Her tone shifts from instructive to gently chiding as she looks at Palermo and says: “I don’t know that Steve believes that yet.”

In the water, Palermo did hard work. While sitting, he did 100 leg kicks sideways across his body, 50 with each leg. Then he did 100 leg lifts with a small float strapped to his ankles. Then five walking laps of 16 steps each way across the pool, balancing himself with floats under his hands while Hermesmeyer followed him with her hands touching his hips for support. Then he did three laps with no floats at all, simple treading water with his hands for balance.

This took 90 minutes. It was a tedious grind of slow motion. Palermo’s steps in the pool were ungainly. His knees floated too high and his reaching steps had no certainty about their destination until his feet bumped against the pool floor. He moved like a man in the dark trying to pick his way silently across a floor covered with toys.

He moved slowly.

Inch by inch.

And then he moved with no help at all. No floats. No therapist’s hand. It was movement as beautiful as it was ungainly. Here are a reporter’s notes:

“At the end, Joy isn’t touching him at all. She’s like a mother who has taken her hands off her boy learning to ride a bicycle. He’s free now. He is walking. Steve bites his upper lip. He is single-minded. Eyes are focused on where he’s going. No smiling, no talking. Walking takes his full attention. Now Joy hustles to catch up. She’s almost blushing she’s so happy.”

On July 7, he could move two toes. Three months later, he could walk by using hand crutches and full braces to support his legs. Then one day in October he asked a therapist to go outdoors with him because he wanted to do a test. He asked her to go 22 steps away. He held both crutches in his left hand. Then the right-hander threw her a baseball.

In was his only bullpen work before saying yes to Commissioner Fay Vincent’s invitation to throw out the first ball of the 1991 World Series. Palermo simply wanted to be sure he wouldn’t bounce it in there.

THE GYM

Mid-America’s gym is busy shortly after lunch. Therapists work a patient’s body until it can do heroic things. Such as stand up.

A therapist sat across from an old man on one of the large platforms used during exercises. The therapist tossed a balloon toward the man and the man reached up, tapped the balloon back toward the therapist and broke into a smile.

A young man named Casey gathered a crowd of patients in a corner of the gym to watch his video. He watches it every day.

The grainy tape first shows Casey as a rock ‘n’ roll drummer lashing at the drums so quickly the sticks become a blur. Then he is in bed, eyes open but seeing nothing. A car accident crushed his left side. Doctors said he would never come out of the coma.

But on the TV screen he sits up and bats a balloon back to a therapist. Then he is walking carefully, his left side still weak. The crowd saw all this on the video that ends with Casey seated behind a drum set. He beat the drums slowly, smiling at his good work.

Palermo applauded and said, “Bravo, Casey, bravo!”

“They told me I’d be a vegetable,” Casey said. “And they told me I’d never have any function in my left hand. I want to see that doctor and say, ‘How’s this for function?’ ” At which point, Casey raised a finger of his left hand and laughed out loud.

The Mid-America gym was full of damaged people. A child tried on an artificial arm. A woman lay strapped against a tilt board. A tall young man in a wheelchair wore a steel frame around his head--a “halo”--to stabilize his broken neck.

These people had their damage in common. They also shared hope.

Palermo said: “They can look at X-rays of your spinal cord and they can do MRIs and they can tell you about the regeneration of nerves. But they can’t take a picture of your heart. They don’t know how big your heart is.”

As if to measure his heart, the umpire looked around at Debbie and therapist Bobbi Arp and said, “Today, you guys are going to see a paraplegic do a new trick.”

The walking Palermo has done since July 7 was accomplished with the help of hand crutches and full leg braces. There would be no leg braces this day. For the first time since he found himself running down Mockingbird Lane in Dallas, Palermo asked his legs to work without steel supporting them.

“I’m going out there naked,” he said.

And he walked, using only hand crutches.

With Debbie beside him and Arp behind him, Palermo walked maybe 50 yards out of the gym and down a hospital corridor.

Back in the gym, he sat down on an exercise platform, tired and hurting in the very best bad-good way.

Debbie tousled her hair and kissed him and when he said nothing, she said with excitement in her voice, “Stevie, are we excited?”

He sat silent, his eyes closed, his head bowed.

She tilted her head to look at him and said, “Sort of?”

He said nothing.

“It’s there,” Debbie said to her husband. “You just have to get it stronger.”

They embraced and he brushed a tear off her cheek. At last he said, “That’s the best walk I ever took.”

Then he said, “Cut ‘em all down,” meaning he wanted to get rid of any full-leg braces still around. From now on he would need only a small brace to support his left foot, in which nerve damage causes the foot to fall forward.

Palermo next moved to the parallel bars. The routine is to walk between them and hold on for support and balance. But on this glad day he soon became bold.

First he walked while pressing the backs of his hands against the bars. When Arp moved closer, Palermo shooed her away.

“If I fall,” he said, “I’ll fall all the way.”

From across the room, Hermesmeyer saw Palermo doing his new trick. The pool therapist called to him, “I’d scream, but you’d probably fall.”

Which prompted Palermo to take the backs of his hands away from the bars. Holding nothing, touching nothing, he teetered for a moment. Then he walked two steps, three steps, four.

A reporter made a note here: “My palms are sweating.”

Out of the parallel bars, Palermo, with Arp touching his hips, moved toward Debbie. Then he asked the therapist to let go. He stood in the middle of the gym with no crutches, no bars to grab should he begin to fall, no braces helping, no one touching him.

And at 1:42 p.m., Dec. 5, Palermo walked 2 1/2 steps on his own and put his head on his wife’s shoulder. At this victory, they wept.

Arp said, “So what do you think?”

Palermo said, “It’s coming, it’s coming.”

Debbie Palermo ran a hand across his forehead. “What did you think? That I’ve been lying to you all this time?”

It was the umpire’s best day since July 7. He also walked using only a cane. He once took the cane by the wrong end, swinging it like a golf club, and said he could stand well enough to hit some chip shots with his buddies at Wolf Creek Golf Club.

Then Palermo looked across the gym to a window through which he could see the Kansas prairie. With delight in his voice, he said he knew what he wanted to do next.

“I want to get a running start, jump through that window and fly.”

HOME

Therapy is hard and cruel and exhausting. Progress gives an inch today and takes back half of it tomorrow. A patient’s abiding fear is that it’s all to no end, that there’s only so far the body can go even if the spirit is willing. In those moments of doubt, it helps to know that people care.

At home in Overland Park, Debbie Palermo has a file of 3,000 letters from people who care. One of those letters came from a young boy who lives in Boston.

Steve sat in an easy chair under the oil painting of himself and Earl Weaver. He had the boy’s letter in his hand. It began, “Tuesday, May 14, 1991, the Red Sox beat the White Sox, 4-1, in nine innings . . . “

The letter was from Ethan Kerr. He didn’t know if Steve remembered that day in May. But the boy did. The umpire had been a nice guy. He had given the boy a real, big league baseball. So Ethan wrote the letter thanking him. He also enclosed a card on which he wrote, “Hope you get better soon, Steve.”