It’s Opening Day and It’s a Painful Road Back for Ump Steve Palermo : Baseball: He’s over being angry at the person who shot him one night in July in Dallas and hasn’t become a crusader against guns.

Opening day this year found Steve Palermo--who many say is baseball’s best umpire--battling his body and his emotions and watching on television as best friend Rich Garcia worked the plate in Detroit.

No green fields yet for Palermo, who can now walk unaided for short distances as he recovers from the robber’s bullet that paralyzed him last July.

“Richie, Richie, Richie,” Palermo cries out with the delight that only someone who knows what it feels like could when Garcia bends over in the exquisite pain of a foul ball off the foot.

Palermo’s pain this day is something different.

“I keep telling my body not to hurt like this,” Palermo says as he watches the Blue Jays and Tigers on TV from his suburban Kansas City home.

His normal five-hour day of rehabilitation had to be canceled because the pain is too great.

“It feels like electric shocks shooting down into my knees,” the 41-year-old Palermo says. “It’s like somebody attached battery cables to my legs and is sending shocks. It’s kind of like you are being tortured a little bit.”

ESPN flashes highlights of the Twins-Brewers game from Milwaukee County Stadium.

“That’s where I’m supposed to be today,” Palermo says softly, his dark brown eyes showing the hurt he feels of being taken out of the game in what would have been the start of his 15th major league season.

He’s been an umpire all his life, starting with Little League games at age 13. An umpire scout saw him when he was 18, and Palermo was at third base in Fenway Park six years later.

Palermo is over being angry at the person who shot him one night in July in Dallas. He hasn’t become a crusader against guns, although he talks to school kids and asks them to think about the consequences of what they do.

Palermo just wants to get back into the game.

“In each town, you have friends,” he says, rubbing his legs as he sits back in a black leather chair, his wheelchair standing nearby. “That’s the hardest part of this whole thing. It’s a ritual. If you’re in Milwaukee, you know you’re going to meet Dennis, Mike, Johnnie.

“Naturally, it’s the game itself. The fact that you are asked to do something humanly impossible--get everything right.

“It’s the friends. Irreplaceable,” he says after a long pause, a hint of a tear in his eyes. “Those are the great parts of the game--the people. Every night, it’s a challenge. Every night is very demanding. From before the game to the start of the game through the game, the concentration is so high that you have a headache at the end.”

Palermo tells a story he swears is true. He’s calling balls and strikes, and Lou Piniella has a different opinion about one of the strike calls.

“Where was that pitch at?” Piniella asks.

Palermo responds by telling Piniella he never should finish a sentence with a preposition.

Piniella repeats the question, this time finishing it with a description of Palermo most people would find unfavorable.

“I told him you’re an intelligent man, you’re well-bred, you have an understanding,” Palermo says. “Sometimes you just have to do something to show it’s not life or death. Sometimes you have to be a lawyer and choose your words very carefully. Sometimes you have to be a psychologist. Sometimes you have to be a judge.

“The game is very important. But it’s not life or death. Lying on a sidewalk and contemplating whether or not you’re going to ever see your wife and your family again--that’s life and death.”

The story has been told a hundred times. Palermo and friends are leaving a restaurant frequented by baseball types when they visit Dallas. Two waitresses get mugged in the parking lot. Palermo and his friends run to help.

“It’s a human reaction,” he says.

Three others drive up, and a shot is fired. The bullet enters Palermo in the side and injures his spinal cord.

“It’s not like you see on TV, where it’s choo, choo, choo and a little spurt of blood,” Palermo says. “It was like scissors cutting the strings on a puppet, on a marionette. Clip. Clip. Clip. It was like an elastic band that suddenly unsnapped. All of a sudden there was no semblance of order to muscle control.”

A long stay in a Dallas hospital followed. The high point there was the two little kids who would crawl into bed with him to watch baseball games and listen in rapture as Palermo divulged inside information.

The days now involve trips to nearby Midwest Rehabilitation Institute. Sessions begin with 90 minutes in the pool and continue with arduous stretching exercises.

Asked how he’s progressing, Palermo puts a video into the VCR that shows him unable to walk, then able to walk only haltingly with the help of crutches and now able to walk on his own for short distances.

Palermo and his wife, Debbie, were married only five months when he was wounded. He credits her with keeping him going.

“My wife,” Palermo says when asked how he faces each day. “She’ll say, ‘Let’s go, hon. Breakfast is on the table and we need to leave in 20 minutes.’ She knows how much it means to me. When I met her, she knew what my life was. She knew I enjoyed it.

“You’ll find that as good a people as umpires are, the wives are much nicer. They’re sitting in the stands listening to their husbands being called every name that’s ever been invented so they have to be very gutty people too.”

Debbie Palermo had a spinal condition when she was a teen-ager that forced her to wear a brace for four years from the time she was 13.

It prompted her grandmother to coin the phrase she now repeats to her husband: “Inch by inch, life’s a cinch.”

Every day, the couple head for the hospital.

“There are days that are horrible,” she says. “I have the ability to focus on one day at a time. I can’t let myself look into the future because that is not productive. It would be a waste of energy. We don’t know. We have to focus on today. We don’t have a choice.”

The trip to the hospital sometimes takes them past a golf course. Palermo was in a car with his wife and in-laws on a beautiful spring day the other day and the course was crowded.

“That’s the other devastating thing about this,” Palermo says of not being able to indulge his passion for golf. “I was trying to hide my feelings, but my mother-in-law knew what I was thinking.

“She tapped me on the shoulder and said: ‘Soon, Steve. Soon.”’