From the Right Plays to Playwright

There were hints along the way. Even in the dugout, with all the cussing and spitting, Bill Kernen did not quite fit the mold.

“Not your normal baseball coach,” a former assistant said. “He had other interests.”

Evenings at the Philharmonic. Vacations in New York and London to attend the theater. The poems he wrote but rarely showed to anyone.

Even though Kernen had devoted himself to the game, building Cal State Northridge into a national contender, he was fond of saying: “I’m not going to be standing on a baseball field with a rake in my hand and a towel on my head when I’m 70.”

Still, his players and friends assumed that he was talking about retirement somewhere down the line. When they looked at Kernen, they saw a baseball man: lean and hard, a face built of sharp angles. They saw a competitor.

So they were stunned when he abruptly resigned as head coach nearly two years ago. Then he gave them another surprise.

At 47, he moved to New York City to become a playwright.

“I had never written a single word of dialogue,” he said. “I didn’t have a clue.”

Kernen’s first play opened off-off-Broadway last month. “And Other Fairy Tales” ran four nights at the Salon, a plain brick building with trash bins out front, the gray East River not far away.

The play follows Ann, an old woman wrestling with her memories over the course of a long train ride. She coos and rants and scribbles poetry in a weathered journal.

“A loveless old bird,” she muses. “On a trip to nowhere.”

Her past materializes in flashbacks. Ann as a child, her father stumbling drunkenly into her bedroom. Ann at 30, pushing away a man who truly loves her.

“I am attracted to misery,” she says.

The action is sometimes uneven and sometimes overwritten in the way that can befall new playwrights. But it is ambitious and complex, hardly the stuff that one might expect from an ex-jock.

Kernen began work on the drama in the fall of 1995 when he enrolled in a Columbia University workshop led by playwright Eduardo Machado.

“I was fascinated by the fact that he was a baseball coach and he wanted to express himself in this way,” Machado said. “If someone wants to change this drastically, you have to take him seriously.”

Kernen did not see the change as being so dramatic. He took to writing with the same fervor, the same long hours, that he had devoted to baseball.

With his first script done, he found a cast and crew willing to work for free, then scraped together $5,000 to rent the theater. Producers were invited in hopes that one might like the show enough to back a full run.

Opening night found Kernen in jeans and cowboy boots, waiting outside the drapes that separated makeshift dressing rooms from the rest of the dusty, cluttered backstage. In baseball, he was a coach who poured himself into preparation. Here, too, he insisted that his work was done and there was no reason to fret.

Once the play began, however, he stood well behind the audience of 40 or so people who sat on mismatched folding chairs. Hands on hips, he looked like a nervous coach on the day of a big game.

“If you had asked me six months ago, I would have guessed that this would be the greatest experience,” he said. “I did not expect to be this uncomfortable.”

It was a moment of doubt, a reason to ask: “What the hell have I done?” At such times, Kernen must recall what drove him to such unfamiliar territory.

Northridge had yet to hit the major-college scene when Kernen arrived in 1989. A former minor leaguer with the Baltimore Orioles, he had apprenticed under Augie Garrido at Cal State Fullerton.

Northridge could not attract the kind of talent that went to Fullerton, USC and UCLA. Kernen’s kids had to be goaded into working twice as hard.

“The typical team, practice starts at the left field line, you stretch and then you practice,” said Ken Kendrena, a former Northridge pitcher. “Coach Kernen would start in the dugout. He would start with some kind of talk and it would usually end up being pretty intense.”

The message was always the same: Commitment equals success.

“He took non-baseball issues--someone practicing the piano, how long they practice--and he would relate that to us,” said Scott Sharts, a former pitcher.

The players endured long days that began with early morning weightlifting and ended with team study hall. Results came quickly.

In Kernen’s second season, Northridge reached the Division II title game, losing 12-8 to Jacksonville State. The next year, moving up to Division I, the team had a startling 44-18-1 record.

“We were a bunch of no-name guys and he turned us into a serious contender,” Sharts said. “People were saying, ‘Who the heck is Northridge?’ It was an honor.”

That year, the team reached the regional final and led Fresno State 5-4 in the bottom of the ninth. Kernen gathered his players on the dugout steps and calmly told them: “Three more outs and we’re in the College World Series.”

It should have been the highlight of his baseball life. Instead, as Kernen now says, “My coaching career ended that day.”

Perhaps the notion of a new life was already forming in his mind.

Kernen first visited New York City in 1983. On Christmas Eve, he was walking along 57th Street amid the shoppers and the clip-clop of hansom cabs when he came upon Carnegie Hall. Ducking inside the lobby with its vaulted roof and chandelier, Kernen bought a ticket to see a youth orchestra perform.

“I’d been in the city for three hours and there I was, sitting in Carnegie Hall watching this concert,” he said.

A few blocks away lay Broadway. A casual theatergoer, Kernen grew to love plays, progressing from Andrew Lloyd Webber to Eugene O’Neill. “It’s fascinating for someone to create something from nothing and then see it come to life on the stage,” he said.

He would prowl the halls of the Julliard School of Music to watch students rehearse. Come fall, the coach known to his players as friendly and eloquent but decidedly no-nonsense would bring all this back to Northridge.

“Every year, the first practice wasn’t even a practice,” Kendrena said. “It was a two- or three-hour talk about what he had done that summer in New York.”

*

A high chopper in the sun. A walk. A misplayed bunt. Fresno State scored twice in the bottom of the ninth to deny Northridge its Cinderella victory.

The team had done everything Kernen asked but had lost. No longer could he preach the gospel of commitment. No longer could he promise that extra fall workouts would produce wins in the spring.

Northridge had winning seasons in 1992 and ’93 but again failed to reach the World Series. Then came two losing seasons.

Off the field, Kernen’s 12-year marriage was ending. Then the NCAA limited the hours that baseball teams could practice. The workaholic sneered: “I couldn’t coach the way I wanted to coach.”

All of this forced Kernen to consider the ultimatum he had so often delivered to his players: “If you’re not ready to commit, then get the hell out.”

In August 1995, he called from New York to resign. At first, it made no sense.

“Then I thought about it,” Kendrena said. “If he wanted to write plays, he wouldn’t be the type to just stay at Northridge and write at night. He’d go to New York City. He’d live it every hour.”

All that remains of baseball are a few mementos: a national championship trophy from Fullerton’s 1979 team, baseballs from his 100th and 200th wins at Northridge. He has not so much as glanced at a college baseball score this season.

Instead, his days are spent writing in notebooks, toiling over dialogue. He sells real estate part time and runs in Central Park. Evenings, he attends plays and concerts for inspiration.

Kernen knows he faces long odds. His debut received no critical attention. None of the producers called back to offer money.

Yet the audience had grown to nearly 70 by the third night, laughing at the right times, applauding warmly at the end. It got Kernen thinking about his next play, a barroom drama called “Graveyard Symphony.”

Once again, he can believe that commitment equals success.

“All I ever asked of my players was to play hard,” he said. “But after a game, what was the first question we heard? Not ‘Did you play well?’ It was always ‘Did you win?’ ”

“In the theater, it’s all about putting it on the line,” he said. “You can win every day.”