Unlike some Dodgers, Little could take a walk

PINEHURST, N.C. -- He has already played 18 holes at a picturesque golf club, no wait anywhere, his own home ducked into the pines overlooking No. 11.

Lunch in town at a quaint cafe, and now he’s sitting in a chair looking over yonder at the playground he built for his three grandsons in the middle of 10 peaceful acres, which he spotted while riding his motorcycle through the back roads.

And frankly, the question to Grady Little sounds rather stupid.

“Why would you leave L.A. and your job managing the Dodgers?”

It has been months since the surprise announcement, in town for two years and gone overnight, a short conference call with the media and a whole lot of questions left unanswered.

He never was one to say much, and he has no desire to expand on his silence on such a fine afternoon, but only as a favor, he relents.

“I was burned out,” he says, “and so now I’m recharging my batteries. But it’s one of those trickler chargers.”

He pauses for a second, which sometimes can turn into eternity with Little, and surprisingly answers the next question before it’s asked.

There was no problem with the Dodgers leading to his departure, or with General Manager Ned Colletti, as some speculated.

“Until the day I die, I will be pulling for Ned Colletti,” Little says. “Everything he does, he does with the best of intentions. It doesn’t mean the best results all the time, but the intentions are right.

“Sure, I’m walking away, but not running away. And I’m not saying I won’t be back in baseball, but if I do come back, hopefully it will be somewhere around Ned Colletti.”

He says no, he doesn’t miss it yet, although he slows down his truck when he notices some high school kids working out on the baseball field.

“It’s just time for a break,” he says. “My son played college baseball, and I saw two games. I want to watch my grandchildren grow.”

As he drives down the road, there’s a whole row of trees still dormant from winter, but when asked what they might look like in full bloom, he says: “No idea. Never been here to see them. But I will this year.”

But won’t he miss it all come opening day, the first he will miss in almost three decades?

“I’ll probably be waiting for a bowl of soup in my little restaurant, watching the scores go across the bottom of the TV screen, and when I’m done eating, I’ll walk out and do what I was doing before I had my soup,” he says.

“Right now I can’t wait for every day to start. Sometimes I just like to take my saw out into the woods and hack away for an hour or so. And I’d like to shoot par golf once in my life.”

He can cut down all the trees he wants, but anyone watching him swing a golf club knows he’ll still manage to find one.

In the next few weeks he has plans to join NASCAR driver Jeff Gordon’s pit crew for a day. He has already been to a couple of basketball games and might attend a hockey game, which suggests he’s running out of things to do in retirement.

“I’ve never been so busy,” he counters. “But now every day, every single day, it’s my choice what I do and who I do it with.”

He has been married to the same woman going on 38 years, Debbie looking more like his daughter than someone contemplating life with a retiree.

“It’s hard to explain,” he says. “But we like each other. We like being around each other.”

He spent a lifetime in the minors as player and then manager before pulling down major league money finally as a coach, Debbie working all those years selling real estate and fitness equipment.

He managed two seasons each in Boston and L.A., compiling a .552 winning percentage, better than two of the game’s present best, Joe Torre and Tony La Russa, and yet he appears to be calling it quits at age 58.

“I love the game,” he says. “I was pushed by my father, who loved the game. There used to be snow on the ground and he’d wonder why I wasn’t outside throwing a baseball.

“My whole life I tried to play the game, but it took me six or seven years in the minors to figure out I couldn’t play. So I got into managing. And I got to manage two of the most storied franchises in the game, and for that, I’m nothing but proud.”

His abrupt manner of speaking probably didn’t give local fans a chance to really know him. But while there might be finer, more decent people in sports, until one steps forward, Little tops the list.

And as they say around here, he’s a real hoot.

He likes to throw marshmallows around the golf course, leading his buddies astray as they think they have found their wayward golf shots. When challenged to make a putt, he pulls out a golf ball painted to look like a basketball, because he intends on slam-dunking his putt.

When the game turns serious with $2 on the line, out comes the money ball, a golf ball wrapped in a $100 bill.

It’s pretty hard to go serious on him, but he did lose $2, and so he acknowledges it wasn’t the losses that took their toll on him as much as the daily issues that come with managing so many people.

“On that drive from Pasadena to the ballpark, some days I didn’t know what the issue was going to be, but I knew there was going to be an issue,” he says. “At one point I felt the same after a four-game winning streak as I did after a four-game losing streak.

“I knew it was time for serious self-examination. It was the issues, and I’m never going to be one to put up a smoke screen.”

In Little’s world, a “smoke screen” obscures the truth, and he’s all about the truth. “People have a lot of pride,” is the nice way he explains it, “and they don’t want to look at themselves as the ones making mistakes, so they throw up smoke screens.”

Maybe he’s talking about older players talking about headstrong young players in an effort to deflect attention from their own struggles, and maybe he’s not.

There’s no way he’ll be more specific, and anyway that’s water under the bridge, as someone points out, the same bridge he hits with his second shot on No. 18 to ruin any chance he might have to win back his $2.

“You can’t always control the outcome,” he says, or his swing for that matter, “but I kept at it, and I got to the top of my profession, and I have nothing to be sorry for now.”

With that, he’s gone -- his choice to contribute time this evening to the local boys’ and girls’ club. But as good luck would have it, he leaves without paying off a bet, a good reason to meet once again down the road.

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T.J. Simers can be reached at t.j.simers@latimes.com. To read previous columns by Simers, go to latimes.com/simers.