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I first met Whit of Wall Street when I was a sixth-grader standing on the pitcher’s mound at Our Lady of Mercy’s baseball field in Potomac, Maryland. Up until that moment, I had lived a Beaver Cleaver life, 24/7 wholesomeness without a whiff of the nefariousness corroding city streets.
Then some hood-looking guy stepped in the batter’s box wearing oil-stained bell-bottom blue jeans, a tight white T-shirt, and a mostly smoked Camel cigarette hanging from his lips.
While the rest of us players on both teams wore Little League baseball uniforms, Whit looked like a fully pubescent Arthur Fonzarelli showing off slicked black hair minus the black leather jacket.
To play a Little League baseball game.
I thought to myself: “Who is this guy? Why is he here? Is he going to mug me if I don’t let him get a hit? Why is he not wearing a baseball uniform? Why is he smoking a cigarette? Does it help him hit better? Should I start smoking? How old do you have to be to smoke while playing baseball? And why is he now coming up to bat against me after not playing the field? Is he some ringer pinch-hitter coming straight from Wisconsin Avenue near St. Anns to get the heroic Hondo hit to pull his team out of the loss they were headed towards because I was mowing down his ‘teammates’ with gas-drenched fireballs?”
Confused and slightly unnerved, I still had to get his cocky ass out. So I wound up and let loose my 90-mile-per-hour scorcher. He swung as if he wanted to hit the ball across six state lines.
To say he popped the ball up doesn’t begin to capture what happened. He hit the ball straight through the cirrus clouds, past Mars, as high as Whit and I and the fellas have ever been. An hour later it came down and I caught it. The highest pop-up hit in the long history of Little League Baseball.
Though not as world-renowned as I would become 48 years later, I, Sammy Sportface, got his cocky hoodlum ass out. It was the first of dozens of times Sportface proved he reigned supreme in all things athletic compared with Whit Fonzarelli.
But Whit had his superpowers. He partied better and was Kirby Casanova. Visitation girls were more infatuated with Kirby than Sportface, and that never sat well with Sportface.
But that was then. Fast forward 48 years to, let’s say, today.
Whit is supposed to take us all on a boat ride this coming Saturday on Bethany Bay. But he’s reacting to this rude proposition with rancorous and dismissive text messages.
“Who is this? Stop spamming me!” he messaged Sportface the other day while blazing his boat around the Bay. This, just minutes after the sports blogging mogul blogged to a bevy of disinterested dudes that they would be taking a joyride on his boat this Saturday despite Whit never inviting Sportface or any of them.
“No boat ride for Sportface,” texted Whit. “He wasn’t invited and never will be. Sportface needs to shut down his blog. It’s a Baby Boomer Brotherhood abomination.”
Why is Whit always this way, Sportface ruminated? Why is Whit always Whit? Why can’t he be different, more manageable, more agreeable, more sincere, more open to being figured out, less shifty, less into being Whit, less elusive, more transparent, more on the level?
That’s just not Whit. Whit is aloof. Whit is enigmatic. Whit is a keg full of unanswerable questions. Whit is unpackable. Whit is a man like no other, a wildass street tuff from third grade on who remains in that mysterious mode, a guy who no one can box into a corner, a man who does what he wants whenever he wants, a guy forever on the run, always avoiding being pinned down.
So will Whit take us on his boat this weekend? Will he allow Sportface to come along? That is the question.
Does it matter? Do any of you care? Of course, you don’t. But this isn’t about you. It’s about me and Whit and our lifelong interpersonal tensions and whether we, in old age, can overcome them, become bigger about all this, find some sort of common Tiki Bar ground to work through our issues, or at least reach a stalemate.
If you saw Whit today, the first thing you would notice is how bald he is. Rocking a golf-tanned shiny head, he looks like a retired Hollywood movie producer, a retired hedge fund manager who spends his days in a tanning tube, or an old man dead set on ensuring his investments appreciate.
“If I saw myself in high school, I would have wanted to go out with me,” he said.
Come on, Whit. Just commit. Where do you sit? This is it, Whit.
Commit to Sportface and the fellas. Take us for a joyride to Tiki Town on your boat. We need your boat or there will be no Booze Crooze. I know it’s never any fun but it’s a tradition and traditions are all we have left.
I want to watch him act all captain-like on his boat. I want to watch him limp around the Tiki Town Bar on his old man-walking cane.
If not Saturday, when, Whit? If not with Whit, how else can we get lit?
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Sammy Sportface, a sports blogger, galvanizes, inspires, and amuses The Baby Boomer Brotherhood. And you can learn about his vision and join this group's Facebook page here:
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