CARLTON FLETCHER: From boys to men … and then to boys

“A legend’s only a lonely boy when he goes home alone.”

— Carly Simon

In one of his most brilliant novels, “The Prince of Tides,” one of Georgia’s greatest writers, Pat Conroy, offers this take on the fleeting glory of high school athletics:

I carry with me always the memories of my time as an athlete and those life-changing, exultant nights when I took to the measured fields and tested my strength and swiftness and character against that of other boys. I lived for the subsidies and praise of ingathered crowds, the rousing music of bands, the pixilation of cheerleaders high-kicking to the rhythm of drums, chanting out the urgent banalities of the sport. … The sight of the opposing team, black-helmeted and serious, sent a shiver of delectating pleasure down my spine. On this green field … I would taste immortality for the first and last time in my life. … I could feel the breath of God running like light through my bloodstream. I shouted, I exhorted my teammates, I danced in the lean, honed grandeur of being a boy, gifted in his chosen game.

As I’ve read and reread this wonderful book over the years, this piece always grabs me and takes me back to the time I was that high school boy, feeling the electricity, the will of an entire community, to do something extraordinary that they might collectively revel in it.

I never considered myself extraordinary in the games I loved — football and baseball — but I had a career at Irwin County High School that I look back on today, almost 50 years later, with a certain amount of pride. I’ve tried, and I think succeeded, to keep my exploits from growing to mythic proportions in the years since, as those “glory days” stories often do, and I think I’ve succeeded. I think of those games on those green fields as part of my life that brought me great pleasure and won me friends I never would have encountered had I not played them.

Now I tell this story as a man who, as a boy, played on baseball teams that won one state championship, played for another and lost, and played for South Georgia championships in football, only to have lost both times. Those games mean little to anyone now, but I look back on them as the primary reasons I stayed in school.

That previous paragraph was not meant as boast. I’m not that kind of person, and besides, I played only my small part on each team. I offer the successes, though, as context for one of my greatest sports memories … as part of the Tifton Gazette-sponsored softball team that won the Tifton Recreation Department’s slow-pitch league championship tournament before I left that wonderful city to come to Albany.

The Gazette team was, at best, a ragtag bunch. We had some good players — Lester Cromer, who worked in circulation, was a bomber, and our editor, Danny Carter, one of the nicest, most even-tempered individuals I’ve ever met (and one of my journalism heroes) became a beast on the field of play, leading some who followed The Albany Herald’s team after both Carter and I came to this newspaper to swear that his alter-ego “Evil Dennis” emerged when he played. But most of us were past-our-prime former athletes looking for a (wee) bit of glory. We found it during the post-season tournament that was, I’d guess, circa early- to mid-1980s. We’d done only so-so during the regular season and were seeded somewhere in the middle of the pack for the post-season tournament. When we lost the first game of the tourney, most figured our season was about to end.

But in that magical world of sport, where strange and even miraculous things sometime happen for no apparent reason, the Gazette team — with no forewarning or no sign that it was happening — became unbeatable. We worked our way up from the bottom of the losers’ bracket, knocking off much better teams along the way until, somehow, we found ourselves in the finals against the tournament’s lone unbeaten team. We beat them, though, setting up a one-game showdown for the championship.

The city of Tifton had just finished work on its new softball complex, so the championship game was played there, the first event at the beautiful complex. Everyone expected midnight to strike on our Cinderella run — “everyone” being the few wives, girlfriends and sports junkies who attended the tournament — but we held onto the magic for that one last game and somehow won the tournament.

It wasn’t the ’69 Mets, but it was close enough for us.

The new rec complex had a holding pond, and after we received the tournament trophy, all us grown men ran over and jumped into the water like impish little boys. We didn’t win the hearts of our community — it was only slow-pitch softball. But on that night, we all got to pretend for a little while that we’d accomplished something special.

The next day, we went back to work.