The last time I saw Gene was in April 2000 during a trip to Minneapolis. He drove down from Duluth to meet me. We talked lightly about the past, but it seemed pointless to belabor. I have more urgent angers, and Gene can only be a hollow punching bag anyway: I got the feeling in Minnesota that, were I to hit him, he'd have politely bounced back up -- not because he's resilient, but because he seemed complacently and utterly unaware that I might have wanted to fight with him, and that there was anything to fight about in the first place.
So the last time I really saw Gene was in the summer of 1985, in Durham. I walked over to the boarding house where he'd bivouacked while pondering which woman to choose. We spent a typical day together: we played catch; we ate at Eckerds lunch counter; we may have even gone to a Bulls game, although oddly I can't remember. I think I learned my nostalgia from Gene. Then we went back to his room at the boarding house and put out the lights for bed. I finally found the confluence of courage and opportunity -- and darkness -- to ask Gene exactly what the hell he was doing.
In order to illuminate this nighttime moment, and perhaps a piece of Gene himself, I must flash a bit further back and recount what I have come to call the Sidd Finch Incident. Earlier that spring, Gene showed me an article in the latest issue of Sports Illustrated magazine. The article was about a young pitcher in the New York Mets' spring training camp. His name was Sidd Finch.
Sidd Finch was a funny looking guy, especially for a baseball player. He had bushy, dark hair and he wore glasses. He wore a hiking boot on one foot, even when he pitched. The article said he had been studying with lamas in Tibet, and had mastered the ability to throw a baseball 168 miles an hour -- nearly twice as fast as the average major league fastball. (The highest speed a pitch had ever registered on a radar gun was 103 MPH.) His accuracy was as breathtaking as his velocity: Finch never failed to hit the precise spot where the catcher placed his mitt, much to the dismay of the catcher, whose palm would be badly bruised. Finch's arm suffered no damage from pitching; its resilience may have had to do with a yogic 'internal heat' he had learned to harness. He intimated that he could pitch even faster, but restrained himself so as not to break the hands of the poor guys who would have to catch him.
