I would like all of you, especially if you’re a baby boomer, to be 10 years old again for a minute or so.
Transport yourself back to 1964. Think of what was going on. We were reeling from the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and the Beatles lifted us out of that funk.
In the spring, another idol emerged: Tony Conigliaro — the local kid from Swampscott via St. Mary’s. He could have been my neighbor and we could have had a ‘Gansett together.
I was your typical scruffy little kid who lived, ate, slept and breathed baseball, so me and Tony C were the perfect fit (seeing the movie “The Sandlot” helps paint the picture).
I’d heard of Conigliaro, and even saw him play once or twice in his younger days because my godfather’s son was on one of his teams.
But in those days, he wasn’t Tony C. He was just another player. He was a guy whose name I couldn’t pronounce. I used to say “Cong-liaro.”
He lit up Scottsdale, Ariz., during spring training. Every morning, I’d open the Boston Globe and read about his exploits. One day, the headline screamed “Conig hits one a mile.” I took it literally, and tried to visualize exactly how long a mile actually was.
My mother had to explain, very gently, that the headline writer was using a literary device called “hyperbole,” and that Conigliaro (by then I’d learned how to pronounce it) may have hit a monsterous home run, but it didn’t go a mile.
Anyway, 10-year-old boys (and girls, too) developed an instant fascination with Tony Conigliaro. Every guy I knew wanted to be him, and every girl I knew swooned over him as much as they did over John, Paul, George and Ringo.
Those were innocent years, although not for long. And 10 is an innocent age. Your mind doesn’t travel to dark, ambiguous places where the Frank Merriwells of the world may go when they’re off the clock. And when you’ve spent your life worshipping a sports or music idol, it’s awfully disillusioning to find things out that you never wanted to know.
John F. Kennedy is a saint in a lot of Irish Catholic households. My uncle had his picture on the wall of his study next to the Pope. That’s pretty heady company.
To find out he was a serial womanizer? I’m of a different generation than my uncle, but I definitely felt the JFK vibe. And finding out that he had such obvious feet of clay was devastating to me then (a little less so now).
Much of the angst with the Beatles break-up came from the knowledge of the nasty in-fighting that went with it. And to find out that the Beatles, gasp, took drugs, and that John Lennon used heroin, and that he split with “Cyn” for Yoko Ono … all that stuff was really hard to take for the teenage brain that preferred to remember them as they were in “A Hard Day’s Night.”
Tony C’s life was tragic enough. He may have been Italian, but Greek tragedies have been less visceral. He had it all. He could hit the stuffing out of the ball, was not afraid of big moments, he had a recording contract, had matinee idol looks … his was the world and everything in it.
And just like that — one errant fastball thrown by Jack Hamilton of the California Angels in 1967 — it was gone.
Or it would have been gone for most people.
It is a testament to the man’s incredible courage, desire, and innate athletic ability that Conigliaro was able, with his eyesight compromised by the beaning, to resume his Major League career for two seasons before being forced to retire. He was truly a profile in courage, at least in athletic terms.
His misfortunes continued. In 1982 he had a heart attack, lost oxygen to his brain, and was never the same. He lingered for eight years before dying in February 1990. He was only 45.
The gods have been good to us with regards to Tony C’s legacy. Granted close friends have been regaling us for decades about Conigliaro’s bravado, his natural swagger, and his chutzpah in certain situations.
All of those stories have been marvelously entertaining, and they give you a better look at the man so you don’t put a halo over his hat the minute you see a picture.
But what you don’t hear are tell-all tales about Tony C’s darker side. I’m sure he had them because we all do. What emerges in all the things I’ve read and heard is that he was a lot more driven to excel than anyone could have thought, and that there was no room in his life for much else.
People always wanted to find or create, perhaps, a dark side that didn’t exist. But they didn’t get far. He was what he was.
Friday night at City Hall, there will be a documentary shown about his life. St. Mary’s will retire the No. 12 he wore in high school.
I intend to be there to watch it, and I want to be 10 years old when I do, worshipping unconditionally a guy who owned the world and everything in it.
Steve Krause can be reached at [email protected].
