Free Just Tell Me I Can't by Jamie Moyer Page B

the region had recently produced—didn’t make the cut owing to a mistake by the tryout organizers.
    It was perplexing that by midsummer after his senior year of high school, Moyer’s once-promising future was still unknown. It looked like he’d be enrolling at Montgomery County Community College and playing next spring for the Mustangs—not exactly the dream Moyer or his hometown had long harbored. But neither Moyer nor his boosters knew then that this would ultimately be the story of Moyer’s career—that nothing would come easily. Skip Wilson, the legendary coach for Temple University in Philadelphia, took a ride that summer to Souderton. Under Wilson, Temple had played in the College World Series in 1972 and 1977 and had received four other NCAA bids in the ’70s. Now here he was, in the Moyer living room, making his pitch for Jamie to come and play for the Owls. Joan, however, wasn’t impressed, not with the College World Series appearances or the NCAA bids. Wilson, you see, had worn shorts and sneakers with no socks— no socks! —to her home.
    When St. Joseph’s head coach, George Bennett, came to visit, he wore socks; Joan liked him right away. And Jamie liked that Bennett was offering the chance to start as freshman, something the more competitive Temple program couldn’t guarantee. But there was a catch: “We’ll give you a scholarship, but you’ve got to work as hard for me in the classroom as you do on the baseball field,” Bennett said. Moyer would be a night student his first semester and then upgraded to full-time status if he could carry a 2.5 grade point average. Moyer saw it as a challenge.
    When the academic year rolled around, Moyer realized how quickly fortunes can change. Just a couple of months prior, he’d been dreaming of being drafted and of playing minor league baseball by now. Instead, he got a day job working for the Town of Souderton. He’d spend his days mowing ball fields, collecting leaves, and tarring roadways. At quitting time, he’d drive his parents’ blue Pinto up the turnpike to Philly for night classes at St. Joe’s.
    But at least he had a team, a baseball home, and a scholarship. After hearing all the doubts about his game and after not getting drafted, he got his first lesson in the sheer power of perseverance. Years later, after he had become a star for the Seattle Mariners, an attendant named Tom stationed outside the clubhouse door would slip him a piece of paper that read:
    P RESS O N
    N OTHING IN THE WORLD CAN TAKE THE PLACE OF PERSISTENCE
    T ALENT WILL NOT; NOTHING IS MORE COMMON THAN UNSUCCESSFUL MEN WITH TALENT
    G ENIUS WILL NOT; UNREWARDED GENIUS IS ALMOST A PROVERB
    E DUCATION WILL NOT; THE WORLD IS FULL OF EDUCATED DERELICTS
    P ERSISTENCE AND DETERMINATION ALONE ARE OMNIPOTENT.
    The scrap of paper immediately found a place in Jamie’s vaunted shaving kit, where he keeps his motivational reminders, for Moyer knew not only how true it was, but how it could just as easily have been penned by the seventeen-year-old Jamie Moyer who, at the eleventh hour, got a baseball scholarship, and by the forty-eight-year-old Jamie Moyer who would try and defy the game yet again by coming back from Tommy John surgery.
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    Like Jamie Moyer, Harvey Dorfman fell in love with baseball at the youngest of ages. Unlike Moyer, though, Dorfman didn’t dream so much of playing the sport as of escaping into it. Little Harvey, six years old in 1941, was bedridden in his family’s Bronx, New York, apartment with extreme asthma, surrounded by an overprotective mother and two doting older sisters. He took solace in the re-created teletype games that played on his bedside Emerson radio.
    As it would be in the Moyer household, the father gave his son the game. Mac and Harvey Dorfman would listen to games on AM radio, Harvey keeping score in a school notebook. When he wasn’t gasping for breath, it was