American Greatness

I’ve been wondering what in the hell Robin Ventura was thinking since I was age 7, when the pup third baseman for the Chicago White Sox charged Nolan Ryan like he was an untrained bull calf loosed upon Pamplona. This was the sequence of events:

• Ryan, pitching for the Texas Rangers, plunks Ventura in the back with a fastball;
• Ventura skulks a few paces toward first base;
• As if to try ambushing Ryan from 60 feet, 6 inches away, Ventura then drops his bat, removes his helmet, and charges the mound in one impressive, but doomed, motion;
• And Ventura just jogs into Ryan. Not sprints. Jogs, with a “j” softer than Charmin. Posture not indicating an attacking stance. Neither arm coiled for a punch.
• Instead, Ventura springs his limbs outward and forward in some Greco-Roman lunge and buries his head into the breast of a 46-year-old man. If I didn’t know better, Nolan Ryan was 26-year-old Robin Ventura’s daddy, and this was the end of an emotional estrangement.
• Instead, Ryan demonstrated his fatherhood by catching Ventura in a headlock and landing several abbreviated uppercuts while escorting him away from two triggered, emptying dugouts. There’s a still image of the encounter in which Ventura is facing away from the camera, and it looks like the Texas pitcher is giving him noogies.
• By this point, Ventura still hasn’t thrown a punch.
• The two men eventually are swallowed by a mob of players. A few minutes pass. Skirmishes continue. Ryan remains in the game, and Ventura and Sox manager Gene Lamont are tossed.
• At which point Lamont loses his mind.

“Boy, I tell ya what, that’s the maddest we’ve seen Gene Lamont since he’s been in a Sox uniform,” said Chicago play-by-play man Hawk Harrelson at the time.