IMAGE: CNS
By Mark Pattison
WASHINGTON
(CNS) — Longtime baseball writer and broadcaster Tim Kurkjian has called it
“the greatest baseball story ever told.” And one of its central characters is a
Catholic who never played an inning in the big leagues, but got to coach for 30
years in the majors.
“The
Chicken Runs at Midnight” tells the wildly improbable story of the
strong-willed coach, Rich Donnelly, and his equally strong-willed teenage
daughter Amy as she was battling brain cancer while her dad’s team was making a
playoff push.
To make
a great story short, it’s not the happiest of endings. She died in 1993, but the chicken indeed
did run at midnight.
Donnelly,
in a phone interview with Catholic News Service prior to the book’s publication by Zondervan
in early October, talked about his faith, how he strayed from it — and how he
regained it.
“I was
a ridiculous Catholic,” said Donnelly, now 72.
“Besides
being a priest, I don’t think there was anyone more religious in the world,” he
said, recalling his youth: “Say your morning prayers when you wake up, say a
prayer to St. Jude, the patron saint to helpless causes — which is me — say
three decades of the rosary, go to morning Mass , do the Stations of the Cross,
make a May altar in your room when you are 8 and keep in there until you are 17.
“I
would pray to God all day. I’d walk my hometown of Steubenville, Ohio. It had
14 Catholic churches. I felt if I didn’t have a visit (when passing by), that
was like a sin. So that’s what I did,” Donnelly continued. “When I was 8, 9 and
10 I celebrated Mass myself. I got a load of DiCarlo’s Italian bread. I made little
hosts up, I had an imaginary congregation. I knew all the prayers in Latin — I
was an altar boy — so I did all the Latin prayers by myself.”
Donnelly
also became a standout baseball player from the tutelage of his father, who
trained his sights on the boy after Donnelly’s older brother, a promising
pitcher, died of cancer while still playing in the minors. The lad thought
swearing was uncouth, and proclaimed he would never swear once he got into the
minors.
He also
never thought he would have sex before marriage. Or cheat on his wife. Donnelly
admitted his focus on baseball took focus away from his family, which by then
included four children, including Amy, his second child and first daughter.
“I was
all Catholic-ed out when I was 16,” Donnelly told CNS. “There wasn’t much to
do, so I went in a different direction, which was bad.”
He
added, “My second wife, Roberta, she and Amy got me back in the baseline. I was
at second base (metaphorically), and (instead of running to third) I was
running to left field. I was going nuts and being wild. They got me thinking:
When was I happiest? When I was a kid, when I was going to church, when I was
saying my prayers.”
Donnelly
said he thought that going to church while being active in baseball was a sign
of weakness — until he went to church as a coach, and found one of his players
at the same Mass.
It was
that player, Craig Counsell — the Catholic manager of the playoff-bound Milwaukee Brewers — who was
nicknamed “Chicken” due to his batting stance. And it was Counsell who scored the
winning run in extra innings for the Florida Marlins in Game 7 of the 1997
World Series right around midnight — a fact pointed out to Donnelly by one of
his sons, who was a Marlins batboy, as the rest of the team was celebrating on
the field.
Yet as
remarkable as all that was — especially as it had seemingly been prophesied by
Amy years earlier when her dad was coaching another team, a club that didn’t
even have Counsell on its roster — it nearly pales to Donnelly’s return to his
Catholic faith.
“I
prayed to God for funny things: ‘Put a priest into my life like the priest (he
had) when I was growing up,'” Donnelly told CNS. “I got connected … in my
hometown. Holy Family (in Steubenville). Msgr. Jerry Calovini.” The priest, he
added, is “a baseball nut. He’s my confessor, he’s my adviser … someone who
understands me.” He added, “In the winter, I go to Mass pretty much every
morning with Msgr. Jerry.”
Donnelly
also credits his second wife, Roberta, for his return to the fold. “When you
ask for stuff, you might get more than you asked for,” he said. “She’s
incredible. And she has become a biblical scholar, my pastors have told me. She
teaches biblical classes to pastors! They give her a talk (to do) to three or
four pastors. She writes notes and notes about the Bible and tries to translate
what it means.”
Retired
from baseball, Donnelly — who has beaten cancer twice himself — is not one to
sit still. “I’m a world-class racquetball player. I play racquetball five days
a week against guys who are in their 20s and 30s. I toss batting practice every
day. I’ve been blessed. I don’t drink, smoke, use drugs. I never have and I
never will. I got into racquetball. People tell me, ‘You’re not 70, you’re 50.’
But I can tell I’m 72 in the middle of the night!”
Donnelly
also has a speaking tour pegged to the book’s release. Plus, “I got a lot of
grandkids,” he said. “I spend a lot of time with them.”
Curiously,
going to games doesn’t interest him. After three decades of big-league coaching
— 17 of them under manager Jim Leyland in Pittsburgh, Florida and Colorado — sitting
in the stands is boring to Donnelly, while coaching by comparison is “a fast-paced
chess game.”
However,
he’ll waive that policy should Leyland — whose brother is a priest in Ohio — ever
be elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame. “Jim is my best friend in
baseball,” Donnelly said.
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Editor’s Note: More information about “The Chicken Runs at Midnight: A Daughter’s Message From Heaven That Changed a Father’s Heart and Won a World Series,” written by Tom Friend, is available at the publisher’s website, www.zondervan.com.
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Follow Pattison on Twitter: @MeMarkPattison
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