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Show As "team physician" by compulsion, Father luckily had no emergencies to deal with. The closest was when Vernon Johnson raced to first for a single. His cleats cut the shoe off a Lund player. But there was no injury. Partly no doubt because of exultant surprise, that game is one of my cherished memories of Nada. One of the best aspects of it is that Clyde never did or said anything to impair our belief in his possession of fiery power kept under icy control. John Bangle and Clyde gave up their homestead and moved away a couple years later. We lost track of them. If there is design in the shifting fabric tangled between man and man, man and nature, what was the object served by Clyde's pitching skill and his unwilling use of it that day? He evidently ranked success in the game low among his goals in life. Did Clyde's achievement that day startle one or more of u s- Phil or me or several in Lund and Nada--into dim recognition of a hidden gift and help encourage it? The power would not have had to be athletic. It might have been a gift in a different field, a talent lying buried or half-hidden, waiting to be found and cultivated as he must have done years before he came to Nada. But somewhere, I like to imagine, youth found hope in his near-genius, his fusion of deep energy with subtle and strong application of it, his fiery force, spiritual as well as physical, under iron control. Perhaps he gave many an obscure boy a hint of what it meant to pursue excellence toward triumph, if only victory within oneself. |