In the Tigers’ den

If it wasn’t for the story of Mike Beebe and the Detroit Tigers, we’d have nothing but bad news.

So in honor of the holiday weekend, let us divert our attention momentarily from petty corruption, killer storms, scandals and rumors of scandals.

Let us think instead on the life’s journey of a poor boy born to an unwed mother in a tar paper shack in northeastern Arkansas in December 1946.

As a youngster in the late ’40s and early ’50s, Mickey Dale Beebe resided in Detroit. He lived in an inner-city Polish neighborhood with his mother, who worked as a waitress, and his grandmother and step-grandfather, who was of Polish descent. His grandmother had left the Arkansas farm for Detroit and better opportunity.

The boy never got a strong sense of a boyhood home, but he did get a strong sense of a favorite team. That would be the Detroit Tigers, American League rivals of the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox.

In time, mother and son would resettle in northeastern Arkansas, where the son of the unwed mother got raised by a community-a village, if you will-in and around Newport.

In the summer of 1961 when he was 14, Beebe got his mom’s permission to get on a bus with a school friend and go to Detroit to stay with his uncle and see a Tigers game. That was an epic season, with the Tigers of Al Kaline, Norm Cash and Rocky Colavito chasing the prevailing Yankees of Roger Maris, who would hit 61 home runs, and Mickey Mantle, who would hit 54.

Even today, aides know that the one thing Beebe requires each evening is a report on the Tigers’ game, especially if his favorite player, Justin Verlander, is pitching.

So it came to be that Governing magazine was putting on a leadership forum May 1 in Lansing, Mich., a 90-minute drive from Detroit. The magazine invited Beebe to speak.

Sure, said Beebe. But were the Tigers in town the night before, April 30?

They were. And Verlander was scheduled to pitch.

For all his Tigers obsession, Beebe had not seen a game since 1961.

One thing led to another. There were conversations between Beebe’s press office and the Michigan governor’s office. Then there were conversations between the Michigan governor’s office and the Tigers’ front office.

While stopped over in Chicago on his way to the next-day conference, Beebe got a call from the Tigers.

They had arranged private accommodations for him at the game that night. They had set up on-field privileges for him for batting practice so that he could meet the manager and players-but not Verlander, who speaks to nobody before games when he is pitching.

And one other thing: The Tigers had made an official jersey for him-with his name.

He would need to wear it that night when he threw out the first ball.

He’d toss it from the mound to Drew Smyly, a left-handed Tigers reliever who was born in Little Rock and had played for the Arkansas Razorbacks.

“Yes,” Beebe told me last week when I asked if he had been nervous.

He’d thrown first pitches for the Razorbacks and Arkansas Naturals. But this was the big show. These were the Detroit Tigers.

He would stand on the very pitchers’ mound where Verlander would momentarily stand. There would be 20,000 or more fans watching. And YouTube could be cruel if an Arkansas governor made a comically wild throw.

Beebe got his pitch to the plate, a bit low. But Smyly caught it in a sweeping motion that made it look almost like a strike.

Verlander would then pitch a solid game and lead the Tigers to a 6-1 victory over the Minnesota Twins.

That afternoon, hours before the game, Beebe had insisted that he be driven to that old Polish neighborhood. It was hardly recognizable with all the vacant lots and boarded-up houses. It was reasonably safe, “but only in the daytime,” he said.

“Surreal is how I’d describe it,” he said. “It’s the irony, I guess. A kid 4 or 5 or 6 living in the ghetto with his grandmother is standing there throwing out the first pitch surrounded by players who are the descendants of the players he idolized as larger than life when he was a little boy.”

Was the moment emotional?

“I think it was more emotional for Ginger,” he said.

His wife, back in Little Rock at a sports bar hoping in vain to see him, was “armed with the background” of his Tigers obsession, as he put it.

Many times over the years she’d piled into a car with him late at night to watch with annoyance as he worked the AM radio dial trying to pick up a few sounds through the static from the Tigers broadcasts on WJR in Detroit.

To her it was noise. To him it was an occasionally discernible word telling him something important that was happening on that far-away ball field.

And now there he was, a 66-yearold man with the name “Beebe” on his jersey, firing a pitch on that very ball field.

“What you think about when you have time to reflect,” he told me, “is not the big event itself. It’s the succession of small events in your life, each one important in leading to the next, all of which got you to that place.”

So here’s to the small formative moments-gubernatorial inaugurations and such-that can put a man where a boy never dreamed of being.

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John Brummett’s column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at [email protected]. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.