The Motivational Power of Trash Talking

Due to the circumstances of the Phillies' victory yesterday, I thought I would tell you a sports story today, one from a long time ago in a place that no longer exists.

This was a time before the internet and before cable TV, at time where we got our news from either the Courier-Post or from Jim Gardner. There were pretty much not other options. It was a time called "the 1980s". It's a story about a softball team, one best-of-five championships series, and it is a tale of motivation by accident.

Before I played hardball for 25 years with the Washington Township Senators, I had a whole 'nuther "life" in sports as the centerfielder for a softball that existed for 15 years. That team was the Avalon Bar/White Lantern Inn/Richie's Tavern/Oaklyn Manor Bar Softball Club.

There were several reasons why I did not continue to play hardball after the age of 18, which was my last year in the now-defunct Garden State Baseball League. First of all, I didn't think I was good enough. I was a late bloomer, and there were only two league in which "men" could play in those days: The Tri-County League and the Rancocas Valley League. These were VERY good leagues with the Tri-County League featuring great player like Pete Conlin, Doug Kepple, Dave Koerner, Danny Barbara and many others. Secondly, these league played 3-4 nights per week with 6 PM start times, and I was a married man working in Philadelphia. There would have been no way for me to make the games, and to spend 3-4 nights PER WEEK not showing up at home until 8:30-9:00 PM was not a hill I was willing to climb.

Softball, however, was thriving in South Jersey in the 1970s and 1980s. There were literally hundreds of teams, there was coverage daily in the Courier, and the standing published in the Sunday paper were massive. It was a virtual cottage industry around here. So with Mike Veneziani, Rick Veneziani, Frank DeNinno, Mike Deninno, Lou Martelli, Mike Carducci, Chubby Carbone, Danny Martelli, Mike Piontkowski, Pat Dunleavy, Joey Martelli, Jimmy DeClemente, Harry Cristino, Charlie Chambers, Dom Albanese, Billy O'Connor, Stan Howard, and probably some others I am forgetting (with apologies), we started a team in 1977 at the Avalon Bar on Van Hook Street in Camden.

We moved from the Avalon after the 1978 season and played one season for the White Lantern Inn on the White Horse Pike in Stratford, but that turned out to be a horrible fit for us city boys, so in 1980, we made some personnel changes and moved to Richie's Tavern at 4th & Viola in Camden, where we won our first championship in 1981, beating Chuck Seibold's Mutual of Omaha team in the finals. People like Lee Abt, Frank Rose, Mike Schilling, Art Watson, Bill Ernst, Eddie Ciemnicki, Bill Banks, Mike Carbone, Joe Dilks

We stayed at Richies for the next couple of years, finally settling at the Oaklyn Manor Bar in about 1983 (memory is fuzzy on this; I'm sure someone will correct me). We won another championship in 1985, taking out Infotron in the finals with an exciting victory in the finals at their field in Cherry Hill after they beat us handily in a game at our Whitman Park, Camden home field.

At this point in our softball "careers," we were getting a bit long in the tooth, and although we added probably the BEST player to ever wear the uniform, Steve Cordner, we moved to a new league in 1986 and got trounced. Didn't even make the playoffs for the first time in the history of the team. It was demoralizing. 

So again in 1987, there were personnel changes. Cordner had enough and moved on (who could blame him?), and some guys who had already come and gone rejoined the team. We moved back to a league that was more manageable for us, and we were once again a very good, if aging, ballclub. We made the playoffs and beat (I think) ICAC of Fairview to reach the finals, which were to be against a very good team, McMichael's Gym of Stratford.

After the ICAC victory, we returned to The Manor (as it was always called) to celebrate. While we were there whooping it up, a guy from one of the other teams happened to stop by. Wish I could remember who it was, but that information is lost in the mists of time.

Well, this guy told us that he had just come from whatever bar the McMichael's guys were hanging at, and he told us they were actually CELEBRATING because we had won the other semi-final series because they knew they were going to crush us in the finals. We were not supposed to hear this, I'm sure they would never have said anything like this to our faces, but the fates allowed it to get back to us anyway, and we were NOT pleased. Not a little bit.

Make no mistake: we were clearly going to be the underdogs in this series. Those guys were big, strong, and mean, and they even played at a bit of a band-box ballpark in Stratford, a place with a very short right field porch were the balls were known to fly out into the neighborhood, which gave them a big edge against our rag-tag bunch of skinny lawyers and geeks. And they would have the home advantage, too. So on paper, this was NOT a very good scenario for us, even though we played our home game at that time on a wide-open field that likely would favor our style of play, which was defense and small-ball.

But as the Atlanta Braves learned this week, it is never wise to poke the bear. The bear gets angry, and he eats you.

So let the snacking begin.

The first game was at their ballpark, and we came out hitting. We had a team meeting and decided to make NO mention of the incident, but to instead let our bats do the talking. We beat them up and down the field by a 20-7 score. This is slow-pitch softball, so there is always a lot of scoring generally, but we were not a team that scored 20 runs all that often. But we did on this day.

Game #2 was at our place, which I believe at this point was at a school in Pine Hill (if memory serves). It was an open field with no fences, which we hoped would negate their power advantage. This wound up being the closest game in the series, and we won by a score of 18-13 (could have been 17-13). We now had them on the ropes.

Nonetheless, I'm sure the McMichael's boys were confident they would bounce back, Game #3 being at their home bandbox park.

Well, not so much.

Our furious bout of offense simply rolled on, and we pounded them by a 22-4 score, taking the best-of-five series 3-0 in a beautiful, surprising, earth-shattering sweep. We were elated, and we celebrated much as you saw the Phillies celebrate against the Braves last evening. That stuff is a LOT of fun!

Of course, this was the last hurrah of the Oaklyn Manor Softball Club. As the next couple of years wore on, the core players began to drift away one by one, we couldn't muster any momentum again, and at the end of the 1991 season, we decided to call it quits. It was the right time.

I wound up playing one more year of softball in 1992, going "professional" for a single season with RPF Transport of Gloucester. I played with some GREAT ballplayers that year (the Cowgill brothers, John Chiodi, Keith Kowalski, Jazz Thornton, Michael Tompkins, Chris Nardone, Darryl Henderson, and others, won a LOT of tournaments, and played in over 125 games. It was grueling, as in addition to twice-weekly night games, we often left early on a Saturday morning and played all day Saturday and all day Sunday in tournaments. I had a lot of fun, finally determined that I could play that game on a big stage with pretty much any level of ballplayer, and achieved some very big numbers. A highlight was when we got up a 4 or 5 AM, had breakfast at The Club Diner, had a practice at Bellmawr in the early morning fog, drove to Mercer County Park for an 8 AM game against a team from Lynn, Massachusetts, and promptly scored 22 runs in the top of the first inning before they even came to bat.

But though it was all fun, nothing could possible top that series with the Manor boys, when a loose tongue from the opposition found its way to our ears, and cause a spark that brought us our final championship together. The Manor teams were legendary for rising above our level of talent to perform at a level that was beyond what should have been possible. Those are the things you can do when you have a team that believes in itself.

Like these Phillies.