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For teachers, the last day of school is the day after we say goodbye to students. You get your room cleaned-up, pack what you might need for the summer, turn in your keys, and then head to the luncheon to say goodbye to your colleagues for the next couple of months. / 1
On this June day in 2014, when work needed to get done, I made a huge mistake. I looked at Twitter. Sadly, I found out that Tony Gwynn had finally succumbed to cancer. Me, a fully formed (mostly) adult, wept like a baby. I cried the whole morning. I got nothing done at all. / 2
I finally got to the point where I was incapable of getting anything done and decided to leave. To go to the luncheon, get a beer, and try not to cry in front of adults who likely wouldn't understand why I was crying about a guy I never met. But that's the way we all felt. / 3
We all felt like we knew Tony. We all claimed him. He was ours. So I locked my classroom, committed to returning the next day, and left for that beer. As I walked out of my room, I saw my teaching partner from the previous year inside of her old classroom. / 4
You see, she also had cancer. / 5
Having taken the year off because she had missed parts of previous school years for a combination of chemo treatments and tumor removals, she had decided to take an early retirement. She was 41 years old with two young daughters. / 6
As I walked into her room I didn't recognize the person who I had spent the first part of my career teaching alongside. A tumor on her thyroid was pronounced. From the medication, I presume, her face carried the type of bloat I hadn't seen before. / 7
It was so hard not to start crying again. / 8
I put my best foot forward, said I hoped to see her at the luncheon if she could handle it, and got the hell out of there. I needed that beer. I needed that day to end. / 9
My colleague, and amazing next door neighbor, passed away 5 months later. I wrote this about her hoping it would be cathartic: …https://afineplaceworthfightingfor.blogspot.com/2014/11/neighbors.html
/ 10
/ 10
I felt better after having written it. It allowed me to deal with the pain and the emotion. It was my intention to write something about my hero Tony Gwynn 5 months earlier. But I never did. I never wrote anything about the Padres again. / 11
I couldn't very well write something extremely stupid about the Padres (my forte) without first acknowledging the death of our favorite son. But I couldn't do it. I couldn't bring myself to write about him. It was too hard. / 12
Within 5 days of Tony's passing I was on my way to Oregon to watch the youngsters play in Eugene. I figured I would write a lot about that trip. That was the whole point. Write about what we saw! / 13
We sat in the scout section. Here I would give detailed reports about how Franchy Cordero wasn't living up to the hype coming from @ProfessorParks and how Trea Turner was clearly looked like the best player on the field but ... meh. / 14
Let's be honest, I probably would have written more about Eugene's breweries. It was a fun trip but I couldn't write anything about it until I first wrote about Tony Gwynn. And I couldn't bring myself to write about Tony. So I never wrote anything else again. / 15
And so here I am, writing about Tony Gwynn, 6 years later. What can I say about him? I didn't know him. I felt like I knew him, as we all did. I have his autograph. But I never met him; I had traded another card for it. So while that's really cool, it's not really the same. / 16
Here's my story about how I knew Tony through a weird degree of separation. Tony lived in Poway and I went to Poway High School where I played baseball. A classmate of ours was Garry Templeton's daughter. / 17
She invited us over to her house, offering her father's batting cage if we ever wanted to hit. So a group went over to hit one day. We just cruised into Tempy's backyard like it was no big deal. Like we were supposed to be there. And we set-up the pitching machine. / 18
The cage was filled with equipment (bats, batting gloves, etc.) from so many of the local guys who would also come over to hit. Alan Trammel. Matt Nokes. Obviously Tempy. And the guy who lived down the street ... Tony Gwynn. / 19
In that cage was Tony Gwynn's bat, stamped with his signature. 32". We hit with it, a little toothpick of a bat. It was the bat, maybe not the exact same one, that he had just beaten Will Clark for the 1989 N.L. Battling Title. / 20
We were using the greatest hitter in the world's bat. And he may have used it the day before, in Tempy's cage, and now we were holding it. Swinging. Hitting. Trying to bat left handed to be as authentic as possible. We were, in a disconnected way, shaking hands with our God. / 21
Sadly that would be the closest I would ever get to meeting Tony Gwynn. He regularly drove past my girlfriend's (now wife) house and they would wave, Tony waving back. I was never there for that awesomeness though. / 22
I became friends with @619sports who was calling Aztec games and I desperately wanted to try and finagle a meet with Mr. Padre. But that felt weird. So I took for granted that, one day, I would meet him. And then the time was up. / 23
Being a San Diego sports fan is a tough row to hoe. The experience is softened by having a player like Tony Gwynn to cheer for. So when all you've got is the man to hold on to, well, you want them to stick around. Forever. / 24
But he didn't get that. Nor did we. And there's nothing about that reality that's fair. But so it goes. / 25
I wish I could have planned this thread better and ended on the 19th tweet. Or that I could have told a better story and extended it to a 28th tweet. But things don't always play-out the way we would like. / 26
Tony Gwynn is ours. And I'm glad for that. / 27x
