The Mouth That Roared (41 page)

The headline of a June 2006 column by Stan Hochman for the
Philadelphia Daily News
threw more fuel on the fire. It asked, “Is it Dallas Green Time Again?” The column, written during a stretch when the Phillies lost 13 of 15 games, itself posed a couple more questions: “Is it time for déjà vu all over again? Is it time for Green and his big mouth and his throwback ideas about how the game should be played to be turned loose on this stumblin’ bumblin’ fumblin’ ballclub?”

I threw cold water on that idea, citing my advanced age and lack of interest in taking someone else’s job.

Fortunately, the Phillies played winning baseball down the stretch and salvaged another second-place finish.

General manager Pat Gillick asked me to visit with Charlie during the off-season to smooth things over. At our meeting, I clarified the meaning of what I said and made it clear I wasn’t after his job. We shook hands and have been on good terms ever since.

*

My first year back in Philadelphia in 1998, we drafted Pat Burrell with the first overall pick of the draft. After reaching the majors in 2000, he played very erratically. Every productive season was seemingly followed by a poor one. It bothered me that a player with such talent wasn’t fulfilling his potential. And I told him that when we hung out together in spring training. Then I told the world.

“It’s time for Pat to look in the mirror,” I told the
Philadelphia Inquirer
. “He’s got to become a baseball player and want to be a contributor and want to be the Pat Burrell that we all anticipated he was going to be when we signed him as a kid. He’s 30 years old. Damn, time is slipping by here.”

I think he took it to heart. Pat never became the superstar we thought he might be, but he and the rest of the team took an important step in 2007.

No longer satisfied with second-place finishes, they went on a memorable run in the final two and a half weeks of the season to catch the Mets and win the National League East. It was 1964 in reverse, with Philadelphia coming out on top this time. The Phillies ran into an even hotter Rockies team in the League Division Series, but simply making the postseason was a major breakthrough. A season after Howard won National League MVP in 2006, Rollins kept the award in the Phillies family.

We all know what happened the next year. Following another late-season comeback to win the division, the Phillies felt like a team that was ready to make a deep postseason run. From my perch, I saw even further growth on the field and in the clubhouse. The team played with a pride and character that I believe is an essential part of winning. Charlie deserves a lot of credit for engineering that. Cole Hamels emerged as an ace who could win in the playoffs. Brad Lidge was perfect as a closer. And our lineup clicked.

After beating the Milwaukee Brewers and Dodgers to get to the World Series, we took out a feisty Tampa Bay Rays team to celebrate our first championship in 28 years. That was a wonderful season, and I was ecstatic to see the organization capture another title. In the years since 1980, a generation of young Phillies fans had grown into adulthood without seeing the team go all the way. To them, the 2008 championship must have felt like a first.

The revenue generated by ticket and merchandise sales in 2008 helped us keep building the team. In a complete reversal of the past, the Phillies started freeing up money to sign top free agents and keep existing players. In another break with the past, stars like Roy Halladay and Cliff Lee, undeterred by the dimensions of Citizens Bank Park, actually wanted to come and play in Philadelphia.

There have been two no-hitters in postseason history—Don Larsen’s perfect game for the Yankees in the 1956 World Series and Roy Halladay’s no-hitter against the Reds in the 2010 League Division Series. I have to think I’m one of the only people who attended both.

From 2007 to 2011, the Phillies won five straight National League East titles.

Winning does wonders for a guy’s reputation.

A few years after my dust-up with Charlie, Hochman wrote, “Yo, I’m here to tell you that Charlie Manuel is the best Phillies manager in the last 50 years. Maybe forever! Been here six years, in the playoffs the last four, in the World Series twice. Won it once.”

Stan ranked Gene Mauch, who managed me for five seasons, as the second-best skipper in Phillies history. Of me, he wrote, “Green’s way of creating team unity was to get everybody mad at him! That might work, but not for the long haul.”

On the morning of September 11, 2001, hijacked airliners slammed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, part of a coordinated terrorist attack on the United States that claimed nearly 3,000 lives.

Several hours earlier, 90 miles northeast of the Pentagon, John and Roxanna Green welcomed their second child into the world, a girl they named Christina-Taylor.

The first photo of Christina-Taylor, snapped in the hospital shortly after her birth, was later featured in a book about children born on that tragic day. She and the other 9/11 babies symbolized the notion that renewal and hope will ultimately triumph over destruction and hate.

Christina-Taylor embodied that spirit.

Her dad, John, a former professional baseball player, worked as a scout for the Baltimore Orioles. Her mom, Roxanna, stayed home to care for her and her older brother, Dallas, who was named after her paternal grandfather, George Dallas Green.

Christina, as she became known to friends, gravitated to baseball. Her father had a strong connection to the game, but so did her grandfather, a lifelong baseball man who managed a World Series–winning team in 1980.

As a nine-year-old, Christina-Taylor was the only girl on her Little League baseball team in Tucson, Arizona, where her family relocated after her father took a scouting job with the Los Angeles Dodgers.

Equally comfortable on the ballfield and in the classroom, she brought home perfect grades and glowing assessments from her teachers. For a child her age, she showed an unusual interest in current affairs and the workings of government. Always seeking to get involved, she sat on her elementary school’s student council as a third grader.

On January 8, 2011, Christina-Taylor was offered an opportunity to see democracy in action. An adult neighbor invited her to a Saturday morning meet-and-greet with an Arizona congresswoman who was making the rounds in her home district. They’d make a day of it, the neighbor told Roxanna, with lunch and manicures afterward.

On a crisp and clear Tucson morning, Christina-Taylor joined dozens of other constituents of U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in the parking lot of a Safeway grocery store. She planned to say hello to Giffords and possibly ask a question if she could think of a good one.

As Christina-Taylor waited in line, a young man approached the group. He had no intention of asking a question, however. He was there to incite terror.

Over the next 16 seconds, he fired 31 shots from a semi-automatic pistol, including one to the head of Giffords, who miraculously survived her injuries.

Six people were killed in the rampage, including Christina-Taylor. The neighbor who brought her to the event was injured trying to shield her from the gunfire.

Born on a day that spurred myriad conversations about the world we live in, killed on a day that revived some of those conversations, Christina-Taylor Green became a tragic symbol of lost life, innocence, and infinite potential.

But for her grandfather, his eyes hidden by dark sunglasses at a press conference a month after the incident, she was and will always be the little girl he called Princess.

*

On the morning the planes hit the World Trade Center, Sylvia and I were driving back from Christiana Hospital in Wilmington to our Maryland farm. We had just come from seeing our beautiful new granddaughter, Christina-Taylor, for the first time. We heard about the terrorist attacks on the car radio. Feeling like we needed to see the unfolding events with our own eyes, I stopped at a nearby shopping center. At a Radio Shack store, we stood in front of a television and watched the news in disbelief.

A little less than 10 years later, Sylvia and I were at our vacation home in Providenciales, an island in the Turks and Caicos, looking forward to a lazy Saturday. We don’t normally watch much TV while we’re on the island, but we happened to turn the set on that morning. One of the all-news channels was reporting that Arizona congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and several others had been shot at a public event on the northwest side of Tucson, Arizona. Among the victims was a young girl. The breaking news would have gotten anybody’s attention, but because our son, his wife, and their two children lived in Tucson, it definitely grabbed ours.

John and his family lived on the opposite side of Tucson, but we still felt like we should check in with him. Sylvia called his cell phone, but it went to voice mail. We continued watching the coverage and waited to hear back from him. A short time later, John called. The little girl being talked about on the news was our granddaughter Christina-Taylor.

It’s hard to describe the emotions I felt at that moment. Just two weeks earlier, John and his family had spent Christmas with us in Providenciales. It was a wonderful time. The images of Christina-Taylor splashing in the Caribbean Sea were still fresh in my mind.

I was numb and screaming mad.

Sylvia and I made preparations to fly to Arizona. The next day, authorities released the names of the victims. Giffords, the target of the shooter, was clinging to life after being shot in the head at point-blank range. Christina-Taylor was the youngest of the six people killed in the massacre. The situation might have been even worse if bystanders hadn’t wrestled the gunman to the ground.

In my professional life, I’ve always enjoyed the challenge of fixing problems on a baseball field. Sometimes I succeeded, and other times I fell short. But I always tried. In the wake of this tragedy, I realized there was nothing I could do to fix what happened. As much as Sylvia and I hurt (and continue to hurt), we realized our son and daughter-in-law were the ones coping with the kind of immeasurable pain that can only come from losing a child. I couldn’t fix that. The only thing I could do was be there for my son and his family. In the days following Christina-Taylor’s death, that meant sitting and crying with them.

Her obituary read, “Our beloved Christina-Taylor was taken from us on January 8, 2011. There are no words to express how much she will be missed.”

And there are still no words to adequately describe my feelings about what happened. Sylvia and I had no idea that such an extremely personal tragedy would affect an entire nation.

Though she and I have different opinions about President Barack Obama, I’ll say this about the president: the speech he gave in Tucson the week following the shooting nailed a lot of the emotions I was feeling at the time. His words about Christina-Taylor in particular moved me profoundly.

And I believe that, for all our imperfections, we are full of decency and goodness, and that the forces that divide us are not as strong as those that unite us. That’s what I believe, in part because that’s what a child like Christina-Taylor believed…She saw public service as something exciting and hopeful. She was off to meet her congresswoman, someone she was sure was good and important and might be a role model. She saw all this through the eyes of a child, undimmed by the cynicism or vitriol that we adults all too often just take for granted. I want us to live up to her expectations. I want our democracy to be as good as Christina-Taylor imagined it. I want America to be as good as she imagined it. All of us, we should do everything we can to make sure this country lives up to our children’s expectations.

It provided me with some comfort to know that our loss was felt deeply by so many Americans. Sylvia and I got hundreds of cards from friends, many of them from the baseball world.

I spoke to the media when I got to Phillies spring training in Clearwater. I apologized to the reporters for not returning their calls. They knew that wasn’t my style. But for the first time in my life, really, I didn’t have the words to express what I was feeling.

During the press conference, I addressed the fact that the gunman had been able to purchase a semi-automatic weapon that held 33 bullets. “That doesn’t make sense to me,” I said. “I guess I didn’t think about that until this happened. What other reason is there to have these guns except to kill people?”

I’ve been around guns my whole life. My father and grandfather took me hunting as a kid, and it remains a favorite pastime of mine. But I don’t have a Glock, an assault rifle, or any of the other high-powered firearms frequently used in mass killings. I don’t understand why these weapons continue to be sold.

I can’t help but think of the Tucson shooting when I hear about other shooting tragedies, like the ones at a Connecticut elementary school and a crowded Colorado movie theater in 2012. We don’t seem to be getting any better at preventing that kind of tragedy.

I’m an eye-for-an-eye kind of guy. It angered me that some lawyers tried to say the guy who killed my granddaughter was not competent to stand trial. He was competent when he bought the gun, and he was competent when he squeezed off the rounds that killed my granddaughter and the others.