I lived across the street from my Grandma Silvey until I was 12 years old. Her house was practically my house as I spent as many nights with her as I did in my own house. My dad was a long-distance truck driver, and since he was on the road for weeks at a time, my mom, my sister, and I stayed most of the time with my grandma. Yes, we had our own house across the street, and our toys and clothes stayed in our rooms in our own house, but there just seemed little sense in fixing two separate suppers and breakfasts everyday when we could just all sleep together in Grandma’s yellow room (as we called her other bedroom) and we could spend our evenings with my Grandma Silvey and my Great-Grandma Smith, her mother who lived with her. My Grandpa drove a truck, too, so he was in-and-out as well, so the women of the house bunked together. Routine life was the women doing life together; the times when a man was around seemed odd – the exception rather than the rule.
So, in a household full of women, with little exposure to men, how did I become a baseball nut, an athlete, someone who knows how to keep a baseball score book and who hates the Braves because they traded Brett Butler in 1983 when she was just 11 years old when few modern fans even know who Brett Butler is? How did I become a Duke basketball fan as well as pick up enough lingo to discuss ice skating along with roller derby? How am I one of the few women of my age who can remember where she was when Jim Valvano’s NC State Wolfpack won the National Championship? How did I become a Lakers fan who read articles about Kareem Abdul Jabar when my friends were watching Dynasty? I remember wearing a Minnesota Vikings sweat shirt when I was little, and I remember trying to figure out how to hit golf balls with old wooden clubs my grandpa had stored in his junk building out back. In fact, nearly all of my childhood memories have a sport involved in them somewhere – shooting basketball in my backyard, playing softball with the neighborhood kids with my mom being all-time pitcher for both teams, racing my cousins either by running or riding our bikes around and around my grandma’s circular driveway, and hitting golf balls with Timmy, the next-door neighbor. Maybe I was born with a natural affinity for the athletic world (since my sister didn’t pick up this same affinity), but I feel certain that affinity was nurtured by my Grandma Silvey. And if I were to place bets, I would be willing to bet that she had that same natural affinity.
Every once in a while, some other television program might find its way on my grandma’s TV: we watched Little House on the Prairie and The Waltons during the week. We watched Lawrence Welk and Hee Haw on Saturday nights, and I would catch her watching old detective / murder mystery black-and-whites in the middle of the night when she couldn’t sleep, but most of the time, I remember my grandma watching sports on her TV. I can vividly recall Saturday afternoon college football games where I would watch for a little while and then go outside to try to replicate some of the cheers I saw the college cheerleaders do. I remember Sunday afternoons when she would listen to John Madden’s commentary for a while until he made her mad, and she would mute the TV, and watching her Redskins was a ritual all to itself. I remember her love for ice skating and how she would explain to me how the scores worked. We discussed tennis history when Andre Agassi broke protocol with his blue jean shorts. I knew who Tom Watson was because she watched golf, and when my grandpa was home, and he would always say, “Ssshhhh! They are putting!” as if they could hear us through the TV. I am eternally grateful for her loving Carolina instead of Clemson and inspiring me to become a Gamecock (although, she was the type who would said she would pull for Clemson as long as they weren’t playing Carolina. I didn’t take after her in that way). And conversations with visitors nearly always came back to sports of some sort when I was around her at home or at church. But the best sport, the one she really loved, the sport that shaped my entire existence was baseball. I love baseball because my Grandma Silvey taught me to love baseball.
I began playing t-ball when I was 5, and I played softball for years and years later. Often, my mom was the team’s scorekeeper, and she scared nearly everyone at the game with her enthusiasm for our successes and her sharp retorts at our failures (she once told a girl on my team that if she didn’t learn to run hard to first base, she was going to stick a firecracker up her butt). I did happen to take after my mother in that respect; ask my boys if you don’t believe me. Joel apologized to an umpire just last week with the explanation of “My mom is crazy.” But not my grandma. She sat at my games in her fold-out lawn chair in total silence. She didn’t cheer or fuss; she just observed. And when I got into her car after the game, she spent the ride home explaining to me how I needed to field a ground ball or how I needed to swing when I had 2 strikes or how I needed to keep my cool even when I encountered a bad call. She said no one liked a John McEnroe temper even though he got lots of publicity for his temper tantrums; I needed to learn to keep my emotions in check. Sorry, Grandma. Still working on that one.
She would also take me to see our town’s minor league team – the Spartanburg Phillies (who underwent name changes rather frequently). On Stroller Nights, sponsored by a column writer for the Spartanburg Herald-Journal, we could get into the games for free with a clipping of the newspaper column, so my Grandma and I went. We watched the blossoming of a few Major League stars right there in Spartanburg, SC.
Years later, I discovered where her love of baseball came from when I learned that she had played the game herself when she was younger. She had never told me about that time in her life until I asked her about an old photograph I saw in the newspaper, which prompted an eye-opening tale about cotton mill baseball programs, even for girls in ’40s and ’50s. Yep, just like the movie.
Years later, the very day before she died, Marc and I had taken Jordan, who was 5 at the time, to see his first Braves game at Turner Field on a Saturday afternoon. On our way back from Atlanta, I received the call that she probably wouldn’t make it much longer, so we brought Jordan in to the hospital to visit one last time Sunday morning. When she saw him, her first comment was, “Jordan, did you see Chipper hit that home run yesterday?” She lost consciousness later that day and died on Monday, August 30, 2004.
In terms of MLB, Grandma Silvey was first and foremost a Dodgers fan. She followed them from Brooklyn, and she told me they used to listen to games on the radio when she was a little girl. She also told me that we had Dodger-Blue blood in our veins, even when she would disapprove of Tommy Lasorda at times. She was also a Braves fan, as she felt she must be since we lived so close to Atlanta, and she was of the old-school philosophy that we are supposed to cheer for the home team, and she watched the Braves every night at 7:35 on TBS. In fact, she took me to my first MLB game at Atlanta Fulton County Stadium in the summer of ’84, to a Braves-Dodgers game, of course. But every afternoon when I got off the bus and entered her house for an afternoon snack, I would find her watching the Cubs on WGN. She often became exasperated with Harry Caray just as she did with John Madden, but she watched them every day they were on TV regardless. There, I learned to love Ryne Sandberg, an incredible 2nd baseman for the Cubs, and we discussed the Steve Sax / Ryne Sandberg rivalry regularly. There, I learned the reverence for Wrigley Field and the Ivy. There, I learned to sing “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” during the 7th-inning stretch. Afternoons with the Cubs became an indelible memory of the time I spent with my Grandma Silvey, time when the conversations may have started with baseball but soon turned into history lessons or moral lessons. Like I said, nothing new here – Cubs fans are telling this same story all over America this week. And that is why we love baseball; it is so much more than a sport. Baseball binds us as family and as Americans and is as much a part of our personal and national story as black-and-white photos and Chevrolets and apple pies. But the commonness of the story makes it no less special or meaningful to me, and I need to add mine to the pile.
So I had no choice but to stay awake late into the night and watch the Cubs win the World Series. We had waited so long. And at 1:30 in the morning, even as I sat up in bed with my husband, a baseball coach himself, watching history made on the TV in our house where we are raising two boys to play baseball, I was a little girl again, sitting in my Grandma’s living room, lamenting the hopelessness of the lovable losers, knowing that someday it was going to happen. They couldn’t keep losing forever. And they won! The Cubs are World Series Champs. And Grandma, this time, I am not even trying to keep my emotions under control.
Kristie Camp 