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| Volume 25 | Issue 4 | July/August 2008
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| The Sporting Life with Goose Gossage |
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| by Bryan Di Salvatore |
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In the fall of 1978, two young friends, one from central Washington, the other from Colorado Springs, were hunting in Rocky Mountain high country. You know the sort of place: a grand, ancient bowl, large as a Connecticut county, straddling timberline. No sound but the wind. Not another human in sight. Nothing above but scree and steepness and sky, nothing below but the rest of the world, which seemed, at the moment, fussy, far away and a little bit foolish.
Former co-workers, the men were lucky enough not to have to punch a time card for a few months. The previous year had gone well, the future looked better.
As it was, Bruce Kison, from Pasco, Washington, would spend 15 years pitching solidly in the major leagues for Pittsburgh, California and Boston. The other, Goose Gossage, became one of the most successful and effective relief pitchers in baseball history. He played 22 years, was a nine-time all-star, and ranks in the top handful of every relief pitching statistic worth its salt. Most dramatically, this summer he’ll become only the fifth reliever in history to be inducted into baseball’s Hall of Fame.
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Gossage, center, with elk hunting buddies circa 1970s. |
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| “Talk about going from one end of the spectrum to the other,” Goose says of that hunt, one of hundreds he has taken over the years, “A week or two before, I was in Yankee Stadium with 55,000 fans screaming at me or for me, weight of the world on my shoulders. Then . . . it’s just Bruce and me, in the solitude and beauty of the Rocky Mountains.”
Pressure, indeed. In the race to the 1978 World Series, Gossage had retired the 9th inning Kansas City Royals (with a man on) to help the Yankees win the pennant. Then, in the World Series, he shut down the Dodgers in a crucial fourth game, and pitched shutout ball in the eighth and ninth innings of the sixth game, giving the Yankees the title.
“You know, whenever I went hunting during my career, I said to myself, Goose, you’re a lucky man. You have the Rockies and New York City, which became a home away from home in a way. That sounds a little funny coming from a small-town Colorado boy, but it’s exciting. What kept me sane through the years was knowing I didn’t have to stay in New York. I believe in the contrast of life.”
How could he not. Today, Colorado Springs—which Gossage still calls home—is a well-scrubbed place, an Eagle Scout with traffic lights. With a metro population gaining on half a million, it’s America’s 48th largest city and the southern tip of the FoCo (Fort Collins-Denver-Colorado Springs) corridor. It is a high-tech industrial hub; home of the U.S. Olympic Training center; headquarters of several large religious groups such as Focus on the Family and Young Life; and site of a packet of military facilities, including the U.S. Air Force Academy and NORAD’s Cheyenne Mountain.
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Goose passing it on to his sons. |
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| But back in 1951, when Richard Michael Gossage was born, The Springs wasn’t much more than a dusty, windy afterthought, whose economy depended on ranching and farming.
Goose’s father was a landscaper. “We never starved,” he remembers, “but there were lean times. Dad was a great hunter. He’d have been a perfect mountain man. We grew up in town, but we spent every minute we could outdoors. I was hunting darn near before I was old enough to pull the trigger. Small game at first, rabbits, birds, big game later. We had a freezer, but we ate the small stuff soon as we shot ‘em.
“When I got older, you couldn’t keep me down. I’d run around all over the place looking for pop bottles, then we’d turn those in for the deposit and buy gas so we could go hunting. I remember mom saying that she’d eaten so much deer she was going to start sprouting antlers.”
When he wasn’t hunting, Goose played baseball.
“I was good, but I’d get all embarrassed when [my dad] said he thought I’d pitch in the big leagues. I thought players like Mickey Mantle had to be fictitious. We didn’t have any uniforms. Some of my greatest memories, as successful as I was, were on the sandlot.”
In fact, Gossage has a feature segment in the DVD of Sandlot: Heading Home called “For the Love of the Game,” which, he says, is “about the life lessons that are learned on that baseball field.”
He worries that what he calls an atmosphere of “instant success” is instilling the wrong ideas in youngsters today. “My White Sox manager, Chuck Tanner, put me in the bullpen which, in those days, was a scrap heap, where old starting pitchers went to die. But we changed that. A reliever became very important. But not overnight.
“Baseball, like life, is not about ‘your kid’s a star.’ If he’s gonna be a star, that’s fine, but it’s important he just go out and have fun and enjoy the game for the wonderful game it is. Baseball is about failure. Even a .300 hitter fails seven times out of ten.”
Every elk hunter is familiar with these kinds of odds—the norm of failure making success all the sweeter. Goose would like to see more young folks coming into hunting, learning those lessons, tasting the magic.
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“I know, personally, Goose is one of the most generous, kind-hearted men you will ever meet,” says David Allen, Elk Foundation president. “Goose has also spent hundreds of hours in the outdoors with all of his boys as they grew up. He made this a priority and it shows today, as he and Corna have raised three great young men.” (photo courtesy of Goose Gossage) |
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| “Kids need to get out. I don’t care if it’s a ball field or hunting. I worry about hunting. Fewer people seem interested. It’s different than when I grew up. My family hunted a lot, but it was a way of life. We never killed what we didn’t eat. I don’t know if parents are exposing kids to hunting enough. It isn’t just killing. It’s . . . the older I get the more aware I am of how special these animals are. We have a tradition as sportsmen, an obligation. I mean, what would happen if no one hunted? They’d get out of control in numbers. There’d be huge winter kills, misery. We need to be caretakers.
“But to do this right, we need conservation. The animals need land. That’s where groups like the Elk Foundation and others come in. I’ve seen land disappear here like nobody’s business. Where I hunted, now it’s all houses. But, at the same time, it’s great, there are elk and deer where there weren’t before. That’s due to conservation. Awareness.”
Goose speaks intensely, passionately, just like he played. He was listed at 6’3” and, with his great blond drooping moustache, a barely sub-sonic fastball, a firm belief he, not the hitter, owned both halves of the plate, and a steely scowl that made him look like a cross between the president of an outlaw Scandinavian motorcycle gang and Attila the Hun . . . he was, to put it mildly, a presence.
“Truth is,” he once said, “if I’m a batter, I don’t want to hit against me.”
And he brings that same intensity to his post-playing days, which are spent hunting, doing a little spring training coaching for the Yankees, golfing and good works.
“I’ve worked with a great group, the El Pomar Foundation—darn near anything public and beautiful in Colorado, they had a hand in it—to get some playing fields here in town. And now we have nine of ‘em, on 54 acres.” (He neglects to mention the complex is named in his honor.)
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A lifelong hunter, Goose Gossage will enter the Baseball Hall of Fame on July 21. (Elk Foundation file photo) |
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| Once you get Goose going, it’s hard to get him to stop, even if, in fact, you wanted him to. He’ll hunker down and talk caliber (his favorite rifle at the moment—part of what he calls a “regular armory,” is a Sako 7 mag), his opinion of many baseball records (Inflated!) and steroids (Bad stuff!). He’ll tell you about hunting whitetails in Texas and muleys in eastern Colorado, or the time he and his cousins went after a Kodiak bear in Alaska, (“The first hunt I ever flew to.”). He’ll even, with notable candor, tell you about the sad day that he had to sell a ranch he had bought during his playing days. (“I’m not much of a money man.”)
But the central focus of his life these days is bonding with his sons—Jeff, Keith and Todd, all in their 20s.
“I haven’t gotten an elk in three or four years, but the boys have. They love to hunt. Me, I get—maybe it’s age—less of a thrill out of a kill than I used to. You talk about adrenalin? There’s no difference in intensity between looking down at home plate in the late innings of a big game and, after four or five empty days in rugged country, seeing an elk and putting a stalk on! Now I get that watching the boys hunt, just like my dad. When we were too young for a “rough hunt” we’d go out after rabbits and the like. That’s the legacy thing I was talking about. We’re getting up a pack train for next fall. We used to do a lot of backpacking, small tents. I’m beginning to take it a little easier.
”One thing funny about all this is my wife. She won’t step on an ant. I told the boys when they were younger, don’t lie, [about getting an animal] but you might want to throttle back on the details with Mom. She gets upset. Once, a friend and I got us a couple of bucks. We got back and I’m so excited, I said, ‘Hon, come on out. Look at these!’ She goes to the garage, takes one look and bursts into tears.
“So I said to myself, ‘Okay, back to the drawing board.’”
Goose laughed.
“You know,” he said, “some people, a lot of them I suppose, just don’t understand the real meaning of hunting until they’ve done it. You hear the stories, ‘I killed a deer and I was a basket case.’ Well, okay, fine. It isn’t for everyone, and I respect that. So I don’t push hunting on everyone. But if we do hunt, and talk about it, we’ve got to do it right. And we’ve got to help the animals, these wonderful animals, thrive. True sportsmen respect this big old wild world. We try to preserve it. The good word . . . we need to pass it on. With luck and a lot of hard work, it’ll spread all over.”
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| Bryan Di Salvatore is the author of A Clever Base-Ballist: The Life and Times of John Montgomery Ward. He lives in Montana. |
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