As a player, you have to portray a certain amount of necessary arrogance. When you’re walking to the plate, you need a strut in your step that says, I’m going to get you. But there’s a time, even during the game, when that wears off. There’s a time when, during a pitching change, you can walk over and exchange pleasantries with an ex-teammate or say hello to a third base coach. There’s nothing in the rule book that says you can’t be a good dude and still have an edge.
I’m the classic example. Nobody wanted to knock a pitcher’s head off more than me. But when I wasn’t either hitting or gearing up midpitch at third base, I’d like to think most people on other teams would say, “That Chipper is an all right dude. He came over and said hey to me, told me I was a good player.”
Getting a compliment from an established player can do wonders for a young player. And I don’t think there’s anything wrong with giving somebody on another team an encouraging word. Our pitchers could get them out no matter what I said.
Cal Ripken did it for me. So did Tony Gwynn. Some of my best friends in the game were guys I never played with. Do you think Derek Jeter is too big to autograph something for me? He would walk over after I hit a two-run double in the gap and say, “Hey, man, swinging it. Way to go.” Those are guys I respect. Those are guys I could sit down with at an All-Star game and have a beer with.
Meeting Cal in Game 1 of the ’95 World Series broke the ice for me. The next time I saw him was two years later when we played the Orioles in the first year of interleague play. With a couple of years under my belt, I felt better about walking up to somebody of Cal’s stature and saying, “Hey, what’s up?” But Cal had made me feel like I belonged from the get-go. It was the same way that series.
I was standing at third base during a pitching change and Cal came over to me. I was like a little schoolgirl, inwardly giggling and hee-heeing. Cal is talking to me. We massaged each other’s egos for a minute, but typical Cal, he did away with the pleasantries pretty quickly and got right into baseball talk.
He had just made the move from shortstop to third base that year. He started asking me where I took my cutoff throws from left field. I thought, You’re asking me for advice, really? But he was dead serious, so I backed up and showed him.
“Right here,” I said.
“OK, I can see that,” he said, and then went on. “Let me ask you something. Wouldn’t it help if you were back a little more towards the catcher? That way when you’ve got that runner coming around third, you can keep him in your peripheral vision longer. And you can already tell if the throw needs to be cut or if it’s on line. You can cut more bad throws.”
I’m thinking, Man, this guy has been playing third base for a shorter period of time than I have and he’s coming up with this great piece of advice.
“That makes perfect sense,” I said. “That’s awesome. Something so simple, I never even thought about that.”
From then on, I played as deep as I could toward the catcher on cutoffs. I never even had to listen for the catcher to tell me when to cut the throw because I already knew. And I had a much better shot of getting outs, either by throwing a guy out trying to take an extra base or letting a ball go through for an out at home plate. I got all that from one conversation on the base paths with Cal.
—
I had a couple of funny conversations standing on deck throughout my career, too. The most memorable one was with President Bush, the elder one, H.W.
He was sitting right behind our on-deck circle at Minute Maid Park in Houston during Game 1 of the 2001 Division Series. Big Astros fan. I couldn’t help but cut my eyes over there as I stepped out of our dugout. President Bush was looking right at me.
Straight-faced as hell, he said, “Don’t you do it.”
The game was tied 3–3 and Astros manager Larry Dierker had brought in Billy Wagner, their closer with the 100 mph fastball, to face me in the eighth inning. It was the right move. I was 0-for-9 with seven punch-outs off Wags at that point, hadn’t gotten so much as a base hit off him.
But I had a little shit-eating grin on my face.
“Mr. President, I’ve got a job to do,” I said. “You of all people should understand that.”
“I do,” he said. “But I’m really nervous about this at-bat.”
“I’m glad to hear that,” I said.
I think he actually helped relax me. I remembered something I had heard one of the Cardinals hitters, Eduardo Perez, say in passing by the cage, about facing Wagner. He said he always tried to swing an inch over the ball. Wags threw kind of uphill and everybody swung under his fastball. I figured I’d try it.
First pitch, Wagner threw me a heater middle in. I tried to swing an inch over it, and I barreled it. It landed in the first row in the Crawford Boxes out in left field.
After I crossed home plate and celebrated with my teammates, I looked over to President Bush. He had his hand on his head and his eyes wide, as if to say, “What?!”
I gave him that shit-eating grin again as I went back to our dugout. We won 7–4 and went on to sweep the series. That was pretty cool.
—
Playing major league baseball had perks. You get to meet a lot of cool people. For me, Muhammad Ali was at the top of the list.
I met The Champ in Houston. He scared the shit out of me.
I was with Karin and a baseball card dealer, who introduced us. I walked up to Ali and his entourage.
“How you doin’, Champ?” I said.
He cocked his head and said, “Did you call me a nigger?”
He said it with a straight face. His whole entourage looked dead serious. I took a step back. Finally, somebody in his entourage started cracking up. Eventually, Ali cracked up.
“Ah, look at that. White boy got scared,” somebody in his entourage said.
He loved getting that kind of reaction out of people. Karin and I laughed as soon as we could breathe again.
“Don’t ever do that again,” I said. “You just scared the shit out of me.”
Ali just laughed and let me take a picture with him.
He put my fist up to his jaw, so it looked like I was right-crossing him. He signed a couple of gloves for me. I thought that was killer.
Then there was the time I got to meet Christie Brinkley. She was down in spring training at West Palm shooting photos of baseball players for Beckett Baseball magazine. She was actually the one taking the pictures, with some guidance from another photographer. She’d been in front of the camera for so long, I guess it intrigued her to be behind it.
She took pictures of a couple of us with the Braves and Expos. One of the ones she took of me ended up on the cover of Beckett Baseball.
As soon as I saw it a couple of weeks later, I knew it was going to drive Bobby Cox crazy. He’s a stickler for how you wear your uniform, and there I was with my sleeves rolled up, my shirt unbuttoned, and my hat on backwards. But hey, she did with me as she pleased. What am I going to say?
Christie Brinkley was still married to Billy Joel at that time. Guys like me had fantasized about her for years in that black dress in the “Uptown Girl” video.
The shoot was fun. Not only was she gorgeous but also really nice and easy to talk to. She wanted to play catch with me, and she signed a baseball to me that I still have.
—
I got to meet some pretty amazing celebrities during the course of my career, but a lot of the “everyday” people I met because of baseball made just as big an impression on me, if not more. Matthew Bowles was the prime example.
Early on in my career, I was looking for a charitable organization to support, something that I felt a personal connection with. Nobody in my family had cancer, multiple sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s disease, by the grace of God. I didn’t even lose my first grandparent until I was forty-three years old.
I was still searching for the right fit in January of 1997, when I met Matthew at a celebrity hunting event outside of Selma, Alabama. He was an eleven-year-old from South Georgia.
We were introduced through Jackie Bushman, a big name in the hunting industry, who started the Buckmasters Classic to give Make-A-Wish kids a chance to realize their dreams of hunting.
Matthew had cystic fibrosis, a life-threatening genetic disease that can affect your lungs and pancreas. His days were numbered.
You could tell he was sick. He was gaunt, and he had to have an oxygen tank with him all the time. But he had a fervor, this spice for life, and he wasn’t going to let his sickness dampen his spirits. It was awesome to witness.
When I got into camp, Matthew already had a truckload of deer. He had shot himself out of ammo.
“Man, you had a day, didn’t you?” I said, nodding toward the back of his truck.
“Chipper,” he said. “I sat there and emptied my gun. I shot three or four deer and I had a blast. But after I ran out of bullets, this big buck walked out. Man, I really hope you kill that deer.”
He didn’t say, “Man, I wish I hadn’t run out of bullets because I really want to go back and harvest that deer.” He wanted me to do it, and he was genuine about it. That tugged at my heartstrings.
“He’s this big nine-point, with a big ol’ round rack,” Matthew said. “He’s got big twos and threes [referring to the G2 and G3 antlers], a big frame. It’s the biggest deer I’ve ever seen in my life. What’s the biggest deer you ever killed?”
“A one-hundred-and-twenty-inch seven-point,” I said.
“Oh,” he said. “Then he’s the biggest deer you’ll ever see, too.”
That got my attention.
A couple of days later, I was in a tree stand when I saw the deer Matthew had described. I knew it from the second I laid eyes on him. I got him with one shot.
The first person I ran into back at camp was Matthew Bowles. When he caught a glimpse of the deer in the back of my truck, his face lit up like a Christmas tree. He gave me a big hug. Then he walked over to the tailgate and picked up the deer’s head.
“I would have had you if I’d had one more bullet,” he said.
I sat there beaming like a proud father. This was such a cool kid. Everybody who ran across Matthew was drawn to him. I don’t know if I would have been as happy-go-lucky as he was, making the most of every single moment like he did, if I knew I was going to die soon.
Within a week of the Buckmasters Classic, Matthew relapsed and went in the hospital. His dad told me they knew he didn’t have much time left. One of Matthew’s dreams had been to kill a deer and have it mounted on his wall, so they put a rush on a mount from one of the bucks he killed in Selma. When his dad walked into his hospital room carrying the mount, Matthew’s face lit up. He put his arms around that mount and hugged it.
Not long afterward, Mr. Bowles got up to get a Coke from the vending machine down the hall. Matthew passed away while he was gone.
It’s a tough story, but one I always tell at all the golf tournaments and charity events I host to explain why I support 65 Roses, the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation.
At various times in my life I’ve felt as if God has tapped me on the shoulder and said, “Whoa, watch yourself.” I’ve also felt as if God has tapped me on the shoulder and said, “I’m putting this here for a reason. If you’re smart enough to listen, you can get a lot out of it.”
Meeting Matthew Bowles was one of those moments. The Bowles gave us the mount from that nine-point deer, and my parents put it over their fireplace. It’s a monster.
—
A week before the 1997 season started, when I walked into our clubhouse in spring training in West Palm, something felt off. The mood was somber.
I went to my locker, which was between David Justice and Marquis Grissom, and tried to mind my own business. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed DJ’s locker was packed up. All his clothes and gear were in Braves duffel bags. David was nowhere to be found.
Marquis was sitting on the other side of me, shooting the breeze with some guys.
“Where’s David going?” I said.
“We’re going to Cleveland,” Grissom said.
Cleveland? Then it hit me that he had said we.
“We’re going to Cleveland?” I said.
“You ain’t,” Grissom said. “But me and David are. We got traded.”
“Shut the fuck up,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said. “We got traded for Kenny Lofton and a left-handed pitcher.”
You could have hit me with a two-by-four right between the eyes, and I wouldn’t have been more shocked.
I didn’t understand. We went to two World Series with these twenty-five guys. Why would we break it up?
Two of my best friends weren’t going to be here anymore? David had taken me under his wing from day one. Marquis was the consummate professional and a great teammate. I had played the outfield with both of them. I loved hitting a couple of spots behind Marquis because the threat of him stealing meant I saw a lot of fastballs. David gave me some of the best protection of my career hitting a couple of spots behind me.
And David was my big brother, my mentor. He was the one guy who didn’t care as much about hazing me as he did preparing me to be “the man” in our lineup one day. After all my at-bats my rookie year, he would sit down next to me and say, “OK, what’d he do? What’s his go-to pitch? What do you think he’s going to get you out with the next time? What approach are you going to take?”
Even as he was making fun of me for being the “Golden Child,” he was preparing me.
“You’re good-looking, and you got game,” he said. “You’re going to be here forever, Chipper.”
When David showed up at his locker that morning, he had tears in his eyes.
“Man, I’ve got to get out of here before I start bawling,” he said.
Our goodbyes were short-lived. I was getting choked up, too.
That trade gave me my first real taste of the business of baseball. We had Andruw Jones and Jermaine Dye waiting in the wings, and the “Big Three” were all due extensions. The left-hander we got from Cleveland turned out to be Alan Embree, the guy I’d hit the bull off of in Durham. He was a good pitcher but, by virtue of his role, didn’t stay long. And Lofton, as good a player as he was, had no desire to be in Atlanta. He could hit .330 with a toothpick if he wanted to, and he was a Gold Glove center fielder who could fly. But he had found a home in Cleveland, and he got traded against his will. For whatever reason, Lofton never had much success as a Brave and lasted only one season. He signed back with Cleveland that winter.
Shortly after the trade first went down, David Justice said something in the paper about how “the club is Chipper’s now.” I read it. I didn’t agree with it. The quickest way to piss off the powers that be who were still in that clubhouse was to walk around like I was some kind of top dog.
Our pitchers were our leaders. They might have acted like ten-year-olds off the field, but they were still “the man” when they were on the mound, and I wasn’t ready to assume that leadership role yet. You have to grow into that. I still had a lot to learn.