Jace Wittman had always thought of himself as special. Like his brother-in-law, Bo Hines, Wittman was a miracle. He was the fifth child in a brood of six, which in and of itself didn’t make him special, except for the fact that his mother had had three miscarriages before his birth.
His mother always called Jace her gift from Saint Theresa. Every miscarriage took its toll on Mary Alice Wittman, but the Roman Catholic Wittmans didn’t believe in birth control. Jace Francis Xavier Wittman’s birth proved God still loved his mother, and even though she would eventually have another child after him, a girl, Jace would always be the special one.
His older brothers teased him and often ganged up on him, but nothing ever dimmed his belief in his predestination to greatness.
“No matter how many times we hit him,” his older brother Frank would tell friends, “Jace would never back down from an argument.”
Jace was never wrong, and his mother made sure the Wittman siblings understood it. No one could ever tell her that Jace wasn’t perfect. When he was caught with matches and gasoline setting a neighbor’s shed on fire, Mary Alice blamed his friends for egging Jace on.
On the baseball diamond, Jace was the best baseball player. He had gloves for batting, fielding, and running the bases, a trio of bats to use, and real cleats. Jace pitched and played shortstop when not on the mound. The biggest kid on the field, he led the league in home runs—that was until Stan Daniels’ family moved from Gulf Breeze to Cordova Park when the governor appointed his father to a county judgeship.
Stan played with a hand-me-down glove from his older brother. He wore Keds, not baseball cleats, and used whatever bat the coaches handed him. But he could hit homers from the right and left sides of the plate, and his fastball was unhittable.
Roger, whose nephew played on Stan’s team, remarked, “It was something watching the Daniels kid come up to bat. He was thin and wiry, with lanky, rust-colored hair that fell straight over blue eyes. Everything seemed effortless for the boy.”
Jace hated him, and so did his mother. When Stan was the altar boy at St. Paul’s, she wouldn’t take communion.
Both Stan and Jace made the Little League’s all-star team. At the team party at the Wittman house, Jace beat all his teammates on his brand-new ping-pong table playing, of course, with his own special paddle.
Then Stan took off one of his flip-flops. Using it as a paddle, he beat Jace in three straight games. Mary Alice had her husband put the table on the street after the party. Jace never played ping-pong again. Neither did Stan.
Both boys went to Pensacola Catholic High. Stan didn’t try out for the football team his freshman or sophomore years. He worked at his grandparents’ grocery store after school. His parents were fine with that. They wanted him to learn the value of a dollar and how to handle customers.
Jace quarterbacked a rather mediocre team, which won its district but never progressed far in the state tournament.
The coaches watched Stan in PE and convinced him to try out his junior year. He not only won the starting position but also quarterbacked the team to two consecutive state titles. Jace was moved to tight end.
Stan got a scholarship to Florida. Jace went to Louisiana Tech and never forgave Daniels for stealing his thunder and proving that he wasn’t as special as his mother and he thought. Within a year, the Louisiana Tech coaches kicked him off the team. There were rumors that he had gotten a professor’s daughter pregnant—something never mentioned in polite social circles.
Stan, meanwhile, was injured his sophomore year and never started a game at Florida as quarterback. He still earned a UF letter after the coaches switched him to be the long snapper on punts and field goals. Stan went on to law school, worked two years with the state attorney after graduation, and then joined one of the big firms in town.
Both Jace and Stan returned to Pensacola and married girls that were best friends at Pensacola Catholic High. The wives never expected Jace and Stan to get along, which was a good thing since they didn’t.
Jace went back to school at Pensacola State College until he flunked out. He got a job as a bartender at a Warrington dive, The Barrels. His career changed when his father died in a boating accident, and his mother married Bruce Eaton, Sue Hines’ father. Jace became an agent for Eaton’s real estate firm.
Though their wives stayed close, Jace and Stan rarely crossed paths. Stan became a managing partner of his law firm and president of The Florida Bar. His firm, one of the oldest in the state, mainly handled the legal affairs of corporations, specializing in the utilities, health-care systems, banks, insurance, real estate, and construction industries. They partnered with large out-of-town firms to defend the tobacco and pharmaceutical companies when they were sued in Florida courts. Whether the lawyers won or lost their cases, Daniels’ firm always got paid.
The animosity between Jace and Stan came primarily from Wittman. Stan never commented on Jace and their high school days. For his wife’s sake, he tried to keep his relationship with Jace civil. But Wittman saw every success of Daniels as something that was stolen from him.
Jace floundered as a realtor, largely because he spent more time playing softball and hunting on the Eaton’s land in South Alabama than selling real estate. When Stan’s firm hired him to handle a land deal on Pensacola Beach, Jace botched it so badly that his stepfather was forced to rescue him. This gave Wittman even more reason to hate his rival.
Then Jace somehow got himself elected to the Pensacola City Council. In politics he found the adoration and attention that was sorely lacking in the rest of his life. He positioned himself as a rebel who was an environmentalist and advocate for the people. He didn’t win many council votes, but he never lost an election until the maritime park controversy.
The proposed project was a no-brainer for most people. The city would take polluted waterfront property across from city hall that it owned, use bond money to remediate it, and create a public-private joint venture to revitalize downtown Pensacola that was still struggling to recover from Hurricane Ivan and the 2008 recession. It was progressive thinking outside of the box, something that Jace would naturally support.
But there was one big problem for Jace. It turned out Stan Daniels represented A. J. Kettler, the owner of Pensacola’s minor league baseball team who wanted to use the ballpark proposed for the site for the Pensacola Pilots’ games. Jace could not let Stan take credit for the renaissance of downtown Pensacola, which would happen if Daniels’ client got a piece of the maritime park.
Wittman found every reason to oppose the plan to build the park. So no matter what Stan or anyone else said to persuade him that it would be the best idea for the city, Jace refused to agree that the maritime park would revitalize Pensacola. Stan even had the bishop try to intervene and mediate the dispute between Jace and Kettler, the baseball team’s owner. But Jace wouldn’t budge.
When the Pensacola City Council finally passed the plan for the park by a 9-to-1 vote, Jace immediately began a petition drive to rescind the decision. It became a vicious battle. There were no bounds to the lies and half-truths that Jace spread to stop the park. He focused primarily on the baseball park, overlooking the maritime museum, office building, and other components of the project. As far as Jace was concerned, the battle over the construction of the maritime park boiled down to whether to have a ball field for the Pilots. Jace called the public-private venture a “land grab by a millionaire carpetbagger,” completely ignoring Kettler’s sixteen-million-dollar investment in the project.
The Pensacola Insider supported the construction of the new maritime park and expressed enthusiasm for the addition of a ball field. I created a weekly feature in which we tackled Wittman’s lie of the week. My blog became particularly effective in bedeviling the councilman and his cohorts. I rapidly rose on Wittman’s enemies list, though never high enough to supplant Stan Daniels.
The referendum to build the park passed with 57 percent of the vote. A year later, Wittman lost his council seat. His wife died of cervical cancer while he was running for reelection, and he and his daughter moved in with Bo and Sue. The couple had plenty of room, and Sue provided a motherly influence for her niece. Besides, Jace had been forced to sell his house to pay for the cancer treatments.
Wittman’s new petition drive sponsored by his political action committee “Save Our Pensacola” was his final attempt to stop the park and deny another victory for Daniels and his client.
Wittman’s goal was to cancel the building contract and force a new contract that didn’t include construction of the ballpark. He needed to present a petition signed by 10 percent of the city’s registered voters—about 3,700 signatures.
One more time it was Jace Wittman versus Stan Daniels. Jace could not—would not—let Stan beat him again. Any collateral damage didn’t concern him.
He had to win.