JOHNSON: Baseball legend Rod Carew overcomes tragedy to help kids

By Bill Johnson, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published June 27, 2007 at midnight

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It had been better than a decade since I last spoke with him, that awful day when he walked from a tiny, glassed-in, doctor-filled hospital room, dabbed at his eyes and softly began to cry.

"We lost her."

That was all Rod Carew said before he was swept up into the arms of some half-dozen people hugging him.

We had spent weeks together before that day, him chatting and me writing, the outcome of a desperate call he had made, asking me to write about his daughter, Michelle, 18, and what people could do to help her and leukemia patients like her.

Her loss in 1996 flat leveled him inside a misery from which I wasn't fully convinced he would emerge.

Yet there he stood Tuesday, on the baseball field at Regis University, a Hall of Fame, seven-time American League batting champion teaching dozens of mostly black middle schoolers the proper way to slide into a bag.

He immediately recognized me.

He is a little grayer now, like me a little thicker about the waist, but still standing on the long, spindly legs I thought should rightly snap in that exaggerated crouch the first time I met him. That is now a quarter century ago, when as a young, first-time-out baseball writer, I nervously walked up to the cage while he was taking batting practice.

"What is this (bleeping) kid doing here?" he barked over and over, pointing his bat me. OK, he was a jerk. We laugh about it now. Kind of.

"Not in a million years," he said after we shook hands and I asked what he was doing and whether he ever wanted to coach in the majors again.

The last time I saw him, he was the hitting coach of the Angels, standing with the team in Anaheim, Calif., during the playing of the national anthem, the day after Michelle died. He was in street clothes.

He would continue in that job for another three years before taking the same job with the Brewers for another two.

"I got tired of baby-sitting," he explained firmly, "of just begging guys to come out and do early work. I will never go back."

Major League Baseball came to him after that stint in Milwaukee, putting him on the rules committee before asking if he'd help with its academies in Compton, Calif., as well as elsewhere in the United States and abroad.

"This is way more fun," he said of instructing at camps such as this one at Regis, the Opportunity Through Baseball clinic, a three- week, all-expenses-paid program, now in its 14th year. Forty-eight inner-city boys, ages 11-14, are being taught not only baseball but academic skills and self-esteem building.

"I know what this can mean to these kids," Rod Carew, now 61, said. "As a kid, when I got on a baseball field, I forgot about being abused by my dad at home. If I can get these kids out playing, if baseball can give these kids any opportunity, why not?"

The clinic's focus is "Sports, not gangs," a theme that is never uttered but is constantly reinforced in the more than a dozen coaches' emphasis on self-esteem and confidence-building.

"These kids want someone to look up to," Rod Carew said, "to guide them along the way. I had that. This is about giving them confidence, something maybe some of them don't have, which can help them avoid a lot of negative things we all know are out there."

I ask if any of the boys know who he is, reminding him that none were even born on the day he retired. Rod Carew laughed.

"Some do," he said, still chuckling. "I think most have a sense, a feeling, that this old guy did something in baseball."

To put it mildly.

I ask him of his life now.

"Life has been great," he said. Yes, he acknowledged, he went through a terrible time after Michelle's death. He and his then-wife of more than 30 years, Marilyn, divorced. He survived by dedicating himself to the leukemia research work he began during Michelle's illness.

He started a foundation, which over the past decade has raised millions for research and blood drives and bone marrow education.

"When Michelle fell ill, there was only a fraction of the African-American population in the (bone marrow) registry. Today," Rod Carew said, "the number is much greater. But there is still a long way to go . . . So I'm still on that crusade.

"And I don't look at it anymore as I lost a daughter. We have saved so many kids in the years since. Now, all those kids, I feel, are my kids."

He remarried six years ago. The Twins, with whom he was Rookie of the Year and earned all those batting titles from 1965 to 1979, then called, offering a spring coaching and management job. It is why on this day he is dressed in a Minnesota uniform.

"I am very happy now, content even," Rod Carew said, the wide smile on his face I had never before seen, one I honestly did not think I would ever see.

"I have a great family and my health. Now, I am never away from my family for more than four days. Ask me, everything else is gravy. You can't want for anymore than that."

We shook hands again.

There were more stories and lessons to share with those little boys.

johnsonw@RockyMountainNews.com

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