Normal recovery time for the operation is about a year. It takes months to get the necessary range of motion back in your elbow, fighting through layers of scar tissue. But that was just too long for Lars.
After surgery, Lars walked into the doctor’s office for a consultation and he asked the doctor how long it would take to get full mobility back in his arm. The doctor told him the usual, months of rehab. Lars asked why, a question most people would hold off on, content to take the doctor’s word, considering their arm just had holes drilled in it. But Lars had done a lot of homework on the surgery before he went under the knife—a lot. In fact, it wasn’t uncommon to catch Lars reading books on pharmacology or medical journals in the locker room.
The doctor explained the process of recovery—how breaking up all the scar tissue is excruciating and how the body has to go about it slowly to build up its tolerance. Lars looked the doctor in the face and bluntly asked, “Pain is the only thing? There are no other repercussions?”
“The kind of pain I’m talking about is enough of a repercussion.”
“So, I could get it back now if I could take the pain?”
The doctor laughed. “Sure, but you don’t want to do that.”
Lars stood up right then and there, pulled off his sling, placed his arm in the frame of the office door, and jerked his arm straight. He swooned and passed out. When he came to, despite the chastisement of his doctor, he could extend his arm straight.
Of course, this story didn’t shock me that much. Before he had Tommy John, he chose to have open-back surgery with no anesthetic. He said that, at the time, he believed experiencing the farthest reaches of pain would serve to expand his ability to appreciate life more fully. It was part of his metaphysical period, in which he also got high and traced his out-of-body experiences in spiral patterns, hoping to capture thoughts created by brain activity usually operating in the subconscious.
You can’t see the scar on his back. It’s covered by a tattoo of Atlas, the mythological god who carried the world on his own back. The variation depicted on Lars’s body was slightly different though because his Atlas let the world fall and splatter all over the ground like an egg and is walking away from it. When I asked Lars what it meant, he said, “Atlas is basically saying, I don’t give a fuck about the world, and I’m going to do my own thing.”
Lars and I actually lived together for part of a season. A very nice, well-adjusted, Catholic host family with three kids, a cat, and a dog put us up. Lars, despite all my expectations, did not kill any of them. In fact, they loved him. He was a charmer and a gentleman, and never missed a chance to TiVo Grey’s Anatomy. To Lars, there were no set ways to do things, no rules of operation, no expectations but his own.
Lars stood up and walked to the front of the group. Earp, who simply thought Lars was batshit crazy, was giddy at the thought of what might come out of Lars’s mouth.
“Got a good one for us?” Earp asked.
“I like it,” Lars replied in a way that conveyed he didn’t care if anyone else did.
“Alright, lay it on us.”
Dryly and completely void of emotion, Lars looked to us and spoke, “What’s the hardest thing about rollerblading?”
“I don’t know. What?” Earp asked.
“Telling your parents you’re gay.”
Chapter Nine
After that, Lars was elected to tell jokes at most of the morning meetings. A few days later, he led the day off with one about an octopus who could play the bagpipes. The punch line was something along the lines of this: “Play ’em? Once I get these fancy pajamas off, I’m gonna fuck ’em!”
We’ve heard funnier jokes, but the situation Lars told it in made all the difference. A film crew was on location to document the life of another camper, Cooper Brannan. Cooper was a former soldier injured in the War on Terror, when a flashbang grenade exploded in his left hand, costing him a digit. Before he joined the service, he was a pitcher with aspirations of going pro. In what was sure to become the feel-good story of the season, the Padres signed Cooper to a spring-training deal, stirring up a media frenzy.
Everyone from Jim Rome to Deal or No Deal was in, asking Coop what it felt like to go from active duty to pro athlete in America’s greatest pastime. To Coop’s credit, his answers were always humble, respectful, and genuine. He was a media darling, and the cameras seemed to appear at his command. Unfortunately, they did not disappear at his whim, or maybe they would have opted out of videotaping Lars’s morning joke.
Rather than toning things down, the first thing Lars did was walk up to the panoramic lens of the film crew and put two middle fingers into view, causing his peers to erupt with laughter. Then, after taking his place in front of the group, he proceeded to stretch the joke into a five-minute, Andrew Dice Clay swearfest, dropping lines like “Holy fucking shit, that octopus is the most fucking amazing musician I’ve ever seen, he’s like Prince.” Before he reached his conclusion, the camera crew had to stop recording, as none of the material was usable in Coop’s daily in-the-life-of documentary. The entire camp tittered like naughty little kids each time Lars used a swear word, including Earp, who had no one but himself to blame.
Along with Lars’s jokes, Coop’s film crew became a normal camp occurrence. On the cover of many magazines and television screens, Coop was a sensation, while Lars’s humor was a centerpiece for player discussion. Coop, it could be said, represented the side of the game most people wished it to be, which is why it was such good television material. Lars, on the other hand, represented what baseball life was really like, raw and unrefined. I found it odd that both could exist in the presence of one another without canceling each other out.
Evidence of Coop’s mass appeal was apparent thanks to the stream of letters from well-wishers and supporters, which came pouring into his locker daily, not to mention the many boxes of complimentary equipment that showed up with his name on it.
Before he was signed on, there were reports of Coop’s ability to gas the ball into the low nineties from the left side. Maybe it was this particular spring, maybe it was always this way, but all the hype surrounding his ability to bring lefty heat looked like make-believe because most of the time he labored in the low eighties, scuffling for outs.
To most folks, that didn’t matter. His testimony steamrolled right over such trivial things like production, even though it was make or break for everyone else. Coop was the most remarkable story in camp, and it was generally accepted that he’d have a job come the end of it—a fact that sat well with most players, though the reasoning behind it was undeniably questionable, considering the business’s normal operating procedure.
Coop had that kind of an image—too good to waste. So good, in fact, that it made the normal business of the game look ugly in comparison. He was such a quality individual, a credit to the service, that there was something cheap about how much attention he garnered. I was actually a little pissed off about it. Not at Coop, he was a class act, but at the industry for lavishing so much product and attention on him hoping to look good by association. People stood to profit from him, as they did from all great athletes, but something about the way they chased after Coop made me feel that no one really cared about Coop as much as they cared about the marketing potential of his story.
Possessing undeniable nobility, Coop would say he felt as if he were playing on behalf of the other wounded and injured, but the companies weren’t concerned about them. They were only concerned about one wounded veteran ballplayer who made for fantastic advertising. It