You always hated to say anything against the owners because you were made to feel you were lucky to be playing baseball. You should be thankful for it. Never mind you’re not getting a fair shake, you’re lucky to be there and you shouldn’t ever, but never, criticize the major league owners or the administration. One of the first things my coach in college told me when I went into pro baseball: “Don’t be a clubhouse lawyer.”

A clubhouse lawyer was a troublemaker. Don’t make waves, man. Don’t rock the boat. Just go play, do your job, and be happy, you hear? That stuck with me. I was a good boy. There were very few clubhouse lawyers. They were branded right away as being loud-mouthed hotheads who didn’t care about the game. It seems to me a person who speaks out against injustice is not a clubhouse lawyer. He’s just exercising his rights.

Recognition, fame—I think of all the time I stood outside my house in Charlestown, Indiana, a two-tone brick, and I threw a baseball where the different colors met. I hit it over and over and over again. We caught flies where it got too dark to see, just hours and hours and hours and hours . . . that’s what most of us have done.

It’s been a good life. Maybe I could have done better, have a better record or something like that. But I’ve really had very few regrets over the past twenty years. I can enjoy some of the arts that I had shut myself off from as a kid. Perhaps that is my only regret. The passion for the game was so all-consuming when I was a kid that I blocked myself from music. I cut myself off from a certain broadness of experience. Maybe one has to do that to fully explore what they want to do the most passionately.

I know a lot of pro athletes who have a capacity for a wider experience. But they wanted to become champions. They had to focus themselves on their one thing completely. His primary force when he becomes champion is his ego trip, his desire to excel, to be somebody special. To some degree, he must dehumanize himself. I look forward to a lower key way of living. But it must be physical. I’m sure I would die without it, become a drunk or something.

I still like to skate. One day last year on a cold, clear, crisp afternoon, I saw this huge sheet of ice in the street. Goddamn, if I didn’t drive out there and put on my skates. I took off my camel-hair coat. I was just in a suit jacket, on my skates. And I flew. Nobody was there. I was free as a bird. I was really happy. That goes back to when I was a kid. I’ll do that until I die, I hope. Oh, I was free!

The wind was blowing from the north. With the wind behind you, you’re in motion, you can wheel and dive and turn, you can lay yourself into impossible angles that you never could walking or running. You lay yourself at a forty-five degree angle, your elbows virtually touching the ice as you’re in a turn. Incredible! It’s beautiful! You’re breaking the bounds of gravity. I have a feeling this is the innate desire of man.