| THE CINCINNATI ENQUIRER | FRIDAY, JULY 31, 1998 |
Making the Right Call
BY GEOFF HOBSON
When Mom was working at the egg ranch, or ironing white collars uptown, Joe was the boss. Joe Munoz, the big, glowering brother, said Anthony could come out of the house only if he played ball.
And when you lived at 516 Garfield St., in the middle of the 1960s, in the middle of modest and poor, in the middle of two brothers and two sisters, you had two choices.
Baseball or football.
So Anthony, eight years younger than Joe, two years younger than Tom, stood at the sewer top that served as home plate. He tried to hit homers onto the railroad tracks about 200 feet from the house, where six of them slept in two bedrooms.
His first football field was a 50-by-100 foot grassy patch bordered by the house and tracks.
In this place by the tracks, the wrong choice could kill you. Joe Munoz, now 47 and about 5-foot-11, is grateful Anthony kept the ball in play.
"I thank God a guy being my brother's size had this little thing about him," Joe Munoz said. "He was good-natured, if not jolly, a good temperament. Had he turned the other way, he may not be alive today. You go in the gangs and a cop would have shot him. Or a homeboy would have shot him, because who would want to mess with a guy like that?"
Joe got swallowed up by alcohol even as he was trying to show Anthony the right way. Baby sister Ruth went to jail. A kindergarten friend and baseball teammate became a drug dealer.
But somehow, Anthony rose above the temptations and made Hall-of-Fame choices. Sports pushed the 7-year-old to DeAnza Park instead of any number of dead ends.
But he needed more to fight the demons. Anthony believes he went the right way because God branded his soul with grace and strength.
So does Joe.
Anthony thinks Joe could have been a heck of a ballplayer. He had some pop in his bat. Joe's '62 Elks missed the Little League World Series by a game, but then he started making bad choices. At least four. Four DWIs.
"It's pretty bad when you have friends who are drunks and they tell you they're sick and tired of you being drunk," said Joe, who has been sober 18 years now.
"When I quit drinking, the people at work said, 'You must have been scared about losing your job,' and I told them, 'I didn't quit drinking for you guys. I found the Lord and straightened out in his name.'"
Joe remembered Anthony coming home from USC after his freshman year, trying to guide Joe to God, praying for him. Anthony told him since he already had the feelings, that meant he'd been touched. Finally in 1980, Anthony, his new wife DeDe, and Joe knelt to pray as Joe became a Christian.
"It's like Anthony says," Joe said. "Sometimes trying to get to the people closest to you is the hardest."
Life without father
Michael Anthony Munoz realized early he would never get close to his father. He left soon after Anthony's birth here Aug. 19, 1958, and was never a factor.
Anthony saw a photo of him once, but couldn't tell much because the guy wore a beard and shades. Sometimes, he wonders what his father sounded like. Did he sound like me?
He remembers the old man showing up twice. Once, when he was 5. All he can recall is being scared. By the time Anthony was 12, the family had moved a little north to 817 D Street -- a three-bedroom with a real dining room -- and one day his father's car pulled up. But Anthony was running late for baseball practice and wanted no part of him.
About seven years ago during a Father's Day service in church, folks stood to tell of experiences with their dads. Anthony broke down. For him, it was blank.
The man died five or six years ago, and Anthony Munoz has no idea where or why, but he has made another choice. He chooses not to be haunted by a man who never bothered to know his son.
Relatives, coaches, school officials offer no information on Anthony's father. They can't. The family never talked about him. They still don't.
"If you don't know what it's like not to have a father, it's hard to tell you," Joe Munoz said. "You don't realize it until you get older how much it would have meant. But my mom had four uncles who were around all the time. We all had friends who had fathers. They treated us like we were one of their kids."
When they retired Anthony's jersey here at Chaffey High School last month, a tiny lady came out of the crowd and asked to hug him.
"Alan Palmer's mother," Anthony said of the kid who lived across the street from the school baseball field, a house where kids used to hang. "Everyone kind of took us in."
A mother's strength
Brothers. Uncles. Coaches. Friends. They all replaced a father. But most of all, it was his mother, Esther, who helped nurture a Hall-of-Famer known for his compassion as well as his competitiveness. She made sure right choices were made.
"We should all wait on her with bended knee for what she did for us," Tom Munoz said. "She was mother, father, boss. If she called your name in Spanish -- To-mas, or Antonio, you were in trouble."
Sometimes, she was out in the street hitting them grounders.
"Mom was a good athlete," Anthony said. "She played some softball. She had a mean swing."
And Joe was there if her iron fist wasn't.
"I always thought he got his speed running from me," Joe said.
California's lush fertility lured more than just America's Dust Bowlers. Esther's father came from Mexico looking for work in the grim '30s. Her family and many other Hispanics settled in the citrus groves about 50 miles east of Los Angeles, where the communities of Ontario, Upland, Pomona and Rancho Cucamonga grew together.
Her Dad worked off the land -- just like Esther would do -- driving a winery truck, working in the quarries. Frank Hernandez, one of many Munoz cousins, remembers Esther her brother picking grapes in the fields while Frank waited with Tom, building play houses out of the crates.
Anthony's mom didn't have a car. So the Hernandez uncles, who were always under a tree fixing a car, gave the family rides. Anthony wouldn't have a car until his senior year in high school, when he ignored Joe's warning and dropped $500 on a '65 Chevy Malibu. A week later the engine ate the radiator, and Joe, shaking his head, fixed it in fine Hernandez tradition.
There were struggles. But when Tom and Anthony biked eight miles or so to all the parks in Ontario to play ball, it was a blast.
Nobody could tell them they had it bad.
"It was not bad," Anthony said. "I tell people -- and that's the sad thing about it because it's more developed now and it's not like it was then -- but I would not trade growing up there for anything. We didn't have all the building; we had great vineyards north of us and we were on our bikes all the time. We'd leave at 7 in the morning and get home for dinner during the summer and not even think twice about it. We didn't know about drugs.
"It's like when I go to Mexico," Anthony said of his ministry missions. "We had holes in our house on Garfield, but you should see it down there. Little two-, three-, four-bedroom houses, but the people are happy."
At times there were holes in his clothes, too, but he learned to sew watching Esther. When things got worn, he ironed on patches: "The first day of school we had new clothes, but they had to last."
Esther is 65. After a stroke and arthritis that forced two knee replacements, she doesn't burn with the fire that stoked a household. She can't make her son's Hall induction because she fell and broke her hip.
But her eyes still twinkle. "The clothes might not have been new, but they were clean," Esther said. "I'd starch the collars and Tommy would complain they were too tight."
The big thing was high stirrups over baseball socks. You needed an elastic to keep them high. So Anthony dyed his elastic the color of the stirrup and sewed the elastic on just below the knee: "You learn that stuff when you need to do it."
But you needed help.
"We'd wear jackets about four times our size so we couldn't get any splinters," Tom said.
Joe was his coach. In the Garfield grass, Joe taught Anthony not to turn his head on grounders, to throw a drop curve. He bought him his first glove. One of the first things Tom and Anthony remember is Joe's Little League coach, Lucky Fleming, taking them with the rest of the team in a '50s paneled pickup truck.
"You wanted to wear those uniforms and you could smell the leather," Tom said. "Of course, there was more shoe polish than leather, but that's the stuff we dreamed of."
As Chaffey's varsity baseball coach, Jim Semon dreamed of having an athlete like Anthony: huge talent, sweet demeanor.
Semon is one of those father figures. He first knew Anthony when he was 7, showing up after riding four miles on his bike with Tommy to DeAnza every summer morning at 7. That's when Semon, working for the Ontario parks, would start emptying the shed of equipment to play games.
"He would sneak into the back of the pickup truck when we went to Colony Park, about another four miles," Semon said. "Sometimes I'd let him, sometimes I'd pretend I didn't notice and sometimes I'd tell him to leave. But somehow he always made it to the park."
Sentimental journey home
Colony Park, where Semon took his precocious stowaway, is now Anthony Munoz Hall of Fame Park. The town fathers renamed it last month during Anthony Munoz Day, when they also retired his No. 77 at Chaffey and threw him a $75-a-plate dinner at the Ontario Convention Center.
D Street runs into Convention Center Way on the other side of Ontario. When Anthony moved to D from Garfield at age 8, he thought he was moving from Baltic to Boardwalk. Even though it was still modest and cramped, he wondered how the family could afford to make the payments.
But D Street is also a reminder of what might have been if the wrong choices had been made. Everytime he comes home, those choices stare back at him.
The day before his day, he spoke at a church in the old neighborhood. From the Victory Outreach stage, Munoz figured he could hit the old house on D Street with a baseball throw.
For a guy who has toured the country in the name of Jesus, giving testimony to the home crowd was an emotional tidal wave.
"I want to be transparent. I want to be vulnerable. I want to take the mask off," he told them.
Fans whirred over squeaks of folding chairs. Ushers collected offerings in plastic buckets from about 100 people. Glistening with sweat, Larry Perez, Victory's energetic pastor, led the singing for a youth band of electric guitars and keyboard.
Perez called on his ushers to give their testimony before Munoz spoke: "Brother Louie, this guy was a gangster. Twenty years of heroin, drug addiction, jail." Perez introduced another usher. Brother Henry got up on the stage and admitted, "The devil had me running the streets of Pomona. I was his puppet."
Brother Anthony then reflected on how he thought he had made it while playing football at USC. A starter. A scholarship. A wife-to-be. If you asked his freshman year, he thought the Bible was the USC playbook.
"I can't say I was hooked on heroin or I was jailed for this amount of time, but Satan still had me just like he had them," Munoz said. "I didn't know what was significant in my life. . . . I realized I didn't have strength to go on without Jesus Christ at 6-6, 280 pounds."
Giving his life to Christ as a college sophomore was the easy part. Trying to keep him was tougher, so he used the analogy of knee pads and a helmet in reading from Ephesians:
"Put on the whole armor of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world. . . . "
After the service, a man stood in the parking lot imitating a stab Anthony made at third base to save a tournament. They were kindergarten friends. Years later, he and Anthony were out in front of stores trying to get people to buy them some of that Boone's Farm strawberry wine that was popular with kids in the '70s.
"I was 16. I had the car. It was our first taste of alcohol," the man said. "It stopped after we graduated, but it continued for me. That was the environment. He got out. He got the scholarship."
The man sank lower and lower. Wine turned into drugs. He was a dealer until he was 26, but he has put the pieces back the last 14 years.
"To hear which way he went after high school," Munoz said, "it makes me wonder about the bad choices I made my senior year in high school, my freshman year in college. But look at him now."
Together again
The night glittered when Ontario threw Anthony his tribute dinner. City councilmen. Corporate suits. The USC elite. Baseball coach Rod Dedeaux. Former USC football coach John Robinson. New coach Paul Hackett. Another USC Hall-of-Fame tackle, Ron Mix. Not to mention the voice of the Trojans himself, Tom Kelly. Jim Semon, veteran of USC's 1961 national baseball champions, was also there.
And there were the six of them. Esther, Joe, Tom, Anthony, and the sisters, Debbie, 38, and Ruth, 35, all together. An event rarer than a gathering of the USC glitterati. The last time was probably six years ago in Cincinnati, for Anthony's last NFL game.
Joe came to the dinner with his wife of two years, Barbara. Earlier in the day, Joe took her and his four stepsons to a luncheon in which people got to have their picture taken with Anthony and his jerseys from Chaffey, USC and the Bengals.
"They like music, not so much sports," said Joe of the new boys he is keeping in line. "They're in the marching band. But I like music, too."
Joe, a loan officer, lives 20 minutes away in Azusa. Tom, a cholesterol screener, was drawn to the open spaces of Texas three years ago. Debbie and Ruth are close by, struggling to make it like their mother as single parents of three children each.
"When it's something like this, everyone gets together," Joe Munoz said.
When Anthony spoke at the dinner, the presence of his sisters wasn't lost on him. "I thank them for being here," he told the crowd.
It wasn't easy for Ruth. The day before she had been released from prison. Anthony is sketchy on the details, but Larry Perez, her pastor, said she served 18 months for refusing to testify in a murder case.
"Wrong place, wrong time," Perez said. "She's paid a big price."
"The fact she felt comfortable enough to be there meant a lot to me," Anthony said. "I've always wanted to help. You make their bed so many times, there are times you have to let them sink or swim. I just talked to my mom and Ruth has a job and is looking to put her life back together and it's good to hear. We can all look at that, trying to learn from choices."
DeDe Munoz calls it breaking the cycle. Anthony is trying to do it and so is Debbie. She pronounced herself "very proud" at her brother's special night. She works at a distribution center and is raising children 18, 13 and 7.
Earlier in the day at the new Anthony Munoz Hall of Fame Park, Andrew, her youngest, clung to her. Yes, he plays third base like a certain uncle.
"I'm going to try and get him into baseball," Debbie said. "Keep him busy."
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