Sex and the Little League
By: Dawn DeWinter
I first heard this story at Billy Bob’s, a honkytonk on the fringe of Fort Worth, Texas in the August of 1998. Since it comes from Texas, it may be tall tale. Texans have been known to tell them, especially after a month of one-hundred-degree days have chilled their brains with Lone Star beer. Also, Jess may simply have been trying to make me feel better after being tossed on my head by a mechanical bull in near-record time. (I essentially fell of while trying to mount it. Jess laughingly explained that “it weren’t a cow and that I was supposed to ride it.).
As my head was ringing, and the country band was lustfully singing to the urban cowgirls who were mingling enticingly in their high boots and tight jeans with the pearl-buttoned truck drivers and mail clerks a-tingling with lust, it may be that the story I’m about to relay from Jess to you has got some of the details wrong. But I do believe that Jess was more or less telling me the truth. I know that I want to believe it wasn’t a Texas tall tale. Maybe I even need to believe it. That may be true for you too.
And what did Jess tell me that fetid Friday night at the back of the hottest honkytonk on the sweltering Texas plain? Pointing to the television above the bar, tuned as always to ESPN, the sports channel, he said that it wasn’t true, as the announcer had just claimed, that Victoria Roche, a Belgian ex-pat, became in 1984 the first girl to play in the Little League World Series (an annual event for 11- and 12-year-old baseball players from a 100 different countries).
“A French-speaking foreigner first? No way,” Jess said, “I reckon that a Texas girl beat her to home base way back in 1961. But the national media never noticed, because she was a different sort of girl.”
“You mean she could easily pass as a boy,” I hazarded, as I envisaged a heavyset, budding bull dyke with “Spike’ as her nickname. At eleven, some girls don’t even have to worry about taping their breasts, especially back in 1961 before growth hormones got into the beef supply.
There had been periodic scandals, I knew, when girls got caught playing Little League ball; one or two even openly played as girls at the local level, the first being Kathryn “Tubby” Johnston in 1950 (though she pretended to be a boy for several games first). However, once the national office learned about them, their team had to turf them, since only boys could rightly play in the Little League until the courts ordered the League to admit girls in 1974.
The Little League in 1974 created a separate softball division for girls, which meant that only a handful of girls subsequently played hardball (the real game of baseball) with boys even at the local level, and it was rare to see even one girl playing in Little League’s premier event, the nationally televised World Series for 11 and 12 year olds (and the occasional 13 year old if he timed his birthday carefully). Few girls, it appeared, were ready to face hardballs hurled at 70 plus miles per hour.
But a Texas girl had played in the Little League World Series in 1961, Jess claimed. “What was her handle?” I asked. “Did she go by her initials? Or was she, like Kathryn Johnston in 1950, known by a nickname. (She called herself Tubby after her favorite cartoon character.)
“The Texas girl was Kelly Rodman. That’s quite a surname to have, don’t you think? It definitely gets you thinking about males, even if her first name was almost as sexually ambiguous then as it is now.”
“Now, how do you know that Kelly Rodman, a girl, played in the Little League World Series of 1961?” I asked.
“How do I know? How could I not know? I first met her in 1961, when we both played Little League in Matagorda County, a sweltering swamp on the Gulf of Mexico. Unlike me, she qualified for the county’s all-star team that went on to win the Texas State Championship and to finish second at the World Series. In the final game, Matagorda was narrowly beat by a California team.”
“Okay, you knew Kelly Rodman way back when. But how did you know that Kelly was a girl? Why did she let you in on the big secret, especially if you were on opposing teams?”
“She told me because for us it was puppy love at first sight, which did get me, I have to admit, wondering about my own sexuality. I was mighty relieved when she owned up to being a girl. I reckon that’s the moment I decided to marry her. We had to wait a spell, naturally, since Texans can’t legally marry at twelve. Thirteen maybe, but not twelve. However, Kelly was my beloved wife for twenty-eight years, until breast cancer finally took her to the Lord last November.”
Jess’s body started quivering, but he was man enough, Texan enough, to show me no tears.
“There, there,” I said as soothingly as possible, as I stroked his inner thigh to give comfort. “At least, you’ve known love. I wish I could be so lucky.” (I was, of course, misrepresenting my own life in order to make Jess feel better. In fact, I’ve known love about 650 times, but what was the point of depressing him?)
“Do you want to see a photo of her – taken, you know, before she got ill?” He took a photo out of his wallet and placed it tenderly on the bar. (She resembled Sigourney Weaver.) He wasn’t pleased when I accidentally sloshed some beer on it, but I pointed out that the photo was laminated. It wouldn’t wrinkle I promised (and sincerely hoped).
“Now that she’s no longer with us,” Jess next said, “it’s possible to talk more openly about Kelly’s life. Would you like to hear about her Little League career? It didn’t last long; she played youth baseball for only one season before switching to field hockey and soccer. But she broke through so many sexual barriers that the championship field at Williamsport should put her bust on permanent display.”
Hoping to experience love one more time, I was all smiles as I encouraged Jess to relate Kelly’s career in the Little League. If the telling of the tale proved him to be at all sympathetic to crossdressing (at least if done by an eleven-year-old girl), I figured I might admit to being, despite appearances, a dude before inviting Jess to the deserted, Stockyards district nearby to relieve his sexual tension. I figured he’d perform better if he had no fear of making me pregnant. (I have been told that I look thirty years younger than my real age, and thus still strike men as dangerously fertile.)
“The first thing you gotta know,” Jess said, “is that Kelly had six older brothers …”
“I guess her parents kept going until they got a girl,” I interjected.
“Something like that. Well, a family with six boys was bound to be sports-oriented, and Art, the family head …. No, I can’t call him that. Head or boss he never was, even when it came to the kids. Susan definitely ran the family. After all, Art could never have forced her to have seven kids; but she wouldn’t stop until she had a girl to dress up like a doll. Kelly told me that her clothes budget sometimes equaled that of all the boys combined.”
“I’m surprised that a mother intent on raising a little princess would let her play Little League ball.”
I was pushing him to get to the point of his story, as I wanted it to end before the Lone Stars had dulled his wits and sexual appetite entirely.
“That’s a good guess, but wrong in this case. Susan was as much a jock as Art, and so was anxious for Kelly to excel at sports – just so long as she was well-attired while doing it. As a result, Kelly wore the only ironed baseball uniform in the Matagorda Little League, as well as the only braided belt. It was Kelly’s idea, of course, to play baseball. No one – not even Susan – got her to do anything against her will.”
“But why did a little princess want to risk getting her head knocked off by a wild pitch? A Little Leaguer was killed by one over in Garland (Texas) in 1956.”
Jess reminded me that Little League had introduced protective helmets for batters two years before Kelly’s big year. He then continued: “In any case, all of her brothers had played Little League without getting anything more than a few scrapes, and as she was more athletic and coordinated at eleven than any of her brothers had been, it was natural that she’d try out for baseball – especially with her dad and mom having already coached the local team for a decade. Kelly had already gone to the State finals when she was six to cheer on Dave, the fourth of the brothers. I am sure that the cheering crowds left a permanent impression on her. As she saw, Dave even signed a few autographs that weekend.”
Gagging on a prairie oyster, I gasped: “I imagine … she had to disguise … herself as a boy, even if everyone … in a rural county knew …. her true story. You know – for appearances sake, given the hostility of the national Little League office to girls playing.”
Jess shook his head. “Hah, Kelly wore her hair long and proud. It was her freedom flag. People in Matagorda knew that the doings of their league wasn’t going to be noticed by the Yankees back east. Who cared about a bunch of dirt farmers and shrimp fishermen in them days? Nobody in Pennsylvania I’ll wager. Anyways, no one seemed to care that a girl was playing Little League in rural Texas until Kelly, who was an ace pitcher and sure-handed third baseman, got named to the Matagorda County all-stars. They’d be playing for the right to represent the Little Leagues of the entire Houston-Galveston area in the State finals.”
“Which means,” I interjected, that the metro Houston press would be reporting on her games.”
“And you can guess what that would have meant, especially with an ‘uncouth’ Texan in the Vice-Presidency. The Eastern media were bound to pick up her story so that they could use it to ridicule Texas. Women’s equality wasn’t a Liberal cause in those days; hell, all the major papers ran separate job ads for women and men.”
“I know – it was a different era, to be sure. In those days Liberal Democrats even opposed the equal rights amendment for women because it might threaten laws or union contracts giving them special rights – like cab fare if they had to work the nightshift or a guaranteed minimum wage in States that felt they didn’t need that sort of law for men.”
“Anyways, to get back to baseball, if it was reported in the New York Times that a girl was playing Little League way down South, even the head office in Williamsport, Pennsylvania would have noticed and taken immediate action to disqualify her team. Maybe just from the tournament, but Matagorda County could also have been kicked out of youth baseball for good. Kelly and her family couldn’t let that happen.”
“So what did Kelly do? Is that when she disguised herself as a boy – in order to play in the area tournament?”
“You hit the nail on the head. Kelly was the star of the tournament, pitching a two-hitter in the championship game. That got her a lot of publicity, and a lot of tongues wagging back home in Matagorda County. Even I was talking a lot – far too much. Loose lips do reveal girl’s slips, you know.”
I winced, then asked the logical follow-up: “Did Kelly risk playing as a boy in the Texas State Championship? I guess she must have, inasmuch as she went with her team to the World Series.”
There wasn’t an immediate reply. Jess had to relieve himself in the men’s john. As I waited, I listened for the first time to the band. Billy Bob’s is s a huge place, and there were a couple of thousand loud, drunken voices between me and the stage. Anyway, I didn’t figure I was missing much – it was some bearded goat of a man named Willy or Billy, with pigtails, and a red bandana around his forehead, and with a scratchy voice singing about someone always on his mind. “Not my type at all,” I sniffed. “He doesn’t even look like a cowboy.”
Jess, on the other hand, looked like the genuine article: sanded Wrangler boot jeans heavy in the crotch and tight in the ass, a saddle-tooled, black western shirt (with embroidered yokes and cuffs, pearl snaps, and smile pockets at the nipples), black, pointed boots made from rattler skins, a wide studded belt with a gigantic long-horn buckle, a turquoise bolo tie, and black Stetson hat. But best of all, he never took off his black oilskin duster (i.e., a heavy cotton coat with a snap-on rain cape that went down past his knees).
My, he looked every inch the cowboy, unwilling to make any concessions to the 100- degree heat inside the honkytonk or, given the two-month drought, to the weather outside. He was a he-man and he came from a rural county. I just knew he could throw a lasso. I’ve always wanted to be hog-tied.
If I played my cards right, later that night I’d be getting down and dirty (my knees at least) with the holy grail for a girl like me – a heterosexual, widowed, Texas cowboy who was stallion enough, and drunk enough, to plug any hole he came upon. Maybe I could get laid without even having to explain that my ample, supple breasts aren’t real. (I tell people I’m a D cup – because of the four D batteries I use to keep my breast forms toasty warm.)
Jess had already told me that my having a gaff was “no worries” to him because everyone, he said, made the occasional gaffe. The important thing was to look forward, not back. I heartily agreed: a gaff is all about the look forward.
Jess looked real good as he sauntered back from the washrooms (I later learned that he walked that way because he’d grown too big for his boots). He’d unsnapped his rain cape, which I took as a good omen for our evening together – you know, he was already starting to undress for me!
As soon as he mounted his bar stool, Jess resumed his tale of Kelly’s adventure in the Little League. O how I loved how the way he sat on that stool – legs flung wide apart as though it were a saddle! I’d have easy access if and when I made my move.
“You was asking whether Kelly dared to show up at the Texas State Finals in San Antonio …”
Hoping for a sympathy squeeze somewhere on my body, I interrupted: “Speaking of San Antonio, I almost got killed by a cottonmouth snake swimming by its famous River Walk.”
“You don’t say. How did that happen?”
No squeeze yet. I explained: “Well, I got a bit tipsy at a sidewalk café and tipped over into the San Antonio River. I grabbed on to a cottonmouth swimming by, thinking it was driftwood. Fortunately, somebody conked it on the head with a thrown shoe before that viper could bite me.”
“It would have served you right to get bit, but it’s highly unlikely that the snake had enough venom to kill someone as big as you,” he replied. He was giving me a compliment, I guess. However, I would have preferred a squeeze.
Instead, he told me that Kelly, her team, their parents, and the three coaches (that is to say, her parents and their second son Brad) had several “pow-wows” about whether they dared to bring a “pretend boy” to the State finals. They finally decided that they didn’t dare leave Kelly at home, as there were bound to be questions about the non-appearance of Matagorda’s star pitcher at a tournament on which several gamblers were rumored to be making book.
“What about the other coaches?” I asked. “If they suspected anything, wouldn’t they tell the authorities and force Matagorda to forfeit?”
“There was that risk, of course, so Susan convinced the Matagorda parents that they had little or nothing to lose by telling the truth to the head coaches of the other three teams in the tournament. The other coaches were understandably appalled, but agreed not to expose Kelly for the good of Little League baseball.”
Jess explained why: As three of the teams came from counties as underpopulated as Matagorda, their coaches knew how difficult it was to find 14 or 15 kids whose ball play, when televised statewide, wouldn’t embarrass their families and neighbors. And, as the coaches from Big Spring and Del Rio, two towns in the middle of nowhere, argued, Little League was often the only way for their kids to get to know the wider world. They couldn’t abide a scandal that risked permanent damage to an invaluable social outlet.
So they’d let Kelly play, so long as she posed as a boy and wasn’t a starting pitcher in either game her team would play the following day. While the fourth coach, a realtor whose team came from a Dallas suburb, at first resisted (as far as he was concerned, the scandal merely proved that hick towns shouldn’t attempt to play at the State level), he eventually bowed to the collective wisdom and physical threats of his fellow coaches.
“Obviously, Kelly’s team won. Did everyone keep her secret all the way to the World Series?” I asked, so that Jess wouldn’t try to tell me about each game she played.
“Well, that coach from Dallas might have been trouble, but his team was eliminated by Del Rio before his team got a chance to play against Matagorda. So he kept his mouth shut. As for the coaches and teams at the Southern Regional, they never had a clue that they were playing against a girl. Susan and Al had no qualms about lying to Floridians and Alabamans; messing with them wasn’t like messing with Texas.”
“So you’re telling me that no one outside of Texas had the slightest ideal that the South, home of Bubba and the good ole boys, was sending the first girl to the Little League World Series?”
“Dawn, I’m surprised to hear you talk that way – you know, like a Yankee. Good old boys admire any girl who can rope a calf, break a bronco, drive a stock car, hurl a baton thirty feet in the air, and throw a baseball more than seventy miles a mile. And Southern whites are as keen as Southern blacks on fooling ‘the Man’. Everyone I know would congratulate Kelly for being athletic enough to pass herself off as a boy. It’s only Yankee men who like their women to be skinny, pasty-faced neurotics afraid of animals, guns and the great outdoors.”
“You can’t call me skinny,” I objected.
“No, Dawn my girl; no one would call you skinny. And you’re wearing far too much blush to be pasty-faced. Has anyone ever told you how much you look like Tammy Faye Bakker (Messner), the one-time evangelist?”
Anxious to get to the point where Jess, having finished his baseball tale, would get all choked-up about Kelly and need my comforting, I deftly steered the conversation back to his deceased wife’s Little League career: “So the long and short of it is that Kelly was able to pass herself off as a boy and so play in the Little League World Series. What a story!”
“It wasn’t that simple,” Jess replied, “at least not after a reporter for a big Philadelphia newspaper came by to ask Susan and Art to comment on a story that it intended to break on the first day of the Little League World Series.
“You mean …” I started.
“Yup, that damn paper was going to reveal that the South’s and Matagorda’s best pitcher was a girl.”
“But why would the paper do that?”
“Why? Because the Eastern champions came from a Philadelphia suburb. The publisher wanted the local kids to win. He didn’t care whether the scandal hurt Little League baseball and the town of Williamsport, PA; after all, since when did anyone in Philadelphia ever care about a mountain town?”
“But how did a Philly newspaper learn the truth about Kelly?”
“How else? I suppose from some kid like me shooting off his mouth back home in Matagorda. They must have sent a reporter to snoop around. But take it from me – that paper didn’t come close to knowing half the truth about Kelly before she and her parents made a discreet visit to its editorial offices. They met with the senior editor, a guy who prided himself on coming from one of Philadelphia’s founding families. He was even a Quaker still. The Rodmans found his pretensions useful.”
“How so?” I asked.
“Well, that creep was eager to tell the world that Kelly was a girl. But he was a lot less eager to confirm that Kelly was, as the Matagorda Little League maintained, a boy. In 1961, there was no way anyone who claimed old-family status could discuss such a thing in public.”
“Huh? Now you’ve got me totally confused. Kelly a boy? I thought you said Kelly was a girl. Didn’t you marry her?”
“Well, pardner, she was definitely a woman when I married her. At twenty she had quite a figure and the tightest puss … er, vagina that I ever had the pleasure to experience. But it wasn’t quite the same when she was eleven and twelve.”
“I still don’t understand. You’re saying what exactly?”
“I’m saying that Kelly was always a girl, but she had the wrong body – a boy’s body – until she went to Denmark in 1970 and had THE operation. Always gutsy, she was one of the first to have sexual-confirmation surgery. I always loved the spunk in her.”
“I still don’t understand: If Kelly was a transsexual, why on earth would she want to play baseball? The transsexuals I know are much too feminine to play boys’ games, especially dangerous ones where they might get scarred or dirty. It’s simply not lady-like.”
“Well, Dawn, I guess you haven’t met many transsexuals. Like other women they come in all sizes and flavors. Some of them actually want to play baseball. Of course, they’d rather play in a girls’ league, but you gotta understand that wasn’t an option for Kelly in 1961. It had to be a boys’ team if she was going to keep the family tradition alive by playing youth baseball. Girls’ softball wouldn’t be an option for another thirteen years.”
“So what exactly did she and her parents tell that Philadelphia newspaper? How did they kill the story?”
“They told the truth, or the limited version of it that the Straight world knows. Kelly told me that she even stripped off her white jockey underwear (bought special for the occasion), baring all. After that, there was no way the paper’s publishers could accuse her of being a girl on a boys’ team. And, this being 1961, there was no way that Philadelphia newspaper wanted to raise the issue of transsexuality. Hell, it was still forbidden for movies to talk about ho-mo-sexua-lity. So the story disappeared the instant that Kelly’s hairless balls appeared.”
I now understood why Jess considered Kelly the first girl to play in the Little League World Series, but being transgendered myself, I wanted to hear him say it, so I asked, “If Kelly sported two ball sacks, then how can you say that she was the first female ballplayer at Williamsport?”
“Dawn, how can you of all people ask me that? Everything that really mattered – her soul, her consciousness, her innermost being – was female from the moment she was born. A government-appointed shrink might say that Kelly’s mother, finally despairing of giving birth to a child with XX chromosomes, screwed up her youngest son by raising him as a female, but I’ve talked with Kelly’s father, brother, uncles and aunts. Every one of them agrees that Kelly was born female. Her mother Susan merely recognized and accepted the obvious.”
“Since Kelly was technically a male, she obviously had a right to play in the Little League World Series. Did the rest of her team ever learn the ‘straight goods’ about her?”
“No, that never came out. She was a genuine girl, boobs, cunt and all, as far as her teammates were concerned. It’s almost forty years later, and only one or two of them are any the wiser.”
“I bet Kelly was a star at the World Series.”
“You bet she was. Not only did she score the winning run against the Indiana team, but she pitched five innings in the championship game against California before her pitch count meant that she had to be relieved from the mound with her team ahead by one run. In other words, the adults figured she’d damage her arm if she kept pitching. They were surely wrong about that; they didn’t know Kelly. But a rule is a rule, especially when it comes to kids, and she was sitting on the bench when the Californians won with a three-run homer in the sixth.”
“Tough luck, but her parents and home town must have been proud of her,” I offered.
“Proud? They was mighty proud. Kelly was the star of a homecoming parade down the main street of Bay City, the county seat. Her teammates, being preteens, mugged for the cameras by pretending to kiss Kelly, still looking and acting like a boy. It was an inside joke that most of the community shared; even so, it looked like the gayest event that Bay City had ever seen.”
“Did you see the parade?”
“I certainly did. I looked a proper fool blowing kisses at the star pitcher of the Matagorda boys’ team. We started going steady a couple of weeks later. By then, Kelly was going around in girls’ jeans again. God, how I miss her.”
As anticipated, he started sobbing.
“Jess, don’t cry. I’m here for you. I’m ready to spend the entire night with you if you need a shoulder to cry on and a body to hug. I’m not Kelly, but I may be woman enough for you tonight.”
“That’s right kind of you to offer, Dawn. And it doesn’t really bother me that you’re a dude …”
I interrupted, my voice cracking with tension (I was after all in the heart of Texas): “But how, how did you know that I’m a guy underneath all this glamour?”
“Because I saw you pissing on the outside wall of Billy Bob’s,” he replied. “You were even peeing upwards. I don’t think a real woman could do that unless she stood on her head. But don’t worry Dawn, I won’t rat on you. Hell, if things were different, I’d even get it on with you.”
“You mean if you weren’t still grieving for Kelly?”
“Well that, and the fact that you’re about twenty years too old for me.”
“Why, I never! We’re about the same age. How can you say I’m too old for you?”
“It’s a man’s prerogative to rob the cradle, Dawn. You’re woman enough to understand that, aren’t you? Anyways, I wouldn’t be good company for you tonight. Tomorrow would be Kelly’s forty-ninth birthday. Thanks for lending me an ear, for letting me talk about her, but it’s time for me to go home now. I promised myself that I’d toast her birthday with a Shiner beer at midnight sharp – and that’s a toast a grieving man must make alone.”
“I understand, I guess. But I was hoping you’d be my first cowboy. I’ve been hoping to bed down with one since I first saw a really young Clint Eastwood play Rowdy Yates in Rawhide.”
“Dawn, I ain’t much of a cowboy. What you see is pretense. I’m all hat, no cattle. Sure, I grew up in a county with cows, but I always lived in Bay City. After leaving it for good, I’ve made my career as a chef in the Dallas Metroplex. I’m currently head chef for a sushi restaurant right here in Fort Worth. Here, take my card, you can use it to get a free meal. This being Texas, you can even get a sixteen-ounce steak, if you like. We serve only the best beef from Minnesota.”
After passing me the card, Jess gave me a lingering wet kiss. Then he disappeared into a Texas starry night.
Many times since that night, now twelve years past, I deliberated whether I should publish his story and Kelly’s; but each time I decided that I hadn’t the right to intrude on his memories and grief. Their story was properly his to tell.
So why is it different now?
The answer is in yesterday’s obituaries: Jess Parker, beloved father of three adopted kids, grandfather to six, and a recent widower, has gone to be with his cherished wife Kelly.
He officially died from a cardiac arrest, but I just know that he died from a broken heart.
I wonder if they play baseball in Heaven. If God is truly there, they must.
It’s high time that people knew about Kelly Rodman. She must have been quite a gal.
THE END