Where to Go When You Don't Go Pro

bY bO aLLEGRUCCI


Kids, I want you to stay in school.

Play an instrument, learn a trade, go to college, join the family business, start your own business, join the Peace Corps (not the Marine Corps), do whatever you can to diversify and maximize your youth.

Discover as many ways as you can to enjoy life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Do something productive and positive with your life and try to make a living doing something you love, ‘cuz you ain’t going pro in sports.

Haven’t you seen that commercial during every college football game? “There are over 400,000 NCAA student-athletes, and almost all of us will be going pro in something other than sports.”

That commercial ain’t lyin’. Your odds of going pro are a little over 500,000 to 1, and unless you’re 6-foot-3, 215 with a 4.5 forty or a 40-inch vertical or a 60-percent jumper or a 95-mph fastball, you’re not that 1.

My father played minor league baseball in the Yankees organization once upon a time, and I grew up one of the better ballplayers in a baseball-playing town of 130,000. Working a regular job never looked like fun to me, and since I had a little talent, I wanted nothing more than to start in centerfield and bat second for the St. Louis Cardinals or the Kansas City Royals someday.

Obviously that didn’t happen, or I wouldn’t be writing this article right now, but since I wasn’t quite good enough to play sports for a living, I knew I wanted to write sports for a living. Then I lost my job at a small-town newspaper not once but twice in the last three years. The industry eroded and the economy evaporated, and suddenly I’m thinking I should’ve stuck it out in centerfield a little while loner when I was a little bit younger.

I just turned 30, which is about the peak of your athletic prime in most major sports (give or take a few years), and it got me to thinking: how many guys my age did go pro? Who made it? Where were they from? Why them and not me? I’m not a full-time sports reporter anymore, and since I work overnights at a group home for disabled kids, I have plenty of time for research in the wee-hours of the morning.

I set out on a journey across MLB.com, NFL.com and NBA.Com to find every player my age on every professional roster. I didn’t bother with hockey because I never played hockey, never liked hockey, never wanted to go pro in hockey, never watched hockey on TV and nobody I knew ever went pro in hockey.

I graduated high school in 1998, so that was the criteria for my search … I counted every professional baseball, basketball and football player born in late 1979 or early 1980 (which meant they were likely a part of my graduating class).

I started with baseball since that was my best chance at a meal ticket, but after scanning the current 40-man rosters of all 30 major league teams (1,200 players), I found just 62 men from the class of ‘98 who’re in the show right now at the peak of their prime. That’s five percent of the league.

There’s actually one player in the bigs born the exact same day as me: Toronto reliever Scott Richmond, born August 30, 1979. I guess one of us had to go when the major league teams were making their draft picks a decade or so ago.

The aforementioned St. Louis Cardinals have the most players my age of any MLB team: Six, including most of their stars, Albert Pujols, Rick Ankiel, Matt Holiday and Skip Schumaker. I guess there wasn’t room for all of us on the big league roster, so I’ll lay back and wait for the next life.

Other perennial all-stars my age include Ryan Howard, Mark Teixeira, Josh Beckett, Adam Dunn, Ryan Theriot, Adam LaRoche and Chien Ming-Wang.

Ankiel and Beckett were at the same AAU national tournament my youth team attended in the summer of 1995 outside of Memphis, but I never saw either one. I did play against Albert Pujols growing up in the Kansas City area, and he took one of our best pitchers (and one of my best friends) deep twice in one game during the summer of ‘97.

The best player I ever played against, however, was a guy from Wellington, Kansas, named Nate Cornejo.

Cornejo’s father pitched professionally for the Mets and his older brother was a collegiate pitcher, and Nate Cornejo was a superstar from the first time he walked on the field. He was the best pitchers in the country at an early age and one of the most feared hitters, and his reputation preceded him: you heard about him long before you ever actually played against him.

His fastball was blinding and his four-seam, 12-6 curve was one of the best I ever swung and missed at. He was a household name across the Midwest by age 12, and teams from other states picked him up to play in regionals and nationals whenever Cornejo’s team didn’t make it that far (which was rare).

He hit nine homeruns in the state tournament alone when we were 12 years-old, and the only time I ever faced him was at a tournament in Ottawa, Kansas when we were 16. In three games that day, he hit two grand slams and a three-run homer, the latter of which came against my team, and he also struck out 11 in a complete game one-hitter against me and mine.

I was 0-for-3 with two K’s and an RBI groundout -- our only run in an 11-1 loss. I was behind the plate catching that day, and after Cornejo doubled early in the game, he started stealing my signs from second base and relaying them to the batter. I went out to the pitcher’s mound and told our pitcher to put a fastball in the next batter’s ear, but he refused for fear of Cornejo’s retaliation.

Cornejo had some weird skin disease where he had no eyebrows and these pale splotches and spots on his neck and head, but he was a first-team all-state quarterback and a varsity basketball starter our junior year of high school before injuring his knee late in the school year.

He scrapped football and basketball the following year to focus on baseball, and after he hit 97 on the radar gun in the 4A state tournament, he was drafted in the second round by the Detroit Tigers.

He made it to the big leagues two years later, and I saw him pitch on the 4th of July against the Kansas City Royals in the summer of 2001. I barely recognized him: he had gained about 30 or 40 pounds, altered his delivery and abandoned the disgusting 12-6 curveball I saw at age 16 for a mediocre slider. The pitching coach in the Tigers’ organization that made those changes hopefully lost his job, because they ruined a beautiful thing.

Cornejo spent a couple seasons at the back of the Tiger rotation when Detroit was at its worst earlier this decade, and then he blew out his arm and disappeared into the night. That was the best player I ever saw, and he didn’t even make it pro for very long, so I realized then I never really had a chance. I do, however, still hold records at my high school for home runs in a career (17), season (6) and game (3), so take that all you baseball scouts out there who forgot to call me on draft day!

Baseball may’ve been my best sport growing up, but football was my favorite, and it always will be. There are just under 1,700 players in the NFL right now, and 149 of them are my age (eight percent of the league). Among those 149 are Antwaan Randel-El, Antonio Pierce, Kyle Vanden Bosch, Julius Peppers, Richard Seymour, Bart Scott, Anquan Boldin, Nate Clements, Todd Heap, Carolina’s Steve Smith, Super Bowl hero David Tyree, Super Bowl MVP Deion Branch, Heisman Trophy winner Carson Palmer and the infamous Michael Vick.

I myself was a two-year, two-way starter at wide receiver and cornerback for the biggest high school in my state at the time, and I had my best high school game against Dallas Cowboy pro-bowler Terence Newman. I’m not kidding, and I can prove it. Newman played in the same league for perennial powerhouse Salina Central, and I was sick as a dog our senior year on the night we were matched up 1-on-1.

I checked into all of my classes so I’d be eligible for that night’s game in Salina, but I went straight to the nurse’s office to sleep after role was called, and I even rode to the game with my parents so as not to spread my illness to the rest of my team.

Yes, even sub-.500 high school programs bend the rules whenever they have to.

Later that night, Newman intercepted the first pass thrown to me, but I caught everything thereafter: six catches for 102 yards and a touchdown. We still lost 44-19, and while Newman went on to a full-ride at Kansas State and the fourth pick in the NFL draft, I’m sitting here writing this article 12 years later.

I ran into Terence at the KU-K-State basketball game in Manhattan three years ago, and he recognized me right away. He remembered.

Speaking of basketball, 37 of the 450 NBA players on current rosters were born in late ‘79 or early ‘80, which, like the NFL, comprises eight percent of the league.

My father was once offered a scholarship to play point guard at Texas Tech, but I never played basketball competitively. The greatest collection of hardwood talent I ever saw was at the 1997 Topeka Invitational Tournament, hosted at Topeka High School in Topeka, Kansas, my alma mater.

I was a junior at the time, and I covered the event from top to bottom for the school newspaper. Tulsa’s Will Rogers high school was in town for the ball, and they had a 6-foot-4 man-child named James Hall, who averaged something like 34 points a game in high school and committed to Oklahoma before ending up at some Division II school in Georgia five years later.

Will Rogers also had a small forward named Ronnie Powell, who was an average basketball player but a majestic athlete. Powell’s pre-game warm-up consisted almost exclusively of two-handed windmills taking off from the last block on the lane in front of the free-throw line.

Kansas City’s Washington High School was also at the tournament, and while they had just one headline name, it was a good one: newly acquired Indiana Pacer point guard Earl Watson.

My high school’s team played Watson in each of my first three years in school, and while we won all three, Watson hit us for 31, 33 and 36 points respectively. He made one of the best passes I’ve ever seen at this particular tournament in 1997, and he scored his 36 points that night in a 99-98, double-overtime loss.

Wichita East won the Topeka Invitational that year with two guys you’ve never heard of leading the way: Korleone Young and Laverne Smith. Smith was a Missouri-signee who was a year older than I was, but Young was my age and was long regarded one of the nation’s top power-forward recruits from the sixth grade on. He played AAU ball for the now infamous Myron Piggie, out of Kansas City, and his traveling teammates included Watson and JaRon Rush, the oldest -- and best -- of the three Rush brothers to play at Kansas City’s Pembroke Hill parochial school (Kareem and Brandon followed).

You can Google Myron Piggie and see what you find, but I’ll save you the trouble and tell you that Watson is the only player from that power-packed 1997 tournament who made it in the NBA. The only other NBA player I saw in person (that I know of) was Toronto Raptor forward Reggie Evans, who played at Allen County Community College when I was a freshman working for the Independence Community College newspaper in southern Kansas.

Fun times.

I had several friends who played serious AAU ball growing up, and I remember them telling stories about dominant guys our age named Quentin Richardson and Corey Maggette. Other NBA stars from the class of ‘98 include Michael Redd, Tayshaun Prince, Ron Artest, Caron Butler, Rashard Lewis, Richard Jefferson, Josh Howard, Lamar Odom, Luke Walton, Jamal Crawford and Stromile Swift.

As a sports fan, you wake up one day and realize you’re 30 years old, and if you were ever going to make it, you would’ve made it by now. A few years ago, the college veterans and young professional stars you saw on TV were your contemporaries, and it was comforting in the back of your mind to know that could still be you if you got yourself in shape and went out and had a good day at the right tryout somewhere.

But time marches on long after you’ve stopped, and suddenly the young stars you see busting onto the scene now days are young enough to be your nephews. You never really notice anything changing, but one day you look up and everything’s different.

There are 50 states in the union with 300 million people in them but only 62 guys my age are playing major league baseball, 149 in the NFL and 37 in the NBA. That’s a total of 248, which is about eight percent of the 3,000 athletes in America’s three major sports. That’s how good you have to be to make it to the top, and that’s when you realize exactly who and what you’re up against.

American athletes grow up competing primarily within their own region of the country and almost exclusively against kids their own age -- or at most three years older or younger. Once you turn 18, however, suddenly you’re competing for college scholarships with kids in your age group from all over the country -- if not the western hemisphere or the entire world in some sports.

When your collegiate or amateur days are over, you find yourself competing with every athlete of every age from every corner of the globe to make it as a professional, and there are six billion people and counting on this planet.

I’m not saying it’s impossible, and I’m not saying kids shouldn’t play sports if they won’t go pro, but I’m just saying it’s a good idea to have a plan B. Play sports, enjoy sports, but don't take sports too seriously. Sports are a great way for many kids to earn a college education, but very few will follow the path any farther than that.

Every time someone told me that when I was 12 or 14 or 16, I just laughed. I thought surely I would be that 1 in 500,000 who made it and proved them all wrong, but who’s laughing now?

All I can do now is hope to reach the next generation, so kids, if you’re not going to listen to your parents or your coaches or your teachers on this one, take it from me: you’re not going pro.

Find something else you can enjoy and do well, and be ready and willing to pick that up when sports drops you off.