I.L. "Vick" Vickrey

REMEMBERING MY REAL HERO THIS FATHER’S DAY
By Bob Vickrey
                                  
Waco Tribune-Herald, June 17, 2012

As I watched an exciting conclusion of the Houston Astros’ game the other night, I found myself pleasantly imagining watching the game with my dad, like some kind of mystical moment from the movie Field of Dreams.

I let the moment pass, but it reminded me of times we had silently watched great sports events together decades earlier. It seems a bit odd to think of such things now, since he’s been gone for many years, and we probably hadn’t watched any sports together in well over twenty years. However, watching the Astros make their dramatic comeback offered fond memories of the gentle and charismatic man who was my father.

Dad followed the Houston area baseball teams all the way back to the days when the city only fielded the minor league Houston Buffaloes. His evening desk job in the payroll department at Armco Steel allowed him to listen to the games on the radio.

I remember him taking me out to Buff Stadium on one of his nights off when I was a kid. I was thrilled at my first trip to a ballpark and the experience was so grand to this eight year-old boy, it might as well have been Yankee Stadium.

‘Vick,’ as he was known for most of his life, was one of the finest athletes in South Texas back in the 1920s. He played about every sport that was offered at Groveton High while splitting time with his schoolwork and chores on the family farm just northeast of Houston. He excelled in baseball and basketball, but track and field was the sport that created a legacy for him in his hometown.

Several of his classmates from Groveton were family friends of ours, and my siblings and I heard the stories of the heroic athletic achievements of our dad. I remember his lifelong friend Bert Dominy rattling off statistics and recounting the brilliant plays that ‘old Vick’ had made in those halcyon days of their youth. My dad proudly smiled as his classmate painted a picture of him as hometown hero. He sheepishly admitted that Bert had boldly embellished his stories in succeeding years.

Bert’s story of my dad getting to the district track meet had all the ingredients of movie material. While my dad was busy plowing the fields after school, he was told the 100-yard dash was about to begin at the high school field. In Bert’s words, “Vick handed the reins of the plow to his brother and tore off his overalls which covered his track suit he wore underneath. He raced through the fields and down the dirt road to the stadium and arrived just in time to dig a ‘hole’ for his starting stance in the race.” There were no starting blocks, and he wore only tennis shoes which offered little traction on the slippery grass surface.

According to Bert, he outdistanced his rivals by ten yards and was timed by a hand-held wristwatch at “between nine and ten seconds.” This story always left my dad chuckling because he knew anyone who had followed track and field would surely second-guess his rather dazzling timing given the running conditions of the era.

Bert also told us that once at an area track meet, my dad told the officials that the long jump pit was too short and they needed to dig it out farther for him. They paid no attention to his warning and he proceeded to jump completely over the pit on his first jump. Bert said he fondly remembered the startled officials’ faces as they reluctantly extended the length of the pit by three feet for his second attempt.

Dad showed me his silver medal in the state long jump competition, but I remember his lifelong frustration of finishing second, which he mentioned even in his last years when he was in his late nineties.

Eventually, he coached my brother and me as we competed in sports as young men and we sensed that he never relinquished his competitive edge as he instructed us along the way. Perhaps he was hoping we could win that gold medal which had escaped him in his youth. Years later, he beamed proudly after my older brother Ray had won the Southwest Conference long jump event while competing in college.

We all manage to find our heroes in this life, and Bert Dominy certainly had found his in my dad. I’m hoping that old Bert wouldn’t be too upset if he ever discovered that we happened to have shared the very same hero.

Bob Vickrey is a freelance writer whose columns have appeared in the Houston Chronicle and Ft. Worth Star-Telegram. He is a member of the Board of Contributors for the Waco Tribune-Herald and a contributor to the Boryana Books website. He lives in Pacific Palisades, California.