Picture this: It’s one of your last seasons in KIF baseball and you have a chance at a batting title. Your hitting .600, leagues better than most players, but only inches better than one: your rival. You don’t like this
Picture this: It’s one of your last seasons in KIF baseball and you have a chance at a batting title. Your hitting .600, leagues better than most players, but only inches better than one: your rival.
You don’t like this guy. Not because he’s a bad person. Not because he spit in your coffee or stole your girlfriend with a flashy car and a diamond studded ring.
What stinks is you know he’s nothing like that. In fact, he’s more like you than you’d like to think.
He’s competitive, driven, athletic and bright, somewhat like you. He’s going to college, just like you. He’s going to play baseball at the next level, just like you. He may even end up in a plush job with a house and a wife and kids and a car, or maybe he might spend a couple of years in the minors and get a chance to play in the big show for a season or two.
Just like you.
He’s so much like you, it scares you. Not because you aren’t comfortable with your own qualities, but because you know that the guy sitting on second base with his sterling smile, confident attitude and .600 average may steal the batting title from you.
Would you ever see him again after the title run is over, when the KIF season ends, when the lights have gone out at Vidinha Stadium or when the plane’s wheels fold and you’re hundreds of feet in the air and miles from anything that looks like home?
Maybe you’d see your rival (or more appropriately, your colleague) at the Rainbow Gas Mart during the winter vacation. Maybe you’d run in to each other at Kalapaki beach, or somewhere around the three decent stores at Kukui Grove.
But you’d never see each other away from Kaua’i. The two of you are going to college over 3,000 miles apart, you both play baseball, but in different leagues, different conditions, seperate divisions. You might meet in winter leagues here and there, but it wouldn’t be the same. He wouldn’t present such competition again.
Or would he?
Just like that, a few years later and a few classes wiser, you’re in the outfield, glove-in-hand, cap tipped to the right a bit to stave off the sun, and there you see him, perched on second base.
The memories of home, of the batting title, of the nerve-recking KIF season and the work it took you to get to college, flashed in your mind like vintage film of your teen years.
He’s just as confident, but this time brighter, just like you. He’s successful, just like you. His dreams were met, and yet, all he recognizes is that his dreams have broadened, and he feels he has much more to accomplish.
Just like you.
What must have gone through the heads of both Kaliko Oligo and Micah Furtado the day they met at Les Murakami Stadium in Honolulu? Oligo’s Hilo Vulcans were at the University of Hawaii field to battle Furtado’s Lewis and Clark State College in a Rainbow Classic bout on Tuesday.
Like the days of old, they faced each other as foes. Two great ball players, each his team’s leadoff batter, each one step closer to a big-league dream.
Furtado went 3-4 with three hits and three RBI’s in Lewis and Clark’s 10-2 win over Hilo. Oligo notched a hit and a run for the Vulcans, a team he admits hasn’t matched hitting with pitching this season.
But the scores and stats don’t matter. Each of them looked at the other, a kid they respected more than anyone in terms of competitive nature, each sharing a moment in KIF history that will forever stick in their minds.
Each looked at each other and saw more than the growth of their biceps, or the strength of their bats. They each saw the boy that now looked like a man. They saw a Kauaian success story. They saw how determination brought them to college, to the land of opportunity, to the birthplace of extended thought and bountiful memories.
They saw themselves, that day.
And now all the two can do is marvel at what kind of human being the other will become tomorrow.
