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Pat Dye Field => War Damn Eagle => Topic started by: ssgaufan on May 04, 2011, 12:00:31 PM
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Baseball is all about getting home. But what happens when you get there and it's gone?
It happened to Hueytown (Ala.) High School baseball head coach Rick Patterson on Wednesday. He walked to his house only to find a tornado had taken it.
Pitchers love making saves. But what happens when the save you have to make is your sister's life?
It happened to 15-year-old Hueytown JV pitcher Brandon Miller that same day. He was hiding under a mattress in the hallway of his house, wearing his baseball helmet, when a twister took the roof off. Then it started to take his 14-year-old sister, Sara. He reached up and grabbed her in the final fraction of the moment.
High school sports is about playing for love of school. But what happens if your school closed for a week because nobody can drive the roads to get to it?
You keep playing is what happens.
In the eye of all that, Hueytown carried on in the Alabama 5A state playoffs Monday, splitting its first two games with Briarwood Christian in the best-of-three second round. Afterward, each Briarwood player donated $20 to Patterson to help out.
These are the remains of coach Rick Patterson's home in Pleasant Grove, Ala.
And you think your team has distractions?
"Boys, if you wanna help me, keep winning," Patterson told his players before the games. "Because as long as we keep winning, I don't have to think about the rest of my life."
The rest of his life is scattered over blocks and blocks of Pleasant Grove, Ala., where he and his wife, Debra, were supposed to be living. But two months ago, Debra burnt some beans, which set their entire kitchen on fire, which landed them in the Fairfield Inn, which saved their lives.
Just after the tornadoes that killed 236 in Alabama hit on April 27, Patterson called his daughter, a student at the University of Alabama. The tornado missed her by two blocks. Called his other daughter. She was fine, but her house was cleaved in half. Then he drove to his own house and got stopped by fallen trees two miles from it. He was walking the rest of the way when he came upon a neighbor boy.
"Jonathan, how's your house?" the coach said.
"It's gone," the boy said.
"Gone?" said Patterson.
"So's yours," said the boy.
"My house is gone?"
"There ain't nothin' there."
Where would Patterson and his wife have hidden if they'd been in it?
"Under the stairwell," he says. "And that stairwell collapsed. Concrete blocks and bricks are all on top of it. If we'd have been there, we wouldn't be here today."
House flattened. Car crushed. Lexi, his golden retriever, gone.
Equally flattened, Patterson was trudging the two miles back to his truck when he ran smack into the father of a woman from the neighborhood.
"Have you seen my daughter?" the man asked, panicked. "I'm looking for my daughter."
Patterson had seen his daughter, under a sheet, laying on his sidewalk, dead.
The coach took a gulp and the man's shoulders at the same time.
"I hate to be the one who breaks this to you," he said. "But your daughter didn't make it."
The man collapsed in Patterson's arms right then and there.
Death could've come for Miller, too, were it not for that mattress.
“
A lot of people ask me, 'Y'all still gonna play?' And when I say yeah, they always say, 'Good. That'll give me two hours where I can forget about all this.'
â€
-- Coach Rick Patterson
He was on the couch when his mom came running inside, screaming for everybody to get in the hallway -- fast! -- and lay down. Miller and his dad dragged the boy's mattress off his bed and put it over them.
"We only had about 10 seconds before it hit," Miller remembers. "That tornado sounded like a big ol' freight train coming through. I watched the roof fly right off my house, right above me. And then my sister started to fly off, too. I grabbed her around the middle of her body and just hung on."
When they crawled out from under the mattress, they saw dozens of large, jagged shards of wood and glass sticking into it. "Those things woulda got us for sure," he says.
And in the midst of all this glass-break and heartache and dust-cake, Hueytown must dig in for the playoffs.
"Lately, Coach hasn't been at all like he usually is," says Hueytown starting catcher David Veasey. "He used to be all intense. Kinda hard to play for. But now, he just seems more laid back. I guess maybe he figures there's more to life than baseball."
Says Patterson, "A lot of people ask me, 'Y'all still gonna play?' And when I say yeah, they always say, 'Good. That'll give me two hours where I can forget about all this."
Something he'll remember, though: One day, he was combing through the backyard rubble when he thought he heard a cry. He hunted it. There, trapped under a pile of rubble, was his Lexi, trembling, but fine.
Some wins come with no game at all.
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Unreal
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Damn...just damn.
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Damn...You got a link to that article? I want to see the pictures...
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Having to tell someone their daughter is dead...just can't imagine that.
Many years ago, while I was working in claims with an insurance company, I went to this guy's house that took a direct hit from one of these monsters. You just look at the pile of rubble that used to be a house and wonder how anyone could make it through that. I found my insured wandering through a field behind his home. Understandably, I thought he was trying to salvage anything he could but all he could say to me was, "Have you seen my turkey? We've got family coming in and I had a turkey in the freezer. I need to find that turkey or they won't have anything to eat."
Guy was in total shock. Can you imagine someone in that situation asking, "Have you seen my daughter?"
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Having to tell someone their daughter is dead...just can't imagine that.
Many years ago, while I was working in claims with an insurance company, I went to this guy's house that took a direct hit from one of these monsters. You just look at the pile of rubble that used to be a house and wonder how anyone could make it through that. I found my insured wandering through a field behind his home. Understandably, I thought he was trying to salvage anything he could but all he could say to me was, "Have you seen my turkey? We've got family coming in and I had a turkey in the freezer. I need to find that turkey or they won't have anything to eat."
Guy was in total shock. Can you imagine someone in that situation asking, "Have you seen my daughter?"
One of my local attorneys lives in Tuscaloosa, and his house was in the path, but no the edge. Heavy damage, but not completely obliterated. The found a student's dead body in his back yard 2 days after the storm.
The death toll is going to probably be 400+ when it's all said and done.
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Having to tell someone their daughter is dead...just can't imagine that.
Many years ago, while I was working in claims with an insurance company, I went to this guy's house that took a direct hit from one of these monsters. You just look at the pile of rubble that used to be a house and wonder how anyone could make it through that. I found my insured wandering through a field behind his home. Understandably, I thought he was trying to salvage anything he could but all he could say to me was, "Have you seen my turkey? We've got family coming in and I had a turkey in the freezer. I need to find that turkey or they won't have anything to eat."
Guy was in total shock. Can you imagine someone in that situation asking, "Have you seen my daughter?"
So...
Did you help the guy find his fucking turkey?
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Damn...You got a link to that article? I want to see the pictures...
ESPN.com front page article
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Unreal
Damn...just damn.
Sums it all up.
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Unreal.
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Unreal.
Get your own lines
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Get your own lines
You didn't help find the guys turkey....did you!
Fuckin lawyers!
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You didn't help find the guys turkey....did you!
Fuckin lawyers!
The guy wouldn't pay the turkey retrieval retainer.
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I had already found his turkey back up the road. Still frozen. Put it in my car.
Then I denied his claim.
Always helps to have an extra turkey at Thanksgiving.
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I had already found his turkey back up the road. Still frozen. Put it in my car.
Then I denied his claim.
Always helps to have an extra turkey at Thanksgiving.
You my friend, are a Saint.
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When sad threads turn hilarious on the next Dr. Phil
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You my friend, are a Saint.
Just trying to feed the hungry. And my relatives can get real hungry.
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I had already found his turkey back up the road. Still frozen. Put it in my car.
Then I denied his claim.
Always helps to have an extra turkey at Thanksgiving.
Unreal.
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Unreal.
Life sux, get a helmet.
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Life sux, get a helmet.
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