PUBLIC NUDITY AND CLUNKER CARS (aka my most embarrassing baseball moments)

I’ll never forget the night. It was May 7, 1991. . and it should have been spectacular.

I was at a Texas Rangers baseball game, with a group of 20 guys from my college dorm (I went to TCU). Our dorm manager had purchased group seats in the family section, which was the dumbest place to put a bunch of college-age guys because we couldn't drink or swear there, thus banning the two things that are most essential to having a great night out at a ballpark.

So, I'm in the second row behind the outfield wall. The rest of my dorm crowd is behind me. In front of me, is a group of boys celebrating a tenth birthday. To their right, still a row in front of me, is a group of hot sorority girls from our college. The night sky was a crisp black, the temperature a perfectly mild spring.

Now, this turned out to be a historic game, aside from what happened to me. In fact, it turned out to be legendary Rangers pitcher Nolan Ryan's record-setting 7th no-hitter, and the Rangers were playing the Toronto Blue Jays. When the 7th inning stretch hit, instead of singing "Take Me Out to the Ballgame," Rangers fans get up and dance a thoroughly ignorant redneck jig to a loud recording of a fiddle-based country song.

So I’m up and shaking my ass country-style, when all of a sudden...I feel a cool breeze coming from below and I look down to see that I've been pantsed!. Not just my shorts, but also my tighty-whitey briefs, all down around my ankles. I'm in the family section, with four ten year old boys and an entire sorority in front of me...When a virtual miracle occurs.

The boys are watching something on the field, intensely. The sorority girls are looking back but in another direction, along with most of the guys from my dorm. They're all watching a loud drunk guy getting arrested way behind us all.

So I make the fastest move of my life, and manage to grab my shorts and hike them up fast. I figure nobody saw me. Well, nobody but...First, one guy from my dorm, who yelled out, "Oh GOD, Kozlowski just stuck his ass in my face!"
That was the guy who, it turned out, pulled my pants down and was trying to get everyone to notice. And, another groaning guy from another direction, who it turns out is...
A cameraman from Canadian television. He's been filming, live, us wacky Texans dancing the jig and when I bent down to pick up my shorts, I MOONED CANADA. Yep.
Guess who's never been back to Arlington Stadium?

Now, for most guys growing up in America, baseball is a big part of their childhood. After all, it’s known as “America’s pastime,” Little League games are practically a rite of passage, and there are few bonding moments so powerful between a father and son as a game of catch or teaching your kid how to hit a ball.

I was another one of those millions of kids who loved the game, but like most things in my childhood, I didn’t get to experience baseball in any way approaching normal.

My dad was from Poland, a country half a world over and seemingly from the culture of a different galaxy far, far away. Growing up Polish in the ‘70s, amid a non-stop barrage of Polack jokes and ethnic slurs, was a nightmare – especially considering we were trapped in the illiterate, redneck South. So I took a look around me and figured that baseball seemed to be the great leveler, the one sport everyone watched in America. And it was because of that that I became a rabid fan.

We were living in Little Rock, a city perpetually stuck at about 170,000 population but nonetheless the biggest city in our state of Arkansas. Because the city was so small, we weren’t able to have a major-league baseball team, but instead had a AA ball club – meaning that our Arkansas Travelers were perpetually halfway up the ladder to the bigtime. We were middling and mediocre – and this was a fitting metaphor for our city.

But I have to give my dad credit. Even though he didn’t understand a thing about baseball, he took me to the games each year without complaint anyway. We made quite a pair, as I spent two years with a metallic leg brace as a kid due to the fact I had an insane growth spurt that my knees couldn’t handle and my dad would show up with his gigantic, 700-page medical texts and Physicians Desk References to read. Let’s just say that we not only drew stares but outright catcalls from the uncouth minions around us.

But we didn’t care. Especially not me. I knew that my dad was truly giving me the gift of time all those summer nights, and it was all the more precious because I knew that given a choice, he would’ve been ANYWHERE else than watching this slow-moving game he didn’t understand for three hours at a stretch.

Dad was both protective of me and yet open-minded as well. When I lucked out and won concert tickets to see the cheesy ‘80s rock band Foreigner when I was just 11, every kid in my school seemed to call and beg me to go. My dad was smart enough to realize that a couple of 11-year-olds had no business hanging out amid a sea of pot smoke and shitty music (this IS the band that sang “Feels Like the First Time,” folks), but instead of making me let the tickets go to waste, he popped in some cotton balls to his ears and drove me to the concert himself. There’s nothing quite like seeing the opening act lead the crowd in flipping off their bosses while my utterly unaware dad munched popcorn and asked what all the racket was about. The only thing he related to the whole night was cheering for the gospel choir that came out to sing “I Wanna Know What Love Is,” but at least he didn’t make me leave by taking offense to the band singing “Hot Blooded.” Come to think of it, why was I even WANTING to be there?

I’d try to explain baseball to my dad, but it was pretty futile trying to retrain a mind whose entire capacity for sporting events was wired to getting excited about soccer. I should have just explained to him that baseball and soccer actually have a lot in common: Scoring hardly ever happens, and people get WAY too excited over watching a 0-0 game. The only thing less fun in my personal history of baseball was the one pathetic season I played on a YMCA team and only got one hit in seven games, all of which we lost. There’s nothing like playing on an 0-7 team to shatter one’s major league dreams forever.

But we, like all too many of our fellow Travelers fans, had to find our pleasures in the rest of the ballgame experience. First, there was the drive over to the ballpark on a warm summer night, a jaunt through some of the most idyllic neighborhoods in the city as the sun began to make its way down and over the horizon for the night, shooting out colorful streaks of light in every direction as my dad would crank up the Oldies station and sing Beatles songs with me in an extremely heavy accent.

Sure, that cracked me up at the time, but it’s nothing compared to watching him now in his retirement – as he sports an oversized 10-gallon black cowboy hat, jeans, boots and a checkered shirt while driving with my mom up to America’s Midwestern, white trash equivalent of Vegas: Branson, Missouri. Singing along to country radio, Dad is known as The Polish Cowboy whenever he hits a honkytonk dance floor, with my mom in a long skirt as they hit the floor two-steppin’ and line-dancing. Only now, after more than 35 years in America, citizenship, a quarter-century as a VA doctor and the fact that the collapse of European Communism started in his homeland have all combined to give him a genuine swagger when he hits a club.

Back in the Arkansas Travelers’ Ray Winder Field, however, making a game special often required a ridiculous gimmick. There was Clunker Car Night, in which a local used car dealership would bring in its absolute worst pieces of junk and give away a car to an unlucky attendee between every inning. If you “won” and could drive the car off the ballfield and onto the street, it was yours for free, and for life. One woman’s car broke down at the first stoplight she hit and she came running back into the stadium, weeping, shrieking and looking for the head of promotions. Other nights, clouds of exhaust would fill the air as the engines everywhere seemed to burst into flames.

Another favorite was Captain Dynamite. This was an apparently insane, and likely shell-shocked, old man who would don an American-flag-styled cape, drag a wooden coffin out to the pitcher’s mound between games of a doubleheader with two blond bimbos, fill it with dynamite sticks while tying a detonator to himself, and then climb in and commence a countdown that would lead to his blowing himself out of the coffin. It was quite an impressive feat to all of us Arkansas kids, and always somewhat instructive to find that when he signed autographs, Captain Dynamite would always hear our names wrong and inevitably sign over to the wrong kid’s name. My dad, meanwhile, would try to hustle me along, fearing that I would be unduly influenced by the Captain and his crazy ways.

But eventually, I was old enough to go to games with my friends, and my dad gladly dropped me at Jamie or Steve’s house and switched to seeing movies with me instead.

The most impressive display of Captain Dynamite’s prowess came on what might stand – next to July 4, 1988, when Bon Jovi and Motley Crue both showed up in town to co-headline the Greatest Heavy Metal Show We Had Ever Seen – as the greatest night in Little Rock history. It was July 1989 when LA Dodgers’ pitching legend Fernando Valenzuela came through town while stuck in the California Angels minor league system while rehabbing from an injury.

When word got out that Valenzuela was hitting our fair city, Fernandomania struck in a way that hadn’t been seen even in LA in half a decade. Ray Winder Field legally held 5,600 people, but that night, the crowd swelled to 12,500 before the authorities finally got involved. Every seat was filled, every inch of the spillover grass behind the bullpen was mashed down by the butts of families sharing the Most Magical Night in the History of Arkansas Baseball, and then, yet, it still wasn’t enough!

They had to open up the warning track – the sacred dirt track that lies just in front of the outfield fences to warn outfielders that they’re about to hit the wall – for seating. This development was singlehandedly the most stunning thing I had ever encountered in a ballpark, because it enabled fans to sit ON the field, as close to the action as anyone in history could ever imagine. My friends and I immediately jumped the fence from our bleacher seats and ran across the grass to be part of history.

Unfortunately, we didn’t take into account that this meant rock-hard baseballs would be flying, bouncing and rolling directly at us all night. Having to duck and cover, roll and jump out of the way while having players cuss at us for blocking their path to the ball added a level of excitement and danger that were worth far more than the mere $5 we had spent on tickets.

And then, at the 7th inning stretch, in a stunning display of showmanship, the Arkansas Travelers general manager announced a special surprise appearance by…drum roll please…Captain Dynamite!

All I could say was “Holy shit, holy shit, holy shit!” I was 14 now, and thoroughly excited by this turn of events. I leaped up off the grass and started a rampage of fans headed directly for the pitcher’s mound. I wanted to get as close as possible to the Captain and check out his techniques from up front. It was like getting to see how Houdini escaped his straitjackets.

As the countdown began and I kept running towards Ground Zero, the ballpark announcers started warning us kids to “Stay away from the mound! Do not go near the pitcher’s mound! 5…4…3…” BLAMMO! I got knocked off my feet by the force of the blast and nearly felt my eardrums explode. The bodies of 500 other kids were strewn across the field around me, dazed but laughing.

“That…was…awesome!” I said, along with about 500 other easily amused 12 to 14 year olds.

That may have seemed the greatest moment ever, at age 14. I still go to games 10 or 15 times a year, wherever I’m living or visiting, picking the nights like Free Calendar Night when I know the odds are good that I can join in crowd pandemonium, making paper airplanes and shooting them through the air in defiance of ballpark regulations.

I sneak in beach balls and bounce them through crowds, leap up faster and higher than the rest of my row on The Wave, and sing the National Anthem as dramatically as Pavarotti. I sill drink a couple of brews no matter how expensive they are, kick my legs up and solve the world’s problems with my friends for hours, barely even noticing the game itself.

For I learned long ago with my dad that it ain’t about the runs that score or the double play. It’s about all the fun, crazy random stuff that happens on the perimeter.

And moments like that are why I will always love baseball. Even if the Rangers have banned me from their ballpark for life.