Hondo part ll
November 3, 2008
Is it time for another Hondo story? Are you kidding, it’s always time for a Frank Howard story. If you recall, (Sept. 30 post titled “Hondo”) he and I crossed paths with the New York Mets in 1996. He was the first base coach. I think I can say with reasonable confidence that Frank’s probably the biggest human to ever coach first base and maybe the biggest character too. In the previous post we established that, aside from the spare pair of undies stuffed into his suit jacket, Hondo traveled with nothing more than the clothes on his back. One week, two weeks, or three weeks on the road…it didn’t matter. No luggage for Hondo. Another interesting tidbit about Frank is that he drove a Yugo. I kid you not – a Yugo. How a 6’7” 280 pound man could wedge himself into that piece of junk will forever be a mystery. To watch him drive that car was one of the funniest things I ever saw. All you could see as he peeled out of the NY Mets player parking lot (full of Mercedes and Ferraris – and the one Yugo) was these two big knees wrapped around a steering wheel. It looked like a giant in a Hotwheel toy car. With that in mind, I present for your viewing pleasure another great Hondo episode from the 1996 season.
Let me set the stage. It’s somewhere in the middle of the season and we’re flying home from Los Angeles after a game. We land in New York about 3 or 4 in the morning and we’ve got a game later that day. Todd Hundley, Jason Isringhausen, Bill Pulsipher, and Chris Jones were carpooling home because they all lived in the same apartment complex out on Long Island. Hondo happened to live there too. It was a long flight – and who knows what happened on it – but the guys ended up wrapping their car around a light pole on the way home from the airport. Nobody was seriously hurt, but I guess it was kind of a scene…Jones was trapped in the back seat, Pulsipher was pacing around the car, Hundley had a little bloody nose – you get the picture. Keep in mind that it’s 4AM and nobody is out, the road is empty. So the guys are looking around trying to figure out what to do and they look up and here comes the yellow Yugo putting along the off ramp. It was Hondo of course. He pulls up, rolls down the passenger window, pokes his head out and pauses for a second as he assesses the situation, then points his big finger at the guys and says, “see you fellas at the park tomorrow.” And then he rolled up the window and putted off. That’s it, no offer to help, no questions, no inquiry if anyone was hurt, no reprimand, no nothing. Just see you all tomorrow. The guys said they were shocked. Like he had just passed by them at a restaurant or something and the scene was nothing out of the ordinary. I’ll tell you one thing, he knew enough to keep his nose out of that cluster. Classic Hondo. The legend grows.
“I never get tired son, just a little sleepy” - Frank Howard
