URL: http://www.abqjournal.com/news/special/410506sports11-24-05.htm

Thursday, November 24, 2005
Richardson Threw A Wicked Curveball
By Toby Smith
Journal Staff Writer
    SANTA FE— Bill Richardson is standing in his fourth-floor office in the State Capitol, stretching his index and middle fingers across the seams of a baseball.
    "That's how I held my curveball," the governor says.
    Roland Boutwell, Richardson's catcher at Middlesex School in Concord, Mass., vividly remembers the flight of Richardson's curve. "The pitch was like something falling off a table."
    Richardson, 58, started playing Little League Baseball in Mexico City, where he grew up. Though he was born in Pasadena, Calif., his mother is from Mexico City, where she met his father, an American and a Citibank representative who was posted to the region for almost 30 years.
    During Richardson's junior year at Tufts University, after a decade or so of throwing that curveball, Richardson says his right elbow screamed for mercy.
    His baseball career was over.
    Richardson had hoped to be drafted during his senior year in high school, at Middlesex School, when most young players are, but his father insisted he go to Tufts in the fall.
    Also named William Richardson, and nicknamed "Bug," the senior Richardson in the '60s was a hard-nosed Boston investor. Much earlier he had been a football player for Tufts, in suburban Boston. Reportedly, Bug Richardson in 1913 broke the leg of a promising Army halfback named Dwight Eisenhower.
    "My father and I had some bitter fights about the draft," remembers Richardson. "One of those fights happened on graduation day at Middlesex."
    Richardson's father, who died in 1972, won every argument. Thus, young Bill went off to Tufts.
    "The major disappointment of my life," Richardson told People magazine in 1995.
    As a skinny kid in Mexico City, Richardson had worshiped Mickey Mantle, the great Yankee slugger. "I wanted to be him." When Mantle appeared on the cover of Boys' Life magazine in the late 1950s, Richardson had the cover framed and hung it on his bedroom wall.
    Mantle played centerfield, but Richardson drifted toward the pitcher's mound. "When I got two strikes on someone," Richardson says, still gripping the baseball in his office, "I knew I was going to get a strikeout. I was that confident."
    In a game his junior year at Middlesex, Richardson struck out an astounding 24 batters in a 3-1 win. In his debut for Tufts, Richardson struck out 12 Harvard freshman in a 4-3 loss.
    His hopes of being drafted renewed, he went off to the Cape Cod League in June and became a relief pitcher for the Cotuit (Mass.) Kettleers. One night that summer he pitched to Thurman Munson, later a New York Yankee all-star.
    "I had a 3-2 count on Munson," Richardson recalls in a story he loves to retell. "He clobbered my next pitch and I think it's still rising. The ball went over the center-field fence. Beyond that fence there was an outhouse. The ball cleared the outhouse."
    In his junior year at Tufts, Richardson organized a spring-training team trip to Mexico City. It was there, he says, that his right elbow gave out while pitching.
    "I knew immediately I'd have to find another profession."
    The bum elbow, along with a chronic sinus problem, kept Richardson out of another draft as well: the military draft.
    "I was a very shy kid," says Richardson. "Baseball allowed me to succeed, to feel good about myself. It taught me about teamwork, about leadership."
    His only high school coach, Tom Quirk, retains a mental picture of Richardson: He's standing on the ball field at Middlesex, listening to his teammates, always listening. "He was a diplomat even then."
    One of Richardson's best days in baseball occurred when he finally met Mickey Mantle. It happened at a gathering near Washington, D.C., in the 1980s.
    There was the Mick, his blond hair still thick as wheat, forearms still resembling fireplace logs. He looked for all the world like the Boys' Life cover boy.
    "I was reduced to a little kid," Richardson confesses. "I told him he was my hero."
    Mantle smiled at the familiar words. Then the two men chatted, one legend to another.

E-MAIL Journal Staff Writer Toby Smith