The place where dreams come true

Maybe it didn’t rank right up there on a historical level with the children of Israel reaching Canaan.
But when my friend Diane Lively steered her car up the long driveway toward the big white house and the picture-perfect baseball diamond, I knew I had reached my Promised Land.
This past Saturday was the culmination of a 14-year ambition to travel to the place where my all-time favourite movie, “Field of Dreams,” was actually filmed, on the outskirts of the small Midwestern U.S. community of Dyersville, Iowa.
If you’re unfamiliar with the 1989 cinematic classic (and from someone who has watched the movie a legitimate 68 times, that seems unfathomable), it’s based on the W.P. Kinsella novel “Shoeless Joe,” and starred Kevin Costner as a corn farmer who follows the instructions of a mystical voice who advises him, “If you build it, he will come.”
What follows is a truly touching story of redemption and reward intertwined with the 1919 Chicago “Black Sox” gambling scandal, where eight members of the team where banned from baseball for allegedly throwing the World Series that year.
One of those was the great “Shoeless” Joe Jackson, whose lifetime .356 average is still third highest in history. It was never proven in court that Jackson took any of the gamblers’ money, and despite hitting .375 for the Series and hitting its only home run, he was forced to bear the same fate as his teammates.
I’ll save a future column for this topic. But suffice it to say the second Pete Rose gets inducted into the Hall of Fame (a man who was actually convicted of a crime), Jackson had better be one step behind him or the Hall’s voting committee will face my wrath, guaranteed. But I digress.
After the movie was filmed and received an Academy Award nomination for Best Picture (I’ll never accept “Driving Miss Daisy” as the actual winner), it was decided to leave the property, which is actually shared by two families, as is to remain as a tourism site.
But for those of us who love the game, this is no Grauman’s Chinese Theatre or even the Great Wall of China. It’s so much more than just something to slap on a postcard.
This outdoor tribute to America’s national pastime has become a haven for those searching for solace from life’s tribulations, and those who cherish the joys of youth, whether they still be children themselves or not.
My brush with magic almost never happened. Consumed with fear as a thunderstorm raged at 4:30 a.m. that morning, I woke two hours later to find the clouds clearing and the sun breaking through.
By the time Diane and I reached our destination, the sky was a dazzling blue and the sun shone with all the warmth that the field itself exuded.
My first steps upon the sacred ground were most reverent in nature. I almost felt like I hadn’t earned the right to be there.
After throwing a pitch from the mound, a small blond haired boy no more than four years old named Keston from Emporia, Kan., who was there with his older brother Brandon and mother Karen, approached me and asked if I wanted to play.
I took position behind the plate and Keston proceeded to deliver pitch after pitch from 12 feet away. Some were straight down the middle, some were high and outside, some were in the dirt. But every pitch was a strike in my book, and Keston’s face glowed increasingly with triumph after every delivery.
Suddenly, five-year-old Jacob and his father Don took the field, with Don pitching and Jacob and Keston taking turns at the plate. The ball might have travelled mere feet from their bats, but as Don and I combined for a series of defensive “lapses” to allow the mini-Mantles to round the bases, it was tough to tell who was enjoying themselves more: the adults or the kids.
When Jacob collided with me at home and I accommodatingly sprawled on the shale surface as though I had been hit by Ty Cobb in his prime, our subsequent high-five after I called him safe was a priceless moment—but hardly the last one.
There was little Caci Croft from Pardyville, Wisc., who could have just as easily been Karin Kinsella, Costner’s fictional daughter in the movie. Her sense of innocence and her unbridled awe as she held the softball and the glove I had brought along was a treasure to behold.
There was diehard St. Louis Cardinals fan Drew Young from Linden, Ind., 12 years old who cracked a smile as wide as the Mississippi River every time he connected with the ball or made a catch.
There was eight-year-old Kayla from San Antonio, Tx., who shyly looked on as the game unfolded in front of her. After some gentle coaxing, she consented to step up and take a few swings herself.
Six pitches came, and six pitches were missed, but Kayla wouldn’t quit. And when she knocked the seven pitch 25 feet and outran the pitcher to first base, you could have sworn she was walking on air.
There was Middletown, Ohio native Darrell Wilder and his fiancée Audrey Swartz from Champaign, Ill. and Audrey’s mother Linda, taking in the sights.
The baseball lovebirds met at Lambeth College in Jackson, Tenn., and Audrey recalls Wilder’s unique proposal last Fourth of July.
“He brought me breakfast,” she chuckled, “and there was a ring inside the bagel.”
There was Angie from Carol Stream, just outside of Chicago, watching her grandson do his Sammy Sosa impression at the plate.
“I’m not much of a baseball fan myself,” she admitted. “But I’m here for my grandson. He just loves the game so much.”
There was Brett Mandel from Philadelphia, Pa., the man who came up with the gem of an idea to do exactly what I was doing, except he took it one step further and wrote a book (Is This Heaven?), telling the experiences of those who travelled to this baseball Mecca.
“There’s millions of baseball fields that nobody stops to play at,” said Mandel. “But for so many reasons, people keep coming here 14 years after the movie. It’s so special to so many.”
And there was me, memorizing every step I took around the hallowed field, pretending to fade into the corn like the ghosts in the movie, standing where “Shoeless” Joe had shagged flies off the bat of Ray Kinsella, sitting in the bleachers where Terence Mann made his Gettysburg-like speech at the movie’s climax.
It was a time that means little or nothing to many I know. But to me, my moment on that one field, carved out of a sea of corn in smalltown Iowa, will last a lifetime.
Or, as Moonlight Graham (rest in peace, Burt Lancaster) so eloquently put it in the movie:
“Once a place touches you like this, the wind never blows so cold again.”