Chipper: The Natural

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Pierson, Florida -- As the sign on Highway 17 advises, welcome to the Fern Capital of the World. No place else grows and sells as many ferns and decorative greenery as this rural, one-stoplight town (pop. 1,500) in central Florida. This is Chipper Jones' hometown, where he learned important life lessons about ferns and the strike zone. He learned to hate ferns -- and to know and love the strike zone.

It wasn't just that his parents would sometimes make him weed the rows of ferns out back, punishment for poor grades or misbehavior. "All my friends' dads were in the fern business," Jones said. "It was a given around Pierson that when you graduated high school, nobody went to college. You went to work for your dad. It took me about two, three minutes cutting ferns to know I didn't want to do that."

But then, his future was already pre-ordained. Self-ordained. "At an early age," Jones said, "I knew there was nothing I wanted to do more than play baseball at its highest level."

The strike zone was painted on the back of the wooden garage at Stillmeadow Farm, the horse farm where Lynne Jones, an accomplished equestrienne, teaches dressage. A hay barn sits about 30 feet away. Lynne's husband, Larry, would stand in front of that barn and pitch tennis balls, or wiffle golf balls, to his namesake, their only child. Larry was the baseball coach at Pierson Taylor High School; little Chipper wasn't strong enough to swing the bats the Taylor players used. So he'd cut off a 33-inch piece of 2-inch-thick PVC pipe and whale away.

"We'd get out there and throw the ball just as hard as God let us," Larry said. "I'm sure that's why he hits the fastball so well." Chipper was 11 or 12 the day Larry, a former college shortstop, came into the house and told Lynne, "I can't beat him anymore."

Chipper learned to switch-hit in the backyard. Larry grew up in Vero Beach, the home of Dodgertown, and was an avid Dodger fan. But his favorite player was Mickey Mantle, so Larry taught his son to switch-hit like the Mick. Very soon, Chipper was hitting home runs left-handed and right-handed. A homer was any ball that cleared the hay barn and landed atop the saran, the shade cloth covering the family fernery.

Chipper was a lower-case chipper, too. A paint chipper. Not only was the strike zone chipped away from constant use, but the wood-paneled white house had to be repainted every couple of years. With the nearest neighborhood kids a mile away, Chipper often played alone in the backyard, bouncing tennis balls off the back of the house, the roof, anywhere he could to work on his fielding.

"That's probably why he's good on the radio," Lynne said. "He's out there playing by himself, carrying on a running commentary. I know lots of kids do it, but he did it constantly."

He was talkin' baseball, as always. "When you grow up in a baseball family," Chipper said, "all you're talking about at the dinner table, on the ride to school, it was always baseball."

At 3 o'clock, once school let out at Pierson Elementary, Chipper walked a couple of blocks to the high school. On the way, he'd see the Little League complex where he played, the one where now Chipper Jones Lane leads to Chipper Jones Field. At Pierson Taylor High, he'd spend the afternoon shagging flies with his father's team. It was always baseball. Baseball and Dad.

"He's always liked to do what I like to do," Larry said. "Hunt, fish, play ball, play golf."

Invariably, Larry obliged. Occasionally, though, when Chipper was very young, Larry awoke at 4 a.m. to slip away for a quieter, more adult hunt. Wrong. Chipper would come running down the stairs from his bedroom, dragging his blue jeans behind him, race outside and ask, "Dad, you weren't going to leave without me, were you?"

"Uh, no, son. Just going out to check on the dogs."

They raised Walker hounds to hunt deer and fox, and also showed them at field trials. At his first trial, Chipper won with a hound named Flirt. His dog trophies are still displayed in his old bedroom, along with dozens of baseball awards and photos, and his old baseball jersey from The Bolles School, the Jacksonville private school where Chipper was sent as a high school sophomore. Bolles retired Chipper's No. 10, the number he wore because his father wore No. 10. By then, Chipper had become the best baseball prospect in the country. He'd also grown up considerably.

The best player on the field

It wasn't just that baseball was in Chipper Jones' blood, or that he loved the game and treasured its history. Or even that he was a precocious kid shortstop. What he really loved was this:

"I enjoyed going to the park and knowing I was the best player that stepped on that field. I could go on a football field and couldn't say that, or on a basketball court. I still enjoyed playing them, but I wasn't the player in those forums that I was on the baseball field. I just felt like the baseball field was my domain. I felt like at an early age, I could go out there and do whatever I wanted to do. Who wouldn't like that kind of power, to go out on a baseball field and do whatever you pleased?"

Chipper was 12 when his father first suspected he could be a real player. In a Little League district playoff game, against an Altamont Springs team that advanced to the Little League World Series and included Jason Varitek (who later became an All-American at Georgia Tech and a No. 1 draft pick), Chipper hit three homers in a losing cause. Afterward, Larry Jones told his wife, "Lynne, I think he might be one of the 10 best players his age in the country."

"Yeah, right," Lynne thought. "Little League dad."

The next year, as a seventh grader playing on the Pierson Taylor JV basketball team, Chipper was fouled with three seconds left in a road game and his team down by a point. With a hostile crowd screaming, Chipper took the ball from the referee, stuck it under one arm and waved to the fans, "Come on, come on!" To scream louder.

"I thought, 'What a hot dog,'" said Larry, who then watched his son make both free throws to win. "Afterward, I asked him, 'Why do you put that kind of pressure on yourself?' He said, 'I was going to make 'em.'"

"When the rest of us turn to Jello, he turns it on," said Lynne. "It never ceases to amaze me."

Chipper would never do anything so arrogant now. But his confidence is even greater. That comes not only from sustained success but also from his mother.

"My mom always taught me to have that little strut about you, that little swagger that says, 'You may get me this time, but I'm going to get you back seven-fold the next,'" Chipper said. "She was always like, 'Don't you ever, ever let any pitcher know that he's got you. Even if he strikes you out, you walk back to the dugout and if you've got to talk a little smack to him, talk a little smack.' My mom's a tough little lady."

"I work on the sports psychology end of it," Lynne said. "I think a lot of the game is mental. Because of my working with the horses, if I'm scared or unsure, I have to drive that down and fake the horse that the fence isn't too big to jump. I've studied that a lot, worked on it with my students and Chipper...It's not cockiness, or arrogance. It's confidence, so the other guy on the field goes, 'Uh-oh.'"

A big bat at boarding school

Chipper was a freshman at Pierson Taylor when both parents went, "Uh-oh." "He was catching a break at school because I worked there and he was an athlete," Larry said.

"He was making straight A's," Lynne said, "and he never cracked a book."

The solution: The Bolles School, a prestigious private school 90 miles north in Jacksonville, where the academics and athletics were superior. Chipper resisted, but his parents insisted he board there. Lynne wept each weekend when Chipper returned to school. "He was my best friend, and Larry's best friend," she said.

"I went from being a big fish in a little pond to a little fish in a big ol' lake," Chipper said. "It was tough, a big growing-up process. You're talking about a little country hick from a one-stoplight town going to the big city and pulling into a parking lot full of better cars than I drove, and a lot of rich kids. I didn't really fit in. I had problems. But the first time they saw me swing a bat, I made a few friends."

He also made the honor roll, after nearly flunking several courses his first quarter. He learned to study, to balance a checkbook and live on a budget, to deal with baseball scouts and college recruiters. He grew up.

Chipper also led Bolles to the state championship as a senior. The road to the title included a playoff victory back home in Pierson, where many people were still bitter over Chipper's transfer, as if his hometown high school wasn't good enough for him. An angry, overflow crowd screamed insults. Of course, their anger was partly because Pierson was very good that year and might well have won the championship if Chipper hadn't gone to Bolles.

"Best decision I ever made," Chipper said. "That's the reason I was the No. 1 pick in the draft. The reason I'm the kind of person and as mature as I am today."

That person is the guy who was salivating in the on-deck circle in Yankee Stadium on Oct. 26, only to see Mark Lemke pop out to end the World Series. "I can honestly say, if I'd have gotten up, we'd have won that ballgame," he said. "I was so focused on that at-bat, and so ready for that at-bat. I wasn't the least bit concerned that I was going to be the last out of the World Series. I could've re-wrote history with that one at-bat. And how many chances do you get?

"To be honest, I haven't been up in a do-or-die situation that could've compared to that. That's the moment that you dream of your whole life. I was one pitch away from being two outs, top of the ninth inning, Game 6 of the World Series, bases loaded, down a run. That's what you go out in the backyard for your whole life and you're thinking about, 'How sweet would it be to get a base hit?' And every time in that backyard, I got a base hit to win the game. Every single time."

By Jack Wilkinson, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

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