The Hero in the Chair
Last fall my friend Travis died. Given the nature of my job and the pandemic, it just didn’t seem real. I tried to put fingers to keys eight months ago and I could never get to what I wanted to say. I am only now getting around to processing the grief, in large part because all of those emails and phone calls that we had every summer just aren’t coming anymore. Finally, the words are coming.
One of the last times I heard from him was an email. It is the most important email I have ever received in my life. I will likely never receive one that matters more to me.
…You have also put a lot of smiles on faces, certainly mine included…You are a Legend in many ways when it comes to the TRF Tournament, and you added even more [to your] resume.
Thank you for continuing to be a leader and an example to all the other teams and captains.
Love you,
Travis
My story is not unique. There are probably hundreds out there who were closer to him and feel just as I do and are probably even more fond of him, if that’s possible. I revere him above all others. He is the only person for whom I have openly wept while writing about; this current rendition probably isn’t even the third time it has happened. Like so many I am a much better human being because I got to be friends with Travis Roy.
Like so many 19-year-olds, I had a pretty narrow idea of what mattered most in life. My friend Pat needed some teams for a charity WIFFLE tournament that he was holding on his property and it sounded like a lot of fun. In my life I had always been a fairly competent athlete but never good enough, or on a good enough team to win anything that I considered to be meaningful. Sadly we are raised in this world to only see value in winning, often eschewing effort, improvement, enjoyment, and the journey that you take.
On that rainy Saturday in June of 2002, however, leading the HOTDAM squad (whose formation and team name is a funny story for another day) I became meaningfully victorious for the first time in my life, hitting several homeruns, blah blah blah. Look out world, Mario is a champion of a seven-team, rinky-dink tournament that nobody saw.
Travis Roy and his dad Lee were there with bemused looks on their faces. Seemed nice, didn’t really talk to them much. Later in his life Travis would talk about living life with a passion, and then a purpose. I was in the passion phase. Already my mind was on 2003. Getting better players, continuing to win games. Shockingly, the winning continued, HOTDAM beat all comers in the second annual Travis Roy Foundation WIFFLE benefit, now moved to August where it would remain. There was no doubt the world would see me as an incredibly important and talented hitter of holey plastic.
During the third tournament, the concept of player fundraising was introduced. Attending the tournament and buying the food has its limits when trying to create meaningful growth. I would love to tell you that the 21-year-old version of myself jumped right into helping. He did not. Fundraising was something you did in sixth grade by going door-to-door in your neighborhood and selling magazines. It was the worst then, it would be the worst now. Even worse, HOTDAM’s dominance on the field would soon wane away. The team regressed significantly during the next few years, showing that they had indeed been performing at several standard deviations above the norm. Teams got better and we did not. Self-importance takes a big hit when the thing you hang your worth on gets depleted. Realizing that it was a bit embarrassing to be a team captain and having nothing extra for all of those people in need…who needed help again?…I begrudgingly began accepting that player fundraising was necessary.
At the conclusion of the fifth tournament in 2006, another rough showing on the field but a step in the right direction as a fundraiser, I was given Travis’ book, Eleven Seconds, as a reward for winning a home run derby. Naturally I was more excited about the beautiful granite plaque that I could proudly show to…absolutely nobody. With time to kill at a desk job for a company for which would soon go underwater, I cracked open the book and ended up finishing it in two days. Finally, I understood everything for which I had never bothered to consider. That being in a wheelchair is an every-day thing. That there would not be tournament glory there for you every year, but you could leave Vermont feeling great about yourself for placing others’ interests first. Travis Roy, on the brink of achieving so much only to have it unfairly taken away, thought of the others who had it worse. It was time to re-shift my own focus. It was time to be an adult.
Despite a renewed, more noble focus toward the festivities in Vermont every August, I was still more of an admirer of Travis from afar. One time I along with my brother Eric and young nephew Kirk (both also on the team) saw him at a Montreal Expos game and he identified Kirk as my own offspring. While hard to believe now, Travis’ own involvement with the WIFFLE tournament progressed slowly at first. Certainly things changed dramatically in 2007 when the money raised nearly eclipsed the previous five years combined. Travis took on more tournament responsibility as the event became a cornerstone of his charity and with that, we had more chances to connect.
My own involvement had also evolved. I found a place on the tournament committee as the scheduler and maker of tournament t-shirts. Most summers Pat and I would brainstorm the different ways we could make the tournament even more fun and things that would have been considered absurd in 2002 eventually become reality. A second field. An exchange trophy where every member of the winning team would have their name engraved. Other tiny trophies for the winners. Food trucks. Sculpted granite awards. A fundraising ceremony where top fundraisers are recognized. A lottery ball process to determine additional playoff participants. A huge rock on the property that had the winning team names etched. Televised games that could be streamed live on the internet. A third field. A brick pathway with names of donors. A fantasy sports component where you could draft participants to pretend teams and see who put together the best squad. The weekend became truly absurd. For most of us, it was what we focused all of our efforts before as it was dubbed, “The Best Weekend of the Year.”
But also in that period, I got to know Travis more personally. Travis would go out to dinner with me and my wife, Brooke. He would invite us into his home and have us drive his van. We would talk about all things in life. The tournament and foundation obviously, but also friends, family, music. Travis was no longer the person I would see annually who runs a foundation that I raise money for to play WIFFLE ball. No, instead he was my friend who was just inherently good and thoughtful who was using his platform to help others. And I got to be a small part of that. And it was magical.
And the thing that made you believe in humanity, in the good that people can be if properly inspired, was that tournament. Specifically, it was 2:30 on Saturday afternoon when all the teams would gather and accolades would be handed out and you would hear all of the Herculean efforts of your peers, all in the name of helping those who needed it. My summers became all about being able to step onto that field and know that you did everything you could to help. Maybe you couldn’t raise tens of thousands of dollars by yourself, but if you got there and knew that you did what you could, then that feeling would be better than anything else you could experience for the year. A healthy addiction, if there ever was one.
Every summer Travis would find new words for us to say thank you and give us hope that there was a light at the end of the dark tunnel of paralysis. That not only were people getting help, but that science was finally catching up. That Travis might one day run the bases. And that was enough to get you through the next 360 days. It gave you the courage to ask your friends again, and again, and again, AND AGAIN, for money. Because this really remarkable person let you into his life.
Toward the end of this magical run, Travis started talking about living life with a passion vs. living life with a purpose. That he was passionate about being a hockey player, but now his purpose was to help others. And as I listened to him I started to internalize what my purpose was. What does it mean to do right? What it meant to be good? What does it mean to be selfless? What is real grace? How do we really experience magic? But if you listened closely, you also heard his own optimism change. “I’m going to get out of this chair” turned into, “I hope someday to have more independence.” And while that can sound like a very sad acceptance of doom, I always thought of it as brave growth. To see reality, and rather than meet it with bitterness, instead find a way to make it meaningful. To set the path for others and to show people that just because you lose doesn’t mean you are defeated.
HOTDAM spent the next decade plus being an also-ran in the tournament. A good way to needle me personally was to point out that those two runs to the trophy were a product of poor competition. But along the way, the group changed a lot. You had to be on board with raising money to play. You had to have a good attitude. You had to “get it,” to use a term coined by long-time tourney participant Rob Young. And the losses were excruciating but we ended up building a family within the bigger TRF family. We would text each other in the winter and talk about how we were so pumped for August. That THIS YEAR WAS THE YEAR.
Finally in 2017 we caught all the breaks and won it all. It was absurdly special, but not for the reasons I thought it would be. As it turns out, it just felt better to win, AND raise $20,000 as a team. It felt better to win with guys that you knew also were really moved by Travis specifically, and felt the way you did. It was special because I grew up. I was living with that purpose that Travis taught us all about. We just all got to be a part of something special; there was nothing else like it in the world. There never will be.
That trophy sat in my office at school for a year. Not a single person asked about it. Nobody is all that impressed that you won a tournament. There are thousands of tournaments for anything you could imagine. But when you talk about what this tournament is, and the improbable way it became to be: man suffers tragic, fluke injury, starts foundation, other man builds wiffle ball stadium in back yard, runs event for foundation, event flourishes to cornerstone for foundation that annually raises half a million dollars, you’ve been a part of it from the start…THAT’S a worthy story. That’s something to envy. To be a part of that journey. They still don’t care about the trophy. And that’s just fine.
Last August, for the first time in 19 years I was not able to experience the butterflies of turning onto Sawmill Drive in Essex, VT and seeing those lights and that big green wall. Pandemics are unfair, and so many people had to deal with so much worse. I and others channeled our energy into doing an online event and making the best of it. That young version of myself would have checked out. The current version doesn’t want the games to define him. That’s some pretty substantial growth to be proud of.
What none of us realized is that though there would be a next time for all of us, Travis will not make it to join in the joy. I will not be able to be the best I can be this summer, and then walk onto that field being proud of how this tournament has made me better. I will not then be able to hug Travis and tell him that I love him. It’s so unfair. I’m just glad that I did when I got the chance.
But as all heroes teach us, part of the journey is the end. Things will not be the same. We will have to grow, to move on. The only real tragedy is when we don’t grow. When we don’t apply those lessons to lead a better life. There is a line in Travis’ book where he talks about wondering if his injury was all a bad dream. That when he passes on this earth, perhaps it will be to wake up to find himself on the ice again, having hit the boards but bounced back to finish his shift, blissfully unaware of a different life confined to a chair. And I hope wherever Travis might be, that he does feel that freedom and joy; that chance to be passionate again. But in this world, I just think of how improbable it is that something so bad ended up giving birth to something so great. And I will ultimately try to pass that lesson on to others. All that matters is what we do for each other. That’s the real magic.
Thank you Travis, for helping me grow. I will never forget you and hope to drive you home with a base hit in the next life.
The 20th Annual Travis Roy Foundation WIFFLE benefit is August 13–15, 2021. If you would like to donate on the author’s behalf, please do so here.