How R.A. Dickey Found Hope Beyond the Mound

This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people, coming to you from the city where the West begins, Fort Worth, Texas. Major League Baseball pitcher R. A. Dickey is one of the most unlikely success stories in baseball, a man who rose from years of pain and heartbreak to win the game’s highest honor. What he found along the way was something far greater than baseball. Here’s R. A. to join us with his story.

When you’re sexually abused, you feel less than human. You know, you feel like you’re something that has been used and thrown away, and you start forming these big, macro kind of things about the world from this place of hurt and deception and secrets and dark and wickedness. And if you do not deal with that, it will hurt you to your core for a very long time. And that was the beginning of my path. My mom got pregnant and had me when she was seventeen years old. It wasn’t smooth sailing from a family life standpoint. I started to figure out, you know, the tribulations and tragedies of life pretty early. My parents got divorced very early in my life. A lot of it I thought was because of me, or, you know, the burden of having children and not having enough income. Like those are some of the motifs that I felt as a kid. At the same time my parents were getting divorced and moving on, the first real trauma of my life occurred outside of just the divorce. I went through some sexual abuse by a babysitter or someone that was supposed to be in charge or in care of me. And then another time in Pulaski, Tennessee, by a stranger. And so those things happened simultaneously in the same summer. It changes you when something like that happens at such an early age, and maybe at any age, but to me, you know, I was, you know, eight years old. It stunts your growth as a human being. It’s almost like you stop growing emotionally. And the only real concern you have in those moments are self-protection, self-preservation, how you can survive, how you can hide. You learn all these toxic mechanisms for getting through life without anybody knowing who you really are because you’re so ashamed. And when that happens as you’re forming at eight, nine, ten years old, it’s just a very lonely place. I became very good at stuffing and being a chameleon, making people see what I wanted to see. From a very early age, I was super manipulative, lying about where I came from, trying to cover up pain and loneliness, and no one knew. And as I grew up, the one sanctuary that I always had was sports. I threw myself into them. I wanted to compete all the time. I was always playing a sport. There was always a ball in my hand. I went to Wright Junior High, which was a kind of an inner-city school, and my hope was that at some point I would be able to go kind of to the other side of town to a place called Montgomery Bell Academy, where my uncle Ricky Bowers went. I’d grown up kind of going to watch him play basketball. You know, I just always was competing, always at something, and so that was kind of the place where I felt the safest on a field somewhere. It gave me a breather from the things that I battled in the darkness. And so I threw myself into sports really heavily and worked at it relentlessly. So that got recognized to the degree where Montgomery Bell Academy, which was an all-boys prep school in Nashville, they took notice enough, and I had a little bit of pedigree there and legacy with my uncle having gone there and done well that I got an opportunity to go over there. At this time, my mom was working two or three jobs. I was a latchkey kid; you know, the key was under the mat for me. I’d come home from school and be on my own until she would get home from her second job sometimes. And so I was just running the neighborhood, playing sports with whoever I could, and then I would see her at nighttime and wake up and then go back to school. But I was going from that environment over to a very affluent area where this prep school was, and I did not fit in and did not feel like I measured up. You know, I didn’t grow up with money, didn’t understand it. You know, felt inadequate a lot of times, and not because people would even make me feel inadequate. I came in with this stigma attached to the things that had happened to me already. And there was a guy that took notice of me. We were on the middle school football team together, and he invited me to a Fellowship of Christian Athletes event that we were having on campus, and that was my real first exposure to Jesus. I was captivated. I was captivated by this person of Jesus and what I didn’t yet buy into what he had done for me, like I didn’t quite understand that part, but the way that he lived and why he had come and what he potentially was able to hold for me stuck with me. You know, I was always one that was going to rather see a good sermon than hear why, and so I was always watching how people behaved to see if I could trust it. And so, in Bo, who confessed to have a relationship with Christ, I was watching a human being act selflessly and still compete hard. And he would be the first guy to smash in the mouth, but the first guy to pick you up off the ground. Like I was getting to see that kind of behavior, and I just watched. His mother, Vicky, talked about Christ all the time when I would come over, and she would always be trying to convert me, and I would always pump the brakes on it or I would slip out because I was uncomfortable still. I just was scared. Man, I operated out of fear: the fear that somebody might know me, really, the fear that I’d be rejected, you know, if they did know me. And what I was being invited into by Christ was a very intimate relationship, and I was scared of the intimacy, petrified of it. But Bo Bartholomew represented something that I felt like was worth chasing.

And you’ve been listening to R. A. Dickey, who happens to be the first knuckleball pitcher to ever win the Cy Young — that’s the greatest award a pitcher can win in Major League Baseball.

And he was.

Sexually abused when he was young. And also, his parents were divorced when he was young, and of course, he blamed himself for that. And the shame and the trauma from being sexually abused, well, he just hid it. He did what people do. There was one sanctuary: sports, and one that looked interesting, and that’s Jesus Christ. When we come back, more of the story of R. A. Dickey on Our American Stories. This is Lee Habib, host of Our American Stories. Every day on this show, we tell stories of history, faith, business, love, loss, and your stories. Send us your story, small or large, to our email: oas@ouramericanstories.com. That’s oas@ouramericanstories.com. We’d love to hear them and put them on the air. Our audience loves them too. And we continue with Our American Stories and with the story of R. A.

Dickey.

When we left off last, he just learned that his pitching arm was missing its UCL — news that threatened to end his dream, one that he thought was just beginning. Here again is R. A. Dickey.

I went back home and was thinking, ‘I’ll just go back for my senior year and do the best I can as a UT Vol and see what happens.’ But there’s no guarantee I’d even be drafted again. And then the night before I had to go back to class. And once you stepped foot in the classroom before your senior year, you become ineligible to sign with a Major League club until the following draft. So if something was going to happen, it had to happen before my first class, first 8:00 a.m. I was enrolled in an English class at 8:00 a.m. the next day, and it was about 9:30 at night, and I still hadn’t left Nashville. And the phone rang, and it was the general manager of the Texas Rangers, and he basically said, ‘Hey, we have seventy-five thousand dollars for you. Take it or leave it, and you can start your professional career with us, and we’ll give you a chance.’ Now I was crushed, you know, but at least it…