My Home's In Alabama

In 1984, I was 16 years old. It was probably the greatest year of my life. And my life back then centered on one thing: baseball. While everyone else ran around playing basketball and football, to me there were only two parts of the year: baseball season, and waiting for baseball season.


My first taste of real success came earlier when I was 13 and made my first All Star team. Although we were eliminated in two games in the region tournament, we were finding the right pieces that would make us a force to be reckoned with.

The 14 year old All Star team was loaded with talent. We swept through our region and went to the district tournament. After dropping the first game and were close to elimination, we roared back through the tournament beating everyone in our path until there were just two of us left. Since we had a loss from day one and the other team didn't, we would have to beat them twice. We beat them in the first game to force a winner take all game the next day. Losing that next game 4-3 was the most heartbroken I have ever felt in my life up to that point. I cried all two hours of the drive back home.

It would be a long two years before that same nucleus of players was together again. Hello 1984.

We did something that had never been done before. We swept our district and went to the state tournament. We crushed everyone there and became the Alabama state champions. The story doesn't end there though, because now they take away those jerseys that say "Phenix City" and give you one that reads "Alabama" across the front. Now you get to travel to Mississippi and play all the other state champions in the World Series. Yeah.

I remember the drive there in the vans with everyone wanting to play their music on the boom box. It was the 80's remember? Some of us, including me, groaned when some country music was put on. One song shined through and bonded us together even more. The stories and heroes from that World Series will be forever etched in my memory (and possibly written about some other time), but when it was all through that certain song always takes me back to the van ride home, where 15 exhausted young men finally relaxed and sat back enjoying what they had just accomplished. We never lost a game. District champions. Alabama state champions. World Series champions.

No one complained ever again when this country song was played.

I've lost so much of me but there's enough of me to say

That my home's in Alabama, no matter where I lay my head
My home's in Alabama, southern born and southern bred