![]() We can get angry without losing our temper, and when we can do that, our parenting becomes much more effective. But, we can take steps to control how we react to our anger. Here’s the truth: feeling angry is a fact of life, and we can’t stop that. Indeed, we often treat our loved ones the worst. We can lose our tempers and yell at our kids in a way that we would never do with a child who wasn’t our own. Gene Weingarten, an editor and writer in The Post’s Style section, is a lifelong Yankees fan.Our kids have the uncanny ability to get under our skin and bring out the very worst in us. ![]() It was the weapon he always had, the thing that made him a great pitcher even on days he wasn’t, the thing only a disease could finally take from him. Slower.Ĭatfish had only one weapon that day. I remember how he had the Dodgers lunging at balls out of the strike zone, and taking strikes on the corners. Catfish gave up a bunch of hits, but no walks. He’d retire the following season, for his own good and the team’s. ![]() Later, he would confess that he had never stood on a mound so naked. His slider hung motionless, like a ball on a tee. He was over the hill, and everyone knew it. 17, 1978, the final game of the World Series. You’ll get all of that in other stories today: Catfish’s perfect game, his 20-win seasons with the Oakland Athletics and New York Yankees, the years he mowed down opponents with that fabulous right arm. It happened on a baseball field, but it was not any of the highlight-reel stuff. I am trying to replace it with one from 20 years ago. It is hard to get that image out of my mind, but I am trying. It put him in a coma from which he never really recovered. Without his arms, he could not protect himself. He knew he was falling, but could do nothing about it. Standing at the top of the stairs at his home, Jim Hunter lost his balance. And although I wasn’t there, in my mind I can see the scene unfold with terrible clarity. ![]() He invited the world in, to raise public awareness, and maybe research money, for this disease. "I’d be a groundskeeper and not let anybody know me," the Hall of Fame pitcher said.Īnd yet in the months after his diagnosis he made his private agony very public. He was an intensely private man, a country boy who wanted nothing more out of retirement than living in obscurity in the last days he told one writer that he would have traded all his fame and money for health enough to watch his grandchildren grow up. Hunter was publicly upbeat, and remarkably brave. Then, the diagnosis of Lou Gehrig’s disease. Hunter watched, in horror, as one arm and then the other began to weaken and hang flaccid at his side. But why did it have to start with Hunter’s marvelous right arm? The disease that took him at age 53 creeps from one part of your body to another, nibbling your nerves, paralyzing as it travels, until it hits your chest and chokes you to death. There is a sour irony to it that boggles the mind. But I cannot for the life of me understand why Jim "Catfish" Hunter had to go the way he did. When someone dies young, people grope for meaning and sometimes find it. Read a profile of Hunter from the National Baseball Hall of Fame's site. Jim "Catfish" Hunter died Thursday of Lou Gehrig's disease. : Hall-of-Famer 'Catfish' Hunter Dies at 53
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