Beyond Belief Read Online Free PDF Page A

made sure to be respectful to the other team and the umpires. I always made sure to clean up the dugout after the game.
    There were a lot of people who helped me improve, by giving me either instruction or opportunity. One of the men I always admired was Clay Council, who helped run the American Legion program in Cary. My brother played Cary Legion, and Coach Council was an assistant coach on that team. Whenever I didn’t have practice or a game, I would go to Jason’s practices and shag balls and hope to get in a few swings at the end of practice. That’s how I met Clay — he would always have time to throw a few to the thirteen-year-old who was hanging around with his older brother. And he’d always smile and talk to me at the games when I was chasing down foul balls so I could get the free hot dog that came with every ball you returned to the concession stand.
    Coach Council was a quiet, friendly man with a deep North Carolina drawl. He was about sixty years old when I met him, and he had already devoted a good part of his life to helping local teenagers become better ballplayers. He was a great batting-practice pitcher, and it seemed he could throw for hours and hours. As long as someone wanted to hit, Coach Council was there to throw.
    He became part of the landscape of amateur baseball around Raleigh, and even though I played on the Fuquay-Varina Legion team, I would occasionally see Coach Council at the various high school fields, always throwing to whoever wanted to hit. Because my daddy was someone who volunteered his time to coach youth baseball, I was always aware of the sacrifices other coaches were making for me and my teammates. I noticed that ballplayers didn’t always thank him for his time, and it made me more conscious of thanking him or any other coach.
    Clay was one of those men who get forgotten when the boys pass through high school and move on to college or the pros. He worked at the Raleigh-Durham airport and spent much of his free time helping kids. He kind of blended in, never demanding anything, giving only instruction and encouragement. He and I both loved baseball more than anything in the world. I never felt as happy as I did when I was on the ballfield, and he looked like he felt the same way.
    After I got drafted, I saw Clay at one of the fields during a Legion game and I told him right there, “If I ever get asked to be in the Home Run Derby, I’m going to ask you to throw to me.”
    I told him that every time I saw him after that, and he always had the same answer, “That’s nice, Josh. I’d sure like that.”

CHAPTER TWO
    I NEVER HAD A PROBLEM with being the center of attention on the baseball field. It started when I was little, back when the president of the Tar Heel League showed up to watch me shag baseballs in the outfield of my brother’s practice. I never sought out attention, but my ability brought it to me naturally. In a lot of ways, my parents and I had prepared for a time when the attention would turn from parents and teammates to scouts and college coaches, so when I entered my senior year at Athens Drive High, I had a pretty good idea of what to expect.
    Or at least I thought I did, until it became a reality, and then I realized there was no way to prepare adequately for this amount of attention.
    Baseball America
magazine and every other publication that cared about amateur baseball rated me as one of the top five high school players in the country. I pitched, played the outfield, and sometimes played first base if I needed to either rest my arm after pitching or save it for an upcoming game. The only real issue for major-league teams was whether to draft me as a pitcher or an outfielder.
    My preference was to be an outfielder, so I could play every day and do what I loved best — hit. But I had spent the time since the end of my junior year working out with rubber strength bands, and by the time my senior year started my fastball was clocked as fast as 97 mph. I