It was as a fan, not a beginning journalist, that I hoped that I’d be able to at least catch glimpses of the already legendary player in the lobby. To my surprise, things turned out very differently. Bobby and his wife Pat, who always was armed with a smile and never wore an ounce of pretension, quickly struck up a real friendship. To my Polish-born wife Christina, still relatively new to the U.S., they couldn’t have been more welcoming. The four of us were in our 20s, with five children between us. Our daughters, Eva and Sonia, raced around the building and danced at birthday parties with the two older Bond boys, Barry and Ricky, while little Bobby Jr. looked on. Barry taught Christina how to play ping-pong. And Bobby invited us to games at Yankee stadium, where we sat, sometimes with Pat, behind home plate. Back in our apartments or at the pool, we talked baseball but also about everything else from bringing up kids to politics.
So back to that day when Bobby asked me to play catch. He was playing in the evening and said he wanted to loosen up his arm–as if he wouldn’t be doing that in practice later. I grabbed my old glove, and felt as nervous as I was elated. We walked to a field nearby, and he quickly put me at ease, establishing a distance between us I could comfortably handle. He played just long enough to make it feel good, and not so long that my arm would flag. I quickly realized that Bobby had asked me to throw because he knew what it would mean to me.
Then, after only a year, our families went separate ways. Bobby was traded again and again after that one season with the Yankees–to the Angels, White Sox, Rangers, Indians, Cardinals and Cubs. I moved too; I was assigned to various foreign postings–Hong Kong, Moscow, Rome, Bonn, Warsaw and Berlin–for NEWSWEEK. But we kept sporadically in touch. On our way to Hong Kong in 1978, we stopped in San Francisco. Bobby was playing ball elsewhere, but Pat and the boys had returned to the Bay area. Pat picked us up to take us to their house. On the way, we stopped to get Barry, who was just returning from his high school’s sports awards’ ceremony where he’d garnered another clutch of trophies. Pat joked she didn’t know what to do with them anymore.
After a long spell when we lost contact, Bobby tracked us down during our stint in Washington between my foreign postings. In 1990, I went to pick him up in Baltimore so he could come back to our place for a few hours. Unprompted, he mentioned all the pain he lived with as he found himself shuffled from club to club in his final playing years. He had been struck by a pitch on the hand, and every subsequent at bat hurt. The fact that he talked about this at all, even in his usual low-key manner, meant that this must have been a far more difficult ordeal than he ever let on.
Three years later, I got in touch with Bobby when we were returning from Warsaw for a vacation to the U.S. He quickly offered tickets to a Giants game in Philadelphia, which would be preceded by an old-timers’ game. Thus, both Bobby and Barry would be playing that day. I arrived with my 13-year-old son Adam and, a moment after we reached our seats, someone arrived to escort us into the visitors’ locker room. There, Bobby met us and led us to Barry’s locker. Since he was born later, Adam had only heard about our friendship with the Bonds’, but both men did their best to put him at ease as they posed for pictures with him. It was as if the time we’d been apart had just evaporated. Barry signed a ball for Adam, and I asked Bobby to sign it as well. For all my love of baseball, I’ve never been wild about memorabilia. But I told Adam this is one of my proudest gifts to him.
A couple of years ago when we returned to New York from Berlin, I sent Barry a note providing our new phone number and asking that he pass it along to his parents since I wasn’t sure where to reach them. Soon afterwards, I took my youngest son Alex to a Mets-Giants game. Never shy, he shouted out to Barry as he was returning from outfield practice: “The Nagorskis are here.” With everyone else yelling, Barry cupped his hand to his ear as if it were a phone and mouthed the words: “Did my parents call you?” I nodded and grinned. Alex was grinning even wider, with the Bonds’ connection suddenly made real to him.
Bobby had said he’d look us up when he made it to New York next time. He never made that trip. Instead, he began his battle with lung cancer and a brain tumor. When Christina reached Pat to express her condolences, she reminded her of our game of catch, and they both laughed at the memory of Bobby pretending that he really needed to warm up with me. “He was always a real gentleman,” Christina said. Pat acknowledged as much, adding: “That’s Bobby.” Yes, it was.
