Another year in baseball is focus for Fisk

Tuesday with…

LA QUINTA, Calif. – Being a longtime Carlton Fisk watcher, dating back to the University of New Hampshire playing baseball on an ice-cold afternoon at the University of Maine, it was old times watching him swing a golf club at the PGA West’s Jack Nicklaus Course.

Red Sox fans know the swing by heart. Fisk’s two short steps toward home plate, then a look at the hands, a long stare at the bat, and finally, No. 72 of the Chicago White Sox, who wore No. 27 when he was a Boston Red Sox mainstay, made himself available to the opposing pitchers.

It’ll come as no surprise, I suspect, if you might expect Fisk employs the same mechanics when addressing the smaller ball perched on a golf tee.

The man is now 44 years old and holds all the credentials necessary for an everlasting place in baseball’s Hall of Fame. Cooperstown, N.Y., is certainly ready, though Pudge Fisk isn’t, not yet anyway.

Carlton (Pudge) Fisk’s focus at the moment is not his place in the Hall of Fame, now that the Super Bowl is history, but the coming major league “What keeps me going? The competition. And I guess the confrontations.

“That’s the one thing that is going to be hard for me to accept. Once you leave the game, you can’t ever replace it. It’s not like golf or, say, tennis. A man can play those games until he’s 100 years old. But, once you’re done as a baseball player, you can’t ever replace that. You know what I mean?

“You can’t ever rekindle that part of your life. Suddenly, you’re no longer up to being able to equal that challenge.”

Pudge Fisk is heading toward his 20th major league baseball season. That’s a bunch of at bats for a guy who came out of a small New Hampshire town called Raymond.

He holds the career home run record for catchers.

“Yeah, I guess that’s a fact,” he laughs, “but I leave those details for you guys to search out.”

Fisk simply cannot dodge the Hall of Fame question as he prepares and makes his way toward the 1992 baseball season. He has never liked to look backward at his accomplishments or ahead to his inclusion in baseball’s Cooperstown shrine.

“I try not to think about it,” said Fisk. “Heck, everybody else thinks about it enough for me. I simply discipline myself not to dwell on the past or spend a lot of time thinking about accomplishments. I really believe that’s why I’ve kept more in tune with the present and not got stuck in the past. That’s why I feel that I can meet the challenges of the present.”

The one-time Red Sox catcher admits holding off the aging process may be his greatest single challenge. For 20 seasons, save for occasional appearances at first base, Pudge Fisk has played baseball’s most physically demanding position.

Fisk postgame workout sessions are legendary in baseball.

“You’d rather do a lot of other things after a tough ballgame. But, long ago, I realized if I was going to compete with guys half my age, I had to do something a bit more than the other guys do. It’s all very different, the game today. When I came up to the big leagues, we never had the distractions of today. The distractions wear more on you in today’s baseball environment than a tough ballgame.”

Fisk refuses to call players like himself, 44-year-old Charlie Hough, or a Nolan Ryan a dying breed.

It’s not a question of today’s players like Hough and Ryan being able to play the game. The question is whether they’ll want to. Guys like Hough and Ryan have something that burns inside them more than a paycheck.

“I get upset when I hear people talk about the size of the paychecks and forget the man’s extraordinary talent. The players today are terrific. I just wish they were permitted to be respected as players and people and not just for the money they make.”

Carlton (Pudge) Fisk grabbed the driver from his bag, took two short steps toward the ball, gazed at the club like it was a bat and Fenway’s left field wall was out there in the fairway, and let one fly off tee. The baseball grip on a golf club sometimes gets a man in deep trouble.

Pudge’s tee shot found water, hardly a difficult trick on the treacherous, man-eating PGA West playground. Fisk will never make golf’s Hall of Fame. He’s practically a sure thing for Cooperstown after an illustrious baseball career.