Living: The Boys of Winter

Middle-aged Mittys take on the Chicago Cubs' 1969 team

"To play this game good, a lot of you's got to be a little boy."

—The Dodgers' Roy Campanella

The brochure was dynamite. "We won't just take you out to the ball game," it promised. "We'll put you in it—against the 1969 Chicago Cubs." To a man with enough boy in him to be a fan of the ever vincible Cubs, the offer was irresistible. While the team has not won a pennant since 1945 or a World Series since 1908, its performance in 1969 was nothing short of heartbreaking: the boys were flying high until they collapsed in September and finished second to New York's miraculous Mets. Now, for $2,195, any Cub-smitten manchild was offered a trip to Scottsdale, Ariz., for a week of the kind of training the big leaguers get, a chance to mingle with the holdover heroes of '69 and be coached by them. Finally, he would get to play against the aging Chicago stars at Scottsdale Stadium, where the team had trained in '69. Among them: Hall of Fame Infielder Ernie Banks, slugging Third Baseman Ron Santo, homeric Outfielder Billy Williams and solid Second Baseman Glenn Beckert.

Re-creating the summer of '69 for middle-aged Mittys was the idea of Randy Hundley, 40, catcher for the team that year, and Allan Goldin, 43, former head of the Evelyn Wood Reading Dynamics Institute and a lifelong Cub loyalist. The two men had formed All Star Baseball, Inc., in 1980 to run summer baseball camps for children, and late last year they decided to put on a spring training camp for adults over 35, or "middleaged kids," in Hundley's phrase. They expected 35 takers but accepted 63.

The Scottsdale rookies were motivated as much by sentimentality as by any illusions of athletic prowess. Dr. Leonard Arnold, 61, came along with his twin sons Larry and Gary, who "were born the last year the Cubs won a pennant." Jim Anixter, 38, a wire-company executive from Highland Park, Ill., was a member of a syndicate that attempted unsuccessfully to buy the Cubs from the Wrigley family in 1981 (the team was purchased by Chicago's Tribune Co.). Gene Marzelli, 45, of Palatine, Ill., who designs office interiors, had been working out daily since Thanksgiving. Everyone's favorite goat was Dr. Harry Soloway, 45, a bearded Chicago psychiatrist whose flubbed grounders and muffed flies on the first day prompted a Phoenix sportswriter to call him "probably the worst ballplayer I've ever seen."

The oldest of the Campers, as the group was called, was Art Lessel, 63, a corporate jet pilot who pitched for the Air Force in occupied Japan. Said he: "My legs are in shape, and my arm feels good. I can still twist off a few curves, pull the string on a change-up, throw a fair knuckleball, and move the ball around pretty good." Not everyone had such steely resolve. Denny Albano, 42, a Chicago commodities trader who was varsity catcher at Bradley University in Peoria, Ill., trained mostly on four vodkas a day. When he essayed his first indoor swing in 20 years, he shattered the kitchen chandelier.