Inner city kids grow up fast, learning to act tough and speak rough before many are even big enough to hold a baseball bat.
But their seemingly insurmountable list of problems — from random shootings to gang wars — didn’t deter insurance broker Bob Muzikowski from figuring out how to use Little League baseball to such kids’ advantage. He tells his story, with the help of Gregg Lewis, in a new book, “Safe at Home: The True and Inspiring Story of Chicago’s Field of Dreams” (Zondervan).
Muzikowski’s love of the game inspired him to bring Little League to kids in Chicago’s roughest neighborhoods. For 10 years he has been the driving force behind a project that brings together volunteer coaches, many of them influential business executives, with youngsters isolated by poverty and other social ills.
He co-founded the Near North Little League for kids of Chicago’s Cabrini-Green and is now focusing on the Near West Side League, which has more than 600 players. His first league won a “Point of Light Award” from former President George Bush and earned a Youth Services Award from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development for helping change kids’ lives.
“How else would a guy from the Board of Trade meet a 12-year-old from Rockwell Gardens housing project?” Muzikowski asks of the unusual pairings initiated by his program.
“The kids are disconnected and what the league does — it just happens to be through baseball — is to connect people with means, education and a different perspective with kids in the inner city,” he said. “Those people serve as mentors, foster parents. The carrot is baseball. There’s no way these kids would meet a million dollar trader from the mercantile exchange but for baseball.”
The relationships established go way beyond baseball. Volunteers, both men and women, mentor kids, tutor them, provide scholarships to private schools, help parents find jobs and sometimes even become foster parents. These, Muzikowski said, are youngsters whose lives may be ripped apart by inner city problems long before some finish elementary school.
In his book, he writes of going with a grandmother to the morgue to identify the body of her grandson, one of Muzikowski’s players who was shot to death.
He laments the times parents have dropped off players for a ball game and never returned to pick them up. With humor and candor, he writes of baseball games disrupted and sometimes canceled by gunfire.
But not every story is sad. He tells of a player who played for the Oakland Raiders and now works for Coca-Cola and of another now finishing his junior year in college. Muzikowski’s commitment to these Little League players includes being a model for them of such values as honesty, hard work and responsibility.
A 45-year-old evangelical Christian with an unabashed commitment to his faith, Muzikowski grew up streetwise in blue-collar Bayonne, N.J. He played baseball as a kid, going on to attend Columbia University on a scholarship. A detour into drugs and drinking almost ruined his career and his life. He credits Alcoholics Anonymous and a friend who bailed him out of jail and then took him to the emergency room for helping turn around his life. When the friend prayed with him, a gradual change began.
“Lightning didn’t flash as we prayed,” Muzikowski recounts in the book. “I heard no voices when we finished. But it was suddenly as if I had new eyes.”
Those new eyes saw baseball as a way to bring change. It’s a commitment he shares with his wife, Tina. The couple lives with their six children on Chicago’s Near West Side. They are active in Armitage Baptist Church, an interracial congregation, and also keep an apartment in their basement, which they offer to folks struggling to get back on their feet such as homeless people or recovering addicts.
Despite occasional setbacks, Muzikowski remains committed. All of his royalties from the book will go to his charities including Chicago Hope Academy, a nonprofit private school for inner city kids which is scheduled to open next fall.
“Nothing is a big deal,” said the straight-shooting Muzikowski.
“It’s a lotta little deals. You have to have a servant’s heart and stay humble. It looks glorious being in the paper, having a book and a movie.
But it really comes down to this: “Who’s getting up on Saturday morning and going to the field? Who’s taking the kids to the tournament on July 4th weekend? The answer to these questions is me. For 11 years.”
(RNS)
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