Cody Webster Doc

Looks like it's already been done.

Adults in the stands and watching from home saw a much broader field of play. The memories of American hostages and a crippling oil crisis were still fresh; the economic malaise of the late 1970s still lingered; and the new President was recovering from an assassination attempt even while confronting new threats from the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, back on that tiny baseball field in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, where America’s game was celebrated each summer, no American team had won a true international Little League World Series Championship in more than a decade.

More 1980 hockey parallels. Interesting.

And I told him a story – as best I could remember it – of a group of schoolyard friends from Kirkland, Washington. When they made it to the championship game back in the early ‘80s, ‘America’s Game’ didn’t really belong to America anymore. Teams from Southeast Asia had dominated the tournament for more than a decade. In fact, the only time a team from China, Taipei, or Tokyo didn’t win during that stretch was the year international teams were banned from the competition. In 1982, an over-sized kid named Cody Webster carried the team from Kirkland into the final game of the Little League World Series. Each member of that squad, whether they understood it or not, was also shouldering the frustrated hopes of an entire country. They won.

My son responded to the tale the way I’d hoped: promise and dreams still intact … but I found myself considering Cody Webster and his friends, now, more than a quarter-century removed from holding that championship trophy high over head. Where did they go? What did they become? What if that moment in Williamsport turned out to be the highlight of their lives? Whatever happened to the kids from Kirkland?