Bill Richardson-!!!!!
Yesterday early afternoon, I received an email from the New York Times subjecting “Breaking News: Bill Richardson, champion of Americans held overseas, dies at 75.”
Impossible, but I had no choice but to post on my Facebook page, ”Oh, no. I lost another congressional friend. He was my No. 1 rival in the Congressional Coed Softball League.”
Most of the public knows William Blaine Richardson III (Bill) served as Governor of New Mexico from 2003 to 2011. Others knew that Bill was the congressman from New Mexico’s newly established 3rd Congressional District (1983-97) and was appointed by President Clinton as Ambassador to the United Nations through 1998. He was later appointed United States Secretary of Energy and held that office until 2001.
Young generation people were impressed by Bill’s post-career helping to free people held hostage or wrongfully detained abroad through his Richardson Center for Global Engagement.
But why softball?
In 2009, the Roll Call newspaper reporter asked the readers to provide her with how the co-ed softball program started. I answered her as a former statistician of the original Congressional Softball League. Then she wrote the article "Leagues' Early Days Began in '71." The last sentence reads, "Playing congressional softball is the GREATEST thing to do on the Hill!”
In 1971, there was no emailing, no faxing, no using a smartphone, and no relay service for the deaf, so I walked weekly from the Republican National Committee building (where I worked on the basement floor) to the office of Rep. Bill Frenzel of Minnesota in the Longworth House Office Building in Washington, DC. In the latter office, I exchanged with Frenzel’s Josie Thorpe, who assisted the original Congressional Softball League Commissioner, Harry. M. “Chip” Shooshan III, completing a weekly softball newsletter.
One day, Thorpe informed me that she had a new player on her co-ed team, an unpaid intern working for Republican Rep. F. Bradford Morse from Massachusetts. His name was Bill Richardson!!!
Richardson played softball well in the next softball seasons, so I declared him my Number 1 rival player. Oddly, I received an email last year from Jim Dykstra, who took Shooshan’s position of Commissioner in 1972 and wrote,” I remember playing against Bill Richardson in the Capitol Hill Touch Football League as well. He was quite a great athlete.”
Richardson’s Athletic Background:
Attending Middlesex School, a preparatory school in Concord, Massachusetts, Richardson was the starting pitcher for his prep school’s baseball team with dreams of a professional career. He entered Tufts University in 1966, where he continued to play baseball.
During the summers of his Tuft time, he played collegiate summer baseball in the Cape Cod Baseball League, pitching for the Cotuit Kettleers in 1967. He returned to the league in 1968 with the Harwich Mariners.
When a professional career in sports did not pan out, Richardson earned a Master's degree at Tufts University's prestigious Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy.
In 1971, Thorpe recruited Richardson to play in the Congressional Softball League.
A decade later, in 1982, he won the Congressional race. Meanwhile, the Democratic legislators got excited to have him for teaming with them to play in the Congressional Baseball Game. Watch the video of his 1983 pitching to Ron Paul (R-TX). [Both ran for President 25 years later in 2008.]
“It's an extremely competitive game because the players are the most competitive people in the world,” Bill Richardson told NBC News in 2016.
No surprise! Richardson was inducted into the Roll Call Congressional Baseball Hall of Fame in 1997.
Sadly, his death ended my dream to have a nostalgic chat with Bill Richardson.
I learned that Santa Fe, NM, was only 320 miles from Colorado Springs, CO, where I attend the periodic meeting of the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Museum's "Ted Stevens Olympic and Amateur Sports Act and Title IX" working group to assist the museum in correcting the misinformation about the Act. I asked myself why I had not seen Richardson after the meeting.
It was time for me to thank him for what he had done in supporting Deaflympians.
In 1972, he attended the fundraising event co-sponsored by Congressmen Chuck Whalen (R-OH), Bud Brown (R-OH), and Jack Kemp (R-NY) for my expense to the 1973 World Games for the Deaf (renamed to Deaflympics in 2001) in Sweden.
My Deaflympian friend, Ronald Stern, then Superintendent of the New Mexico School for the Deaf, told me that Gov. Richardson socialized with him well. I told Stern that Bill knew me, too.
In the past year, I had three attempts to see him but no luck due to his globetrotting to rescue Americans aboard.
His Executive Director, Mickey Bergman, suggested that Richardson could call me when I would be in town. Nay, I preferred to chat with the assistance of an interpreter for the Deaf.
At around 6:30 pm this summer, Washington DC commuters and tourists saw men and women playing softball at the National Mall, West Potomac Park, Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling, or any commonly used softball fields. They work for Congressional offices, agencies, interest groups, media companies, and law firms. They participate in the Capitol Hill-centered softball leagues: the Congressional Softball League (CSL) (inactive since February 2020), the United States Senate Softball League (USSSL), the United States House Softball League (USHSL), and the Capitol Alumni Network Softball League (CANSL).
One player among these could become the President of the United States of America later. That is the American dream.
“That was a major disappointment in my life, not playing major-league baseball,” Richardson told People magazine in a 1995 interview. “I guess I made the right choice.”