A Change of Guard

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Sunday 24 February 2008

To founder, Cambodian baseball a diamond in the rough

Joe Cook, in yellow shirt, posed with his Cambodian players.


At great sacrifice, a former refugee fosters the American game that gave him hope.



By KEVIN BAXTER,


Los Angeles Times



DOTHAN, ALA. - Baseball's ground rules are different in Cambodia.
A ball hit off the water buffaloes grazing in the outfield is in play, but a ball lost in the adjoining rice paddy is not. And timeout must be called whenever a motorcycle approaches on the dirt road that cuts through the outfield.
"You can't put it in perspective with words," said Jim Small, managing director for Major League Baseball's operations in Asia. "You just need to see it."
Even then, you can't always believe what you're seeing.
Shirtless children in plastic flip-flops batting cross-handed. Adults pitching with both hands wrapped tightly around the ball. And slides that are more like baserunners falling, then rolling.
"Teaching baseball in Cambodia," Joe Cook said, "it's not easy."
Cook, a Cambodian refugee who survived the Khmer Rouge genocide to escape to the United States, has spent the past five years trying to turn the former killing fields of his homeland into fields of dreams for a generation that has known little more than war, poverty and despair.
Along the way he has lost his life savings, his car and nearly his marriage.
"I want to walk away from this. I do. But these kids," he said, pointing to a photo of three shoeless children in torn clothes toting bats and gloves through a rice paddy, "baseball brings smiles to their faces."
In December, thanks to Cook, Cambodia fielded a national baseball team for the first time in the Southeast Asian Games in Thailand. It was a milestone as inauspicious as it was historic: Cambodia's first four hitters struck out without touching the ball, and it took four games for the team to get its first hit. By then Cambodia had been outscored 67 to 1.
"The biggest deal is we showed up. We had the guts to be there," Cook said.
Whether they show up again, however, is anybody's guess. Although the other five teams in the Southeast Asian Games are supported by relatively well-financed national organizations, the Cambodian team is supported largely by Cook and whatever donations he can scrape together.
Lately that hasn't been much. Two months before the games, Cook was far short of the $50,000 he needed to get Cambodia to the competition.
He also was half a world away, in southeast Alabama town of Dothan, working as a chef at a Japanese steakhouse.
Mark Dennis, a Dothan businessman, helped Cook obtain more than $41,000 in loans, wiring the final $4,500 himself less than an hour before the registration deadline. Said Dennis, "I just had a hard time seeing him fail that close."
But despite the victory of showing up in Thailand, Cook hardly feels like a winner these days. He's $41,500 in debt, and Cambodia Baseball has just $1,585 in the bank.
"I'm so frustrated. I've had enough of this," Cook said, fighting back tears while sitting in his cramped apartment. His sofa, which sits next to a broken coffee table, is both an office and a bed for Cook, who leaves the bedroom to his wife and daughter. During his last trip to Cambodia in December, his Hyundai was repossessed and the gas and electricity were turned off.
He wasn't thrown out of the apartment because his boss pays the $450 monthly rent.
"I'm the grandfather of baseball in Cambodia," he said. "Yeah, that's great. But I live in a poor way."
Major League Baseball has sent coaches to Cambodia, donated equipment and paid for Cook to fly back and forth from Alabama -- contributions worth more than $50,000 over the past two years alone.
Local companies and schools in south Alabama also have helped collect, store and ship equipment to Cambodia, but few have donated cash. Cook said he had spent about $300,000 on Cambodian baseball since the fall of 2002 -- huge chunks of it coming out of his pockets or those of family members. But he can't go on that way.
"I'm burning out. I can't do this alone," he said. "I don't want to do anything with baseball in Cambodia anymore. Period."

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