By MONTE DUTTON

When Clinton High nailed down the Class 3A state baseball championship on May 23, I wrote the 5-4 victory over Hanahan was played in front of the largest crowd I’d ever seen for a high-school baseball game, at least in Clinton.

This was on my mind for a while, and I’ve concluded that the biggest crowd at any kind of local baseball game that I attended was around 1970, when Clinton fielded an American Legion team, coached by the late Sam Owens, aided by his brother Truman and others, that played its home games at the old textile venue, Cavalier Ballpark. The Clinton team, which wore bright-blue jerseys with red-and-white stripes around the shoulders, made it to the Upstate finals, where Anderson won in five games.

I was there for the two games in Clinton and almost surely rode there on a bicycle. Most of the details now elude me, but there’s one memory as clear as a sunny day at a mountain vista. Anderson’s star belted a homer that was the longest I ever saw in person for about 40 years, or until Barry Bonds bounced one off the right-center field façade in Yankee Stadium. Ten more feet, and it would have escaped the confines.

The Cavalier Ballpark blast landed in a cemetery, up a bank behind the outfield fence. The graveyard sat behind Bailey Elementary School. It took my breath away. It was the only fly ball I ever saw that I thought might not come down.

The teen-ager who hit that home run was James Edward Rice, then known as Ed, now enshrined in the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y., and mainly referred to as Jim, sometimes “Jim Ed.”

Thirteen years later, that home run came in handy. Rice wasn’t fond of the media. Several veterans of the Fenway Park press corps assured me I had no chance of getting him to talk to me.

I wasn’t even a sportswriter at the time. I was a PR man. The Greenville Piedmont – the world had afternoon newspapers in those days – paid me to write features on Anderson native Jim Rice and former Clemson pitcher Mike Brown, then toiling for the Red Sox. With the assistance of Piedmont sports editor Abe Hardesty, I hawked the tickets I had purchased outside and entered the grounds with credentials that allowed me access to the field during batting practice, the press box during the game and the clubhouse afterward. Even at 25, I was aware of the ethics of journalism. I never asked for an autograph or for one of my heroes to pose for a photograph. What few photos I own from nearly a half-century of writing were sent me by photographers out of the goodness of their hearts.

It was a thrill, however, to watch my all-time favorite player, Carl Yastrzemski, playing poker with Dwight Evans, Dennis Eckersley and Wade Boggs. Boston’s manager, Ralph Houk, regaled the visitors with old tales about championship Yankees teams. One was about Mickey Mantle and Whitey Ford convincing out-of-town reporters each was the other.

Rice? He was about as friendly as a mongoose, but that was undoubtedly because I was easily identifiable as a member of the Fourth Estate. I didn’t think I was going to get a story at all the first night. I knocked out the feature on Brown, a forgettable tome about a hurler destined to win a total of 12 games in parts of six seasons with the Sox and the Seattle Mariners.

In sheer desperation, I approached Rice the next night and mentioned that I had seen him hit the longest home run I’d ever witnessed.

“Oh, yeah?” he said.

“It was in an American Legion game in Clinton, South Carolina,” I said.

The slugger’s eyes lit up. “You saw a good one,” he said, and I got my story.

I have no idea now what I wrote. If I saved it, I don’t know where I put it, and if I found it, I’m almost sure I would be embarrassed by it. On the rare occasions when I see one of my ancient offerings nowadays, I’m routinely mortified.

I may not be much, but I’m much better.

That trip to Boston benefited me, though. Jim Ed Rice wasn’t the last surly athlete I encountered. It was a gut check to interview Dale Earnhardt, Bob Knight, the Carolina Panthers’ Steve Smith, and while he was briefly dabbling in NASCAR, Formula One’s Kimi Raikkonen.

Raikkonen reminded me of the old story about Calvin Coolidge. At a White House party, a woman told him she’d bet a friend she could get the 30^th president to say three words.

“You lose,” Silent Cal said.

Read a colorful novel about baseball that I made up. The Latter Days is available by clicking here.