In most circumstances, I do not like to talk about my sweat lodge experiences. They are of an entirely personal nature, and not the stuff of garbage gossip or idle tea-party talk. But this is an experience about someone else – I did share a sweat recently with former baseball superstar “Slamming” Sammy Sosa. I, myself, am not much of a baseball fan – when I was younger, I was forced by my domineering father into joining town baseball leagues (despite my varied attempts to dispose of and/or ingest the permission slip needed to join), and I was a miserable player, and a miserable child as a result.

But the past is prelude to the story that I myself have written, and there is no way to remove those pages without damaging the spine of the book that is my life, so let me end my digression thusly. I know of Mr. Sosa only from his quest for the treasured home run record (with Mark McGwire), and while I am still no fan of baseball, I appreciated the importance of his journey. I also know (from what some of my students tell me) that his story seemingly ended amidst scandal and cruelty, and many people in the public sphere have been uncommonly cruel when talking about Mr. Sosa and his career and his attempt to return to the game he helped resurrect.

The things these rancid vultures say about him go against the detailed and nuanced portrait of the man that I grew to know and, yes, love. Whether this love was a pure, spiritual union between two kindred souls or some tawdry affair of the fleeting flesh, I will leave to those with the need to make such a base distinction. This thing we call “life,” after all, is fleeting – the body is only meat given breath by the soul, emotions are biological reflexes we choose to interpret and act upon, and social mores are nothing more than accepted means of personal censorship.

For example – I am sitting in my office at the university wearing nothing but a brown-orange serape gifted to me by young Ecuadorian children I befriended during a Greenpeace mission to their troubled area. The gruff sensation of the blanket’s coarse fabric against my glans as my bare dappled buttocks spread across my hand-made three-legged stool has produced a modest erection, though I am not myself aroused. I tell you strangers this because we will all be dead soon, and such furtive moments will never matter. Nor will this story, which is why I share it with you.

I first met Sammy just by chance. I came home early from an archaeological dig in the San Fernando valley to find a group of my female students using the lodge in my back yard (as I said they could) with Sammy and some members of his entourage, including a cameraman and some needy fellow telling the girls to take off their shirts for the camera. He (the needy fellow) was very cordial, however, explaining that he was a sociology student visiting from Stanford, making a film about the declining social mores of our society (with the help and support of Mr. Sosa). After we shared some of my piece pipe, he asked to borrow a few of my students and my bedroom for some interviews, leaving Sammy and I to our sweat.

(For any purists reading this – suffice it to say that I don’t adhere to the traditional notion of a sweat lodge, such backwater nonsense as orienting the entrance to the sweat lodge properly, or barring menstruating women from the lodge, or segregating men and women, or forcing women and men to wear modest clothing within the lodge, or deny their biological imperatives. We are in a new world, and traditions must evolve in order to survive.)

That first night, Sammy and I just talked as the steam coaxed impurities from our willing pores. Mostly, it was Sammy talking. The steam went on for hours, one endurance melding seamlessly with the next as we discussed the demands of the public arena, the allure of the forbidden, the fall of the once mighty. Though English was his second language, he spoke with the skill of a poet. He spoke of his anger at having to leave the sport that owed him so much. He spoke of the anger thrust upon him by the city he once called his home. He told the tale of a simple immigrant, chosen by a higher power to become more than he ever could become on his own, destined to realize the greatest successes and the lowest failures. By the time we entered the seventh endurance, his righteous fury dissolved into a torrent of tears punctuated by screams directed towards Dusty Baker and Bud Selig and other godless entities, and fits of language that made sense only to Sammy. “Joe Francis is giving me only fifteen kay! Snoop got one hundred! I can beat snoop at rocken jock every day! Dan Cortez said Francis would give me the hook up! I cannot believe Dan Cortez did this to me! I did not even round the second base with anyone!”

Afterwards, I took Sammy to The Whole Donut for bearclaws and hot chocolate. (I always have a bearclaw and a hot chocolate after a good sweat – introducing impurities back into the system so soon after they egress helps maintain a spiritual equilibrium.) By this time, he was emotionally drained, and very receptive to my advice. I told him that, clearly, he was still traumatized by his inglorious exit from baseball (as the quote in the previous paragraph attests). I told him that, indeed, if he did love the sport as much as he claims to, he should try to re-enter the sport. And I swear, when I said that to Sammy, his mouth full of glazed dough, he erupted into the most joyous smile I have ever seen on a man. He bolted from the booth and wrapped me in his masculine arms, thanking me as tears (and cocoa) streaming down the back of my shirt. And then he ran out of the restaurant.

I haven’t seen him since, but I knew what he would be doing. And now I see that he will be playing for the Texas Rangers this year. I do not think that I’ll be attending any of their games this year (as I have never attended any of their games), but I will, possibly, turn on the transistor radio one warm summer evening in June, and perhaps bear auditory witness to a man realizing his lifelong dream all over again. Sammy – if you ever find yourself outside of Waco, my lodge (and my arms) are always open.

Dr. Fletcher Grabinniach (A.B., College of Western Michigan; Ph.D., Southern Texas Baptist University) is a member of the Anthropology Department at STBU, and the author of Laetoli Footprints, Schmaetoli Footprints: Mary Leakey’s Upright Conspiracy (Pendant Publishing).