MLB

Josh Hamilton Once Drove Home A Classmate Who Had A Feminine Emergency, And Other Phenomenal Things We Just Learned

If you haven’t had a chance to see it yet, Tim Crothers wrote a must-read piece on Josh Hamilton for Sports Illustrated. Without giving too much away, Crothers outlines Hamitlon’s childhood rise to becoming baseball’s top prospect, and a once-in-a-lifetime phenom. Here are five tidbits to whet your appetite, and please, for the love of God, go read the rest of the story.

Josh Hamilton was always a freak athlete, and it wasn’t limited to baseball.

Alongside Josh’s father, Tony, Ronnie Powell coached Landon and Josh through various youth sports. “I remember when Josh was eight years old in Pop Warner football and he looked like a weeble with that big helmet on,” Powell says. “Josh would average about 30 yards every time he touched the ball. Nobody could catch him and nobody could tackle him. They either ran him out of bounds or he scored.”

Powell recalls that in basketball Josh was a point guard, completely lefthanded, and his favorite move was to dribble down the left sideline, circumventing the entire defense and lay the ball in the basket, until inevitably he became the first kid his age who could dunk.

Clay Council, who threw to Hamilton in the Homerun Derby in 2008, has been throwing him BP since age 12.

One summer day after a batting practice session, Council told Josh, “You really hit me good today, boy.”

“If I ever get to the bigs and get in the Home Run Derby,” Josh told him, “you’re going to throw it.”

Council replied, “Yeah, right.”

Josh Hamilton: not a fan of Splash Mountain.

“My favorite story about Josh from back then is how he went to the Walt Disney World complex nine or 10 times for different All-Star games and he never once entered a theme park. Josh was there to work. He was all baseball. That was his life.”

In high school, he DH’d an entire season and then pitched his team through the third round of the state tournament.

Before his sophomore season, Hamilton hurt his arm while working with a pitching instructor, so he acted as the team’s designated hitter for most of that season. But then in the third round of the state playoffs at Lee County High with the game tied in the late innings and the Jaguars starting pitcher clearly spent, Tony Hamilton walked to the Athens Drive dugout and told Mozingo that Josh could pitch, but he could only throw 50 pitches. “I told my catcher not to waste a single pitch,” Mozingo remembers. “Josh threw five innings on 50 pitches and didn’t allow a hit. The kid had not thrown a pitch from the mound all season. It was the most unbelievable pitching performance that I’ve ever been a part of.”

He is a phenomenal human.

“One afternoon a female student of mine was having a personal need emergency,” Mobley begins. “There was an item that a woman would need and she didn’t have it and couldn’t get it. It was very obvious that she needed to go home and change clothes, but for some reason she could not reach her family. Then she ran into Josh. As soon as Josh saw her, he didn’t hesitate. He drove her home. He cut two classes and that was not a good thing for Josh to be doing. When he got back to school, he was called into the office and our principal Walt Sherlin asked him, ‘Why did you leave school without permission to take this young lady home?’

“Well,” Hamilton said, “she asked me.”

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