Sunday, 24 February 2008

To founder, Cambodian baseball a diamond in the rough

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

By KEVIN BAXTER
Los Angeles Times
February 23, 2008


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."

The Rev. Frank Cancro, a Catholic priest in North Carolina who visited the first baseball field in Cambodia, chuckled when he heard that. "He's said that at least three times since I've known him," he said.

As a result, from a misshapen diamond carved out of the jungle near the village of Baribor five years ago, Cambodian baseball has spread to more than 50 teams in four age divisions in three provinces.

Game changed life

Cook's love affair with baseball began shortly after a Christian aid organization rescued him and what was left of his family from a Philippine refugee camp in 1983, relocating them to Chattanooga, Tenn.

Cook, whose legal name is Joeurt Puk (he began using Cook after taking his first restaurant job), said he spent nearly half his childhood in Cambodia living off tree bark, insects and grass in Khmer Rouge labor camps. Along the way he lost his father and two sisters and was nearly killed twice before escaping to Thailand.

"I was starving and I just wanted to end my life," he said.

Arriving in Chattanooga as a 12-year-old, he was introduced to marvelous things he had never seen before -- a flush toilet, television, radio, a mirror. And baseball.

"Seeing kids running around without having to worry about booby traps or gunshots, explosions. America was like heaven," Cook said.

He eventually wed a political refugee from Cambodia seven years his senior, in an arranged marriage that produced two children. And he never forgot the transformative power the game had on his life.

That turned his life around again nearly six years ago, when he returned to the Thailand border to reunite with a sister long believed dead.

There, in the children of the poverty stricken town of Baribor, he said, "I saw the happiness in their faces. And my heart just opened. ... That's what changed my life. So I told the kids, 'When I come back, I'm going to bring baseball. I'm going to bring the American gift.'"

A few months later he returned with enough secondhand bats, balls and gloves to field two teams. It was enough to give the sport the locals called "throwball" a foothold.

Small said the poor, shy children of Baribor seemed different after putting on donated, sparkling white jerseys with their homeland written across their chests.

"How cool for them to have a chance to represent their country," he said.

Which might be why Cook, at least so far, has been unable to quit.

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