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where he felt very comfortable in the close family setting the Dominicks provided.
    Thurman wrote poems to her. He was discovering his romantic side.
    “He was never around any other girls,” said Don Eddins. “It was always sports and Diane. He was the type of student who had enough smarts but used only just enough to get by. He saved his energy for the ball fields—and for Diane.”
    A few of their classmates recall another boy here, another girl there, whom they had dated, but basically, they were each other’s only real boyfriend and girlfriend.
    “Diane, her parents, my parents, my baseball coach, and I all agreed that college was the right move for me,” said Thurman. “But I knew I could only go if I could get a scholarship, because there was no way my parents could afford it.
    “I got about eighty letters from colleges expressing an interest in me for their football programs, including Kansas, Ohio State, Syracuse, and Michigan. But it was baseball that I wanted, and schools just aren’t that interested in awarding baseball scholarships. I wound up with exactly three offers.
    “Arizona State offered me one contingent on making the team. Ohio University offered me a half-scholarship contingent on making the starting team. I had no doubts I could accomplish that, but it was Kent State that offered me a full scholarship, no strings attached, and that was where I decided to go.”
    And so Thurman would become the first member of his family to go to college. His siblings had all left home as soon as they could, Janice and Darla just moving out, and Duane joining the Air Force. (He later went to college on the GI Bill.)
    The fact that Diane would be close by—Kent is just thirty-four miles from Canton—was certainly a plus.
    “We had the Ohio All-Star Game in our senior year of high school,” recalls Steve Stone, the five-foot-nine pitcher who would go on to win a Cy Young Award with the Orioles. Stone lived in Lyndhurst. “It was actually three games. The east squad was loaded—Munson, Larry Hisle, Gene Tenace—a lot of really good players. For a lot of us, it was our first exposure to Munson, and man, was he abrasive. Nobody liked him. In fact, a kid named Jimmy Redmond beat him out to play shortstop in the first game, and we were all happy about it because no one could stand him. Then the third game ends and he comes over to me and says, ‘I’ll see you in September! I’m going to Kent State with you. I’m gonna be your catcher.’
    “I said, ‘My catcher? I thought you were a shortstop.’
    “He answered, ‘Hell no, I just play short in high school. I’m really a catcher. You and I are gonna be battery mates.’
    “You could have knocked me over. I hated him, but we wound up being roommates on road trips and I loved the guy.”

4
    Kent State University, founded in 1910, has a baseball program that dates back to 1915. Through the 2006 season, ninety-nine of its players have either been drafted or gone on to play pro baseball, despite the team’s short season, a fact of life for Northeastern colleges. It is not a collegiate baseball powerhouse. While the Sunbelt schools played schedules reaching seventy or more games, Kent State, a member of the Mid-American “MAC” conference, played more like twenty to twenty-five games a year during Thurman’s time there. It was a schedule that meant a player had to be hot to be touted; there was no room for prolonged slumps, or scouts wouldn’t have much to go by.
    Bob Nieman (1951-62), Rich Rollins (1961-70), and Gene Michael (1966-75) were the first major leaguers who came from Kent State. Drew Carey, Chrissie Hynde, Michael Keaton, Arsenio Hall, Jack Lambert, and Lou Holtz also went to Kent State, with Holtz, like Munson, a member of the Delta Upsilon fraternity.
    Michael, who would become a close friend, teammate, roommate,and somewhat of a mentor to Thurman on the Yankees, played for the Golden Flashes and lettered in baseball in 1958 before going