Donny was speedy and a good athlete, so he became our center fielder. I played in left. Anson could play any infield spot. Second base was a rotating position—sometimes Tom Bosley, other times Erin Moran or Marion Ross. Garry, Jerry, and a few of the writers played. Even big Al Molinaro got his uniform dirty.
Henry had not grown up playing team sports, though he was a good water-skier—as Happy Days fans would come to know in a soon-to-be-infamous episode. But we couldn’t play softball without him. That’s where our secret weapon came in: my brother Clint.
CLINT
Ron gave Henry the first baseball glove he had ever owned. Henry had obviously never played the sport, but he was a gamer who didn’t want to let his mates down. I was in my heyday as a ballplayer, pitching for the Burroughs High School team, so I did my level best to turn Henry into the Happy Days team’s starting pitcher.
Stage 19 at Paramount, where Happy Days was shot, had a large, long open stretch of space between the audience bleachers and the sets. It was where the cameras operated on shooting days. But on nonshooting days, this space made for an ideal bullpen. So that’s where I held my lessons with Henry, directly in front of the interiors for Arnold’s and the Cunningham family’s living room. The roster that Garry assembled from the crew had several ringers, and we all worked to mold the Fonz into a capable hurler.
Henry was an eager, humble student who happily gave himself over to coaching. What I taught him was actually a modified fast-pitch throwing motion, with no high arc or windmilling. I recognized that his natural arm action made the ball move, and, just like Greg Maddux, he could really hit his spots. His best pitch floated up and inside, tying righties up in knots. Garry Marshall was so pleased with the work I’d done with Henry that he invited me to join the Happy Days team as its catcher.
When we played in front of stadium crowds, the throng wanted to see the Fonz make hitters look foolish. I knew how to oblige. I set up inside and got the majority of overstriding hitters to meekly pop up. Calling for an outside pitch was risky, both in the game and for the show—with the ball over the plate, someone might hammer it up the middle and smack Henry square in the chompers. The poor guy was a great actor but he couldn’t field a lick.
Henry was open about his limitations. If there was a comebacker, he’d turn his body sideways to absorb the blow, trading a potential bloody lip for a body bruise. If there was an infield pop-up, he scurried off the mound and left the putout to the Happy Days staff writer Fred Fox or the dialogue coach Walter von Huene, who were two of our better defensive infielders.
In the beginning, we played the Hollywood equivalent of intramural ball, squaring off on Sundays against other teams assembled from L.A. show-business folk. I was in awe when we went up against a squad that included a beer-drinking left fielder named Alice Cooper. He couldn’t hit Henry, either.
THE SOFTBALL LEAGUE satisfied my yen for competition and success at a time when acting didn’t. And traveling first-class to play in Major League stadiums wasn’t so bad. I’ll never forget seeing my name up on the scoreboard at Veterans Stadium in Philadelphia in front of fifty thousand fans as I stepped to the plate: an unbelievable feeling. The whole experience gave me a sense of purpose I might have otherwise lacked. I was never going to be good enough to become a professional ballplayer, but coaching and playing like this scratched an itch.
Still, I loved acting. I was proud to have made it as far as I had. Most of the kids with whom I’d come up, going on casting calls for westerns and cop shows in the ’60s, had already fallen away and returned to civilian life.
Maybe it was now my turn to fall away. I didn’t know. But I wasn’t going to let that happen without a fight. I was haunted by the same question as Ron: Did I stand a chance of having a fulfilling adult career in show business?
As scarce as good parts had become for me, I never stopped going out on auditions. But the process sometimes worked my nerves. In 1975, I joined every other young guy in town in reading for an ambitious new “space opera” called Star Wars, the brainchild of Ron’s American Graffiti director, George Lucas. In those days, before casting directors could simply watch an actor on videotape or digitally, they called in pretty much every dude in the teens-to-twenties age range to test for the part of Luke Skywalker. I already knew that I didn’t stand a chance—Luke was written as this dashing young hero, and at age sixteen, I was already starting to lose my hair. But shit, I was a working actor. You don’t not go to an audition when you’re called.