Editor’s note: This article was originally published in the May 1986 issue of Referee. It contains detailed discussion of suicide and reflects the language and understanding of mental health at the time of publication.
Dallas Keefover wanted to be a major league umpire perhaps more than anything else in his life.
A Family Searches for Answers
On July 16, 1984, Dallas Keefover took up a pencil to write a short explanation of why he was about to hang himself in the attic of his family’s home. On a small index card, the 22-year-old man explained to his family that he had several reasons. No one should blame themselves or anyone else. He loved his family. With “xoxo,” he kissed them goodbye, then proceeded.
Almost two years later, the family and friends of Dallas Keefover try to make sense of his death by analyzing his life. Among the reasons they consider — elements that make the life of any young man difficult: disappointment in love, impatience for financial independence, and uncertainty about life goals and purpose — none has seemed adequate to the strange dispassionate brutality of the gesture.
But one aspect of Dallas Keefover’s life, and one element in his decision to end it, marked him apart from most young men: A consuming passion to umpire baseball. If setbacks in his goals as an official did not directly prompt his action, baseball was certainly the context in which his despondency grew, his family believes.
Dallas Wayne Keefover was the only son of Dallas Ray and Barbara Keefover who, with their daughter Kelli, now 19, live in the suburbs of Baltimore. For 24 years Dallas Ray has worked for General Motors, currently in the material department. Barbara is a homemaker.
A Major League Ambition
Dallas became interested in officiating at the end of high school. He had played baseball, but not seriously or particularly well. His ambition, his yearbook recorded, was to be a major league umpire.
After working for a year at a hospital, he went to the Bill Kinnamon Umpire School in St. Petersburg, Fla. (now called Joe Brinkman’s school), outfitted with top-of-the-line equipment he had purchased by mail order.
He was disappointed by the school. Insufficiently experienced for the minors, he worked local games. Toward the end of 1982, family friends who knew Harry Wendelstedt’s family persuaded Dallas to give school another shot, so he went the next winter, January of 1983, to the Wendelstedt school, also in Florida.
He scored very high on mechanics and rule interpretation, finished among the top ten percent of his class, made the reserve list, and told his parents: “That is how a school should be run.” He was at this time not quite 21.
While Keefover was waiting to be called up, “the anticipation was eating him,” says his father. He worked local leagues in Florida, and then around Washington and Baltimore.
Umpire Development called on Saturday, July 2, to ask Dallas if he could make it down to Florida for a Monday game in the Gulf Coast League, at the lowest level of the minors: a rookie league. Dallas had followed his instructors’ advice — “Tell ’em you got a car” — and said he would be there.
In fact, the family car was the only car. Dallas’ father let him borrow it, but had to calm him down to convince him to leave in the morning, because even though he had just finished umpiring a doubleheader, he wanted to leave immediately.
Jim O’Connor, a past president of the Baltimore-based Mason Dixon Umpires’ Assn., was working the doubleheader with Keefover that day and heard the good news when he happened to make a phone call between the two games. He recalls that when Keefover heard the news, he threw his cap into the air and whooped with joy.
“I hadn’t seen anybody act like that,” says O’Connor. “Emotionally he got real high. Later I wondered whether a person who got that high got that low emotionally too.”
At 5:00 a.m., Keefover headed out and drove all the way to Florida. He arrived at 11:00 p.m., stopped overnight, drove a further 75 miles south, and was on the field on July 4.
A Tough First Season
Keefover worked about 60 games in the league. His first season was “a good, but tough year,” he told Dan Ronan, an umpire he befriended later, while working around Washington. It included several controversial incidents, and one protest over a call that had mystified a manager.
When Umpire Development called, Keefover stood firm — to him, a former colleague recalls, there was no question about the call and no big controversy. The next time the penalized manager and Keefover were together, the manager came to the young official, shook his hand, and told him he had been correct.
Kelli Keefover says that her brother spent so much time thumbing through his rulebook, that it almost disintegrated. His mother found him one day sitting by his cassette player, answering rule quizzes he had composed for himself and taped.
Keefover reacted well to criticism, but took the game so seriously that he pressured himself to eradicate every fault, his friends say.
“He didn’t take setbacks very well,” recalls Phil Budervick, a Mid-Ohio Conference college baseball official who worked with Keefover in the Gulf Coast League that season. “When he did something wrong, for instance, he might say: ‘I can’t believe I did that. I worked on that before.’”
Once in the minors, Keefover was by all accounts a total convert to umpiring. And there seemed to be no reason why he should not set his sights on the big time. In particular, his esteem for some of the National League officials he’d met at school was unbounded. One day, he and a few colleagues traveled to Atlanta to watch Harry Wendelstedt work a game. They visited their mentor in the lockerroom, and he gave them money to go out on the town.
Keefover’s parents still have a letter from their son to Wendelstedt, thanking him. Keefover never mailed it because, his father learned, he couldn’t convince himself that Harry Wendelstedt would remember a small fry like him.
His Colleagues Remember
Released From Professional Baseball
After that season, Keefover returned to Baltimore, eager for word that he would be called back to work in the minors the next season.
By the early months of 1984, he was becoming impatient for a call. “Dallas knew the odds,” his mother says, “but it was like waiting on the edge of a cliff.”
Keefover’s friends from umpire school were waiting too. Minor league rules require that officials who are let go be told so, but Dallas had not heard anything by April. When he learned that his friend Don Warner had called Umpire Development and been told that he was to be rehired, Keefover painfully summoned the courage to do the same.
For him, the news was not so good: He had been released. Recently Barney Deary, administrator of Baseball Umpire Development, recalled the phone conversation he had with Dallas.
According to Deary, the umpire was released because “he didn’t have major league ability” or potential.
Deary says Keefover was told that he had only average ability and that he “was in the wrong profession.” Deary explained that Keefover “didn’t project himself very well, wasn’t aggressive, was too timid.”
However, Deary also says he told Keefover that if he wanted to try it again, he could go back to umpire school and start over. “He said he’d work at home and maybe try again,” notes Deary, who says he felt Keefover seemed to be “in favor” of giving it another shot.
Barbara Keefover says her son’s phone call to Deary was made while the rest of the family was away from home. On their return, Dallas told them he had been released, but never elaborated on what was said at the time. Barbara notes that the day her son was released from pro baseball “was the day he died inside. . . . He felt like a failure.”
She adds that he had discussed the option of again going to umpire school, but wasn’t sure if umpiring “was what he still wanted to do.” They told him to take his time, go to college and if he opted to give umpiring another try, they would support that decision.
Returning to the Field
Keefover never spoke much about the reasons he had been given, Ronan says. He threw himself instead into college, American Legion and high school ball.
Ronan’s supervisor, Lorin Sarbacher, commissioner of the Southern Maryland District Umpires’ Assn., had seen Dallas work a game at the University of Maryland; eager to have the young man on board, he gave him a two-month-long schedule of games to work.
Ronan, who called many college and legion games with Keefover, says he “was a pretty outgoing, happy-go-lucky type of person. Working a ballgame with Dallas was fun. He knew the rules, the mechanics, and he hustled on the field. Often after working a game, I’d go out for a beer and a sandwich with him. We became friends very quickly.”
Keefover’s father watched just about every one of his son’s games in the Washington area. They were virtually inseparable. “Dallas’ father was very proud of his son and his accomplishments,” says Ronan. “He was also guardedly optimistic his son could get a job again in pro ball. After all, Dallas was 22, and he was a pretty damn good umpire for his age.”
With his father, Keefover was now traveling about 400 miles a week to games, working six or seven days a week. The closest job was 45 minutes drive away.
Dallas didn’t want to work games around Baltimore, because he considered the quality of competition much higher around Washington, his father explains. “He wanted to stay as close to the pros as possible.”
Ronan says: “Keef never came with an attitude of ‘What are we doing at this level?’ He was always upbeat, never negative. He always looked like he was enjoying the ballgame. But it was very important to him.”
Pressure and Abuse
Then, in early July of 1984, Ronan says, “Dallas had a couple of real rough games. The word had gotten around that he had been in pro ball . . . and some of the managers felt they’d try to see how far they could push him.”
Barbara and Kelli Keefover only went to two of Dallas’ games, because they couldn’t stand to hear the abuse he took. “We were ready to take on all the mothers,” Barbara says.
The vehement partisanship of the many parents who turned out to watch their sons in the American Legion leagues was not the biggest problem Keefover faced, however. The managers were worse.
“They all wanted to be Earl Weavers,” but lacked Weaver’s sense of humor, Dallas, Sr. says.
“The legion coaches are usually older men,” says Ray Ruffian, who worked many games with Keefover. “It’s harder ball to work than college or the unlimited leagues. It’s harder than professional ball, particularly for younger guys like Dallas. The coaches see these baby faces and they really try to intimidate them.”
In the heat of play, Ruffian says, the Legion leagues’ code of ethics — to win with dignity, to maintain self-control, to lose with pride, to display sportsmanship — can easily go by the boards. “When these guys start playing they should tear that page out of the book. Before anybody can coach baseball they ought to be made to umpire for two years.”
One taunt Keefover heard, a colleague recalls, was: “You never made it to pro ball; you can’t even do Little League.”
Nonetheless, Keefover took the verbal abuse bravely. On one occasion, for instance, he discretely signalled to his father in the stands not to try to shout down an abusive manager; he could handle it. But he was young, “Dallas took much more than his share of it, there’s no question,” Ronan says.
Dallas Keefover’s Final Game
On July 15, 1984, Keefover called his last game. Ronan recalls: “There was a big crowd on hand. Dallas had the plate, I had the bases. From the first pitch, he was taking heat from the dugouts, most of it on balls and strikes. What was expected to be an important game quickly turned into a blowout. The losing team’s manager had to be run in the first inning. He came out to talk with his pitcher. When Dallas came out to break up the long conference, the manager popped off, and got ejected. Later the guy went up into the pressbox and sat there. Meanwhile, the blowout continued. About the sixth inning . . . one of the coaches went out to change pitchers. He talked with his pitcher, and then blasted Dallas. It was a big league argument, both men in each other’s face. The coach got run. Now the manager and the one coach were done. . . .
“Almost without warning the manager who had been run came onto the field . . . in uniform . . . and began attacking Dallas verbally. It was a very explosive situation. I got between the two men. The manager was fed up . . . and he wanted everyone to think he was losing a very important game because of us. He then turned to his dugout and pulled his club off the field.”
The verbal abuse Keefover took was such that he was well within his rights to throw out the manager and coach, Ronan says. “There was nothing Dallas did to the ballgame that contributed to the mess. The losing team tried to put the monkey on his back.”
Afterward, Keefover “was angry about the situation . . . but his anger was not at himself, it was at the two men who made such a mess of the game. . . . We both agreed we had done all we could do to keep the game under control. It was a frustrating situation.”
Before leaving the park, Keefover talked to Ronan about plans to go back to Wendelstedt’s school in the fall. “We both joked that the two of us had one of the teams, the winning team, that next Thursday.” Keefover told Ronan he’d see him then.
He would not see him again. Dallas killed himself the next day.
A Death No One Expected
Ronan was working a college game a day later. His colleague arrived late and very upset. “He told me that Dallas had taken his life. . . . He wrote his game report . . . and then did it.”
While his parents and sister were away from the house, Keefover had locked himself in, gone to the attic, attached a carefully measured length of heavy-duty electrical wire to the main beam in the ceiling, and hanged himself.
He had written the note to his family, and had also taken the time to write a formal game report to his supervisor, Lorin Sarbacher. At some point, he had tried unsuccessfully to phone a friend.
When his family returned home, they waited in front of the house for several hours, wondering where Dallas was. Eventually, well after midnight, his father broke into the house. Seeing the attic door open, he went to investigate. He found his son there.
Says Ronan: “I was one of the pallbearers at the funeral. And sitting there in the funeral parlor, it was so bizarre, it wasn’t like he was a cancer patient or something. I’ll be honest with you. I’m mad as hell at him.”
Keefover had plans to go back to Wendelstedt’s school. He had talked repeatedly in the days preceding his death about going to a local community college. He had taken college entrance exams, and had registered for classes. (In fact, his mother knew, he had gone so far as to make up a schedule for his whole fall, with times and dates of his classes, and of those of friends he had already made out there.)
“Dallas evidently had deeper problems than we ever thought,” says Sarbacher, who says he realizes in retrospect that Dallas was probably working too many games, on too many days — six or seven a week. “Whatever he did, he put 200 percent into it. He didn’t want to wait for it, he wanted it now. I think that was the biggest problem.”
David Watkins, a colleague of Keefover’s who praises the courage he displayed in making tough calls the way he saw them, has two reactions. On the one hand: “Why Dallas did that I don’t understand. I sort of cringe in myself . . . the finality of doing that. I don’t understand it.” But on the other hand: “He did what he had to do. He was willing once again to take a stand for himself. That was his life.”
The Side His Family Saw
The young, eager official passed himself off to his colleagues as a calm, disciplined and quickly-maturing young man. To Ronan, he was, even when facing ferocious harassment from managers and spectators, “a guy very much in control of his emotions. He was never erratic. Always dependable.”
But to those who knew more of Keefover’s personal life, there was another side to him. To his family, he was in reality temperamental, impatient, and given to fiery flares of temper, which he exhibited only behind the closed doors of his own home.
His mother tells herself she should have suspected something when, after being released by Umpire Development, Dallas took down from the wall a collage of photos of himself with Wendelstedt’s instructors, and memento baseballs and broken bats.
Her son was also battling with a frustrated dependency upon his family that was directly related to his umpiring, Barbara Keefover says. While the industrial leagues pay their officials every game, the Legion league would pay twice a season, so that Keefover would have to depend on his family for cash, and for the car. His mother says he did so very hesitantly. His dream, she says, was to be able to say truthfully that he had his own car.
She also knows now that her son’s insistence one day on talking about a February ’84 suicide shooting at his sister’s school was a warning light; but at the time, “he didn’t seem unduly depressed.”
One day in May, 1984, he did. He called his sister into his room. She recalls that he hugged her, crying, and told her, “I never want to leave you.” The phone was on the bed and she guessed that he had been speaking to a young woman the family knew him to be very interested in, and troubled by, but whom they had never met.
The young woman’s rejection of Dallas Keefover, his parents believe, triggered the fatal despondency that had been put in motion by what he perceived as his rejection by baseball. He had known the young woman for only a short time, but the friendship had been complicated by common problems: indecision on her part, a previous boyfriend, unequal seriousness, and pain inflicted unwittingly or negligently.
Keefover’s parents say that in their efforts to make sense of their son’s death, they have blamed, in their minds, everyone who might have given their son cause to feel rejected. But ultimately they speak of his hypersensitivity, and reject blame. In his suicide note, Keefover asked that no one attribute it or accept it. His action was, he wrote apologetically, a result of many factors.
After his son’s death, Dallas, Sr. umpired a couple of games for Lorin Sarbacher. “I wanted to get back to see what Dallas had experienced,” he says. He had been to so many games that he knew what was needed on the diamond.
Calling games could not clarify what had happened. “So much that happened is inconclusive. There were so many other options he had.”
Barbara Keefover says: “I hope it relays a message to some of the younger ones” in umpiring. She says that she would tell other young men: “Never give up. There’s another tomorrow.”
She remembers that her young man, who had wavered between impatient despair and buoyant exhilaration, had been in the habit of proclaiming in a Churchill-like voice: “You never give up.”
Peter Monaghan is the assistant editor of The Chronicle of Higher Education in Washington, D.C.
