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Keyboard and Diamond. On and off the field, McLain has been tackling all comers with careless abandon ever since he was an eighth-grader in suburban Markham, Ill., and refused to wear the blue uniform tie prescribed by the Roman Catholic sisters at Ascension grade school. As Denny tells it: "Ten days or so before graduation, I decided I wasn't going to wear that goddam blue bow tie any more. So I ripped it off, and Sister said, 'Put that tie back on,' and I said, "I'll be damned if I'll put it on.' Well, she called my parents and they came to school to get me. My father took me home and beat the living hell out of me with his belt. That's the worst beating I ever got." It was not the last. And there were plenty of near misses. Denny still remembers nervously the day when he was only twelve and "borrowed" one of the family cars. It ran out of gas, and he pushed it all the way home. He barely got it back in the garage before his father walked into the house. "If he had caught me," says McLain with a reminiscent shudder, "I wouldn't be alive today."
An insurance adjuster who picked up extra cash by giving electric-organ lessons on the side, the heavy-handed elder McLain was a semipro shortstop in his youth. He started Denny on his lessons early—both at the keyboard and on the diamond. Denny had trouble deciding which he liked best, the organ or baseball. "He'd be having a game in the park across the street," his mother remembers, "and he'd call Time!' and run into the house and play a couple of songs on the organ. Everybody would have to wait for him, and he'd play so loud they all could hear him." Says Denny: "I practiced on that organ every night. Sure, I knew a lot of people thought it was a sissified thing to do, and I beat up a lot of guys who said it out loud."
When he was not playing the organ, Denny was playing ball. By the time he was eight, he was the star pitcher for a Little League team in Markham, blazing them past kids three and four years older. He still brags about his record. "Nobody could hit me. I was too fast." No one could catch him either. "I'd throw the ball to my brother Tim, and he used to fall down," says Denny! "He was only four feet five inches tall."
After graduating from Ascension (with bow tie firmly in place), McLain went on to Mt. Carmel High, Chicago's "Little Notre Dame." Father Ben Hogan, a former English teacher at Mt. Carmel, remembers Denny well: "He had a lot of trouble keeping his mouth shut." And he was no whiz in the classroom, although he managed to maintain a C average. Denny insists that he was really better than that. "I went to school like I pitch," he says. "I am as good as I want to be. I could study 20 minutes and pass a test. Or I could pass without studying. I'll bet I didn't crack twelve books in four years."