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Bench is thinking every minute, however—about every batter in the box, every runner on base, every pitch in his battery mate's repertoire. It is his brains and his calm, confident manner that elevate him to a special plateau above the merely superior receivers. He knows better than any of them how to keep his hurlers mixing their pitches, and will not hesitate to cajole or even bully a reluctant hurler into following his commands. Once Maloney shook Bench off repeatedly on Johnny's call for a curve; he wanted to throw his patented fastball. Bench persisted, and Maloney finally came in with a roundhouse curve that left the astonished batter gaping at a called third strike. Another time, when Bench felt a pitcher was not putting enough steam on the ball, he shocked everyone in the park by arrogantly catching a listless pitch with his bare hand. Thus chastened, the pitcher bore down hard.
Because Bench is a brash, smooth-talking top-drawer athlete with a lavish bachelor pad in a Cincinnati singles complex, he naturally invites comparison with Joe Namath. The comparison is invidious. He is warm, friendly and never overweening. Bench's confidence is the deeply ingrained type peculiar to young men who have always known exactly what they wanted to do in life. As he recalls: "In the second grade they asked us what we wanted to be. Some said they wanted to be a farmer. Some said rancher or cowboy. I said I wanted to be a ballplayer, and they laughed. In the eighth grade they asked the same question, and I said ballplayer and they laughed a little more. By the eleventh grade no one was laughing."
Small Potatoes. Johnny was born in Oklahoma City on the sixth anniversary of Pearl Harbor Day, but raised in the town of Binger (pop. 730), which he describes as lying "two miles beyond Resume Speed." Binger is also near the heart of Last Picture Show country (Johnny guffawed appreciatively at the movie's realism). The third son of Ted and Katie Bench (there is also a daughter Marilyn), Johnny prospered in the kind of aggressively athletic household that can send a young man to the big leagues or the psychiatrist's couch. His father, a onetime truckdriver and furniture salesman, had been a semipro catcher. It was his idea for Johnny to become a catcher; he reasoned that there was a dearth of good ones in the majors and that catching would be the quickest path to success. Ted even created a Little League team in Binger just for Johnny and his brothers. When that did not work out, he drove them 17 miles to Anardarko to play. Meanwhile Johnny glued himself to major-league games on TV, assiduously copying down ballplayers' bland interviews.