By John Erardi - Cincinnati Enquirer Staff
Reds pitcher Bronson Arroyo is the grandson of an outspoken Havana newspaperman who fled Cuba in the 1950s and settled in Key West, Fla. It was there that Bronson's fiery father, Gus - playing drums and belting out lyrics as if he were Tom Jones - introduced himself to his future wife, Julie, at the Rainbow Girls Ball. Their son, Bronson, combined Gus' love of game strategy with Julie's tranquillity under duress, and he added his own confounding assortment of curveballs to make himself into an All-Star for the first time.
Last April, Bronson Arroyo rode into Cincinnati like Clint Eastwood in "High Plains Drifter," a solitary man on a horse for everybody to see.
Arroyo would have preferred to come out of the weeds. But, hey, it's the major leagues, and you don't get to write your own script.
So, we zoomed in for a close-up.
AN ISLAND WAY OF LIFE
You've got to find out a little something about Key West to begin to understand Arroyo. Even though he left there for the Tampa area when he was 10, Key West has made him hot and cool, fast and slow, laid back and intense.
It's as much a part of him as his curveball and his guitar.
On the Pittsburgh Pirates' rookie team in 1995, Cuban-born coach Woody Huyke noticed Arroyo gravitated toward Latin players - the Dominicans, Venezuelans and Puerto Ricans. He sat next to them on the bus and learned their Spanish while they learned his English.
"What is it with him?" Huyke asked Arroyo's parents.
"Key West," they replied.
The island is the southernmost city in the contiguous 48 states. It first was made famous to most Americans in the early 1960s with the "90 miles from Cuba" references by President John F. Kennedy in his speeches against Fidel Castro leading up to the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Key West is not the same place now as it was when Gus and Julie fell in love there, or when Bronson and their daughter, Serenity, were growing up on neighboring Big Pine Key - wearing shorts and flip-flops, climbing trees, bouncing across the street to the canal to fish or just standing on the back porch feeding deer by hand.
It's much more touristy now.
"It's very laid back for the tourists, but for the hometown folks - the Conchs - it's like a little New York," Bronson says. "It's not Jimmy Buffett sitting on the beach having a margarita. Everything goes at a fast pace. People want things done now ! They talk fast, they move fast. I remember when I was 10 and we moved to Brooksville near Tampa; my father said, 'Man, people move so slow here!' We'd go back (to Key West) once or twice a year because we missed it, but after a day and a half, my parents were ready to leave. They remembered things the way they used to be."
Key West is a melting pot - and not just for people of Cuban descent. There are only 25,000 year-round residents in the Keys, and many of them are of English, German, Irish and Italian extraction.
Bronson's mother is of English-Honduran heritage. One of her grandfathers came to Key West from an island off Honduras to sell bananas; his wife-to-be came from the Bahamas. Julie's parents were both born in Key West.
Bronson's paternal grandfather, a newspaperman with an excruciating talent for the well-placed barb, was enough of a thorn in dictator Fulgencio Batista's side in the early 1950s that his best bet for long-term survival was to flee Cuba and settle in Key West.
A SPORTING TRADITION
Both Cuban-born Gus and Julie were athletes. Julie was particularly good at the stick sports (tennis and golf), and Gus was an outstanding basketball player who also loved football, which suited his aggressive nature.
Gus didn't realize how good Bronson had gotten at baseball until Julie signed the boy up for tee ball. When Gus saw him backhand his first chance at third base and throw a seed to first, he knew what game he would be playing with Bronson for the next 10 years.
And play it they did.
Gus coached Bronson and his teammates and ran them like football players. But he kept it fun, and Bronson was as eager to absorb as Gus was to dish it out.
"I was 7 years old and I was eating spaghetti two days before I pitched because I knew I needed my carbs," Bronson says.
Being a weight lifter, the 6-foot-3, 240-pound Gus knew what vitamins to take and what foods to eat. Bronson had long arms and legs like his dad, but was (and still is) a string bean. Just this year, the 6-foot-5 Bronson surpassed 190 pounds for the first time - after untold numbers of grilled cheese sandwiches and bags of Ramen noodles. "This is the first year I didn't try to gain weight; I just ate," he says.
"For my dad, weight-lifting wasn't about looking good or having a nice body; it was about lifting as much weight as possible and being a strong human being," Bronson says. "I loved lifting with him from the time I was 6 or 7.
"And I knew from the time I was 6 or 7 that I was going to be a major-league baseball player."
When Bronson was 10, Gus moved the family to Brooksville, Fla. He knew his construction business would flourish there, that the baseball was good and that tourists hadn't yet overrun the place.
On Bronson's Pony League team were future Chicago White Sox catcher A.J. Pierzynski and two other players who played in the high minors.
"When I was 16 - I was a sophomore - my elbow was bugging me a little bit and that's when we started finding out about the (Dr. Frank) Jobe exercises to get the shoulder stronger, and so those are the weights I did," Bronson says. "Two years ago, when (Red Sox ace) Curt Schilling saw me - 6-5, 178 pounds - he said I'd never pitch 230 innings (in one season). What he didn't know was that I had the foundation for it."
THE RIGHT FOUNDATION
In 2004, Bronson made 29 starts for Boston. The next year: 32 starts covering 205 innings.
He was a thoroughbred - born and groomed to compete.
And like a thoroughbred, he had a special name. It was inspired by his father's favorite actor, Charles Bronson.
That was only the start of Gus' influence.
"I wouldn't be in the major leagues without my father," Bronson says. "And the amazing thing is, my father was learning the game right along with me."
Bronson attributes his never having been on the disabled list to his father's regimen of weightlifting and year-round throwing.
"I'd come from basketball practice and it would be dark out and my dad would put his car lights on and rig up some lights on the batting cage and we'd throw," he says. "There was hardly ever a time there wasn't a baseball in my hands. And if I wasn't throwing with my father - and that was a serious baseball workout - I was always out being physical, throwing a tennis ball off a wall, playing Wiffleball, throwing a football with my friends."
Bronson admired his old man, wanted to be just like him - well, except for the volatility.
"Ever seen the movie 'Scarface?' " asks Bronson. "That's my father to a T. To a T. Worst temper I've ever seen in my life. Now he's a lot calmer than he used to be. I've seen him blow up in some situations and I've said to myself, 'I can't believe I'm seeing this. This stuff has gotta be in a movie.' "
Julie knew to let it pass, and Bronson knew it, too.
"Pisces," Julie explains.
Gus is a Leo.
Opposites.
Is Bronson's ability to think out on the mound while chaos swirls around him a result of his waiting for his father's anger to pass before reacting to it?
"I don't think there's any question about that," Julie says.
PLAYING BASEBALL - AND GUITAR
It was at Double-A Altoona, Pa., in the Eastern League, that Bronson first picked up a guitar. It was 1999.
As a 6-year-old, he'd been taught violin by his grandmother, Norma Dopp - she's still teaching music at 93, by the way - but it wasn't what he wanted. Being outdoors was his thing.
But in Altoona, where he heard a clubhouse attendant named Jake strumming on a guitar in the laundry room, Bronson's musical roots were piqued.
"I saw him picking at Jake's guitar one day and I said, 'I've got an extra guitar,' " recalls Steve Lozinak, now vice president of the Diamond Jaxx baseball team in Jackson, Tenn. "It was nothing fancy, just a $300 to $350 Yamaha that I wasn't using anymore."
But it was plenty for Bronson, who isn't one to cast off the old - he'd rather adapt it into the new. The guitar is the one he played on his CD released last year, "Covering the Bases," on which he was accompanied by such musicians as bassists Mike Inez (Alice in Chains), Leland Sklar (who played with James Taylor), and drummer Kenny Aronoff (formerly with John Mellencamp). And it is the same guitar with which Arroyo posed for the cover. On the album, he covers songs by Alice in Chains, Pearl Jam, the Goo Goo Dolls, The Foo Fighters, Incubus, Toad the Wet Sprocket, Stone Temple Pilots, Fuel, Temple of the Dogs, Vertical Horizon, The Verve Pipe and The Standells.
"When I heard him playing the guitar and singing when he came home after that season, it floored me," Julie says. "I mean, he was never one to sing - not in the shower, not in the car, never."
Says Gus: "He was around music in the house his whole life. He just sort of absorbed it, I guess."
"He picked the right kind of music for his voice," says Julie, who plays piano. "He likes the '90's grunge style. It is good for him."
Somehow, growing up, Bronson managed to avoid the music of the '80s. It surely wasn't being played in the Arroyo home. On his CD liner notes he even thanks his sister, Serenity, "for never getting me into music in the eighties and ruining my musical taste."
But grunge isn't his only genre.
"He's working on some country songs," says Reds player Adam Dunn. "And if he's working on it, he'll get it. He's good."
Ben Broussard, a former Red who now is the Cleveland Indians' first baseman, doesn't recall the city he was in when he and Arroyo, as Triple-A farmhands on opposing teams, got together to play guitar in a hotel room.
"Just one of those things people do who like to play music," explains Broussard, who has made an alt-rock CD. "Bronson can play anything. He's like a jukebox. He hears it one time and can pick it up."
A PITCHER, NOT A THROWER
Arroyo doesn't know exactly why the Pirates exposed him to waivers in 2003. You rarely, if ever, get the truth in that instance. You have to deduce it from what you regard as the pertinent facts.
Fact: He wasn't a hard thrower.
But he knew how to pitch, and his minor-league numbers were good from the start. Coaches' eyebrows would raise when they saw he could throw a good curveball for a strike on a 3-and-1 count, then strike out the guy with a 3-and-2 curveball. There aren't many hitters at any level who can hit those pitches.
Gus thinks the Pirates might have thought nobody would pick up Bronson after an accident at the construction site of his home that winter.
"We were building his house in Florida and he fell through the floor," Gus says. "It was just a lack of experience on his part, that's all."
Gus is a roofer by trade. He had Bronson up on roofs at age 10.
"Nowadays, I'd be arrested for child abuse," Gus says. "But it's the way I grew up. My father was a roofer. I was up on the roof at a young age, too."
Gus had the good sense to keep Bronson, the aspiring pitcher, away from power tools. But he couldn't keep him from falling through the floor joists that day.
"I stepped through a piece of plywood, fell right through, broke two ribs, lacerated my liver," says Bronson, shaking his head. "Had to fly me out of there on a helicopter."
Boston Red Sox general manager Theo Epstein and his baseball people saw something in Arroyo. Epstein knew there was more to pitching than throwing 98 mph. He liked Arroyo's numbers, saw that he knew how to pitch and was able to out-think hitters.
The Red Sox purchased Arroyo's contract. But Boston wasn't his final stop.
SHOW MOVES TO NEW TOWN
It was in the works before the Reds' season had started.
Phil Castellini, son of Reds owner Bob Castellini and the team's senior director of business operations, knew what he wanted to do with Arroyo, who was traded to the Reds during spring training this year, in exchange for outfielder Wily Mo Peña.
The deal was huge for the pitching-starved Reds.
"He has a great feel for pitching - and there are very few of those guys in baseball," Reds manager Jerry Narron says.
Of course, there's more to Arroyo than baseball.
People told Phil Castellini that Arroyo was a rock star in Boston. Phil's response: "Well, then, we'll make a rock star out of him in Cincinnati."
It has been slow building, but it's getting there. Bronson had a gig with singer Raquel Aurilia, wife of Reds infielder Rich Aurilia, last month at the Madison Theater in Covington. At noon Friday, Bronson will play at Joseph-Beth Booksellers in Norwood, then will sign copies of "Covering the Bases."
Music now is as much a part of Arroyo as pitching is. And now he can better appreciate his musical father. Who says you don't gain wisdom until you turn 30?
The $300 Yamaha is going nowhere. Some things never change.
The only difference Julie notices in her son is he likes the major-league hotels.
"Gus and I are perfectly happy in a Best Western," she says. "Bronson says 'Mom, don't you want to stay in the whatever?" I guess you get a little spoiled by the major leagues."
Deep down, she knows there is no taking Key West out of Bronson, but she also knows he has acquired a taste for fine things. Nothing wrong with that.
Traveling first-class and yet remembering what got you there tends to make you play first-class. And, if you can make a little bit of music along the way, what's not to like? If Arroyo does that for the life of his Reds contract - a contract that has two years to run after this season - Reds fans will be happy no matter where he winds up: Boston, Cincinnati or Margaritaville.
