Welcome to Nobody Told Me. I'm Jan Black.

And I'm Laura Owens. Joining us on this episode is Jim Morris, who's an athlete, author, teacher, and inspiration for the movie The Rookie, which was based on Jim's book, The Oldest Rookie, Big League Dreams from a Small Town guy.

Jim's journey has been called a testimony to the power of dreams and their ability to inspire and transform human life.

Jim, we thank you so much for joining us.

Oh, happy to be here.

Thanks for having me.

The rookie was a major motion picture, but for people who aren't familiar with your story,

give us a thumbnail sketch.

Oh, wow.

Teaching out in West Texas at a little bitty school for a team who hadn't won in a lot of years.

I took over and let's just say they'd won one game each year for the three years before I got there.

And I want to change the mindset of these kids and I didn't know how to do it. And then, you know,

I just started teaching them my way. I had a father who was abusive verbally and physically.

Then my football coach was verbally abusive. and I thought if I ever get to work with kids, I'm going to teach them. I'm not going to yell at them. I'm not going to scream, not going to curse. I'm going to talk to them like they're human beings. It ended up working. They bought into it. Later on the second year, there was an athletic director who stopped me on my way to practice one day to tell me you've taken these kids as far as you can. They're never going to amount to anything. And then he put his finger in my chest and he goes, as for you, you're too nice. And you're never going to go as far as I'm going to go in the coaching field because you're too nice and I know how to step on people. The problem with that was that two of my kids heard it. And before I could get to the field, everybody on the team knew that the guy not only in charge of all the coaches, but all the kids, thought they weren't worth coaching. And so what it came down to was a little bit. If they want a district championship, which this group of kids had never won in baseball, I had to try out again at the age of 35, weighing 260 pounds,

and they won, and I did, and then Dennis Quaid played me.

That's the shorthand version of it. Yeah, wow. Well, what did you feel like when the kids challenged you to this to try out for the majors?

I just thought it was a lark. I thought, you know what? If it gets them to play better, I'll say whatever I need to say right now. I just want them to understand that there is an adult who believes in them, and I want to push them and not break them. But I want to get the best out of them that I possibly can without deflating anything that's going on. And we learned

a lot that year. We learned how to talk to each other. We learned how not to talk to other teams,

not talk to other umpires. And the only thing we're going to say to each other are positive,

encouraging, and things

that build us up. Nobody's trying to make an error. Nobody's trying to drop a fly ball. Nobody's

trying to give up a home run. We are an individual positions playing a team sport and we're all

...