John M Holland - Sports Nut

To say that John Holland was a sports enthusiast was like calling Niagara Falls a babbling brook. On the night that John died, he was wearing his coaching shorts and a colorful T-shirt with “Sports Nut” written across the chest … he had just been reading the newspaper, which for John meant reading the Sports pages.

His father had played baseball and must have instilled in John the love of the game. The vacant lot across the street was probably just the training ground needed to set history in motion. John was a professional baseball player in the minor leagues on teams based in Lubbock, Tyler, and Ballinger, Texas. He traveled all over Texas playing baseball. These were the “farm chains” of the Detroit Tigers, Cincinnati Reds, and the Dallas Rebels. John was a pitcher and also played outfield.

One very cold day in 1947, John had pitched for a while then they let another pitcher go in as relief. The manager told John to warm up so they could put him back in, as the replacement wasn’t performing that well. After a few minutes of warm up, the other pitcher’s game improved so John went back to the bench. After sitting out again, suddenly John was called directly from the bench to the pitcher’s mound without warming up his arm. The inevitable happened; John “threw his arm out.” The injury to his shoulder was so severe that he never got over it. On March 20th, 1947 Sam Rosenthal, the president of the Lubbock Baseball Club, handed John an “outright and unconditional release.” In those days the players had no recourse and certainly no safety cushion for injuries. His baseball career was just over.

Back before the war, in 1940, Clarence E. Linz rented the ice arena from Fair Park in Dallas and brought a professional hockey team to Dallas. It wasn’t far into the season that Canada entered World War II and the entire hockey team went home! Luckily they left all their equipment behind. The rink then opened up for public skating and Jack Freel ran the place. John and the other kids would hang around the rinks and help clean the ice after closing time. In return, Jack gave them free passes to skate. John and his friends called themselves the “Rink Rats.” Another one of the kids was Bill Nolen who went to school with John at Adamson. They got to be very close friends out at the rink.

When the war started, some sailors from “up North” would come over to Fair Park from the Dallas Naval Air Station and use the abandoned equipment to play hockey. Jack Freel had been a hockey player and began to teach the kids a little about the game when he had the time. Eventually the “Rink Rats” started playing hockey against the sailors who regularly beat the tar out of the kids because they had been skating all their lives. You just don’t get that much ice in Texas.

After the war, John ran into Bill Nolen again on the street in Dallas and invited him over to his house for a get together. John introduced Bill to his younger sister Lewcile; Bill and Lewcile married in February of 1946. John’s old hockey stick is still around, a treasured (and heavily taped) keepsake. John felt you could fix anything with electrical tape!

In the army, if John was ever “missing in action,” you could be sure he had just gone over a hill to get in a game somewhere. He played divisional baseball and football while he was in the service. He also did some boxing then.

John played some softball in church leagues, but when he got into the cotton business he began to concentrate on a couple of new sports: bowling and golf. The Cotton Exchange had a team that bowled in a league, but John really loved the golf tournaments. Golf was the best part of doing business.

When you are stuck in a port watching them load cotton bales onto ships, what can you do but just wait? Go deep sea fishing, that’s what! Fishing in a lake was a bit too calm for John, but out in the ocean it was lot’s more challenging.

John won trophies for every sport he ever played. He was a natural athlete and he played to win.

His wife Peggy used to tease that she had three children: two girls and one great big boy! He played with the kids all up and down the street. The only time he had no patience with children was when a Dallas Cowboy football game was on television. During the game, the area between John and the TV was no man’s land.

With all his good points, John wasn’t much of a handy-man around the house. He did, however, once build a ping-pong table out in the garage. Obviously an emergency situation!

After John retired, he began frequenting the Senior Citizen Center in Grand Prairie and started weight training again. He also started playing pool rather regularly and, as usual, consistently clobbered the opponent.

His long time friend, Jim Welch recruited him to play with the Grand Prairie Indians. In his early 70s, John got hurt playing Senior Citizen League softball and was forced to quit the league (because Peggy threatened him.) He really missed playing ball.

When the Dallas Stars hockey team got rolling and headed for the 1999 Stanley Cup playoffs, both John and Peg became fanatical Stars fans.

John frequently watched one game on the big television with a small portable TV on top tuned to another game while “just catching the scores” through an earpiece of a transistor radio.