31. Leigh Neuage's Baseball Achievements and Family Life in Australia 1998-1999

Leigh made the U-16’s South Australia State Squad - playing in Canberra January 1998

1998

This seemed like the year of ‘on-our-way’. I for oh so many reasons (I suppose hard work was the primary motion enhancer) signed my application to begin a PhD. Holy Cow how did I ever get that far? Speak of stumbling and falling forward, I was now someone official as a human probably should be – just a couple of decades behind everyone else. Turning fifty was very uneventful – think I gave the whole birthday time and date a miss. Actually, I suppose I was fifty when the PhD signing happened. If I still believed in astrology I would steer toward explaining my progress in life with the aspects at the time with my Jupiter. Transit Chiron was conjunct my natal Jupiter (a Cinderella aspect according to Magi astrologers) and Solar Progressed Mars squared natal Jupiter (all that energy to burst forward in higher education); Solar Progressed Moon trine my Jupiter (great indications to do this on my own at home). As well as the Jupiter influence there would have to have been Mercury stuff happening and sure enough there was: Secondary progressed Mercury conjunct my natal ascendant (got to get that ego out there); and Solar progressed Neptune was trine my natal Mercury.

Of course, astrologers can interpret anything to fit the picture. It is really a hit and miss affair. I have had many times when there were exact ‘hits’ of planets moving about the solar system and through constellations to my natal shit and nothing happened. Some of the most major events in

PhD  chart

my life had no correlation with anything astrological unless I pulled and stretched and used midpoints and imaginary points and supposed planets and who knows what to make it work. Nevertheless, at the time I believed in astrology and angels and Jesus and God and saints and whatever else one wants to believe in to justify the moment. At the time it was obvious that it was time to do a PhD, and I had been lead to this point. It never occurred to me at the time that this was all just a bloody good progression of human endeavour, not of astrological progressions. I had worked hard – studied heaps – for seven years (a quarter of a cycle of Saturn) and now I was accepted into a PhD program. Big deal. I could have done the same thing twenty-five years earlier and not done the Order, drugs and all the farting around that I did for so long. There was nothing cosmic to my life. Only in our minds are we lead by that invisible hand – only in our illusions do we have a purpose. Fact – there are more than seven billion people on the planet – five billion more than when I was born – millions die every day in horrible ways without whoever it is they believe in there to help them.

At the end of the day, we are just evolution’s fodder – keeping the species going for no reason except for evolution. No one is any more important than anyone else. No one is being lead in some great mystical way. Truth be told – there is no one – and never has been – that is any more important to the evolution of our species than anyone else. All the alleged greats – those people we have put on pedestals – are just chance happenings. If Einstein did not sort out whatever it was, he sorted out then some other person would have done it. A different person than the one who did it at some point in time could have done every invention, uttered every great sentence, written, sung, painted or given any artistic expression ever presented. 

Beyond my little say here I was happy to be doing a doctoral degree and really thought I was great – to say the least. My life had purpose, meaning, expression – finally society would recognize me for what I always had – great creative talent – and now that I was doing it all on society’s terms, I would be a hit. Not shit. There would be the guest appearances on Oprah and Lettermen and several Good Morning types of shows. I would be venerated for my insights and opinions – and – oh WAIT Shit That never happened and of course never will, but I had a sniff of what it would be like to be a celebrity if only for a second’s hallucination when I had gotten into some poor kid’s pot stash that was negligently left in the backyard.

I originally had hoped to do a PhD  thesis on picture-poems  with the final presentation being my picture-poems. I began my pursuit of this lofty degree in 1997 whilst finishing my Masters  at Deakin  and doing a Bachelor of Science at Flinders  University . At the end of 1997 I had my Masters – still not quite sure how I made it through that (I think spending a dozen hours a day seven days a week had something to do with it). At the same time, I was doing my BS at Flinders in Information Technology. Having dropped out of high school at Shenendehowa  Central School  in 1985 or so and not quite making it through the second year of college at Towson  decades earlier had left me as a scholar less refugee aflame in academic rubble. To toddle away with the title ‘Dr. of Picture-Poems’ seemed very grand and noble to me and would surely prove the point, though of course I was unsure of what the point was. To my dismay I was told that I could not do a PhD at the same time as another degree, such as my BS thingy. Considering I was not paying for much of any of this – actually I never quite paid a cent.

I opted to pay by the HECS (Higher Education Contribution Scheme) at the beginning of 1991. This meant that at some time in the future, I believe when I finished my studies, I would have two or three percent taken out of my salary as an extra tax when I passed a certain amount of income. This amount has changed over the years but since I did not really make much money the twenty years I was in Australia, I never paid any. They of course cannot take anything out of my US earnings. I am not opposed to paying off my “HECS loan”, but silly me – going overseas after getting all my degrees and working elsewhere…

I realized I should just play the game. I enjoyed my studies at Flinders and fancied I would be able to be some sort of Internet guru given the right environment and some money, but I gave up the science degree right when the dot.com’s zillions of dollars were being made.

Somehow, I became convinced that a doctorial would be better than another bachelor’s degree. Of course, now, being unemployed, and looking for a job for seven months in New York City, I realise how stupid I was to pursue an academic degree instead of a technology one. Not that I was doing well at Flinders. I found it all very difficult and my lowest point was during a class that I could not get the hang of writing code. We were learning some stupid obscure programming language.

Ada was named in honour of Ada Lovelace. This chick was the only legitimate child of the poet Lord Byron and his wife, Annabella Milbanke. She studied, tinkered, and did unsavory things with math and worked on the foreruner of computers - Babbage's newest proposed machine, the Analytical Engine – and now I was brought to tears because of her miserable codes. Two-thirds of the way though my second-hand book someone had written boldly across the page ‘I hate Ada”, I wrote alongside it – “I do too”. But credit to the poor woman – she is long dead – though in terms of the history of the world she got the sand tossed into her face in her grave but just a nanosecond ago – and in the history of the universe – does the history of the earth even have a mention? The seas of time wash over the shores of existence and one grain of sand is sucked out and dissolved in the ocean and that grain is the earth and we worry about a small thing as global warming. It is the universe’s cooling from spreading out that will do our local galaxy in without any consciousness remembering that ever there was a place called earth, but as for you Ada – I still hate you and there is no way to convey it to you because you, as we will likewise, in the future no longer exist.

I just could not get it. Another student, from India who could barely speak the language – and I were taken to the board in front of the class and very loudly shown step by step how to make some kind of string of code. With a ‘now do you get it?’ we were humbly sent back to our seats. The fact that I was some thrifty years older than this little shit and already had a higher degree made me want to break a computer over his head. I spent days, staying up most of the night learning this language and when it came to final time I was in the ten percent of a class of more than two hundred who passed the course. It was that hard. I have no idea how to write Ada now and I never finished the degree.

I had hoped to be accepted for a PhD in ‘textual presentation’ at the University of Adelaide but the person I met said she had too many students already and she recommended me to Jackie Cook at the University of South Australia.

She said, “Jackie is the one for you”. Jackie was not keen on the picture-poem idea but she did like the concept of Internet communication and together we crafted the title ‘Conversational analysis of ‘chatroom ‘ talk”’ and after a six-month period writing a submission piece I was accepted to do my research.  This would be my underlining all-consuming project for the next seven and a half years and through it all Jackie pushed and pulled and edited and assisted. Her doctorial was in new-media and she was an expert on communication via new technologies. I was on my way – The Path was open; obstructions of the past were – well the fucking obstructions were in the past – I had arrived. This would be a breeze; three maybe four years and I would be Doctor Somebody - by the end of 2001 not only would I have a doctoral degree, but Leigh would be playing major league baseball, Sacha would be recording his rapping stuff, I would be publishing everything from children’s stories to novels along with my highly successful picture poem business. No doubt I would still be with Kris at the end of it – it was the perfect life come to pass. mOf course, it did not become as this...

Sacha and Leigh were having a great year: 

Leigh  tall dude in the back row – Under 16s South Australian  State team

• January 19 Leigh was invited by the Texas Rangers to their Baseball Academy for June 11-18 in Arlington Texas – since we had to pay for the trip there we gave this one a miss
• April 7th Leigh wins triple jump for State title (it was a school event that he got pushed into and he had never done track and field before. He outperformed kids older than him who specialised in events and he ended the day with a great triple jump effort. He walked away laughing – much to the dismay of other participants who had practiced for this event – and never collected his trophy for it. He had no interest in any other sport except baseball)
• February 11th Leigh to Canberra for a tournament with other States he did well. Met some girls from an Island off of Western Canada – what happened I am not sure but there were “those photos” hugging a couple of girls. There was some correspondence for a few months after but as in all ‘true love events’ they petered out to nothing. I have the photos on a web site for Leigh so in essence memories have a life span of sort. Canberra is the capital of Australia and the headquarters for the Australian Institute of Sports and many international tournaments are there .
• May 2 – 9th SA Schoolboys team in the National schoolboys 17 and under Brisbane. Leigh collected ‘man of the match’ medallions for each of the three games he pitched.
• 16th Leigh was interviewed on channel 10. Leigh was selected to try out for the Australian team with a cost of more than $4000 to go to the States to play so I wrote a charity group (The Smith Family) who came up with the money and in turn Leigh appeared on a TV sports program mentioning the charity organization.
• June 23rd Leigh arrives Melbourne.
• Leigh is one of two South Australians selected for the U-15 Australian National
• Leigh received numerous sports awards throughout the year: Messenger Newspapers sportsperson of the week of the month and several other organisations. For a while he had more than twenty certificates on his bedroom wall but they became replaced by other sporting conquests; photos of girls.

Sports can be so cruel. A lot of people were selected to try out in Melbourne – Leigh did not tell any of his friends that he may be selected to play in the States, just that he was going to Melbourne to play ball for a few days. Several boys broke down and cried when they did not make the team – everyone wanted to go so badly. It was less cruel than the way they used to do it. Kids would have to pay and travel to the States, and the final selection would not be made until right before the games – those who did not make it were sent back to Australia. Leigh was so determined that he said he would not return to South Australia if he did not make the team.

He had his passport with him, something I had to fight in court with Lesia for him to get. I got a court order for Lesia to pay one-half of the four thousand dollars for the trip, and one-half of the costs of one state and one national tournament until Leigh was 18.

Leigh was on the team and headed for the States. For whatever the reason there was a bit of a hiccup. Leigh got his US passport which he needed to get into the States but he did not have an Australian passport to get back
into Australia.

Smith Family story of Leigh

Teams at the Under 16 World Series at Longacre Park, Fairview, Illinois.
The heading to the 1998 “AA” World Baseball Championship read,
The World’s Best 15 and 16 year olds

• Europe: Italy, Ukraine, Czech Republic
• Asia: Taiwan, Korea, Japan
• South Pacific: Australia 
• Africa: South Africa 
• America's: Venezuela, Brazil, Mexico, USA

• 30th Leigh to US arrives LA
• 30th LA arrive Tucson
• July 05th Tucson arrive St. Louis
• July 6th Leigh in Fairview Heights
• 14th Leigh vs. USA I sat in my office at Magill until very late watching the score on the Internet. Earlier in the day I was walking through the Noarlunga Shopping Centre smiling in my secret little world thinking about how my son was in the States preparing to face the United States in a World Series game. Of course, no one else could imagine why I was smiling or feeling so elated – it is this thing about being a human – we live in our minds and no one else can possibly feel or know what is going on.

Leigh, pitching on the Legion Field Diamond starting at 7 PM did well and the Australian team came close to winning. Leigh pitched six plus innings before being taken out with a tied game. He would tell me later that he was very angry with the coach for taking him out as he thought he could win the game. The Australian team was tied in the sixth and there were two outs when he was taken out of the game and the next pitcher gave up two runs and then another run was scored in the ninth inning by the USA and Australia was unable to respond; whether they could have won is something that is impossible to know whether there would be a change about. Australia did leave nine on base.

Figure 216 USA vs. Australia  U14

Leigh 's stats against USA U-14

A summary of the game from the online reportage of the game said; “…excellent performance. great pitching from Neuage and batted real well despite coming up that bit short…”.

Leigh was the youngest on the Australian team, having turned fifteen days before the tournament began. He was only one of two who were first year under-16 players; the others all had one year of international baseball u-16 experience.

Sitting in my office at the University of South Australia, Magill Campus, working on my PhD late that night, no one on campus, I felt very sad for Leigh, so far away. He telephoned me collect in my office – it was well past midnight, and I wish I could just reach over the world and touch him with a magic wand. Adolescent sports are so difficult on both the players and the parents. It is all so serious when in fact it should be fun and enjoyable. Here was Leigh, just turned fifteen a day earlier, in the excitement of being on a national team in a World Series in America and he was stressed. The evening before they had attended a professional baseball game at Busch Stadium in St. Louis between the Cardinals and the Reds. The kids were in a parade (of all 12 countries participating) on the field before the game. Leigh took a lot of photos and he seemed quite excited, the evening before. A few days later they had a BBQ with the St. Louis Cardinal’s.

• 19th Bronze metal game Australia 2 runs  vs. Venezuela 11 runs

BRONZE MEDAL GAME

Australia came in fourth in the World Series which was good.

PITCHING – perhaps if Leigh had pitched the complete game they could have fared better as he only gave up two runs.

• 20th Leigh to Albany, NY – stays with grandfather

Leigh  with grandfather aged 93 – July 1998

• 25th leaves Albany 

We, frantically; well the mother did, I just went through the motions like I cared – set out to get Leigh his passport. She was all in a huff when she discovered – after I casually mentioned that he forgot to get an Australian passport and she was calling this embassy and that consulate and good golly was she in a tizzy. Leigh received his Australian passport via special delivery from the New York City consulate a couple of hours before he was to leave from the Albany, New York airport for his trip back.

• 28th arrive Adelaide noon

And that was the month of July 1998 for Leigh.

Lesia filed an affidavit with the Family Court in which (amongst many complaints and weird pronouncements in regards to my mental and emotional states) there was some mention to my poor handling of the passport issues.

Leigh wasn't happy with staying with my father...

• PITCHED PERFECT GAME

There is really no difference whether the game is a major league game or a youth game, a perfect game is rarely performed by a pitcher at any level and at the age of fifteen (fifteen and a few months). Leigh pitched a perfect game in division one under 16’s. I do not recall how many he struck out but it was most of the other team. In a perfect game the other team does not reach base in nine innings. It was not a team that was doing poorly but one of the contenders for the State Titles which Southern Districts went on to win that year.

Sacha was doing well too for the first part of the year.

• Sacha – Christies Beach HS semester 1 Design satisfactory achievement

Hackham  to Southern Districts  Baseball field

• Our house at 17 Lynn Place.
• Wirreanda High School and the basketball stadium on States Road.
• Southern Districts baseball field on Flaxmill Road. \

• Christies Beach Train Station
• Noarlunga Shopping Centre
• Christies Beach High School
• Our last home together –Tenterton Road

This was one of those enjoyable moments in our simple lives. For some reason or the other we either did not have a car or it did not work or it was the time when the police defected it so we walked the 4.21 kilometres from 17 Lynn Place to Christies Beach High School every evening and of course back – we must have walked back because I am now in Brooklyn and I see Sacha is online or at least my mobile phone shows his computer is on back in Melbourne – in other words we are not still at that school.

• May 7th letter from Tamzon

We had stayed with Tamzon in Indiana in March of 1992. She was a girlfriend for some un-remembered period in 1973, and she joined the Order in 1974 then left with one of the Master Teachers who developed a brain tumour and went nuts then died. I had not heard from her for years and this would be the last time I would have any contact with her. I tried to find her on the Internet a few times over the years but never did and now I have absolutely no interest. I have made few contacts with anyone from my past with this World Wide Web vehicle. Either most everyone I ever knew died off or they never want to have contact with me again or they have forgotten my name like I have their name. Whatever the reason I am almost totally separated from the past. However, last week (27 September 2006) I contacted Carol Ann’s daughter, Desiree. Desiree was a few months old when I first came in contact with Carol Ann in 1969 then we wandered around the west coast of America in a hopeless manner ending up in Hawaii and then the Holy Order of Mans. I last saw Desiree and her mother in 1973. I had a bit of contact for a few years with the last interaction being an invitation to Desiree’s graduation in 1986. Last week I came across that invitation and looked online and discovered her school was having a twenty-year reunion. I wrote ever who was in charge and that person forwarded my email to Desire who wrote.

I sent a photo of me holding her in 1969.

We had several correspondences back and forth and she was going to telephone me last Sunday with her mother, Carol Ann, but she didn’t. I suppose that is one’s history; chunks of decade barely (badly at that) remembered. Then again, she was getting married the week I made contact and some old fart from the past who was a hippie with her mom is not as important.

• 9th look for house
• June 14th cleaned 17 Lynn in order to move

I hate moving – not because of moving but because of cleaning up where I; and as was the case for a couple of decades – my children and I lived: throw in a dog or two and at times a few cats and with one primary cleaner/mover/adult – the alleged human- me, and it all becomes almost too much to bare.  Each time we moved we de-cluttered though of course we accumulated so much from the previous move that a de-cluttering exorcism was hardly noticeable.  On a bit larger scale, though somewhat parallel to my leaving decayed homes behind, if there were new planets born in the shadows of a dead star's ashes as NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope uncovered in April 2006, would we equate a galaxy’s de-cluttering with new clutter?

And as karma would have it we have gone through the nightmare renters serenade this past year (2015) and it wasn’t me. Firstly, we had to get a family out of our house in upstate New York; they had several children, four I think and dogs and cats and had lived in our house for eight years. We wanted them out so we could sell our house. It took a month of cleaning and twelve thousand dollars of renovations and as bad luck would follow me now several months later no one has bought our house and we once again are looking for renters. As if that was not bad enough, we had the renters from hell – even worse than my children and me in our New Jersey house and we got to the point where we needed a lawyer to get them out and they left our house almost in ruin. Renters! I wonder how many of our ten homes the owners could not wait to get my children and me out. The worse investment is owning property than having renters.

I have been a renter for most of my living away from the good Christians in Clifton Park – or since 1965; life. It is a terrible position to find oneself in. Throughout the history of the fortunate inhabitants of this most unfortunate planet there have been those who lucked out and those who are fuck-ups – me being one of the primary fuckups to wander this shit hole of a tossed aside piece of stellar dust crap; to give a more positive and Christ-like view of my feelings at the moment. It was never meant for me to have meaning-purpose-happiness or point-of-focal-perspective or a home. Try as I may there just never was a direction for me – maybe it was biological, some DNA molecules fussed; broken down dendrites of some hapless neuron that is unable to communicate with another neuron and so on and so forth and the result was/is my life. At some time, I can download a new brain from Google and erase everything that has been before making life bearable but until then I am forced to live moment by moment the terrors of my thoughts. Was it Jesus or God or Fraud or a drunk on the subway yesterday that proclaimed that our conscious life is nothing but an elaborate post hoc rationalisation of things that we really do for other reasons like perhaps rent a house.

• July 27th settled in new home Tenterton Road, Christies Downs

On July 11 John Wadsworth a scout from the Arizona Diamondbacks interviewed Leigh and me. That is all I have in my diary for that week. I know we had the interview at Kris’s house because I was embarrassed to have it at mine.

Renting a home is done by those who have mental problems; those who cannot get their act together to function properly to own their own home. The more perfect amongst us do not just own a home or two – they have mansions or in the “olden days” they had castles. It took me close to a month to get us moved. It was one of those momentarily luck things; I had applied for a Housing Trust Home in 1998 when I went bankrupt. At the time I was told there was a ten-year waiting list for a home. When I asked in 1995, I was told I was on the list and it looked as if there was another seven years of folks in front of me. I asked again three years later when we had to give up our home in Lynn Place, Hackham and lucky for us renting low-lives there was a place recently made available in Christies Beach. The previous renting low-lives had left the house a mess including a large hole through the lounge wall. It was ideal. The Housing Trust folks repaired the hole, painted the whole inside, and put in a new kitchen. The property had a large backyard with a fence all around for Sacha to graffiti. The place bordered onto a school with a large playing field and basketball courts. I am not sure if I would count it as my favorite house, but it had great memories and somewhat extraordinary events. There was a time when we really settled into family life; meals together, both children attending school, my relationship with Kris was going well, I was working on my PhD and I had an actual paying job. Leigh signed his contract with the Los Angeles Dodgers and Sacha was back at school and I was attending a class in animation in the evening with him at the Christies Beach High School. We had a couple of good computers that we had ‘borrowed’ or acquired from the university, and we had the Internet on at home. But as all things in my life history, it did not last, though there was a moment when it was all very good.

We rarely had good furniture except for a desk and sofa we bought when we first moved into the tofu factory after escaping Lesia shortly before the year 1984 came crashing down. By our move to Christies Beach, mid-1998, our tenth move and fourteen years later, the Salvation Army would not take our crap. Not only had many a person slept and done various human and animal-like activities on the sofa, but various cats and dogs did whatever they do, even behaving as humans at times – taking part in fluid exchanging rituals and events of their own creation on the sofa. The rest of our belongings were collected from various sources over the years: thrift shops, donations, garage sales and items left by others on the sidewalk of life. I painted our dressers and stands, tables and movable storage things when we first moved in to give the illusion that things were better than they were. I even bought myself a rather newish large bed, back in the days when I did not think I was too good to sleep in a used bed – that is not to say I think I am too good now I just would not sleep in a used bed, except at a motel/hotel/my children/or whilst visiting the Queen of England but I would not have a recycled bed in my own home ever again – if it could be prevented. Of course, as we discover as the decades fly by we seldom have much say over much of anything.

Tenterton house It did not have this fence in front and there was a large tree  in front when we lived there

And that pretty much was 1998 in all is glory. I had some rough times with my girlfriend Kris/Chris but I cannot remember what it was all about. She seemed to complain that I spent too much time on the Internet and she never understood why I would want to put my picture poems on the web. She thought I was just doing it for attention. HELLO isn’t everything an artist does for attention? She was most annoyed that I would put poems onto the Internet that I had written to her. I had written her a few thousand poems – there were days I was writing forty to fifty poems to her – and to just give all that to just one person seemed like a waste. My argument that if every artist and writer had only given their work to one other individual we would not have museums. Most likely it is that no one takes me seriously as an artist/writer and my little ditties are only successful to the individual inspirational person who allegedly provided the spark for said little ditty. Well fuck you. You ignorant humans.

Christmas  1998 Hackham , with Leigh  and Kris

1999

In Leigh’s world 1999 was a continuum of mother-father feuding whilst he was working to stay stable and be successful.

• January 18 Leigh to airport

• February letter from Dr B.
• March 2 court trial
• 9th sports award 25 SASI awards
• First semester report for Leigh year 11
• re. Photography: “Leigh has proved to be a capable and talented student. He has some excellent creative ability and should achieve at a high level if he continues to meet deadlines and complete all assignments”
• English “I am pleased that such a student as Leigh is in this class. He is an alert, energetic student who enjoys demonstrating his knowledge and comprehension of literature...” 3/25
• Pure Mathematics – “Leigh is working well and understands most aspects despite frequent disruptions to his studies.”
• Australian studies – “There is no doubt that Leigh is an intelligent and capable student. He needs to develop some responsibility for punctuality and contribution to the class now. His absences are too frequent.”
• April 28 – Leigh selected to act in the capacity of Coach for the U14 state team for a one day winter development day at the Glenelg Baseball Club for May 10th – he was 14 at the top – he went to Perth with the U16 team at that time and did not do it.
• May 1 Leigh to Perth

 (letter to my father – I have omitted a large section about the children’s mother at the end – have to protect people and all)
Thanks!
I got a sponsor for Leigh. Outside the fact that Leigh's trip will be completely paid for it saves the difficulties with the mother.
I sent her the selection papers last Friday and according to Sacha she was far from pleased that she was up for $2200 for half of this trip.
Leigh was worried about her reaction too and had me wait until he was in Brisbane for her to get the papers.
I rang her Monday and said I had a sponsor - of course she was pleased.
Leigh will be doing a media blitz next week - he has a group of corporate sponsors (something I am told is almost impossible to get - but then I was told it would be almost impossible to do a Ph.D. - and almost impossible to get my own office and a good computer with the latest and greatest soft-wear like Director 6 a multimedia developing program). So lucky us. We are putting the money you sent in a high interest account and saving it for next year in case Leigh does not get selected for this trip or if he does he needs the money for next overseas excursion. I don't know how lucky I will be in the future to get a sponsor that will pay for a 14-year-old’s trip overseas.
The biggest seller to all this was the good news value story of this kid seeing his grandfather - and that the only way he could do it was to make this team. Folks love a good news story there are so many bad stories all the time. Of course if he gets to Clifton Park I would expect some media attention from there. I mean this is like a miracle: Leigh can't leave Adelaide except to play baseball - he lives in a poverty situation - we don't even have a car, he is the youngest one trying for this team- the court order runs out July first - he leaves June 30th his grandfather is a zillion years old and you haven't seen any one of us since 1992. And on and on. This story is quite valuable. My only problem is that I wanted to write the story after the fact but now I will be pre-empted.
Spoke to Leigh last night in Queensland. He pitched the first day and received player of the match and won the game and got a big hit. The good news is that the head of the U-16 team is there observing, so hopefully it improves his selection chances. They haven't played the past couple of days due to rain. He will back Friday night so I will write Saturday.
Other news to hand. Sacha just stopped in. He loves my office with this computer - Internet connection and multimedia making functions…

So that is our life.

I hope Leigh is there in two months.
Love terrell

June 28th Leigh to Africa

stats: three games two wins no losses – 13 IP  ERA 2.769  - struck out 16;  teams ERA for 12 games = 7.094

July 12th Leigh returns

The court ordered a family counselor's report to be made to the court. This was done in January 1999. This report recommended that Leigh be permitted to

1. Participate in championships overseas in 1999
2. To begin his baseball career in 2000 if offered a place on a team.
Our court trial began on March the first of this year. However, on the morning of the trail I discovered that my son’s mother had submitted two psychiatric assessments on me. Both affidavits made many claims about my mental health and my ability to make parental decision. I must point out that
1. This psychiatrist is and has been the psychiatrist of the mother for the past five years
2. She has never met me or interviewed me at any time or anyone who knows me, apart from her patient, Leigh's mother.
This affidavit by the psychiatrist states that I have a severe personality disorder with a large paranoid component, that I have a psychiatric illness, that I have a hatred of people in authority and society in general, that I have a paranoid psychosis, a lack of conscience, that I have a mental disorder with an inability to sustain-work (I might add I am doing my doctoral at university) and that I show considerable hostility and aggressiveness towards women in general (and I will add that I have been with my girl-friend for the past five years and she will testify that I surely am not like this.

Sacha  in graffiti  picture

The final sentence by the psychiatrist is: My personal view is that the children would do better by having less contact with the father and more contact with the mother. Well that is nuts.

The problem arose when these affidavits were read by the court appointed lawyer who was representing my son’s interest - and who never met him, and was clearly influenced by this assessment of me and stated before the trial that he would recommend to the court that I should not be granted sole-decision maker. Because of this I did not proceed with the trial. This is causing problems with Leigh signing a contract, as I have no dialogue with the mother, but according to the court order we both have say in his life.
What I am seeking to do is

1. Have a perjury or contempt of court charge brought against this psychiatrist
Sue her for defamation. This report has been shown to others, including having lines from it quoted in another report, and the mother has been telling our children for years that she has proof that "your father is insane" this has made parenting at times difficult. This report is very damaging, and I believe my ex-wife has made this report available to others.

On an old website that I no longer have control of this quote from the good doctor appears http://neuage.indiko.com/view/escape2.htm

"I noted in his writing that he talks about disintegration within his personality; and there is evidence of thought disorder such as loose associations and flight of ideas, which together with his general suspicious demeanour suggests psychotic thinking..."
The good doctor then quotes a few lines out of context from a prose piece, submitted as part of my Honor's degree at Deakin University, and which my university assessor's comments of the exact same piece are
"There is a wonderful energy in your work and some strong things...I hope (I'm sure you will) that this is only the start of a long career for you!"

I received a High Distinction for that piece which she refers to as disintegrated and evidence of a thought disorder. And she goes for several pages with this type of nonsense. I was so amazed at how unethical this all seemed to me that I wrote the South Australian Medical Board a 20,000-word rebuttal of her affidavits which I am sure at the time proved to someone that I was truly nuts.

Christmas  1999 Christies Beach  with Leigh

32. HEADLINE: "Under 18 World junior AAA baseball championships Edmonton Canada and Memoirs of 2000: Y2K Reflections, Baseball Journeys, and Family Life in Australia"