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Greencastle audience gets early look at upcoming baseball film, man behind the story
Faith. Determination. Baseball.
In very brief form, that’s the story of one-time baseball phenom Rickey Hill.
As a few Greencastle moviegoers learned Monday, though, there’s much more. They witnessed it at Ashley Square Cinema when they watched an early screening of “The Hill,” an upcoming film based on Hill’s life.
Later they got even more insight during a reception hosted by The Warehouse, with Hill answering questions from audience members about his life and the making of the film.
Now in his mid-60s, Hill spent four years as a minor league baseball player from 1975 through 1978, with an uncanny ability to crush the ball despite a degenerative disorder that left him with the back of a 60-year-old when he was only 17.
No, Hill never made it to the big leagues, but you wouldn’t know it to hear him reflect on his life.
“I don’t know why I’m the fortunate one to have this story,” Hill said. “I don’t know why, other than my Father in Heaven. That’s the only thing I can attribute it to. I don’t know why he chose me to give this story.”
Some of that story goes like this: Hill grew up dirt poor, the son of a traveling Baptist preacher, in rural Texas. As if crushing poverty weren’t enough, Hill’s physical challenges also showed up early, as he walked with braces as a child.
To his Greencastle audience, he shared one memory of his early misfortunes with a bit of humor, as he sometimes had to go door to door begging for food.
“They’d see me in my braces and they’d feed me,” Hill said. “My brother and sisters, they had a disadvantage.”
Hill was also able to absolutely smash a baseball, or more specifically rocks while using a stick for a bat, a phenomenon colorfully recreated with a “broken window” scene early in the film’s official trailer.
“I always hit the long ball,” Hill said. “Even from three years old, I hit the rocks long.”
He never really lost that ability, as he continued to crush the ball up through high school — until he tore up his leg stepping in a sprinkler hole as a senior.
Even this Hill overcame, eventually introducing himself to legendary MLB scout Red Murff, whom Hill credited with signing pitchers like Nolan Ryan, Phil Niekro and Roger Clemens.
“Really all he does is look for pitchers, he doesn’t look for hitters. So that’s why I knew he wasn’t looking for me,” Hill recalled. “They never really gave me a chance, but the way they put it into the movie and they changed things up, and I didn’t like it. I actually had to go up to him and tell him that I was the best hitter there.”
Murff plays a significant role in the film, portrayed by veteran actor Scott Glenn, and the connection got him a tryout with the Montreal Expos. But after wowing the Expos brass, the offer of a signing bonus confused the small-town Texas boy.
“I got $40,000 to sign — and I thought I had to pay them $40,000,” Hill recalled. “I turned around to my mother and said, ‘Mama, where we going to get $40,000?’ And all the Expos — here the owner is, the owner’s sons, the scouts and all them — are sitting there going, ‘Is he stupid or what?’”
Even getting to that point was an amazing accomplishment.
“By all his injuries, no pro team should have gone after him, but he was such a good hitter,” Putnam County native Mark Timm, a friend of Hill’s, said.
Hill’s connection to Timm is what brought an early screening of “The Hill” to Greencastle. Part of Hill’s wellness routine is through a company on whose board Timm sits.
“This is my last screening, and I did this for Mark,” Hill said of the Ashley Square screening.
The player’s four years in the minor leagues — one with an Expos affiliate and three more in independent leagues — wrecked his body. He put his body through hell just to stay on the field. After collapsing on the field one day at age 23, he didn’t walk for three years after.
Surgeries have helped rebuild his back, which he describes as “full of screws,” but Hill’s body remains full of inflammation that Timm says would keep other people down.
“He’s an amazing human being,” Timm said. “At the beginning of every day, he wakes up and he’s filled with pain, but he chooses to be this positive individual.”
That “positive individual” has managed to make quite a life for himself since his MLB dreams collapsed. He’s a golf instructor — still hitting the long ball — who’s worked with celebrities. He kept Hollywood’s interest for years, saying he rebuffed movie offers beginning in the 1970s until work really started on this film in 2010.
“I turned them down for a long time, until 13 years ago,” Hill said. “This movie took 13 years to get made.”
The screenplay was co-written by Angelo Pizzo, who also wrote and produced both “Hoosiers” and “Rudy.”
Besides the film, which will be released Aug. 25, starring Colin Ford as Rickey and Dennis Quaid as father James Hill, he is also planning to publish a book next year as well as an HBO special that tells more of his life story than the film allows.
He offered reflections on all of this to his crowd of admirers on Monday, but perhaps most notably gave some advice to any aspiring ball players in the crowd.
“If you don’t have the passion, the love and the drive, you’ll never get there,” Hill said. “It doesn’t matter — either you have it or you don’t. I just, fortunately, had it that I could not stop.
“Determination is the bridge between the impossible and the possible.”