VANCOUVER — A large silver ring once worn proudly by her late father dangles on a chain from Katie Uhlaender’s neck. The jewelry from the 1972 World Series weighs only a few ounces, but weighs heavily where it rests, close to her aching heart.
On the one-year anniversary of the death of former major- league baseball player Ted Uhlaender, his daughter will march as a skeleton racer with Team USA in the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics.
This father will never have the chance to kiss the bride on her wedding day. He will not be there with open arms when Katie brings a baby home to Colorado from the maternity ward, or to play catch on the Fourth of July with her kids at a park in Breckenridge.
But you can bet Katie Uhlaender will not walk alone tonight.
“It’s an experience I don’t know how I’m going to handle. I had no idea that I was going to walk in and get my equipment, see USA on my jacket and burst into tears,” Uhlaender told me Thursday, while gently caressing that ring between a finger and thumb. “I wish my father was here to see this. I’m just going to trust that he is with me in spirit.”
Ted Uhlaender batted .263 with three major-league teams from 1965-72, in the era when kids stuck baseball cards between the spokes of bicycles. He once got traded in a deal involving pitching legend Luis Tiant. He played outfield, stroked a double for the Cincinnati Reds during the ’72 Series, did the term “journeyman” proud.
But can you handle the truth?
Ted Uhlaender’s daughter is a better athlete.
Everybody calls her Crazy Katie. Brick walls crumble when they see her coming. And no doubt that toughness made the old man smile in recognition right until the end, on Feb. 12, 2009, when he passed away after speaking with his daughter on the telephone, as she prepared to hit the track for a World Cup race in Utah.
Before hanging up for the last time, this gruff, old-school, rub-some-dirt-on-it, take- two-strikes-and-advance-the-runner ballplayer told his daughter how much he loved her at least a half dozen times.
That alone should have been a tipoff that 68-year-old Ted Uhlaender knew his time was quickly running out to show how much he cared.
Since the No. 1 man in her sporting life has been gone, Katie Uhlaender weeps whenever the breeze on her neck brings back a memory of her dad watching one of her high-school games in Colorado, and she battles an emotion experienced by almost every child who has buried a parent.
The woman feels cheated. Cheated that Dad won’t be there to offer a hug after a victory, or to growl that feeling sorry in defeat is a futile exercise for losers.
“It’s going to be hard. It’s overwhelming. It’s scary,” said Uhlaender, trying to find the words to fill the hole in a heart. “I’m overwhelmed with emotion. It’s a mixture of everything. I’m excited. I’m sad. I’m happy. I’m angry.”
Uhlaender, who slides in excess of 80 mph headfirst through an ice tunnel during Olympic competition and jumps out of airplanes with a parachute for fun, shattered her kneecap during an April snowmobiling accident. Yep, she’s Crazy Katie all right. But four surgeries later, guess who’s coming back at the Winter Games?
So I asked: Will refusing to surrender to the grief, beating an ugly injury and laughing at the long odds give her any sense of closure by marking the anniversary of her father’s death with the triumph of joining the world on the Olympic stage?
“There’s not going to be any purging until I get to the starting line,” said the 25-year-old Uhlaender, scheduled to compete during the first week of the Winter Games.
“If I need to cry my eyes out on the line, that’s what I’m going to do.”
She goes her own way, stubbornly refuses to be cookie-cutter, rubs some dirt on those tears and moves on. At 80 mph.
“I’m trying to bottle up all the emotion,” Uhlaender said, “and do what I’m supposed to do.”
Win.
Mark Kiszla: 303-954-1053 or mkiszla@denverpost.com
