RICK DEMPSEY | I played Little League in Woodland Hills, California, where the valley girls came from. Nine players from our league signed professional contracts, among them Robin Yount. I played shortstop, pitcher and first base. I didn't start catching until my junior year in high school.

My story involves a coach I had when I was on the all-star team. He was an insurance salesman when he wasn't coaching. He had a soft spot for players who didn't have enough money to make road trips, and he was always paying motel bills. He lived less than a mile from our house, and I ran around with his son.

He also was a bank robber -- the Jeff of the Mutt-and-Jeff bank robbing team that hit the Los Angeles area for more than a year when I was growing up. They got called that because my coach was a big man, well over six feet, and the other guy wasn't even five feet. We'd be out of town to play a tournament and they would line up a bank job. Something like thirteen tournaments and twelve robberies. The thing of it was, our shortstop's dad was a police chief and he never caught on. We didn't suspect anything either. To us, he was just our coach and a good guy.

As I look back on it, he did some pretty blatant things. He would play poker with some of the parents, and when he'd run out of money he'd go in the drawer and get a roll of bills that still had the bank sticker on it. Another time, we were driving across the desert near Lancaster, California, and he told us, "Boys, there's a lot of money out here."

The FBI caught him when they saw his picture in the sports section of the newspaper with our team. They went right in his insurance office and picked him up. He said he did it because he always wanted to be a big shot.

He ended up going to prison and died there from tongue cancer.

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