Michael J. Canzoniero Ph.D.

I was born in the Bronx where my pabulum was New York Yankee statistics. My first heroes were the legendary Bronx Bombers: Ruth, Gehrig, and DiMaggio. As a young child I devoured anything and everything written about them, especially anything penned about Babe Ruth. As a teenager all I cared about was the daily "stats" of Mantle, Berra, and Ford. I fantasized about one day playing in Yankee pinstripes. Alas, I never got to play in Yankee Stadium, the "House that Ruth built". Some would say I was not good enough. I like to think the Fates intervened. As a young man I saw one too many of my baseball playing friends get hooked on heroin. Instead of becoming a ballplayer, I decided to become a psychologist and for the last thirty-five years I have worked with drug and alcohol abusers both in school systems and in private practice. I have treated both the abuser and his/her family. My experience has made me an expert on the subject of alcoholic/dysfunctional families and the roles children are fated to play if they have the misfortune to grow up in one. As I grew in my understanding of alcoholism's effect on children's lives, I concluded that my favorite Yankee, Babe Ruth, an alcoholic's son, had no choice but to become a hero: it was his predetermined "role". He was alcoholism's HERO CHILD long before he was Baseball's Greatest Hero. I decided to write a novel that would explain the lifelong roles played by people who grow up in alcoholic families. In it Babe Ruth's "true" story would be told. The result was a book I entitled, CONDITIONAL LOVE: A STORY OF BATTERED EMOTIONS. It is the story of a modern day detective who while attempting to solve a young woman's murder is revisited by the invisible friend he had in childhood Babe Ruth! In return for helping him solve the murder, Ruth wants his true story told by the detective. My novel blends an intriguing murder mystery with a revision and "correction" of Babe Ruth's history. My postulating that Babe Ruth was actually cruelly abused by the legendary psychologist, John Broadus Watson, the founder of Behaviorism, is, I believe, an interesting aspect of this story. I posit this because there is the very realpossibility that their paths may have crossed.Around the time Ruth resided at St. Mary's Home, an orphanage in Baltimore, Maryland,Watson was subjecting unprotected orphans in that same geographical area to his abusive experiments (Anyone who took Psychology 101 will be reminded of Watson's unscrupulous abuse of his power when he conditioned "little Albert"to fear a furry little rabbit.) In the novel I suggest that Ruth became one of Watson's subjects and that his experiments on Ruth led to the Babe's baseball prowess.