The following is courtesy of Jeffrey Laughhead
I play in a softball league called Center City Softball on a team sponsored by the Bishop's Collar bar in Fairmount. Back before the season started, one of my teammates Greg was sending vague emails on our softball thread about how he's 'bringing some kid named 'Mahoney' onto the team', that 'Mahoney is ready to go if we need him,' and 'Do you want me to bring Mahoney on board?'
Flash-forward to April, I meet Mahoney. Now, Greg grew up in Delco and is a hockey player, and so when I first met *Dick* Mahoney, I was taken aback because I figured Mahoney would be a hockey-playing Delco. No. Mahoney was more like Eazy-E circa 1988: black dude with a jheri curl hairstyle, LA Dodgers shirt and hat. "I'm Dick Mahoney," he said when I shook his hand. Nice guy with an odd name.
As a softball player, Mahoney was a stud. In his first game I saw him play he hit multiple home runs and would have had more if it wasn't for the fact that when he hit one bomb, he OVERRAN our teammate Mike on the base path and was obviously called out for it. We put him in centerfield because he could cover so much ground due to his speed. The Bishop's Collar got off to a hot start and rose to the top of the Center City Softball league standings thanks to Dick Mahoney's stellar play at the bat and in the outfield.
Off the field, Mahoney was a pretty mellow guy. Amazing athlete, but kind of soft-spoken. He rarely went out to the Bishop's Collar with the rest of the team after games. His background was hazy. When I was warming up with him in the outfield in between innings one game, I asked him what he did for a living. "A little bit of this, a little bit of that," he replied. I asked him what brought him out to Philly after having spent so much time in LA. He said, "Just, you know...life."
The woman who organizes our softball team asked Greg what Mahoney's email was so he could be added to our thread. "Doesn't have an email," Greg said. When some other teammates witnessed Mahoney park his Porsche Cayenne next to the field, people sort of put Greg on the spot about Mahoney's background, Greg just said, "You're going to have to find out for yourself what Mahoney does for a living.I can't tell you." Conspiracy theories started to spread that Mahoney was a drug dealer or was in porn (he missed a few games because he was flying back and forth from Southern California, apparently.)
Anyway, I get an email from Greg last night saying that Mahoney was no longer going to be on our softball team anymore because Dick Mahoney is actually WALTER THURMOND and since retiring from the NFL a week ago, is making moves to go back to LA to pursue filmmaking.
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The jheri curl was a wig. The alias Dick Mahoney, my friend pointed out, is a combination of Dick Tracy and Breathless Mahoney, which may speak to his love of film.
I've attached two pics of Dick Mahoney-one at the bar (a rare occurrence) and the other an action shot of him hitting one of his powerful home runs. Notice Ben Fineman standing on third, terrified of Mahoney's swing.
