Finch Longs for Home While Going for Gold

Family Occupies The Thoughts Of Softball Star

BEIJING, Aug. 12 -- Jennie Finch could picture the scene because she's seen it before. For that matter, she's lived it before -- only in reverse. Casey would be lying on the bed in the bedroom of their apartment in Rochester, N.Y., probably on top of the covers. Little Ace would be snuggled up next to him, under the covers, fast asleep. The door to the bedroom would be closed, with Casey's parents outside in the living room, because he can't stand to watch her games with anyone else present -- at least not anyone who is awake and potty-trained.

And on the television screen in both rooms would be Finch herself -- her game, her team, the legendary U.S. women's softball team, as it opened its 2008 Olympics campaign for another gold, with Finch on the mound, the only two hours all day when she wouldn't be thinking of her family.

"It's hard. It's weird," Finch, 27, said Tuesday afternoon. "Because we almost have to shut off that emotion [on the field], but when I talk to people about them, instantly the tears and the emotion comes out. It's hard." A pause. "It's hard." Pause. "It's just hard."

On the field, very little was hard about the Americans' 11-0 win over Venezuela at Fengtai Softball Field on the outskirts of Beijing, a game halted after five innings by a mercy rule, a game in which Finch, the face of the team -- actually the face, pretty and famous, of the entire sport -- pitched four no-hit innings before being removed for a reliever.

During those two hours, the difficult stuff was occurring in Rochester, where Casey Daigle, Finch's husband and a pitcher himself for the Minnesota Twins' Class AAA team, would be watching in bed -- it being after midnight Tuesday morning in Rochester -- trying not to wake up Ace, their 2-year-old son, and as he described it, "living and dying with every pitch."

"I'm nervous, really nervous," Daigle said in a telephone interview, minutes before his wife would throw her first pitch. "I know she'll probably have some nerves, so I'm really feeling them with her. But I told her before the game that we'd be there with her every pitch."

Daigle's parents, bless their hearts, are staying with him this month to help with Ace while Finch is in Beijing, part of a vast network of friends and family members whom they are always leaning on to help -- in Rochester as well as Tucson, where Daigle and Finch have their permanent residence, and on the road. But his parents would have to watch without him. He was staying holed up in the bedroom. If things had gone bad for Finch, he would not have been pleasant to be around. "I'm not the type who can just sit and watch and eat a slice of pizza and drink a Coke and carry on a conversation," he said.

While his wife is busy saving softball with her stunning combination of elite athletic power and supermodel grace, Daigle, a 27-year-old right-hander who pitched briefly in the majors for Arizona in 2004 and 2006, is trying not to turn into Crash Davis, the fictional minor league hero of "Bull Durham" who had a cup of coffee in the majors and spent the rest of his career trying to get back there -- even as the prospects who are his teammates keep getting younger and better.

In their marriage, though, Finch's pitching performances, even those that occur on the Olympic stage, are no more important than his, and when he threw 3 1/3 innings in the Red Wings' loss on Sunday night, he and his wife broke it down, inning by inning, over the phone -- they have been talking three or four times a day during the Olympics -- to see what could be learned from it.

"We definitely exchange some thoughts -- 'How'd it go? How did you arm feel?' " Finch said. "But it's also good in that we're an escape for one another."

Finch's life used to be a star's life -- full of red-carpet walks, talk-show appearances and magazine shoots. She became a celebrity almost overnight at the 2004 Athens Games, when the U.S. team breezed to the gold medal while outscoring opponents by a combined score of 51-1. ESPN named her the "hottest" female athlete in the world. People had her on its "50 Most Beautiful" list.

Now her life is a mom's life, one that is no less hectic than the old one, and possibly more so. For much of the spring and summer, as Team USA played a grueling barnstorming schedule ahead of the Olympics -- part of an emergency effort to increase the sport's visibility and popularity at a time when its future as an Olympic sport is very much in question -- Finch and Ace traveled together, leaving Casey behind.