On the first day of first grade at Sunflower Elementary School in Gardner back in 1999, teacher Linda Morgovnik extended her customary greeting to new students. As they walked in the door to her classroom, she pleasantly asked each, "What's your name?"
When Derek Starling entered, he told her his name was Bubba _ the nickname affixed by an aunt not long after he came into the world at 10 pounds and, as he tells it now, "started getting chubby fat." It stuck ever since ... with at least one notable exception.
That day, Morgovnik recalled saying, "Mmm, not in my room. What's your real name?"
"I thought later that probably wasn't very nice," she said with a laugh on Wednesday. "But he was good about it."
During the course of that school year, little Derek let on that he wanted to be a professional athlete, a common fantasy among what she called "these little 4-feet tall" children who also tended to favor futures as police officers or firefighters.
So she offered him a compromise of sorts.
"When you get to be a famous athlete," she said, "then I'll call you Bubba."
Around the time Starling was drafted by the Royals fifth overall in the 2011 Major League Baseball draft, Morgovnik was eating lunch at an in-house retirement party for her when Starling and his mother, Deb, became surprise guests.
For the first time, he was no longer Derek to her.
"Mom, she called me Bubba!" Morgovnik remembered him saying.
Alas, the journey from becoming at the time what Morgovnik called "about the most famous person in Gardner right now" to making his major-league debut with the Royals last July was only beginning.
Along the way, Starling endured feelings of doubt and failure and endless injuries. He navigated many nights of staring at hotel ceilings, wondering if this was meant to be. He thought about what it would have been like playing pro football and dreamed of just getting off the carousel and having fun with friends. He battled what he called "bad anxiety" and more than once thought about quitting.
Along the way, though, he also came to see it as God's plan and a test. And he came to appreciate the odyssey and what it did for him as a person.
"I don't take things for granted in life anymore," Starling said on a January day, sitting in the Royals' clubhouse at Kauffman Stadium and noting his quest now becomes to stay in the major leagues as spring training begins this week. "It's more 'one day at a time' living. One day at a time. How good can that one day be?
"(And) always just throughout the day (thinking of), 'How can I pick others up? What can I do for others now?'"
