ADVANCE, N.C. _ Born intrepid and indomitable, Whit Merrifield was about 8 when he demonstrated that pesky conventional concepts such as gravity need not hinder him. Or stop him from trying, anyway.
Short and scrawny as he was for his age, his limits only were going to be defined by his imagination.
Which explains how the future Kansas City Royals infielder concocted a plan to be "like Michael Jordan and run and dunk the ball," his mother, Kissy said. On his own, he lowered the basketball goal in their driveway to a height semi-conducive to the feat and enlisted to the cause a bucket turned upside down. It may or may not have been placed on top of a chair, too.
"It didn't go well," she said, meaning a trip to the emergency room, a concussion and mangled thumb. "He didn't do that again."
But the misadventure did little to diminish Merrifield's reckless abandon _ he later suffered a concussion diving into a pile for a loose ball in a basketball game _ that came with an unquenchable belief in himself.
That self-confidence was catalyzed by a grit that his father, Bill, described almost literally in terms of intestinal fortitude.
It said something that the pre-teen child kept insisting on playing baseball even as he complained he wasn't feeling well with what proved to be appendicitis. But what happened next made an indelible impression on his parents.
With Whit still in distress after the surgery because of an infection, they returned for treatment. They were startled and incensed when the doctor went from pressing on the wound to suddenly cutting anew on their boy, who had received no anesthetic or painkiller.
"I was like, 'Whoa, hey, no-no-no-no. No!' " Bill Merrifield said.
As they set about stopping the doctor and reconciling the medical care, their son lay in quiet agony. He didn't know how it was supposed to go or feel, didn't know he could say stop.
"You could tell he wanted to scream, but he didn't," the father said.
That's when he figured his son was remarkably emotionally steeled. And he was right.
"I've never seen a mental weakness in Whit Merrifield," said former South Carolina coach Ray Tanner, who still revels in Merrifield's 11th-inning walk-off hit to win the 2010 College World Series. "He always had that presence about him: 'I should be in this moment. I can get this job done.'
"I've never seen him in a position of doubt. I've never seen his face where (it's showing), 'This is a tough moment.' "
His face might not ever have revealed it. But there were tough stumbling blocks along the way to establishing himself with the Royals, with whom he led the American League in hits in 2018 while skedaddling to the AL stolen-base title for a second straight season.
In fact, he was tempted to walk away from it all in 2015.
"It's actually a great story about perseverance," said Mike Herndon, Merrifield's coach at Davie County High School.
Much as he wishes everything had come sooner for Merrifield, he laughed and added, "It makes the story that much better."
