Curtis Threatt – Coach Threatt as he was better known to generations of high school baseball and football players across South Carolina and North Carolina, too – was 83 and on dialysis.
Julie had moved him and her mom, Ellen, from Lancaster, S.C. to live with her and her husband Michael in the Boiling Springs home where they’d raised their three children: John Michael, Austin and Annalynn.
Besides the benefit of family care, it meant Curtis would get to see more of John Michael with whom he shared a deep love of baseball.
“Everybody in our family will tell you John Michael was my dad’s favorite,” Julie said with a laugh.
John Michael Faile – who’s now a 24-year-old catcher, first baseman and designated hitter for the Dayton Dragons – didn’t dispute that Friday: “We always had that bond because of baseball.”
Julie agreed: “Daddy just looooved baseball! And he realized John Michael had that same love.”
As John Michael put it: “Since I was a kid, all I dreamed of doing was playing baseball and he could relate to me on that.
“Sometimes he’d pull out a glove from his basement and we’d go in the backyard and play catch. Other times we’d sit, and he’d tell me his old baseball stories.”
They may have been born 60 years apart, but they were drawn together by the love of a game and Michael, John Michael’s dad, marveled at that:
“They had that bond, and they could talk the lingo. Most people wouldn’t understand, but they always knew exactly what the other one was talkin’ about.”
John Michael said his grandpa was a baseball constant in his life:
“From the time I started playing T-ball, all the way through college, he’d be at all my games. Talk to any of my college teammates, they all knew him. He’d sit and talk with all of them about everything that had been happening.”
And with John Michael, there was plenty happening.
Most of it came with glorious triumph, but at times there was heartbreaking tribulation.
“It’s a great story, just an unbelievable story really,” said Tom Nichols, the director of media relations and broadcasting for the Dragons.
John Michael was the South Carolina High School Player of the Year, but then not one Division I school offered him a scholarship.
Undeterred, he went to North Greenville University – an NCAA Division II school – and, as Nichols put it: “He became one of the greatest hitters in the history of NCAA Division II baseball. He set the record for the most career home runs and most career RBI in Division II history.”
And yet, during his five seasons at North Greenville, he was ignored three straight years in the annual Major League draft.
With his parents and especially his grandpa buoying him through the disappointment, John Michael soldiered on and played Independent League baseball with the Billings Mustangs, where he was named the Pioneer League Rookie of the Year.
With that success and a good recommendation coming from former Cincinnati Reds catcher Eddie Taubensee – who had been a volunteer coach at North Greenville and had connected with him – the Reds signed John Michael to a free agent contract on December 19, 2023.
Some two weeks later he reported to a battery camp for pitchers and catchers in Arizona.
“The whole time he was gone, my dad kept asking me, ‘When is he getting back? When is he getting back? He wanted to make sure he had done OK.”
John Michael was gone a week and Julie’s prayers got more urgent each night:
“Please, just let Daddy live long enough.”
As soon as John Michael got home that Sunday, he said he sat down with his grandpa:
“He was excited. He wanted to know all about it. I told him everything was great. And when he heard that – when he knew I was OK – a peace came over him.
“That evening we took him to the hospital.”
“He passed away later that night,” Julie said quietly.
Yet the story of the baseball-bonded grandson and grandpa didn’t end there.
When John Michael debuted with the Dragons last August, he added a chapter of touching remembrance and powerful pronouncement.
And his grandpa played a part in it.
‘Never give up on your dream’
Curtis Threatt had been a two-sport star at Lancaster High in South Carolina and after a year at Wingate College he transferred to Colorado State, where he played both football and baseball.
Once he returned to the Carolinas, he was an assistant football coach at Lenoir-Rhyne University in North Carolina and then worked as a coach and athletics director at several high schools, including his alma mater.
Until eighth grade, John Michael also lived in Lancaster.
“He was always a little bigger than the boys his age, so he played up with kids two years older,” said Michael. “He was big enough that he could compete with them, but he always was the youngest.”
Thanks in part to his grandpa, he developed a keen understanding of the game.
“Parents would come up and say: ‘Watch him on the basepaths. He’s just smart…Baseball smart,‘” said Julie.
Michael’s job then took the family to Boiling Springs an hour and 45 minutes northwest of Lancaster.
“John Michael would be going to a bigger school where he knew no one, so he had to make it on his own,” Julie said. “I remember there was a tryout with 60 kids, and they kept just three and he was one of them.”
After his stellar career at Boiling Springs High, he shined even more at North Greenville University.
His first season he hit .391, with 18 home runs, a team-high 78 RBI and was named Conference Carolinas Freshman of the Year.
He had a .413 average the following year which was cut short by the COVID shutdown. The next year (2021), he hit .438, had a school-record 23 home runs and was named the league’s Player of the Year and an All American.
He tore his meniscus, had surgery and came back to win the conference’s Triple Crown with a .427 average, 16 home runs and 81 RBIs.
In the College World Series, he hit a home run in his first at-bat and the Trailblazers went on to win the 2022 NCAA Division II National Title that year.
His dad thought that the knee injury and the fact he was coming from a Division II program may have been the reasons he went undrafted.
Although she knew her son was disheartened – John Michael now admits he had been contemplating what it would be like to give up baseball altogether, though he said he feared there’d be regrets from an early exit – Julie said she and her husband stressed one thing to their eldest child:
“I always told him, ‘Never give up on your dream. Everything happens in good time. There’s a reason for this. You just have to let it play out.”
Soon the Billings team – which used to be a Reds’ farm team – contacted him about playing in the independent league.
He hit 21 home runs in just 54 games for the Mustangs and some three months after the season – after Taubensee had talked up John Michael at a Reds’ Fantasy Camp – Cincinnati signed him as a free agent.
And after hitting .355 for the Reds team in the Arizona Complex League last summer, he was sent to Dayton in mid-August
“That’s when the story gets really good,’ Nichols said.
A constant reminder
The Dragons were playing in Fort Wayne and John Michael – who said he’s fueled by a bit of a chip on his shoulder – was inserted into the lineup as the designated hitter.
“In his very first game, he hit a homerun!” Nichols gushed. “In his second game, he hit a home run. And his third game? In that one he hit a grand slam!
“That’s how John Michael Failes’ career with the Dragons started off.”
Back in South Carolina, Julie and Michael were following a stream of the game. “We couldn’t have been more proud,” she said.
The long ball debut brought to mind a South Carolina newspaper headline after their son had had similar homerun heroics:
“Epic Faile!”
Julie laughed: “We’ve seen that more than once.”
“Yeah, he gets that all the time,” Michael said, “People will go, ‘Man, I can’t believe what your last name is compared to what you done!‘”
While he doesn’t live up to his last name when he’s out on the ball diamond, he admitted it could be a marketing dream one day:
“Everybody tells me, ‘If you ever do make it to the big leagues one day, you’ve got a great last name. You’d sell some t-shirts with that.‘”
People say that would be something to wear that draws attention to how he continually flourishes, not fails.
Privately though, he knows he’s wearing something more meaningful than that.
It was around his neck when he started his Dragons season last year with that home run, home run, grand slam barrage.
He’ll be wearing it again Tuesday night – out of sight, right under his uniform – when the Dragons open their home season at Day Air Ballpark against, of all teams, the Fort Wayne Tincaps again.
“I wear this necklace – an urn necklace – and it has some of my grandpa’s ashes locked in it,” he said. “I’ve got it on every day, every game.
“It’s a constant reminder that he’s always with me. He’s watching over me every single day.
“It’s something that brings a calm over me. It brings me peace.
“My grandpa was with me on everything I did in baseball before he passed away …and now he still is.”
For Julie, her prayers continue to be answered.
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