He first saw her one afternoon at Reed’s Bay, out by the ice pond where the cool, fresh spring water bubbles up into the warm salt water.
A friend told Danny Ayala her name was Vivian and that she was a Hilo High School sophomore. A senior, Danny couldn’t deny the interest, and eventually they had a first date, as all couples do.
It was memorable, sort of.
“The first date,” Vivian Ayala said Saturday, keeping score at the Kupuna Senior Men’s Softball game of her husband’s team, Pomaikai, “is tough to remember. I don’t really know what we did, I just remember the game.”
You can consider that a felicitous remembrance for the lives they’ve shared since the first date, whatever it involved. Danny had a basketball game, so they worked in a date around it, later. He always had a game, and still does, three months short of the couple’s 55th wedding anniversary. He also played football and baseball; he was a light-welterweight club boxer, learned golf along the way and enjoyed a long career working for the fire department.
Playing the games of kid is still the backdrop, the narrative of their lives. Ayala, 75, is the only Big Island member of the Senior Softball USA National Hall of Fame. He played every sport, all of them well, decade after decade, but never won a championship. He played in very competitive men’s softball and fast pitch leagues for teams in Honolulu, Kona and Hilo when he was asked to play for an over-55 men’s team on the West Side.
“My first reaction was, ‘I don’t think I’m ready to play with you grandpas’,” Ayala said. “I really wasn’t interested but then I said I would go watch them practice and my first reaction was, ‘Hey, these guys aren’t bad.’”
Danny Ayala figuratively dipped his toe in the water of senior softball and played for “eight to 10 years with those guys. We never won anything,” he said. “It was fun, good guys, but we always came in second, third, or fourth, we never won.”
After the 2002 season, the frustration grew to the point that Ayala realized he knew players – a couple on Oahu, a couple on Kauai, a bunch in Hilo – who were better than the roster of talent he had been playing with for most of the previous decade.
He started his team in 2003 with the expressed desire of winning a national championship. “That’s what I told people when they asked about goals and things,” Ayala said. “You shouldn’t make too much of that because that’s always my approach, I always start out trying to win it all, why not have that as a goal?”
That’s optimistic and all, but there’s also this – Danny Ayala’s first team won the 60-and-over World Championship in Las Vegas. They went to the tournament top-seeded and undefeated, lost their first game and battled through the loser’s bracket to get to the championship game where they beat the Chicago Classics two games straight to win the championship. Down early in the first game, the Hilo squad came back, got the lead and hung on for an 8-7 victory, their sixth game of the day.
That was all it took, they won the second game 26-8 and were officially World Champions.
“It was, ‘Wow, after all this time, I finally have a ring,’” Ayala said of that first team.
Since then his teams have won 14 more national or world championships in the biggest of senior softball organizations and he isn’t quitting anytime soon.
I know a lot of guys who play golf, I play sometimes,” he said. “You walk around, hit the ball, and it’s all individual, and it’s all about you. This game we play, you get more exercise and it’s not all about you, it’s about everybody pulling together.
“You can’t get enough of that,” he said, “it keeps you coming back.”
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