VietNamNet Bridge – Baseball was brought to Vietnam by an American lawyer, whose life changed after he met a Vietnamese singer.

Eighteen years ago, after receiving a degree? In computing science, Tom Trutler was looking for a job at San Jose, California, known for having the biggest Vietnamese community in the US. Trutler decided to learn the language after making friends with some Vietnamese.

He applied for a short-term course at Stanford University. During the course, he won a scholarship to join a volunteer exchange program between Vietnam and the US. He came to Hanoi in July 1993 to study Vietnamese for three months at the Hanoi Foreign Language University.

Trutle said that during those three months in Hanoi, visited the Hoan Kiem Lake only once. He didn’t have money or time to travel. He only learned about Vietnamese culture through his classmates.

After three months, Tom went to HCM City to work as a voluntary English teacher at the Oriental Faculty of the HCM City University for Social Sciences and Humanity for nine months. He spent $1000, all the money he had,, to buy a motorbike . He said that during the time in HCM City he practiced Vietnamese, taught English, and made many friends and that was when he began to fall in love with Vietnam.

After the program, Tom didn’t return to the US but became an interpreter and an assistant to an American law office in HCM City in 1994. He did that job for five years until he became a lawyer and the representative for the Tilleke & Gribbens law firm in Vietnam. During this time, he met a Vietnamese girl which had changed his life.

Love

One day in 1996, Trutler left Vietnam for Vientiane (Laos) so he could obtain a new Vietnamese visa. His return flight to HCM City was canceled due to storm. Trutler spent his extra day in Vientiane and by chance visited a goldsmith’s store owned by a Vietnamese, where he met the girl. He decided to stay in Vientiane for another several days just to see her. At that time he thought she was  the daughter of the store owner.

The girls turned out to be Ngoc Thuy, the singer of the Hai Dang troupe in Khanh Hoa province, who was very famous at that time. Thuy was in Vientiane visiting her brother.

After Returning to HCM City, Trutle paid a $700 phone bill the following month for his calls to Laos to keep contact with the family of the goldsmith’s store owner’s. Though they said that Thuy is a singer and she was very busy in Vietnam, Trutle didn’t believe them.

Unexpectedly, Trutle saw Thuy again in Hanoi in 1997, when she participated in the ASEAN Golden Voice Festival.

Trutle saw a banner with picture of Thuy in front of the Hanoi Friendship Palace. He thought the girl in the picture looked similar to the girl in Vientiane. He was curious so he watched the show. Seeing the girl on the stage, Trutler realized it was indeed her.

The day after the show, they met again at an ice cream shop at the Hoan Kiem Lake. Three months later, they were engaged. Trutler’s family came to Vietnam three times forthe plighting visit, betrothal ceremony and the wedding ceremony. They now live in Hanoi with two sons.

Baseball

Thuy and Trutle’s 12-year-old son, named Ben, and his team – the Hanoi youth baseball club or U12 Vietnam team, has just won the championship of the Asia-Pacific PONY Baseball Championship 2011. Thuy and Trutle are the ones who led the team to the victory.

Ben likes baseball very much but in Vietnam baseball is not popular and it is a costly sport. His parents attended baseball coaching courses in the US. Sometimes, they would bring Ben to the UN International School to play baseball with the school’s team.

For Ben’s birthday his Vietnamese friends give a cartoon “Doremon plays baseball”. Trutler asked them whether they know how to play baseball. When he saw how passionately the kids described what they saw in the cartoon, An idea came to Trutle’s mind: why doesn’t he and his wife teach them baseball?

Trutle asked his family in the US to send uniforms, balls, sticks, etc. to Vietnam. However, the equipment was stuck at the airport. Trutle returned to the US several times to bring back all the necessary equipment.

Another problem was that there was no baseball ground in Vietnam. The couple spent a long time looking for a suitable playground and then transforming it into a baseball ground. However, their effort was worth it because kids were thrilled to have a chance to play baseball.

Among them was a boy who lived 200km from Hanoi and had to catch a bus every weekend just to practice baseball and then return home immediately after to go to school on Monday morning. During the largest ever flood in Hanoi in November 2008, parents of baseball club members took turns to pick up Thuy and Trutle from his home in Thai Ha street to go to the baseball ground by boat.

Thuy and Trutle’s baseball team is opened for any kid who likes baseball. Annually, the couple spends around $25,000 on the team. The team now has nearly 100 members, divided into U8, U10, U12, U15 groups. Trutle wanted a bigger playground for them and so he founded the Hanoi Youth Baseball Team, licenced by the Hanoi Sports Federation in 2008.

Trutle has sent his teams to many international competitions. Within more than a year, the team played 40 games overseas, winning five.

The American Professional Baseball Federation sent its coaches to Vietnam three times to help the team. In 2010, the Hanoi Youth Baseball Team became the first Vietnamese baseball team that joined the U11 championships in San Diego and ranked 60^th in the US. The team also participated in tournaments in Taiwan and Indonesia in 2010  and U11 Asia Pacific 2009.

In January 2011, the team won the Asia Pacific Baseball Championship, held in Vinh Phuc province, Vietnam. Thuy and Trutler covered all the expenditures for hosting the event.

Hoang Vinh Giang, Vice Chair and Secretary General of the Vietnam Olympic Committee expects that the team will be the national team in the future representing Vietnam at the Asian Games 2019.

The team is preparing for the professional baseball tournament called Little Legde in Nha Trang in 2012.

Trutle and Thuy have helped some Hanoi’s neighboring provinces to set up youth baseball clubs. Inspired by the “baseball dream” of his son, Trutle has invested his love, time, money and hope in developing baseball in Vietnam.

Xuan Linh