Wade Rouse Remembers 'The Magic Season'

USA Today and international bestselling author, Wade Rouse, visits with us to talk about his newest memoir, Magic Season: A Son’s Story. “It’s a book very deeply personal that follows the relationship of me and my father through the very last baseball game we ever watched together, which was a 2015 playoff game between the Cards and the Cubs, and in many ways baseball was the only thing that bridged the gap. It was our love language between me and my dad. We didn’t see eye to eye on much. He was a true Ozarks man and wasn’t capable of really expressing a lot of emotion, but sitting down and watching, listening to games, attending games, thousands of games, Cardinals games, over the years really was something [that] was able to bridge to allow us to have, as I call it, a walk off home run in the 9th inning.” Growing up, Rouse had a very difficult relationship with his father. His father only loved with conditions and there were many instances in Rouse’s life that his father showed little to no support, from tearing up his college acceptance letter to not speaking to him for two years when he came out. His father was also not one to make amends and his way of apologizing and reconciling was calling only when MLB player, Mark McGwire, broke Roger Maris’ 1961 home run record.

In the conversation, Rouse also discussed why he writes under his grandmother’s pen name, his brother’s death at the age of seventeen, and using humor as a way to cope. He remarked, “I do believe in humor to, really, I think, you can write about serious topics and you can only preach at people and wag your finger so much… humor is a way to really, when you’re talking about things that are very tough to hear or very tough to remember, it’s a way to lift people, kind of, up out of that ditch and provide some levity and some clarity, and so I use it as kind of an after dinner drink… to let people out of how they’re feeling…a lot of the times it’s a way to bring people in, but it’s also a way to keep people at bay sometimes… My mother taught me a great deal about faith and resilience but also about the importance of humor and being able to laugh at yourself, and if you can’t do that, you’re not going to get very far in this world.”