At the first game of the 1991 World Series, Steve Palermo got to do something lots of baseball fans have probably dreamed of doing. He got to throw out the ceremonial first pitch. So, he was thrilled … right?

"Um, it was OK," Palermo recalls. "But it wasn’t umpiring."

For 15 years, it had been umpiring in the major leagues for Palermo. And it shouldn’t have stopped when it suddenly did.

From Little League To Major League

He’d taken the fast track to the top of his profession, which usually requires as much time, determination and luck as getting to be a major league player requires. Sometimes more. But when he was a 19-year-old kid umpiring a little league all-star game, Palermo impressed Barney Deary. This was a guy who knew what he was talking about. Deary supervised minor league umps. And he told Palermo to consider a career in the game. The kid figured he was on his way.

"What do you do? You work a couple college games and then you go right to Fenway Park?" Palermo recalls with a laugh. "I didn’t have any idea as to what it entailed."

At 21, he entered MLB umpiring school in Florida, and in 1977, just seven years after he’d worked that little league all-star game, Steve Palermo was in the bigs. It was an adjustment.

"You know, I was young and baby-faced, and one ballplayer — and I won't mention his name — but he used to call me teenager," Palermo says. "And so I used to call him pops, just to get back at him. But some of the guys I came up with, they're big, 240-, 260-pound guys, and they just intimidate you as soon as they got out on the field. And here I come, 180 pounds, slender, and they go, 'Let's see, we gonna pick on that big guy over there? Ah, let's yell at the skinny guy.' That's kind of how they approached it. But you earn the respect. You're not given the respect. And once you prove to them that you can do the job, then they leave you alone."

In a profession where every performance is evaluated and every opportunity is earned, Palermo climbed the ladder. He worked the All-Star Game, the American League Championship Series and the World Series. 1991 was looking like a banner year for Palermo: He married his wife, Debbie, and the Sporting News named him the American League’s top official.

Robbery In Dallas

And then in July, after he’d worked a Texas Rangers home game, he went out for Italian food with some friends in Dallas. All went well until Jimmy Upton, one of the employees at the restaurant, looked out the window at the parking lot and saw several men trying to rob a couple of waitresses who’d just left work.

"We came up and off the table and ran out, and we ran after the guys," Palermo says. "And one of them hollered out, 'Look out, look out, here they come.' Two of them ran toward a car, and there was actually a getaway driver in the car. One of the guys got disoriented, and he started running the opposite way. And a good friend of mine — a former football player at Southern Methodist — Terence Mann, we call him T-Man, and we took off after this guy, and we ended up catching him."

Somebody called the police. They said they’d have a squad car there in three to five minutes. They weren’t quite quick enough.

"And as we were waiting for the police to arrive, a car pulled up, about 20 feet from us, and a young guy got out of the front right passenger seat. It was one of the robbers that night and he had come back, pulled out a .32-caliber pistol and fired five shots into the crowd of people that were standing over his buddy. T-Man got hit three times. And the fourth bullet hit a wall, brick wall, behind us. And then the fifth bullet hit me, belt high, and tore a path through my body. And then instantly I was paralyzed. I just kind of melted into the pavement. I knew right away that, oh boy, this is serious. And I tapped my legs, and all I could feel was the sensation on the back of my fingers.

"Jimmy had taken a towel out of the back of his pocket and put it behind my head. And then I looked at Jimmy, and I said, 'Jimmy, if I die, you make sure that you tell Debbie that I love her.' And Jimmy, in his perfect Texas drawl, said, 'Stevie, there ain't no dying going on here tonight.'"

'I'm Going To Prove You Wrong'

Palermo was taken to a hospital and underwent surgery. When he woke up, his doctor had bad news.