When they make the Mookie Betts movie someday, they should include the part about when he was 5 years old and his mother tried to get him onto a Little League team in Nashville.

Diana Collins brought her son to Tusculum Elementary to meet a coach who she was told had room for a few extra kids. The coach looked over Mookie, who at that point in his life was not doing much to foreshadow his future as one of the best baseball players in the world.

“I mean, he was the skinniest little thing,” Collins recalled of Mookie. “He looked like he couldn’t catch or do anything. The coach said, ‘Sorry, I have enough small kids. I can’t take him.’”

Collins assured the coach that her son was, in fact, quite capable. Maybe even special.

She had first noticed an advanced ability to focus when he was 3, at her league bowling games at Cumberland Lanes in Antioch, figuring out rapidly how to smack pins with a bowling ball. But this coach was only interested, he said, in some bigger kids to balance out his team. She looked around and noticed a few other small fries seeking a team, some of them crying.

“So I gathered up all the kids nobody wanted and we started our own team,” said Collins, a former star high school softball player in Paducah, Ky. “That’s how I ended up coaching Mookie.”

Some of this movie will be set in Boston, where the 26-year-old Betts is trying to lead the Red Sox to a World Series championship. The next step is the American League Championship Series against the Houston Astros, tied at 1-1 with Game 3 set for Tuesday in Houston. He is also the favorite to win the AL Most Valuable Player award when it is announced next month. He won the AL batting title (.346 average), becoming the first Red Sox player in 30 years to lead the majors in hitting and the second Red Sox player, and 40th major leaguer, ever in the 30-30 club (30 home runs, 30 stolen bases).

This in Betts’ fourth full major league season. He is early in what is shaping up to be an extraordinary career. He and his fiancée, Brianna Hammonds — they’ve been together since their days at Oliver Middle School — are expecting their first child next month, right around the time the MVP voting will be announced.

But much of the good stuff in this story happened in Nashville and surrounding areas.

Work ethic is part of any tale of excellence, and Betts’ father, Willie Betts, served in the Vietnam War with the Air Force before returning to Nashville for a career as a CSX railroad mechanical superintendent.

Collins grew up working her grandfather’s farm in Paducah along with her cousins and siblings, learning at age 5 how to pull a tobacco plant from the ground while preserving the root. She milked cows and tended to the hogs and drove the tobacco setter, too, when she wasn’t starring in sports.

Mookie Betts, bowling perfection and Rubik's Cube mastery

She would take young Mookie to Paducah to see how farm life worked, though the prevailing memory is of his fear.

“I remember running from a goat,” Betts said. “That’s about all the farming I did.”

In fact, his animal anxiety is something that perhaps could be weaved into the screenplay. The family lived in Murfreesboro during his younger years, and on many occasions that fear would manifest itself. Especially in cases of roadkill.

“If someone hit a snake or a raccoon, you’d tell Mookie and he’d start crying,” Willie Betts said, stopping for a belly laugh at the memory. “He could do all these things. One thing he couldn’t do is look at a dead animal on the road.”

But there are many things he could do. Collins, who has several sanctioned 300 games to her name as a bowler, helped turn her only child into a force on the lanes, when he wasn’t playing baseball, basketball, soccer or football.

He would crush adults at pingpong. He would amaze crowds of kids by solving a Rubik’s Cube in less than two minutes.

“Mess it up any way you want,” Collins said of the puzzle most people can’t solve in any amount of time. “Didn’t matter.”

Betts’ late childhood and adolescence should be a good chunk of this movie. His parents split up when he was 10, and he moved with his mother to Brentwood. Yet his parents remained united in raising him and in fostering his interests. Even now, during the baseball postseason, they stay with him and get along as a family.

This movie should include his trip to the University of Tennessee for a youth baseball camp. Betts dug an errant pitch out of the dirt and smacked it. The Vols coach then, Rod Delmonico, told the pitcher to do the same thing. Betts smacked it again. Then again. A crowd gathered. At the end of the day, Delmonico told Willie Betts: “Your son needs to play baseball.”

Tennessee Vols or Boston Red Sox? It wasn't easy

It will include a terrifying moment, when 12-year-old Betts was ejected from a car filled with kids on the way back from a bowling tournament in Kansas City, after the vehicle hit a utility pole. Collins recalls a man lifting her son from the road in the chaos — Betts suffered a broken jaw and foot in the accident — but she was never able to find the stranger to thank him. Of that moment, she said: “We had angels watching over us, really.”

This movie will have moments of greatness foreshadowed. Betts at Overton High did it all for coach Mike Morrison, pitching in big spots when needed, gradually earning the notice of scouts. All while sticking with the bowling and winning The Tennessean Bowler of the Year in 2010.

“He’d take pitches and you’d go, ‘I’m not sure I’d take that pitch,’” Morrison recalled. “But it’s like he always had a game plan. He always barreled up baseballs. It was really unbelievable, his hand-eye (coordination) and his understanding.”

It will have moments of doubt, the agonizing decision to choose a signing bonus of $750,000 from the Red Sox over attending UT and playing for the Vols. And a moment of struggle, calling Collins after one of many bad nights early in the minors and asking: “Is it too late to go to college?”

“He didn’t think he was going to make it,” Collins said, but she always calmed him down, and that brings up the main lessons he said she taught him.

Every good story has one or two of those.

“Be honest with yourself,” Betts said of his mother’s mantras. “Always work hard. Be humble, because nothing is promised.”

Collins, who retired in August after 23 years with the Tennessee Department of Transportation, said she wakes up some days and “I just have to scratch my head because this is like a fairy tale.”

Or, a movie. For the record, she would like Taraji P. Henson to play her, and she’s not sure on Betts but envisions someone like “a young Boris Kodjoe.”

This could really be something, especially if the rest of this fall and Betts' baseball career go as hoped. The story to date has a lot of promise, though a few details may need some Hollywood treatment. Remember that Little League team of the unwanted and undersized that Collins put together to prove everyone wrong?

“We were terrible,” she said. “Came in last place.”

Reach Joe Rexrode at jrexrode@tennessean.com and follow him on Twitter @joerexrode.

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