Thankfully, He Still Hasn’t Found That ‘Plan B’

Tarik El-Abour fell in love with NASCAR when he was ten years old, and it was an affection that knew no bounds.
“He loved the wheels, the motors, the laps, the stats, the names, the colors and the cars,” remembered Nadia Khalil, Tarik’s mother. “It occupied this little boy’s mind and life all week long for three years, one car race after another, not missing a race, on Sundays, not missing a lap, and knowing enough information to speak about each driver, each announcer, each team, the course…everything.”
The passion overtook Tarik to the point where he would reconstruct each race on the living room rug using toy cars.
“He would line them up, all equal distance apart and duplicate the races,” Khalil said. “Even on the turns. And it would take him hours and he would not get up until the cars where perfect. Then he would just walk away from these masterpieces each day and start all over the next. This kept him occupied in between races. They were masterpieces. I would take pictures because I just wanted to remember how beautiful they were. I would walk into the living room and see this race track in still life, waiting to be changed up for the current day.”
Khalil marveled at the precise workings of her son’s mind.
“He would do this so effortlessly and it would be something that would have taken me hours to do,” she said.
At about the same time, Tarik’s father, Abed El-Abour, signed his son up to participate in San Marino National Little League baseball.
“It was the first time he had ever played in his life,” Khalil said. “He was amazed. He went to his first coach, John Mayberry, and said ‘I want to hit the ball.’ Coach Mayberry said ‘Well, if you want to hit the ball, you have to learn to go out in the field and catch the ball too.’ It was on. He wanted to learn every aspect of the game.”
Tarik was diagnosed with autism, a condition that fully manifested itself through the trappings of the game of baseball.
“That is when I started to see the workings of the autistic mind,” said Khalil. “I started to see how numbers had a lot to do with how he thinks. Those of us without autism think in concepts, he thinks in numbers. The greater the number of times he did anything, the better he was at it. Just like us. However, the way the numbers worked in his mind went way further than anything I could have yet imagined. He knew he had to practice. He knew he loved it. He told me that when he grew up and played baseball, he would buy me a house wherever he plays, so that I could watch his games live. He did not know yet how different he was. He did not know yet how autism was going to speak for him before he could speak for himself.”
Recently, it has spoken in a loud voice. On June 21, 2016, Tarik El-Abour signed a contract to play professional baseball for the Sullivan, NY Explorers. He has since re-upped with the Plattsburg, NY Redbirds for 2017.
He was congratulated by Eddie Gonzales, owner of the Empire Pro Baseball League and later, when recognized by former Major Leaguer Reggie Sanders shortly after inking the deal, Tarik said “I haven’t done anything yet.”
Well, yes he had. Tarik El-Abour had become the first autistic player in known professional baseball history.
The plaudits continue to roll in for the 2010 graduate of San Marino High School. Earlier this year, Tarik was asked to throw the ceremonial first pitch before the Kansas City Royals April 14 game against the Los Angeles Angels (“Tarik was more worried about throwing the opening pitch than meeting Albert Puhols,” Nadia said with a chuckle) and he was recently named to the Empire League All-Star team and was named Rookie of the Year for 2016.
It has been a long and sometimes painful journey from NASCAR races in the living room to snagging fly balls in center field.
“One day I walked in his room and Tarik asked if he could ask me a question,” Khalil said. “Tarik then proceeded to ask me questions about not needing information he had acquired and how to take that information out of his head to make room for the new information he was getting from baseball. I asked him, “What information do you want to get rid of?” He said, that he now loves baseball like he loved NASCAR and that he no longer needed the NASCAR information. So he, in essence, wanted to delete that information. I said to him ‘If you ever figure out how to delete information from our heads that we have learned and do not need anymore, let me know.’ It became a joke between us. But his transition from watching sports to playing sports infused in him a work ethic that I could only learn from along the way.”
Tarik attacked baseball with the same unbridled enthusiasm he had embraced NASCAR.
“The word ‘No’ means nothing to the autistic mind,” said Khalil. “The word ‘How’ replaces the word ‘No.’ He would practice with his team, he would practice at home, I couldn’t buy enough baseball books for him to read. He would watch the Dodgers every game and memorize the stats and history of each and every player in the league on every team. He knew the history of every team, the managers, the players, the origins, every at-bat, every comment. When the Dodgers weren’t on television, he would go to bookstores, lay on his stomach in the aisles and read the stat books on the players and get hungrier and hungrier for any morsel of information. He drove his coaches nuts talking about statistics. They would tell him that baseball is so much more than statistics. Yet to say that to a mind that thinks in numbers was illogical. The coaches were telling him how important it was to be a team player, yet that only confused him further, because he never thought of not being a team player. He only knew that all the stats painted a picture of the work of each player, so he saw the stats as a language that speaks for itself. He did not understand the disconnect from not being a team player by being interested in stats. He saw them as going hand in hand, that they were two different parts of a whole picture. He would tell me ‘If you do not have good stats why would a team consider you?’”
An unending string of practices, workouts and games followed. Tarik continued his baseball career at SMHS, where he was named Offensive Player of the Year following sophomore year on junior varsity and again after his senior year, when he was a member of the Titan varsity squad. He was also named to the all-Rio Hondo League 2nd team as a senior.
“He loved stealing bases,” Khalil said. “As a mom, it would turn me into a nervous wreck, watching him inch towards second base. Then he would find his moment and take off. I could only scream from the stands. Being a Mom and wanting to protect him. All Tarik could see was an opportunity.”
Tarik continued at Pasadena City College, Concordia University, Pacifica College and Bristol University, where he received a Bachelors Degree in Business Administration.
“He wants to announce baseball games when he can no longer play,” said Khalil.
Along the way, many have contributed to his success. Former Titan baseball Coach Mack Paciorek and San Marino High School assistant Coach Marcos Bulgarin, who also coached Tarik at Pacifica. Former assistant Joey Molina still helps Tarik with his fielding, on occasion.
And Liz Hollingsworth, former Principal of Carver Elementary School.
“Liz was great,” said Khalil. “She was always so supportive. She absolutely loved Tarik.”
Tarik has one sour local memory that has since turned cathartic.
“Apparently, when Tarik was at Huntington Middle School, a teacher had all the students in the class say what they wanted to do when they grew up,” Khalil recalls. “Tarik said he wanted to be a baseball player. Someone in the class said ‘You need to have a Plan B.’ Later, when he was able to drive, Tarik would go out of his way to get to places and I wondered what he was doing. He refused to drive past Huntington Middle School. I asked him what he was doing. He said, ‘Mom, someone in there doesn’t believe in dreams.’ I made him do it later. I said ‘We’re getting in the car and we are driving past Huntington Middle School. We did.”
Tarik seems typically unfazed by his success. When asked how it felt to be an all-star, Tarik replied “It felt great because it was the first time I was an all star playing competitive baseball, let alone at the professional level. This is a definite step going up.
He told The Tribune it’s “an honor” to be the first autistic baseball player and he is motivated to keep going because “there will always be that one ‘yes.’”
As this narrative unfolds, the story is just as much about the mother as it is about the son, and it’s not too difficult to see where he gets his tenacity. After Tarik was diagnosed with autism early in elementary school, Khalil chose a proactive approach to educating her son.
“I made a decision not to medicate him, and I went back to school to study Early Childhood Development at UCLA,” she said. “I used him for all of my projects.”
That aggressive approach again showed itself when she and Tarik traveled to the East Coast last summer for his Empire League tryout.
“I don’t know why I did this, but I bought him a one-way ticket and I bought myself a round-trip ticket.”
Turns out her hunch was correct. And typically is. Khalil is an author, speaker and teacher of self development who hosts a popular webcast Monday-Friday at 5:30 a.m. One decision she made was indisputably correct. Playing a hunch, I asked her if there is any significance to the name Tarik.
“Tarik means ‘strength’ in Arabic,” Khalil said. “I named him that because I almost lost him twice during pregnancy. I looked for a name that meant something very strong.”
She certainly found one.