Iron and diamonds: Sahuarita man honors father’s MLB legacy through competition | Local News Stories

“That was the one that he caught behind,” Carreon said. “That was the one where all these legends had played like Mickey Mantle, going back to Babe Ruth, because the field was built back in 1910. It was a very spiritual type of moment.” 

The moment came after he delivered the first pitch earlier that day. 

It was a culmination of childhood memories spent at Comiskey Park beside his dad, and a lifetime connection with baseball that had finally come full circle. A culminating moment Camilo himself never got to experience in his lifetime.

“I got to the home plate, I looked up to the sky and I raised my hands and I was like, ‘Dad, we did it.’ Meaning that we made it back to Chicago.”

Almost a month later, Michael Carreon, 61, can be found at Copper Fitness in Sahuarita training for a new passion: weightlifting.

Carreon has lifted weights most of his life but he’s amped up his training regimen after recently becoming an official USPA powerlifter. Next weekend, he’ll be going for a state record in the bench press for his age and weight class in the the USPA Tucson Strength Classic on Saturday, Oct. 22 at Tucson Strength.

After initially paying for a couple of lessons, the intensity of his weightlifting sessions took off. He is entering his 12th week of training.

After a protein supplement company saw his training videos on Instagram, they reached out to him and they are now an official sponsor. 

He benches 315 pounds with ease in workouts; the record in the 60-65 age bracket, 200-220 lb. weight class in the Raw Full Power Masters division is 303 pounds. 

In the upcoming competition, he’ll start with the squat, then it’s the bench press and the deadlift. Carreon thinks he will win his division and setting the state record on the bench should be a cakewalk as long as he maintains proper form for the judges.

“So they’ll add those three together and that counts as your total score. So I plan to win that division,” he said. “It’s called the Full Power, but I also plan to set the record, and that’s what I really would like.” 

Carreon will be proud if he takes home the state record trophy and certification.

“They give you an official certified document, like a college degree. So, the degrees that I have in my home that I’m most proud of our my honorable discharge, my bachelor’s degree and my master’s degree. Those are things that nobody can ever take away from me or deny me, I’ve earned them, and this is going to hang up right next to them.”

The event is a culmination of his training but also a way to honor his father’s sports legacy.

Michael Carreon moved to Sahuarita about 10 years ago; he has four children, one still in high school. 

He retired after 22 years with the Tucson Fire Department. As the pandemic began to wind down he felt the urge to get back in the workforce. He applied at Freeport-McMoran. He couldn’t resist the benefits, and soon became a safety tech, a member of the emergency response team.

Originally from San Bernardino, California, he grew up in Chicago and tagged along with his father for several baseball games in the early ’60s.

“He used to take me because I was the oldest. He used to take me in the locker room and onto the field,” he said. ” It was a dream come true for me. At the time, I didn’t realize all the legends that he was playing with that were in the clubhouse and on the teams. When I got older I realized these guys are famous.”

Those legends? Too many to mention, but seeing a photo he now has of his father at home plate, flanked by Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris, gives you an idea.

He remembers the Sunday pregame father-and-son games fondly. He hit an imaginary homerun in one of them that set the fireworks off on the scoreboard at Comiskey Park.

“My first five years he was with the White Sox, and that’s why baseball was always a part of our life.”

Camilo Carreon and his family moved to Tucson in 1965, when he got picked up by the Cleveland Indians, which used Hi Corbett Field as its spring training facility.

“He liked it here in Tucson. Cleveland was the only team in Tucson in the late-60s and ’70s, and we settled here and Tucson became home then,” Michael said.

After a season with the Indians, Camilo was traded to Baltimore. Because of a career-ending shoulder injury, it would be his eighth and final season in the majors.

Though he came out of his retirement to play for the Tucson Toros in 1969, Camilo Carreon would move on to a career at Tucson Parks and Recreation.

Growing up, Michael dreamed of making it to the big leagues. He was good, too, and from a young age.

He played on Tucson’s Cactus Little League team that made it to the 1973 championship game of the Little League World Series against Taiwan in Williamsport, Pennsylvania.

Though they would lose a heartbreaker on national television, the team featured several future Major League Baseball players, including Ed Vosberg.

A world-title game Carreon still believes they should have won.

“We played on the Wide World of Sports on Saturday, and we lost to the Taiwanese, but we should have been awarded the title,” he said. “They had over-age players.”

Michael attended Rincon High School where he played on the baseball team. The University of New Mexico offered him a full-ride baseball scholarship but he opted to join the Navy.

Years later, knowing his father’s health was declining, Michael left the Navy with an honorable discharge to be by his side in his final days.

After a funeral in Tucson, Camilo Carreon was laid to rest in his hometown of Colton, California, in 1987.

There’s a memorial for him at El Rio Golf Course in Tucson and a street named after him in Colton.

Camilo passed a week before his son — Michael’s brother Mark Carreon — made his big league debut.

“He didn’t get to see him make the majors. I mean, spiritually, he probably knew, but it was a matter of days when Davey Johnson and the New York Mets called my brother.”

Mark Carreon went on to have a 10-season career.

Over the years, Michael stayed close with members of a Facebook group called Everything White Sox.

When he decided to go to a Chicago White Sox game on Sept. 14, the group administrator, Steve Glochowsky, called the team to ensure he got the red carpet treatment.

The organization invited Camilo out several times throughout the years for reunion games and such, but he was busy with work and raising a family, and he never got the chance to be honored.

When Michael arrived in Chicago the night before the game, the full-circle experience for him started falling into place.

“When I went, the night before, the president (Glochowsky) had reached out to the White Sox and then confirmed that I was going to be invited on the field as a special guest,” he said. “They told me they were going to do a tribute to my dad on the scoreboard, and that I was going to deliver the game ball. So it was pretty special.” 

After the on-field ceremony honoring Camilo, the childhood memories of his father returned with a rush when he was handed a trove of photos of his father’s playing days with the White Sox.

“They escorted me off the field and this is what got me choked up again, because they handed me an official archive envelope with my dad’s photos that they had in their files.”

The trip to Chicago was an experience that Michael will remember for the rest of his days.

“From getting the call from the White So, to showing up at the home plate, and the airline flights. Everything just went smooth,” he said. “Then getting the game ball. It was just a three-day event, one day for traveling, one day to be at the park all day and just to absorb the memories. I was telling the people I was with that I felt like I had been here before, and it was like deja vu for me.”

As Michael continues to train to set a state record in the bench press, it’s clear that he’s still soaking in the experience in Chicago. But that won’t take anything away from the groundbreaking accomplishment he’s aiming for.

“It will be something that I will really be proud of for all my sweat and effort and sacrifices. I can sit back someday and say that I was the Arizona champion,” he said.

Something Michael thinks his father, Camilo, would be proud of, too, showing it in the way he always used to.

“If he was alive, he would be there and he would be enjoying to watch as one of the attendants, and we would probably celebrate with a nice dinner afterward and he would probably just give me a thumbs-up and say, ‘That-a-boy.’ He used to say, ‘That-a-boy.'”