An Unexpected Visit

Sometimes history doesn’t arrive with an announcement.

Sometimes it just walks into the office.

The other day at SolBridge International School of Business, I happened to be sitting in Dr. John Endicott's office when the door opened and in stepped Park Chan Ho.

He had simply stopped by to pay a visit because Dr. Endicott had thrown out a ceremonial pitch at the Hanhwa Eagles' stadium.

And there I was — an accidental witness.

For anyone who has lived in Korea for a while, Park Chan Ho is more than a former pitcher for the Los Angeles Dodgers. He was the first Korean to truly break into Major League Baseball and stay there. If you lived in Korea during the late 1990s, you remember what he meant. Parents woke up at dawn to watch his starts. Newspapers tracked his ERA like it was a national metric. Kids wore Dodgers caps not because of Los Angeles, but because of Park.

And then suddenly he was standing a few feet away from me, in a quiet office in Daejeon.

What struck me was not celebrity energy.

It was calm.

He carried himself without spectacle. No entourage aura. No performance mode. Just a gracious, attentive presence — listening, smiling, speaking softly.

There’s something fitting about that.

Because when I think about Park’s career, I don’t think first of strikeouts. I think of endurance. Of being young and far from home. Of carrying expectation on your shoulders in a language that isn’t yours. Of staying in the game when things get hard.

I’ve lived in Korea since 1990. I remember when he first went to Los Angeles. It felt like Korea itself had stepped onto the mound.

And now, decades later, here he was — not as a symbol, not as a headline, but as a man dropping by to say hello.

We shook hands. I told him how long I’d been in Korea and how vividly I remembered those early Dodgers years. He smiled — modest, almost shy — and thanked me. I gave him a copy of my first novel, War Remains. 

The moment lasted only minutes.

History doesn’t always roar.

Sometimes it just knocks.