Scary prospect.(Milwaukee Brewers pitcher Ben Sheets)

Ben Sheets gets nervous when the lights go out. But after shining in the Olympics, he's ready to make the Brewers rotation and put fear in the hearts of batters.

The Olympic Hero was afraid of the dark. When he was a kid, there were times his mother would enter his room in the morning and find him curled up inside his closet or under his bed. Breathless, he would say, "Mama, I was afraid."

There was a favorite trick his family would play on the Olympic Hero. He spent childhood afternoons playing at Aunt Mary's house. Aunt Mary lived next door, but when you grow up in St. Amant, La., next door means a pasture away. When it got dark, his parents would call and tell the young Hero to come home. "OK," the Hero would say, "but turn on the porch light for me." When he got about halfway between the houses, his parents would switch off the light, leaving the road pitch black. At Aunt Mary's, the Hero's uncle would stand on the porch and shout, "Green Garrett!"--not that "Green Garrett" means anything, but if you're a kid in the dark, even "chocolate cake" sounds like, "bloody murder!" At the sound of "Green Garrett," off the Olympic Hero would go.

"Oh, I would run," the Hero says. "I think I probably could have been in the Olympics in the 100-meter dash the way I used to run from there. I would run barefoot on shells, I was so scared. It was dark, dude."

Just four years ago, his parents helped the Olympic Hero move his things into his dorm on his first day at Northeast Louisiana University, and when all the boxes were settled, the parents wished him good luck and kissed him goodbye. But the Olympic Hero asked, "Where are you going? You're not leaving me here." Rather than spend the night alone in the dark of his dorm room, the Olympic Hero spent his first night of college in his parents' hotel room, cuddled between them on a king-sized bed.

Ben Sheets, Olympic Hero, is still afraid of the dark. Afraid of everything, he says. Well, almost everything. See, when Sheets steps onto a mound, all that boyish fear is not invited. Before he was to pitch in the gold-medal game in the Sydney Olympics, the most important game in the history of USA Baseball, Sheets called his parents, Betty and Arnold Sheets, in Louisiana.

"These other teams are not ready for me," he told them. "They don't know we're going to win."