Bustos — and that is what her teammates call her, or Boo, but rarely Crystl — is 30, a two-time gold medalist who plans to retire from international competition after the Beijing Games. For years, she has been painted in one dimension, as a bruising basher, the Babe Ruth of softball, a top-heavy woman wielding a wicked stick. She is an attention grabber, mostly because of her towering home runs and partly because she stands out among teammates that generally look as if they could have belonged to the same sorority.  But give her tea, and let Bustos do the painting. Or let her teammates fill in the corners. A colorful picture emerges, a more complete one, even if the edges are a bit rough.  “She is probably the nicest person on our team, by far,” said the poster-girl pitcher Jennie Finch, who has often shared a room with Bustos on the road. “She has the hugest heart. She’s covered in tattoos, and her forearms are the size of my thigh, but she is just a great person.”  Finch was sitting in a hotel lobby during the team’s cross-country barnstorming tour. Her 2-year-old son, Ace, played nearby. It was Bustos who organized his birthday party and bought the cake. It was Bustos who often babysat him. It was Bustos who colored two Winnie-the-Pooh pictures for him with markers on velvet, her preferred medium.  “I’m going to frame them and put them up in his room,” Finch said, smiling. “I don’t know if it came from tagging or graffiti or whatever, but, gosh, she’s good.”  That is the side that Bustos rarely displays in public. Not the one who colors velvet posters. (“I bring them to life. It’s what I do. I like it.”) Not the one who stops and makes sure her teammates watch their step when it is slippery. Not the one who may be the most popular player because of who she is, not what she is.  She is the rugged bomber with the long, braided ponytail in back and a scowl in front, generally scaring those who do not know her — opposing pitchers, mostly. That is the outsider’s portrayal, and Bustos does not seem to mind hiding behind it. Never mind that it is Bustos who is scared of the dark, of flying, of the ocean.  “I was super intimidated by her at first,” said third baseman Andrea Duran, who ultimately took Bustos’s job at third and turned her into a full-time hitter. “But after about five minutes, I realized I had nothing to worry about.”  Her teammates appreciate her, partly because she is so different than most of them. Bustos grew up in Canyon Country, Calif., north of Los Angeles — up the 5 to Magic Mountain, then into the hills. She saw no future beyond that.  She nearly flunked out of high school as a freshman. She did not walk with her senior class at graduation because she still needed to attend summer school. She was suspended for fighting more than once, usually as an enforcer for someone far smaller, even one of her own brothers. She got in trouble for stealing, too.  “A purse, of all things,” she said. “Me, a purse? Come on. But I knew who did it. You just don’t rat people out where I come from.”  Her father, George, was a VCR repairman. He spent time in jail when Bustos was a teenager. Too many D.U.I.’s, she said. That left Dianna Bustos with the four children: Gabe, Victor, Crystl and April.  “There was a lot of anger built up in all of us,” Bustos said. “Because it kind of felt like he abandoned us, you know?”  She never had a plan beyond high school, which is why she barely had a plan to stay in high school. It did not lead anywhere.  “At the time, I didn’t care about nothing,” Bustos said. “I didn’t have a future. The whole time, I had people telling me I was going to do nothing, so you start to buy into it, you know? All I did was play softball. That’s all I did well. And every time someone asked me, what are you going to do? I’m going to play softball forever.”  She did not believe that, not really, at least not until the letters from colleges began to arrive. Her mom made a file. No one in the family had ever received a scholarship. But Bustos did not have the grades. It is another way she stands out on the team. Others went to well-recognized four-year universities — U.C.L.A., Stanford, Arizona. Bustos went to Palm Beach Community College in Florida.  She loved the palm trees and the idea of playing softball for two more years. She agreed to play there, not even realizing where “there” was.  “What’s really sad is, and this is how badly educated I was at the time, I didn’t even know where Florida was,” she said. “I’m in class and they pulled down the map and I go, ‘Holy crap, I flew from there to there?’ I came home and I was like: ‘Ma, you’ll never believe where I went. I went to Florida. It’s on the other side of the map.’ ”  Bustos has no qualms about telling the story or any of the others. She punctuates them with a laugh. She tells them to anyone who asks. She shares them with teenagers at schools where she speaks.  “I’m just like them,” she said. “I don’t try to sound really overly educated, because I’m not. So I don’t really use big words when I’m talking to them. And I tell the teachers in advance that I might slip and a bad word might accidentally come out while I’m in here, while I’m keeping it real.  “I tell people, if you can keep it real and talk to the kids, they respect you 10 times more because you’re one of them. And they can see that you make mistakes. I tell everyone about my mistakes. I don’t hide my mistakes. Everyone makes them.”  When these Olympics are over, it is likely that someone like outfielder Jessica Mendoza — politically active, Stanford educated, motivated to change the world — will find ways to stay in the public eye. It is Bustos who may connect privately.  “What I love about her is that she can reach the bad kids more than I ever could,” Mendoza said. “She’s been there. She’s been down that road. And she’s using that to help those kids get out.”  Busto uses her body to mark the milestones and interpret the meaning. Her right arm represents her softball life. Hidden beneath her uniform are tattoos of the Olympic rings, of flames, of an eagle. One part reads, “We came, we saw, we conquered.” Her plan is to wrap the arm down to her hand in skeletons, 25 of them, one for every Olympics victory she hopes to have accumulated by the time these Games end.  The left arm is for her life away from softball. It is almost a completely open canvas. Instead of skeletons, Bustos plans a chain of clowns, twisting around her arm.  “A bunch of different clowns with different expressions, because I’m a person who doesn’t really show a whole lot of emotion,” Bustos said. “So when I put it on my sleeve, on my arm, people will know that I feel all of this, even though you don’t see it out here.”  She has made amends with her father, now her “best friend” and an ardent softball supporter, watching in Beijing. She bought the house four doors down from where she was raised and where her parents still live, and shares it with Gabe and his wife. She had a house in the country and accumulated barn animals, including the cow that was attacked by a pit bull, which was given another home. Bustos moved back because it was too lonely. She wanted to be closer to people.  “Have I gotten what I wanted? I’ve gotten what I’ve wanted 10 times more,” she said. “But like I tell people, sometimes you’ve got to be careful for what you want, because sometimes it’s not exactly the glory that everyone sees. If you think about it, in order to be on top, you have to sacrifice. I’m 30 years old, and I’ve been traveling all over the world. I’m going to have, hopefully, three gold medals. And I’m going to go home to the same place doing the same old thing that I was doing probably 10 years ago: Not knowing what’s next.”  The only certainty is that it will include, after all, sitting on the porch, drinking beer.  “For a little while,” Bustos said with a wide grin that could melt any misconceptions. “I ain’t going to lie. We’re going to celebrate.”
Crystl Bustos, the United States softball team’s designated hitter, does not do subtle. She hits big and talks straight, all without pretense or apology.