The Soul of Baseball (14 page)

Then Dan said he had to go to work. I pointed out Robert Paige, and the men embraced. They spoke for a moment or two about their fathers. Then Dan went one way, Robert went another. A few minutes back, Buck went to the car, and we headed for home.

“Isn’t it amazing that we met Dan Bankhead’s son one day after you were talking about him?” I asked. Buck looked bewildered.

“Dan’s son was there?” he asked. “Why didn’t he come up to me?”

I told Buck that he did walk up, and they had hugged, and Buck had said he remembered. Buck nodded. “That was Dan Jr., huh? I didn’t know that. I thought he was somebody else.” Buck looked out the car window at ugly old Shea Stadium and said, “I sure wish I could remember everything. So much to remember.”

B
uck kept coming back to the old woman. Every city Buck had visited that summer seemed hotter than the city before, but this was the heat crescendo—Washington roasted. Gnats and flies attacked in the humidity. Buck kept talking about the old woman. She had walked across the street in front of the car, and Buck watched her. She was seventy or so, gray hair, small, she wore a long dress and a silver jacket. She carried two small plastic bags of groceries. She walked slowly, like she was considering whether to turn back.

The woman came upon a puddle in front of the curb, a puddle big enough to have condominiums built around it. Buck said: “Puddles in Washington must be bigger than anywhere else in America. The sewers must be backed up or something.” The driver made a crack about sewers and politicians. The woman stood by the puddle a few seconds. She studied it, measured it perhaps. She then seemed to bend her knees and lean forward, as if she intended to jump across. Buck held his breath. Then she shivered, as if a cool breeze had passed through her, and she stood up straight, took one longing glance at the puddle, and made the long trek around.

“Hold on for a second,” Buck said to the driver. Buck stepped out of the car and walked up to the woman. He offered to carry her groceries, but she said she could manage fine. He said to her, “I saw you standing there by that puddle.”

She smiled. “Yeah?”

“I thought you were going to jump over it for a minute there.”

“You did, huh? I thought about it. There was a time, you know.”

“I know,” Buck said. “There was a time.”

“I know exactly how that woman felt,” Mamie Johnson said. “We all had our time, didn’t we, Buck?” Three Negro League players sat together at a picnic table under a tent that flapped in a hot breeze. This was just outside RFK Stadium, where the Washington Nationals played baseball. While Mamie talked, she signed autographs. She handed out baseball cards of herself. The black-and-white photograph on the cards showed a woman fifty years younger reaching high in the air in a posed effort to catch an invisible baseball. They called her “Peanut” then—Peanut Johnson; she was one of three women who played baseball in the Negro Leagues. That was during the Eisenhower 1950s, and by then most of the best black baseball players played in the Major Leagues. Most of the promising young black players played in the Minor Leagues. The rest of the dreamers played in the Negro Leagues. The players in the Negro Leagues by the mid-1950s were mostly old, flawed, or unlucky—the league was dying. Owners needed stunts and sensations just to draw a few hundred people to the ballpark. Women ballplayers seemed interesting enough. “Mamie could play a little,” Buck said.

Across the table, Hubert Simmons tried to sign an autograph. He had pitched for Baltimore in the Negro Leagues for a short time. His hand shook severely as he tried to finish the final letters on his autograph. He stopped short and apologized. “The shakes go away after a while,” he said. The sun scorched the backs of necks. A radio nearby played the song “Kokomo.” The disc jockey then said it was ninety-eight degrees. Body temperature. Buck tried to open a bottle of water, but his hands were sweating and he could not twist off the cap.

“Let me help you there, Buck,” a fan said, but Buck pulled the bottle away and grunted, “I got it, man.” He wrestled with the cap longer. Hubert Simmons gently dabbed his forehead with a handkerchief he’d been carrying in his pocket, and he tried to sign another autograph. His hand shook again. “I’m so sorry,” he said softly. Peanut Johnson handed out another baseball card and talked about how the players used to treat her like a younger sister. Buck managed to get the cap off the bottle of water. His face indicated the drink was not worth the effort.

“Were you good?” someone asked Buck.

“I held my own,” he said.

“Were you good?” someone asked Buck a moment later.

“I’m getting better every year,” he said.

The people kept coming at Buck—some for autographs, some for stories, and some because there was nothing else to do on a hot summer day before a ballgame. Buck’s face flushed, and his eyelids drooped, and he said, “Excuse me, I need to do something for a minute.” He stood up and walked into the Roadway Negro Leagues traveling museum.

Buck went into the trailer and breathed in the air-conditioning. He looked around at the familiar photographs of Negro Leagues players. He saw a young boy watching a video screen. On the screen, there was black-and-white footage of an old black pitcher named Chet Brewer talking at a dinner. Buck and Brewer had been friends—Brewer died in 1990.

On the video, Brewer told this story:

There was this black youngster who wanted to play for the local white team. He showed up at a game one day, and the manager said, “Get out of here, boy. You know Negroes can’t play here.” The player showed up the next day, and the manager said the same thing. The next day, the kid showed up again and the manager said, “If you come back tomorrow, I’ll call the police.”

Well, the player did show up again, and the manager gave in. He gave the kid a uniform, but he told his players, “All right, I know how to get rid of this boy. I’ll find just the right situation, send him out there, and embarrass him so much he never comes back.” In that game, the bases were loaded, two outs, game on the line, and the manager said, “All right, boy, you get in there and hit.”

On the first pitch, the kid hit a long fly ball off the right-field wall. He sprinted around first base. He flew around second. And as he was about to slide into the third base, through the cheering crowd, you could hear that manager scream, “Look at that Cuban run!”

The child in the trailer laughed along with the black and white audience in the video. Buck walked over to him and asked kindly, “Do you know why that’s funny, son?” The child looked up, his face slightly red, and he shook his head. Buck said, “I would hope you did not get it, son. See, in those days, in this country, it was better to be Cuban than an American black man. If you were Cuban, you could get served in restaurants. But if you were black and born right here in the US of A, they wouldn’t give you a meal. Isn’t that strange?”

The child nodded. Buck said:

 

Funny,

You look back,

Didn’t make no sense.

Racism.

No sense

What people do to each other

’Cause of something dark

In their hearts.

 

Buck and the child walked around the trailer. Buck pointed to a picture of Oscar Charleston and said, “Do you know who that is, son?” Another head shake. “Oscar Charleston might have been the greatest player this game has ever seen. You know Barry Bonds?” A nod. “Oscar Charleston was like Barry Bonds. He was better than Barry Bonds.”

He pointed to a photograph of Cool Papa Bell. A head shake. Buck said: “Cool Papa Bell was so fast that he could steal second and third on the same pitch. That was Cool Papa Bell. Fastest man I ever saw on a baseball field.”

He pointed to Josh Gibson. A vague nod. “Best hitter I ever saw,” Buck said.

Buck pointed to a stocky pitcher named Hilton Smith. Head shake. “He had the greatest curveball you ever saw. Actually, he threw three or four curveballs. He had a big curveball and a little one. He was something to see.”

Buck pointed to Satchel Paige. “I’ve heard of him,” the child said happily.

“He was everything you heard and more, son,” Buck said.

So it went. Buck and the child walked around the trailer, they looked at different photographs, and Buck offered a quick commentary on each player. They played a couple of interactive computer games. Then the child pointed to a photograph of a young Buck O’Neil and asked, “Is that you?” A nod. “Were you good?” the child asked.

“It’s not right to talk about yourself like that,” Buck said. And then he smiled and said that he was a pretty good hitter. “I never did have much power,” he said. “I hit those line drives.”

He then explained how, over time, he became a much better hitter. When Buck was a young player with the Monarchs, he was often baffled by curveballs and spitballs and emery balls and the various other kinds of junk pitchers in the Negro Leagues would throw. Then he went into the navy during World War II, and he served in Subic Bay, in the Philippines. By day, he loaded and unloaded ships with his all-black battalion. At night, though, he thought about curveballs and how to hit them. He dreamed baseball. He was thirty-five when he got out, but he led the Negro American League in hitting in his first year back, and the next year he fell just one batting-average point short of doing it again.

“You can do anything you set your mind to, son,” Buck said.

It was then that I noticed a man watching them both. It was the boy’s father. He looked as if he might cry. “Someday,” the father said, “he’s going to know how much this meant.”

But the funny thing was, while the dad was talking, I was not looking at his son. I was looking at Buck. The flushness of his face was gone. His eyes were wide open. He bounced as he walked, and he laughed and talked. When they finished the tour, Buck said, “Well, I’ve got to go back outside to sign some autographs,” and he headed out into the Washington oven and the hungry mosquitoes. He almost ran to the picnic table and announced to all the people wilting in the heat, “You know what? It’s a beautiful day. Feels like the sun is on your shoulder.” Buck sat down, opened up a bottle of water with one grunt and a twist. He drank half the bottle in one gulp.

B
uck O’Neil had to wait forty-five minutes for his ride to show up at Chicago Midway Airport, and it was a good time to take stock. Buck had been home three days all month. He’d spent his time speaking at charity dinners and appearing at schools and signing autographs at ballparks. Now he was going to Gary, Indiana, to appear at something called the Northern League All-Star Game, and even Buck wondered if maybe he was getting too old for all this.

“Why are we here?” Buck asked Bob Kendrick.

“It’s a good question, Buck,” Bob said.

“It’s the only question,” Buck said.

After a long while, their driver finally came by. He mumbled some excuses about traffic. Buck noticed that late people always blamed traffic. The drive to Gary took almost two hours. They arrived at the Radisson Star Plaza, where the marquee welcomed the Northern League All-Stars and advertised an upcoming Huey Lewis & the News concert. Palm trees swayed in the air-conditioned breezes of the atrium, and a life-size waterfall spilled blue-tinted water into a swimming pool. Bird sounds chirped. A few people sat outside “The Khaki Club,” a bar surrounded by tiki lamps, and admired the waterfall. The woman behind the reservations counter handed Buck a brochure that stated plainly that there was no reason to ever leave the Radisson Star Plaza.

“Mr. O’Neil, you will be staying on Bob Hope Drive,” the woman said.

“All right, then,” Buck said, and he headed for his room. After getting lost on both Bill Cosby Way and Liza Minnelli Drive, he found his way.

B
UCK CHANGED INTO
white pinstriped pants, a blue shirt with a tie and blue jacket. His shoes matched his jacket. He then meandered toward the Celebrity Ballroom East, where he would speak at a luncheon for Northern League players and fans. The luncheon would not begin for another hour or more. Buck just had to get out of his hotel room.

The Northern League was what they called an independent league, meaning that, unlike the Minor Leagues, it had no direct connection to Major League baseball. The Northern League featured three types of players. The first group included older players who once showed promise but flamed out in their first shot at the Major Leagues. A handful had reached the Majors for a brief time but for one reason or another fell out. Some of these players felt like they had been cheated out of their destiny; others felt like they cheated themselves by making some critical mistake. They were giving themselves a second shot.

The second group comprised younger players who never got that first shot at the Majors. They were late bloomers or dreamers, men who felt like they had been overlooked or unfairly discounted. They played baseball to be discovered.

Then there was the third group, Buck’s favorite group. These were the baseball lifers. They may or may not have had their shot at the big leagues, but that no longer made much difference. The baseball lifers harbored no illusions. They just wanted to play baseball. They needed to play. In the Northern League, they got a couple grand a month, they stayed in cheap hotels, they took interminable bus rides, and they cursed the Fates for giving talent to players who didn’t love baseball the way they loved it. But they played because, in the end, they had to play.

Buck loved the baseball lifers. He thought they were the closest thing to the men he had loved and admired in the Negro Leagues.

“This is nice, real nice,” Buck said to one of the organizers of the luncheon. The man beamed. He said the chandeliers had been polished. And he said that in addition to salads and baskets of rolls, there was a jar of gummy bears on each table.

“Hey, Buck. Buck O’Neil. We want to sing for you.”

A man walked over with a guitar. He looked to be in his fifties, and he was alone. Buck looked at him and then looked around. “Who is we?” he asked.

Three other men materialized.

“What are you going to sing?” Buck asked.

And they began an old gospel, “Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho.” Nobody knows who wrote the words. The arrangement, though, was Elvis Presley’s.

 

Joshua fit the battle of Jericho

Jericho Jericho

Joshua fit the battle of Jericho

And the walls come tumbling down

 

Buck stepped inside the group, and he started to sing too.

Soon everyone in the room gathered around. The lunch would not begin for another half hour, but people from all over the hotel heard the music and they appeared. They made a circle around the men. Buck danced and sang, he raised up his arms and closed his eyes. All around him, people clapped. Some of them were ballplayers.

“Whoo!” Buck shouted when it ended. His shirt was drenched in sweat. For the first time all day he was smiling. “That sounded like old times.”

A
MAN WALKED
up to Buck in the reception hall and asked, “What Negro Leagues players do you think should be in the Baseball Hall of Fame?” Buck pulled out what looked like an old envelope. It was crumpled, creased, and torn. Names were scribbled on the back, most of them in black ink, the last couple in red. A couple of names on the top were crossed out.

“I made this list a long time ago,” Buck said. “I carry it with me wherever I go.”

“What is this list?”

“These are the players who I want to get into the Baseball Hall of Fame before I go.”

“I see a couple of names are crossed off.”

“Yep. We got those in already.”

Buck ran his index finger down the list. There were eleven names. He ran them down.

J. L. Wilkinson: “He was the owner of the Monarchs. Great man. Invented night baseball. Did you know that? We were playing night baseball five years before the Major Leaguers. And Wilkie was one of only two men I knew without prejudice. The other was my father.”

Dick Lundy: “Great shortstop. Great, great shortstop.”

Double Duty Radcliffe: “He’s still alive. He could pitch and catch. Great player.”

Biz Mackey: “One of the greatest defensive catchers who ever lived. You heard of Roy Campanella, right? Campy is in the Hall of Fame. Well, Campy said Biz Mackey taught him how to catch.”

Newt Allen: “He played second base for the Monarchs for a long time. Had to be twenty years. Great player. I was in awe of him when I came to the Monarchs.”

Ted Strong: “Tall, beautiful athlete. He played for the Globetrotters too, back when the Globetrotters were probably the best basketball team in the world. He might have been the greatest athlete in the world at that time.”

Bill Wright: “They called him Wild Bill ’cause of the way he would run on the bases. He was wild, man. Great hitter. He moved to Mexico and played ball there because he said they treated him like a man down there.”

Mule Suttles: “What a hitter, man. Powerful. He hit the ball a country mile.”

John Beckwith: “Never heard of him, have you? He was another great slugger like Mule Suttles. He was mean as a snake too, but that don’t mean nothing. Some of the greatest sluggers ever were mean.”

Willard Brown: “Could do it all. Hit. Run. Throw. Catch.”

Andy Cooper: “My first manager. They say he was the greatest pitcher of his time.”

A few months later, five of these men would be voted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. The man asked Buck why his own name wasn’t on the list. Buck said: “I wasn’t as good a player as any of these men. If I go, it will have to be for something more than my playing. I was a good player, you know, but…Anyway it’s not my place to say if I belong in the Hall of Fame. What kind of man would I be if I walked around the country with an envelope that had my name on the back?”

W
HEN THE MAN
walked away, Buck wanted to talk more about John Beckwith.

“He really was mean,” Buck said. “They said he used to knock out teammates when they said something to him. Mean as a snake. But you know, that shouldn’t have anything to do with the Hall of Fame. I don’t like it when people start talking about how a man is off the field.

“I remember when I was on the veterans committee for the Hall of Fame. We were deciding whether Enos Slaughter should go into the Hall of Fame. And I said, ‘He should go. Of course.’ He was a great player. He hit .300, I don’t know how many times. He was a great player.

“And people said to me, ‘You can’t vote for him, he was a racist.’”

Slaughter was the son of a North Carolina tobacco farmer, and in 1947 he tried to convince his teammates with the St. Louis Cardinals to go on strike when Jackie Robinson joined the Brooklyn Dodgers. This led to a famous statement by National League president Ford Frick. It was, quite possibly, the boldest civil rights statement made in America up to that point. He directed his statement at the players considering the strike:

“If you [strike] you will be suspended from the league. You will find that the friends you think you have in the press box will not support you, that you will be outcasts. I do not care if half the league strikes. Those who do it will encounter quick retribution. All will be suspended and I don’t care if it wrecks the National League for five years. This is the United States of America and one citizen has as much right to play as another. The National League will go down the line with Robinson whatever the consequences. You will find if you go through with your intention that you have been guilty of complete madness.”

Later that same year, Enos Slaughter purposely spiked Jackie Robinson.

“In the end, I think Enos probably saw the errors of his ways,” Buck said. “I heard that he changed. But that’s not the point. The point is, people said to me, ‘Naw, naw, you can’t vote for Enos Slaughter, he was prejudiced.’

“I said, ‘What’s that got to do with anything? If we think like that, we won’t let anyone in the Hall of Fame. Look around: The Hall of Fame is filled with racists and drunks and all kinds of people. The world is filled with all kinds of people. You can’t know what’s happening in a man’s heart. Could he play or couldn’t he play? That’s what matters.”

I
T TURNED OUT
that someone at the luncheon had even less interest being in Gary than Buck did. Mike Ditka, the famous football coach, was the main speaker. He sat at the head table and wore what looked like a bowling shirt that had the words “Ditka Classic” on the back. Ditka kept looking at his watch and telling everybody around him that he had a tee time scheduled back in Chicago for later that afternoon. Ditka wanted to make it clear: he was not going to miss his tee time.

Ditka was getting paid quite a bit of money to be there—whispers had the price at $15,000. He was a huge name in the Chicago area. Before Ditka spoke, he handed out trophies to each of the Northern League players. The procession was slower than he liked. Halfway through, Ditka turned to the announcer who was calling the names.

“Hey,” Ditka said, “speed it up.”

M
IKE
D
ITKA SPOKE
fast. He talked about the cyclist Lance Armstrong. He talked about his own mad passion for the game of football. Of Buck, he said, “He’s seen the good, he’s seen the bad, and he’s seen the good again. This is a great country. But it’s not so great that it can’t be better.”

He then recited a poem of sorts based on a quote from former secretary of agriculture Ezra Taft Benson.

 

Be careful with your thoughts because they turn into words.

Be careful with your words because they turn into actions.

Be careful with your actions because they turn into habits.

Be careful with your habits because they become your character.

Be careful with your character because it defines you.

 

Finally he said, “I don’t know a lot about a lot. But I know this. You got a dream? Chase it.” Then Mike Ditka told everybody about his tee time, and he split.

Buck said, “There’s a lot of wisdom in what Mike Ditka said. You just had to listen real quick.”

B
UCK WAS NOT
getting paid; he was there to raise money for the Negro Leagues Museum. Still, he stuck around to do the radio and newspaper interviews. He told the Nancy Story on one radio show in Indianapolis, and he told a young reporter a little story about hitting.

“I really could hit,” Buck said. “I didn’t hit a lot of home runs—I was a gap hitter. I hit a lot of doubles. And then I became a manager, and I got old, and I couldn’t hit anymore.

“But you know what’s funny about hitting? You never really stop believing that you can hit. You may not be able to catch up with the fastball, but in your mind you can still hit it just like always. I look out there now sometimes, and I think,
I could hit this guy
. Of course, I couldn’t. But that’s how you think. I remember, when I was a manager, I couldn’t play anymore. But I used to need a pinch hitter. And I would look around the bench at the other players, and I would think,
Hey, I have a better chance of getting a hit than any of these guys
.”

The reporter asked if he ever delivered as a pinch hitter.

“Sometimes I did,” Buck said with wonder in his voice. “You know? Sometimes I did.”

T
HEY TOOK
B
UCK
out to the Northern League All-Star Game that evening at U.S. Steel Yard in downtown Gary. It was a pretty little ballpark that overlooked the highway and the Gary Works steel plant. The World Famous Jesse White Tumblers flipped and rolled before the game started. Buck loved anything that had “World Famous” in the name. A local policeman gave a stirring rendition of the national anthem. Fireworks popped and exploded, lighting up the
KRAZY KAPLAN’S FIREWORKS
sign in the outfield. The players took the field.