The Soul of Baseball (13 page)

Bankhead threw hard. He threw a great curveball. He had good control. He was a superb athlete. Rickey called him a sure thing, a certain star, but when Bankhead pitched in his first Major League game against the Pittsburgh Pirates, he gave up eight runs. Rickey promised the doubtful sports reporters that Bankhead would become a great pitcher. He never did. It takes assurance and poise to be a great pitcher. Dan Bankhead never found his balance.

“See, here’s what I always heard,” Buck said. “Dan was scared to death that he was going to hit a white boy with a pitch. He thought there might be some sort of riot if he did it. Dan was from Alabama just like your father. But Satchel became a man of the world. Dan was always from Alabama, you know what I mean? He heard all those people calling him names, making those threats, and he was scared. He’d seen black men get lynched.”

Robert nodded. He had heard the same thing.

“People always hear the story of Jackie Robinson or my father,” Robert said, “and it’s like they don’t realize just how hard it was, how hard it was to be a black man then.”

“It was hard for your father too,” Buck said. And Buck repeated a story he told often. He said he once went with Satchel Paige to Drum Island near Charleston. They stood on the docks where slaves had been sold after being shipped from Africa. They stood mute for a long time as they looked over the water.

“Nancy, I feel like I’ve been here before,” Satch said.

“Me too, Satch,” Buck said. “Me too.”

M
Y FATHER BELIEVED
in every superstition you ever heard of,” Robert Paige said. He said Satchel believed in lucky clothes, lucky days, and lucky signs. He believed that a man had to be the first to cross through your door on New Year’s Day—if a woman entered your house first, it could trigger twelve years of bad luck. Robert could remember a woman standing outside their house on New Year’s Day one year, banging on the door, but Satchel Paige would not let her in. Of course, Robert said with a small smile, Satch may have had other reasons than bad luck.

Satch avoided black cats and broken mirrors. He never once in his life walked under a ladder. He believed that if a broom swept over your foot it led to some vague sentence of bad luck, Robert forgot how many years. Satch would never put his hat on his bed, and Robert still shuddered over his father’s wrath when he did it by mistake.

More than anything, Robert remembered his father’s fear of tornadoes. Nothing scared the man more. This was a geographical problem because Satchel settled in Kansas City, and tornadoes had a long season in Kansas City.

In time, Satchel worked out his fear this way. He got himself a two-sided ax. When the dark clouds came, Satchel sent Robert out into the rain. He ordered Robert to bury that ax in the ground right in the line of where the tornado might head in. It was important to put the ax in precisely the right place. Satchel would lean his head out the open window and direct Robert—a little to the left, no, a little to the right, no, more to the right. And, on Satch’s word, Robert would raise the ax high, drive it into the soil, and leave it there until the tornadoes had passed.

“What was that supposed to do?” I asked.

“The ax was supposed to split the tornado in two,” he said.

Buck laughed hard. “Split it in two. There was nobody like Satch.”

Robert took a long sip of Corona. “No tornado ever got to the house,” he said.

B
UCK HAD ASKED
Robert Paige if he ever thought about becoming a pitcher, and for the first time that night, pain blazed in Robert’s eyes. He shook his head, and the topic shifted to other things—to Robert’s kids, to the biblical struggles of the Kansas City Royals, to New York traffic, to basketball, to the difficulties of driving a truck with three cars attached.

“I pitched in Little League once,” Robert said suddenly. Robert admitted he could throw hard—Robert said “I could throw hard” like it was a curse—but he never wanted to pitch. He never wanted people to point at him on the mound and say, “That’s Satchel’s boy.” He remembered the one day he pitched vividly. It was a hot Kansas City evening. The smell of barbecue lingered in the air. The coach said: “How would you like to pitch today?”

Robert said: “I don’t know.”

“Let’s give it a try.”

Robert walked the first batter on four pitches. He walked the second batter too. He walked the third and the fourth and the fifth, and all the while his coach yelled, “It’s okay, just relax out there, they’re afraid of you, just throw your pitches, they’re
afraid
of you.” Robert looked over the other team, and he saw that the coach was right, they were afraid of him, but that brought him no comfort. They were afraid he might hurt them. They were afraid because he was Satchel Paige’s son. The batters walked reluctantly to the plate and stood with the bat frozen on their shoulders, their eyes wide open, their bodies ready only to spring out of the way if he unleashed a ball at their heads. He walked the sixth batter and the seventh, and he waited for the coach to save him, to get him out of the game. But the coach just watched now with the same horror on his face as the players on the other team. Robert Paige, the son of the greatest control pitcher the game had ever known, could not throw a strike. After he walked the eighth batter, he simply stopped pitching and waited to be taken out. The coach walked out and said “Sorry” as he took the ball. Robert Paige walked back to the dugout with tears in his eyes, and he did not hear a thing.

Robert never pitched again. He played other sports. Robert became a high school basketball star, and then he went into the army, and later he became a truck driver. He did not dislike his life. He said that every once in a while on one of those long drives—not often, but every once in a while—he would wonder what might have happened had he gone back to the mound and tried to pitch again. You think of some crazy things on those long rides.

“When I walked off that mound, Buck, I looked around for him,” Robert said. “It’s funny. I knew he wasn’t at the game. He was never at the games. That never bothered me. He was off pitching somewhere like always. Still I remembered looking for him that day. I looked all over the park. I thought he might be hiding behind a tree or something. That was one of those times I wished he was there. And he wasn’t.”

Buck nodded. For a minute, Buck looked as if he would say something. Instead he put his hand on Robert Paige’s shoulder and didn’t say a word as the waitress finally filled his iced tea.

R
OBERT
P
AIGE WAS
already in the Shea Stadium parking lot in Queens the next morning when the car dropped off Buck O’Neil. Balloons were tied to chairs, and Cracker Jack boxes stacked on picnic tables. Roadway, one of the biggest trucking companies in America, had sponsored a traveling Negro Leagues trailer museum. The Roadway people wanted to do something with baseball—they wanted to show their clients and employees that Roadway shared the best attributes of the national pastime: speed, teamwork, reliability, innovation. The only trouble they found was that baseball in the twenty-first century also seemed to be about high salaries, steroids, competitive imbalance, and labor issues—and those did not quite fit with the Roadway corporate strategy. Roadway wanted to connect to that time when baseball was still played in the daytime, when players played ball for love and all that. So they embraced the Negro Leagues. They had this traveling museum built, called it “Times of Greatness,” and they brought it to every Major League city in America. Of course, they brought along Buck O’Neil.

That day in New York, the Negro Leagues museum trailer was open for clients to walk through. There was a batting cage where a machine spit Wiffle balls at Roadway employees. A muffled version of “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown” croaked and wheezed over a busted loudspeaker. It was a party. Reporters waited for Buck.

“Who was the greatest player you ever saw?” the Associated Press reporter asked.

“Well, the greatest Major League player I ever saw was Willie Mays. But you asked about the greatest player I ever saw, and that was Oscar Charleston. He could hit you fifty home runs. Steal you a hundred bases. Old-timers like to say the closest thing to Oscar Charleston we ever saw was Willie Mays.”

“What do you think of steroids in baseball?” a television reporter asked.

“As long as people have played baseball, players have tried to get an edge.”

“What do you think of this traveling museum?”

“It’s outstanding. We’re bringing the story to America. That’s all I ever wanted.”

“Do you wish you could play today with all the money in the game?”

“No, I played at a great time for baseball. Shed no tears for me. I was right on time.”

He spoke quickly and softly, without emotion, as if he were reciting the Pledge of Allegiance in a fifth-grade class. He’d done these kinds of interviews so many times. As each familiar question was lobbed at him, Buck offered the same practiced answers. The night before, with Robert Paige, he had been alert, bursting with memories and ideas. Nights like that took their toll. Morning had come. Here, in the parking lot in Queens, Buck was there but not quite, a ghost, an echo. His eyes looked dull and faraway, and he parroted a few old stories, which pleased the people around him no end. But Bob Kendrick looked worried.

“I think we need to get Buck some rest,” he said. “He’s shutting down.”

Bob was right. Buck had stopped talking altogether. He looked over at Bob every so often and nodded, his signal indicating he was ready to go. There were other Negro Leagues players there signing autographs—Jim Robinson, Robert Scott, Lionel Evelyn, Armando Vazquez—and they tried to get Buck talking. Buck was pleasant. But he was not himself.

“Do you have any children?” a man asked.

“No,” Buck said. “No, sir.”

“That’s a shame,” the man said.

“Yeah,” Buck said.

A
NOTHER MAN WALKED
over to Buck O’Neil. He carried a huge envelope stuffed with yellowed newspaper clippings. The man said, “Buck, remember me?”

Buck looked up. His eyes showed no flicker of recognition. But he said, “Remember you? Of course, of course. How are ya doing? How’s your family?” The men hugged, and the younger man said his family was doing well, he was doing well, very well, he had become a musician, he was doing some things with video and computers. Buck nodded and said, “I’m proud of you, son.” By then the line of people wanting autographs had swelled and the younger man walked off.

“He remembered me,” the man said. “He’s amazing, isn’t he?”

“Yes,” I said. “I’m sorry, what’s your name?”

“I’m Dan Bankhead Jr. My father played for the Brooklyn Dodgers.”

Dan Bankhead Jr. I said it was stunning that we had run into him, that just the night before Buck and Robert Paige had been talking at length about his father. “Really?” Dan Jr. asked. He was amazed. He thought nobody ever talked about his father. He wanted to know every detail of the conversation. Then Dan Jr. opened up his clip file, and he slowly flipped through the newspaper clippings, narrating along the way the story of his family. His mother had been a jazz singer; she was beautiful. His father, of course, had been a great pitcher in the Negro Leagues, a hero until he signed with the Brooklyn Dodgers. Then he went to the Minor Leagues, resurfaced again three years later, won nine games, but he was never a hero again. Dan Jr. said he never understood why people did not honor his father more, since he was the first black pitcher in the Major Leagues.

“Nothing against Jackie Robinson, who was a great man, but it was harder to be a black pitcher in those days,” Dan said. “People would say, ‘Okay, maybe black guys can hit or run, but they can’t pitch.’ People
still
say that kind of stuff, and it’s been, what, fifty years since then?

“I just don’t understand why my father has never gotten his due. I want to talk to Buck about that, but I can see he’s real busy. I want to see if he can help me tell my father’s story. My father was not the best pitcher, obviously. But he was the first. And that story, I think it’s an important story. I think it’s as important in its own way, you know, as Jackie Robinson. Did you know, my father hit a home run his first time at bat?”

I shook my head. Dan Jr. was talking faster. His words raced his thoughts.

“He was a great athlete…. My father wasn’t always an easy man to know. He moved down to Houston when I was young, and I didn’t see him very much…. He was a great pitcher, though, you know, before he was with the Dodgers. Ask Buck about that. Buck will know. My father really blew them away in the Negro Leagues…. I can remember one time, he asked me to come down and see him. He told me about how hard it was for him, all the things he had to go through. It was emotional. I remember we both cried. He said, ‘They forgot me.’”

Dan stopped. I told him that Buck had said Dan Bankhead would have been a great pitcher in the Major Leagues, but he was scared to pitch fastballs inside against white batters. Dan Jr. nodded. “It’s true,” he said. Dan Jr. said his father told him that he once had a no-hitter going and then he threw a nice easy pitch down the middle so the guy could get a hit.

“It wasn’t time yet for a black man to throw a no-hitter,” Dan Bankhead told his son.

Dan said he wanted to do a film about his father. He also wanted to give his newspaper clippings to the Negro Leagues Museum so people could know his father. He wanted people to remember Dan Bankhead. As he spoke, he kept looking back at Buck O’Neil, kept trying to catch Buck’s eye. Buck’s eyes would not focus.

“He’s tired,” I explained.

“It’s a hot day,” Dan said. He stood up and walked over to Buck. “I’m coming to Kansas City so we can talk,” Dan said.

“You do that,” Buck said. “We need to talk about a lot of things.”

“We do,” Dan said. “We need to talk about Dad.”