The Soul of Baseball (15 page)

“Isn’t this wonderful?” Buck asked.

He was a new man. I’d seen him emerge out of funks and exhaustion many times—like Houdini escaping from locked trunks—but he had seemed so run-down earlier in the day, I expected him to stay at the hotel. Now he looked refreshed. He ate hot dogs smeared with mustard, and he hopped from table to table to talk with people. A woman gave him a box of candy, and he hugged her. A man asked him about his playing days, and Buck hugged him. The public-address announcer barked out the license plate for a Buck Celica and asked the man to come to the information desk.

“You have just won a free car wash for winning the ‘Dirtiest Car in the Lot’ contest,” the announcer said, and Buck laughed for a long time.

“I wonder if he will come get his car wash,” Buck said. “What a great idea.”

Buck had transformed. All that day, he had looked distracted, tired, worn down, and now he watched the baseball game happily, signed autographs. He looked as if he could go all night.

B
UCK’S DRIVER WAS
a kid named Dwight. He was supposed to take Buck back to the hotel around nine-thirty. But at that time Dwight was nowhere to be found. Numerous people worked their walkie-talkies in an effort to locate Dwight. Finally they reached him, and Dwight raced up the stadium ramps to get to Buck. When he reached Buck, he was breathing hard, and he apologized. He said he had been dealing with mascot issues. Dwight said he had one last thing to do.

He took out his own walkie-talkie and called down to the field. He said: “Hey, guys, I have to take Mr. Buck O’Neil to the hotel. I will not be able to participate in the Great Pizza Race. Over. Is that clear? We need someone else for Pizza Race. Over. We need someone else for the Great Pizza Race. Over?”

Static followed. Dwight shrugged and led the way to the car.

“Who are you in the Great Pizza Race?” Buck asked.

“I’m the pizza man,” he said. “It’s better than being the pepperoni.”

“I can imagine.”

“I got promoted this year,” Dwight said.

I
N THE CAR,
I asked Buck how he did it, how he recovered from his early depression. He shrugged. “You just do it,” he said. He sounded like a magician unwilling to give away his trick.

“Did you get a nap in?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “I was going to nap. But I got to reading, and every time I would start to fall asleep, I came across a really interesting part.”

We rode through Gary for a while, passing numerous fast-food restaurants, and Buck looked out the window. He had a huge smile on his face. We were back to the beginning. Everywhere we would go, people asked him how he did it, how he overcame bitterness, how he avoided hatred, how he kept going happily along at his age. He had lost his wife, Ora, in 1997. He had lost almost all his friends. He had been to so many funerals.

Buck laughed. He told a story. He and fellow scout Piper Davis were looking for a ballgame in Louisiana. They came upon a baseball field. The lights were on.

“This must be where the game is,” Buck said to two men standing by the entrance.

“Oh, yeah,” one of the men said. “This is where it is, all right.”

They drove in and walked toward the field. Buck never could remember which one of them first realized that something was wrong. At some point, though, they were close enough to the field to notice that every man in the stadium was wearing a white hood. A pig roasted on a barbecue pit. A truck was parked on the pitcher’s mound, and a man stood on the flatbed. He was preaching something. He was dressed as the Grand Dragon. “No, Piper, this ain’t no ballgame,” Buck screamed as quietly as he could, and they ran back, jumped in the car, the tires spun in the parking lot, spitting pebbles, and they were gone. They passed the two men at the entrance, who were on their backs laughing. When they could no longer see the lights of the stadium, Piper and Buck laughed just as hard.

Buck laughed again in the car that night. Whenever he talked about racism, he always talked about it like this, with little stories. He laughed about the night he and Piper Davis almost walked into the middle of a Ku Klux Klan meeting. He smiled thinking about the day a young boy in North Dakota called him the worst name imaginable. And even when a memory of racism cut through him, as in this story he told me years ago, he spoke in verse.

 

My wife, Ora, wanted a hat.

So she went downtown

To a store called Woolf Brothers

Where black women could shop

But could not eat

At the counter.

Ora was allowed to look at the hats,

Imagine how they might sit

On her head.

But if she touched one,

Touched a hat,

She had to buy it.

A black woman could ruin a hat

By touching it.

So degrading,

So degrading.

That’s what racism was.

 

“Hey, Buck,” I said in the car that night.

“What’s that?”

“What were you reading that was so interesting? A novel?”

“No, no, nothing like that,” Buck said.

“Newspaper?”

“No. See. Well. I was reading the Bible.”

“The Bible?” I said it louder than I intended. Buck had talked about running into all those interesting parts that kept him from sleep. I figured by now nothing in the Bible would jolt Buck out of sleep. He shrugged.

“Yeah, I was reading the Bible,” he said. “I figured I needed some help.”

“What kind of help?”

“Well,” he said, “I figured I needed some help after some of the thoughts I was having earlier about being in Gary. I thought I could probably use a little spiritual help.”

Buck closed his eyes and smiled happily as the car rumbled back to the hotel.

I
n the last summer of his life, Hilton Smith wrote long letters to the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York. He wanted in. He was not sure how a man went about getting into the Baseball Hall of Fame. Hilton Smith had never played in the Major Leagues. He had never played in the Minor Leagues. He was by nature a modest man, and it had been more than thirty years since he had talked at length about his days as a baseball player. Some of the men and women at church where Hilton Smith was an elder never knew he played baseball. They never even suspected it.

Hilton sat in the kitchen, swatted gnats at his neck, and wrote letters in the fading evening light of Kansas City summer. He addressed the letters to “To Whom It May Concern,” and he began each with the claim that he once threw a curveball that he supposed was the best in the world. Hilton did not like to brag, but they needed to know that he could make the ball curve a dozen different ways—up and down, side to side, whatever he wanted. He had practiced throwing that curveball in his childhood, in a dusty Texas town called Giddings. He threw baseballs against a wooden fence all day, into the night, until he had learned all their secrets. Sometimes he felt like the baseball was his marionette. He could make it come to life.

With that curveball, Hilton almost never lost when he pitched for the Kansas City Monarchs. He included some of his pitching records in the letters—twenty-four wins and one loss one year, twenty-three wins and two losses another—but he knew those records were not written down anywhere, and he was not sure the Hall of Fame people would believe him. So he wrote more about the games and the men with bats he had to make look foolish. Hilton wrote that, had the Fates and timing been kinder, he might have been the first to break the Major League color barrier and not Jackie Robinson. In fact, Hilton wrote, he had been the one to convince Jackie Robinson to play baseball to begin with. He also wrote about the rivalry he had with his teammate Satchel Paige. In the Negro Leagues, they called Hilton Smith “Satchel’s Relief.” It worked like this: Satchel would start every game. This encouraged people to buy tickets. Then, after Satch pitched three innings, Hilton Smith would come in to pitch the final six. Satchel was the attraction. Hilton was the replacement pitcher. Hilton often pitched better in those final six innings than Satch had pitched in the first three. Few noticed. Hilton Smith hated the name “Satchel’s Relief.”

Satchel had died in June of the previous year. It was 1983. Satch’s death had a strange effect on Hilton. He had not liked Satchel Paige—the two men lived just blocks apart in Kansas City but almost never spoke. Hilton believed he was every bit as good a pitcher, but Satchel had received more credit because he was colorful. Hilton was not colorful. He did not think pitchers should be colorful. No, he did not have much use for Satchel Paige.

Still, when Satchel died, Hilton Smith started writing those letters. He started to talk about being forgotten. He asked his dearest friend, Buck O’Neil, if he would ever get into the Hall of Fame.

“You will get there,” Buck said. “You deserve to be there.”

“They don’t know me,” Hilton said.

“We will remind them,” Buck said.

At home, Hilton Smith would jump whenever the phone rang. “Who was it?” he would ask his son DeMorris. “Was it the Hall of Fame?”

“No,” DeMorris would say. DeMorris had played baseball in the Minor Leagues. He was quiet and proud like his father. The two men had a connection—they understood each other’s silences. But DeMorris could not understand his father’s sudden obsession with the Hall of Fame. DeMorris would ask: “Why do you care about the Baseball Hall of Fame? What does that mean? You know how great you were. What difference does it make?”

Hilton Smith said softly, “I deserve to be there.”

DeMorris understood. His father was dying.

Baseball overflows with myths. Nobody is quite certain how baseball was invented—some say it grew out of the British sport rounders, others say it evolved from cricket, others say it came from ball-and-stick games played in antiquity. People have traced its origins to Europe, Africa, Russia, China, and ancient Egypt. About the only thing we know for certain about baseball’s past is that it was not invented by Civil War hero Abner Doubleday in Cooperstown.

That myth, however, proved to be stubborn and powerful. Doubleday remained connected with baseball, though he probably never played the game. The Baseball Hall of Fame was built in Cooperstown, a little town in upstate New York. The redbrick museum is surrounded by a scene right out of 1950s America. Families meander along Main Street. They walk past the post office and Cooperstown General Store, past picket fences and the malt shop. Children lick ice cream cones. Old men sit on park benches and talk about Eisenhower. The supermarket on the other side of town is called “Great American.” The only thing that separates the town from being a living Norman Rockwell painting is a little shop on the square called “The Latest Obsession,” which sells, well, America’s latest obsession. You could imagine the owner one day just got tired of changing the store’s stock from disco boots to parachute pants to Cabbage Patch dolls to flannel shirts to
Sex in the City
clothes to ringtones. “Yeah, yeah,” she would tell the kids who stocked the shelves every time they tried to explain what obsessions were included in the latest shipment. “Whatever. Just put it on the shelf.”

In this Great American setting, the Baseball Hall of Fame feels more like a memorial than a museum. Players inducted into the Hall of Fame often invoked the word “immortality” in their acceptance speeches. And they called the place a “shrine.” The Hall of Fame meant even more to those great Negro League players who never got their chance to play in the Major Leagues. Buck said to them the Hall of Fame meant redemption. A Hall of Fame induction was their chance to hear at last after all the years that they were great. They belonged in the gallery with Babe Ruth and Stan Musial, Sandy Koufax and Walter Johnson. To those few Negro Leagues players elected to the Hall of Fame, it was bigger than immortality. It was an apology.

A familiar scene occurred again and again throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Old black men waited by the phone. In Detroit, Turkey Stearnes waited. Buck said he had been nicknamed “Turkey” because of the odd way he ran—his arms flapped, his legs flailed, like a turkey. Funny thing: The way he ran was not Turkey Stearnes’s defining oddity. He also talked to his bats. Turkey carried his bats in violin cases, and after games he would sit in his hotel room and tell the bats exactly what he thought of their performances that day. He admonished his smaller bats for being too weak, and he scolded his bigger bats for swinging and missing. A bat that relentlessly swung and missed was sometimes threatened with an ax. Turkey’s bats usually hit, though. He played for many years—first for ragtag teams in Detroit and later for championship teams in Kansas City—and the researchers who tally such things have concluded that Turkey hit more home runs than anyone in the Negro Leagues, even Josh Gibson. Turkey Stearnes waited in Detroit for the Hall of Fame.

Willie Wells waited in Texas. They called him “El Diablo” in Mexico—“the Devil”—because he played with white-hot intensity. Nicknames defined the Negro Leagues. Many, like Buck, had more than one nickname. Buck was also called “Cap” and “Foots.” That was a sign of respect—getting more than one nickname. But almost everybody had at least one nickname. On a long car ride, Buck and I came up with a children’s poem of Negro Leagues nicknames:

 

Tack Head and Tubby,

Cool Papa and Bubby,

Turkey and Piggy,

Sir Skinny and Ziggy,

Murder Man, Boojum, Two Sides, Double Duty.

Pigmeat, Hoghead, Police Car Lopez, and Hootie.

Willie Wells was the Devil. Kissing Bug Rose.

One named his roommate Popsicle Toes.

Cannonball and Schoolboy, Toothpick and Duke,

House Lady, Shack Pappy, Pastor and Fluke.

Cream and Sugar played together,

Sam Jethroe was the Jet.

Everyone called George Sweatt “Never”

’Cause he’d never sweat.

Satan Taylor’s mother believed in God,

That’s what the papers said,

So they stopped calling him Satan,

Called him Jelly Taylor instead.

 

The Devil, Willie Wells, slid with his spikes high, and he crashed into pitchers covering first base. So many people threw baseballs at his head that he wore a construction helmet when he went to hit. He was probably the first professional baseball player to wear a batting helmet. As a shortstop, the Devil played like a dream. He chased down so many ground balls that his Negro Leagues teammate Judy Johnson swore he wore roller skates. They also called him “the Shakespeare of Shortstops,” and in his later years he wondered when the Hall of Fame would finally call his name.

Leon Day waited in Baltimore for the Hall of Fame call. He had been a great pitcher—he won every game he pitched in 1937. He threw a no-hitter his first game after returning from World War II. In Puerto Rico, according to legend, he struck out nineteen men in a game. Between starts, Day played every position but catcher, and he once ran the 100-yard dash in ten seconds flat even while wearing a complete baseball uniform and spikes. After he finished playing baseball, he became a bartender. People asked him to talk about his playing days, but he almost never did. Leon Day too waited for the Hall of Fame to call him.

All three men would eventually get into the Hall of Fame, in large part because of the unyielding effort of Buck O’Neil. He talked them up, promoted them, politicked for them. He got them all in. None of them, however, lived to see Induction Day. Turkey and the Devil died many years before the Hall of Fame called. Leon Day was alive when Buck O’Neil called to tell him he was going into the Hall of Fame. “He was so happy,” Buck said. Leon Day died six days later.

“I never heard that business about Hilton Smith writing letters to the Hall of Fame,” Buck O’Neil said as we walked through the Atlanta airport. “Who told you that?”

“His son.”

“Well, I was with the Hall of Fame veterans committee at the time. So I would know if that was true. I don’t believe that is true. We talked about the Hall of Fame a few times before he died. I do believe he wanted to go into the Baseball Hall of Fame. Anyone who played the game wants that. But I don’t believe he wrote any letters.”

Buck shook his head as we got out of the airport train and headed to the escalator. Buck and Hilton were best friends most of their lives. They had played together, they had scouted together, and at the end of Hilton Smith’s life they talked a lot about what had been. Hilton had grown bitter. Buck hated to see that happen to his friend. He never liked talking about it.

The escalator was not working. Bob said that we should just walk around back; there was an elevator on the other side. “No,” Buck said, “we can take the stairs.”

The escalator turned out to be much longer than Buck had anticipated. There were fifty or sixty steps. About ten steps in, Buck realized he had made a big mistake. He looked up, counted the remaining steps and realized that there was no chance he could make it to the top. He then looked back down, and saw other people stepping on the escalator.

“Don’t look down,” he whispered, and he gritted his teeth. He climbed. He started to breathe heavy after a few more steps. “We halfway yet?” he asked in a voice that was meant to be funny but came across as a bit desperate. We were not even close to halfway.

“We’re almost halfway, Buck,” Bob panted.

Buck climbed. And he climbed. After a few more steps he was panting, his mouth was open, and he sucked air and clutched the railing. Still he shook off the helping hand from behind him. “We’re almost there,” he said. There were still twenty steps to go. He muttered, “We’re gaining on it. We’re definitely gaining on it.” There were fifteen steps to go. A man walking up behind him said, “Just a few more steps. Just a few more, sir.”

“A few more steps,” Buck said. There were ten left. Sweat beaded on his forehead. His grip tightened on the railing. You could see the blood rushing to his fingertips. There were eight steps to go. There were seven. There were six. His pace quickened. A smile formed on his lips. “Send a rope for me,” he told people standing on top. But he was taking the steps more quickly. He knew he could make it now. Three steps to go. Two. One.

“I’m an old fool,” he gasped as he stepped on the top. He walked over to a chair and fell in it. He asked if we could see his heart beating through his chest.

“I’ve made a lot of big mistakes in my life,” he said. “And that right there was one of them.”

While he sat, a man walked up to him for an autograph. Buck looked up at him with his you-have-got-to-be-kidding-me expression. But he signed the autograph. The man said, “Buck, are you going into the Hall of Fame this year?”

“I don’t know,” Buck said. “That’s what they’re saying.”

“I’m pulling for you,” the man said. Buck nodded and concentrated again on his breathing. The Baseball Hall of Fame had just announced that a special committee was put together to elect some Negro Leagues players and executives into the Hall of Fame. Buck was not on the committee, which seemed a pretty good hint that they wanted to honor him.

“I’ll tell you about Hilton Smith,” Buck said between gasps. “Before he died, I promised him that I would do everything I could to get him into the Hall of Fame someday. I thought it was my duty, you know. It wasn’t because he was my friend. I was the one who saw Hilton pitch. I know how good he was. He was one of the greatest pitchers who ever lived.