The Soul of Baseball (2 page)

B
uck O’Neil never asked me what this book would be about. This was good because for the longest time I did not know. This book has been many things over time. It was, at first, a story about one fascinating Negro Leagues baseball game played in 1939. The game featured two pitchers and rivals now in the Baseball Hall of Fame—Satchel Paige and Hilton Smith. I researched that game tirelessly, but I could only find two newspaper accounts of it, a total of three hundred eighty-two words. The only player from that game still living was Buck O’Neil.

“I just don’t remember much about that game,” Buck said. He felt bad, as if he had let me down. We had known each other for a few years by then. I was a newspaper columnist in Kansas City and Buck was Kansas City’s favorite son. I wrote about him often. We grew close. It was an easy arrangement. Buck liked telling stories about his baseball days as a player and manager in the Negro Leagues and as a coach and scout in the Major Leagues. I liked to listen. After a while, Buck asked me to lunch. He said that somebody needed to write about what the Negro Leagues were really like. He said, in his deep and lyrical voice, that Hollywood got it all wrong. The Hollywood filmmakers had stretched truths and diminished legends into caricatures, and in general they made the players look like fools. And Buck said the books about the Negro Leagues mostly read like encyclopedias, and that was no way to get people interested. The books, he said, treated players like cold history, when in fact the players were hot, flawed, brilliant, and alive.

“Somebody needs to write that book—the one that tells what it was really like,” he said, and he put his hand on my shoulder. “You’ll do it,” he said.

Don’t get me wrong. It wasn’t like Buck knighted me. I suspect he had given this precise speech to other writers. Still, I tried for Buck. I spent dozens of hours reading newspaper clippings from the old black newspapers—the
Chicago Defender,
the
Pittsburgh Courier,
the
Kansas City Call
. I learned about famous men called Satchel, Cool Papa, and the Devil, and also less famous men called Pee Wee, Turkey, and Slow. I talked to former Negro Leaguers, though it often seemed they were dying faster than I could interview them. Still, my book about the baseball game in 1939 was doomed. There were too many empty places and unanswered questions, and I found myself guessing about things I could never know. The next version of this book, then, was a Negro Leagues novel, a made-up story of a white baseball scout sent into the black leagues. That book died for the opposite reason; it was too real to be fiction.

I put the book away for a while. Every time I saw Buck, which was plenty often, he would ask me how I was doing with the book. I told him I wasn’t sure. He nodded, and he quickly changed the subject to politics or the latest scandal. He was disappointed. It wasn’t only Buck. My wife, Margo, asked often about that book too. I would sometimes mention to her another book idea, one that somehow seemed easier, maybe a book about someone still living or a game I had seen or something like that. She shook her head. “What about the Buck book?” she asked. That’s what she called it. The Buck book.

I said: “I don’t know how to tell it.”

She said: “Maybe you are trying too hard.”

When you’re a sportswriter, it is easy to grow jaded. You get comfortable seats in air-conditioned boxes, and you usually get a nice parking spot close to the door. You wear plastic-coated credentials around your neck, and you talk to ballplayers every day, and though you may not get to know them—not like sportswriters and athletes in the old days, before money separated them—you do get to know some things. You get to know that they’re human, they ache, they curse, they grumble, they preach, they dote on their children, they cheat on their wives, they take amphetamines to perk up for games, they give to charity, they party, they smile at babies, they forget how people who don’t make millions of dollars live, they live quiet lives, they take steroids to get stronger, they play heroically, they play halfheartedly, they drink, they lie, and they do small kindnesses when no one is watching. Athletes are really just like everyone else.

That simple fact can disappoint you if you’re not careful. Everybody knows that sportswriters get cynical. They turn cold to the games they once loved and the athletes they once idolized. I used to worry about that happening to me sometimes. And one day, while worrying about it, I realized why I was so drawn to Buck O’Neil. He was almost ninety-four years old. He had been denied his whole life. He wanted to play Major League baseball, but because he was black he never did. He wanted to manage in the Major Leagues, but again, he was black and he was never given a chance. He became a baseball scout, and he drove his car all around America in search of talent, and he never got much money or credit. He told stories about the great Negro Leagues players of his time—“We could play!” he would shout—and for many years few wanted to listen or believe.

And yet Buck persisted. He still loved baseball. He loved people. He forgave, but so easily that it hardly seemed like forgiving. All those bad memories faded into nothingness, and in the place of muffled dreams, Buck recalled hot jazz in smoky bars and steaks that melted in his mouth like cotton candy. He remembered Count Basie playing “Jumpin’ at the Woodside” on Saturday nights. Sunday mornings he would come downstairs for breakfast in the hotel, and Joe Louis would be eating with Billie Holiday at the next table. After church, Buck’s team, the Kansas City Monarchs, would play baseball in the bright sunshine while adoring fans in their Sunday best ate barbecue and cheered. He remembered the sensation of scooping low throws out of the dirt and the way the bat buzzed and vibrated through his arms when a pitch hit too close to his hands. He remembered the feeling of rounding second, heading to third, his heart beating through his chest, his breath caught in his lungs, and the third-base bag looking about as far away as Paris. To find the bitterness in Buck, you would need one of those explorer boats they use to find treasure on the
Titanic
.

“How do you keep from being bitter?” I asked Buck. In fact, I asked him that dozens of times. Everyone asked that same question—cabdrivers, politicians, talk-show hosts, players, executives, schoolteachers, and children. That day, Buck’s answer sounded something like a song. I had noticed before how Buck’s words often sounded like songs. He said:

 

Where does bitterness take you?

To a broken heart?

To an early grave?

When I die

I want to die from natural causes.

Not from hate

Eating me up from the inside.

 

I asked Buck if he would come with me to a basketball game. Buck said no, he was going to make an appearance in a small Kansas town called Nicodemus. Buck made two hundred appearances a year, most of them to help publicize the museum he had helped to create, the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum. Most of his speeches were in big cities. Sometimes, though, a small town held a day in his honor, and Buck never turned down a chance to talk about the Negro Leagues. I asked him if I could come along to Nicodemus. He said: “Be on time.”

W
HAT WAS YOUR
best day in baseball?” Buck asked me on the long car ride to Nicodemus. I would find Buck did not like talking on long rides, but he did not like silence either. So he threw out unexpected questions to keep conversation alive. Who was the best shortstop ever? Why don’t more people ride in convertibles? Has anyone ever gotten better at golf by reading golf magazines? Do you think this president will make our country safer? Who was a better hitter, Ted Williams or Barry Bonds? He would ask a question and then sit back, stare out the window until the talk had dissipated, and then he would ask another.

Buck asked about my best day in baseball, and I thought about many things. I had a few flickering memories from my days as a Little League baseball player. I remembered diving stops I had made in a championship game for an underhand-pitch team called Hollywood. I remembered hitting a game-winning double with a wooden bat—I refused to use the aluminum bats. Everybody in the Major Leagues, swung wood. I remembered my one Little League All-Star game appearance, though my lasting memory from that day had nothing to do with the game and revolved instead around teammates teaching me how to cross my legs like a man—right leg bent at a ninety-degree angle, right ankle over left knee. I had been doing it wrong.

I thought then about my best baseball days as a sportswriter and fan. I was in a makeshift ballpark in Charlotte when the most amazing athlete, Bo Jackson, hit his first professional home run. He broke his bat on contact, but the ball soared over the Krispy Kreme doughnut sign in left field. I was in Atlanta for a playoff game when Sid Bream rounded third and scored ahead of a Barry Bonds throw, and the stadium rocked and the cheers were louder than any I had ever heard. I was in Boston when the Red Sox won a World Series game—a lovely woman named Loretta Kowal wore a green Red Sox cap because she was born on St. Patrick’s Day. Loretta had cancer. She said she was just thankful to live long enough to see the Red Sox win a World Series game, and she died a few weeks later. I was in Greenville, South Carolina, when a tall Minor League baseball player named Michael Jordan looked bad. He struck out two or three times. He was hitting about .200 at the time. The scouts, in their unfeeling way, called him a “non-prospect.” That meant he would never play in the Major Leagues. So why was he there?

“Have you ever had a dream?” Jordan asked.

I was in New York when Derek Jeter hit a home run just after midnight. It was less than two months after September 11. After Jeter rounded the bases, fifty thousand New Yorkers sang “New York, New York” with a crackling recording of Frank Sinatra. Then they sang it again and again. After six renditions, the public-address announcer asked everyone to leave, but his voice lacked conviction, certainly compared with Sinatra’s, and anyway this was New York, where people did not mind public-address announcers. The New Yorkers stayed and cheered and sang about those little-town blues melting away and being a part of it. I was in St. Louis on a warm September night when Mark McGwire hit a low line drive that slipped over the left-field wall. Thousands of camera flashes popped at once—close your eyes in that instant and you could still see the echoes of light flaring in the dark—and McGwire, in childlike excitement after hitting the home run that broke Roger Maris’s cherished record, missed first base. McGwire ran back, stomped on the bag, then raced around the bases to the kind of cheers generals hear when they liberate cities. When McGwire reached home, he lifted his son high in the air. Even now, even though I presume that McGwire was chemically enhanced when he broke the record, I feel a little something building in my throat when I think of that night. Fathers and sons and all that.

Instead of all that, I told Buck about my father, Steven, born in the Soviet Union during World War II. He and my mother moved to America three years before I was born. His accent never thinned, and he never quite broke away from Eastern Europe. My dad won the Cleveland Chess Open one year when I was young, and he tried vainly to teach me how to mate a king with pawn and knight. He played soccer semiprofessionally for a while in Poland, and he—again, in vain—tried to pass along the physics of trapping a soccer ball between foot and earth.

Still, beyond the soccer, chess, and accent, there was something distinctively American about my father. He drove us around the neighborhood every year on the Fourth of July so that we could see children running with sparklers and hear firecrackers popping and cracking over the clatter of our 1976 Chevy Nova. On Thanksgiving, we would go around the table and say what we were thankful for in the way of some family on one of those television sitcoms we all watched every night. On Labor Day, we gathered around the television and watched the Jerry Lewis telethon, not because we wanted to see Lola Falana dance but because in my parents’ imaginations that’s what American families did on Labor Day.

In those Cleveland evenings fluttering with mosquitoes, my father and I played catch. We threw the baseball back and forth in our small and fenced backyard, under the telephone wire that drooped a bit lower to the ground every summer, near a hole to China and an ant-infested picnic table and a grill that always smelled of leaking propane gas. When I was a toddler, my father had bought me a cheap glove. The glove was plastic, and it was packaged in plastic with a plastic Wiffle ball bat and a plastic ball. After he learned more about baseball, he took me to Kmart and spent a few hours of his factory salary to buy me a proper glove. He used the plastic one.

“On fly balls, always take a step back first,” he would tell me as he smoked his Kents and threw baseballs high over the telephone wire. “It’s easier to come in on the ball than it is to go back.”

“When you have two strikes, choke up on the bat,” he said. “You have more bat control.”

“Before the ball is hit, think about where you want to throw,” he said.

And so on. He was a Confucius of baseball proverbs. Get in front of the ball. A walk is as good as a hit. Make the easy play. Expect the bad hop. Step into your throw. Keep the bat head up when you bunt. Don’t make the third out at third base. If a pitcher is struggling with his control, take a strike. Catch the ball with two hands. Charge the ball. Meet the ball. Follow the ball. Keep your eyes on the ball. I never knew where a semiprofessional soccer player from Poland picked up all that stuff.

“I’m sure he listened to the radio so he would have advice to give you,” Buck said softly and without opening his eyes. “Fathers do that.”