The Soul of Baseball (22 page)

“I wonder if they’ll ask me to speak,” Buck said.

I was about to laugh. But I looked at Buck. He seemed serious. He was serious. I had seen that look. He honestly wondered if the Hall of Fame—shortly after their committee snubbed him—would ask him to speak. More than that, he looked hopeful. I looked hard at the man I had been traveling with for more than a year, and I realized that even after all this time I had not learned the biggest lesson. I seethed with anger for Buck. I wanted to interrogate each and every member of that committee, shine a World War II–era lamp in their eyes and ask them if their hearts were still beating. I wanted to know how they could look at the baseball life this man had lived and not vote him into the Hall of Fame. They had put in seventeen people, none of whom had one-tenth the impact this man had. Yet when I looked at Buck in that moment, the anger seeped out of me.

“Would you really speak?” I asked Buck.

“Of course,” he said happily. “If they asked me…. It would give me a chance to talk about these great players. It would give me a chance to tell the story again.”

“Buck,” I said slowly, “I don’t see how you—”

He put his arm on my shoulder and said: “Think about this, son. What is my life about?” And he went into the other room to answer questions from reporters and fans.

T
HERE WAS ANGER
across America in the days that followed. The committee members held true to their word and did not discuss Buck O’Neil. Rumors filled the silence. One rumor went that some members, while they admired Buck O’Neil, felt he was not a good enough player to get into the Hall of Fame. In this version, it took great courage for them to refuse him induction. They were guarding the hallowed halls. Another rumor claimed the snubbing had to do with a political fight between committee members and the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, and Buck was the collateral damage. Still another rumor had members of the committee jealous of Buck’s fame. None of the rumors satisfied. They never do. Nobody stepped from the fog to explain.

Rage swept through the baseball community. The
New York Times
wrote a story asking how Mr. O’Neil could have been passed over. The
New York Post,
as usual, was more direct: “They left Buck O’Neil off the list…which makes the list a complete joke,”
Post
columnist Mike Vaccaro wrote. More than fifty major newspapers and web sites wrote searing editorials about Buck O’Neil’s absence from the list.

“He is the greatest ambassador the Negro Leagues have ever known,” King Kaufman wrote for Salon.com.

“The committee should be ashamed of itself,” the
Detroit News
editorial board wrote.

Players were outraged. Hank Aaron, the all-time home-run leader, called up the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum to ask what could be done. Ernie Banks cried that Buck deserved to be in the Hall of Fame more than anyone else, and he included himself. Joe Morgan, a Hall of Famer and the vice chairman of the Hall, called it a disgrace. Another Hall of Famer, Bob Feller—never one to mince words—said of the committee: “What the hell do they know about baseball?” When baseball commissioner Bud Selig first heard the news, he asked his spokesman Rich Levin: “How is this possible? How can this be? How is this even possible?”

Politicians spoke up from both sides of the aisle. Missouri Republican senator Jim Talent asked Major League Baseball to correct the mistake while Missouri Democratic congressman Emanuel Cleaver called the snub a “shameful error.” The Negro Leagues Baseball Museum was flooded with angry calls. Hillary Clinton said something needed to be done. Two Internet petitions to get Buck into the Hall of Fame were started. On MSNBC, Keith Olbermann raged—he said this was the biggest mistake the Hall of Fame ever made. In the
Sporting News
, Dave Kindred raged. “I intend to get Buck O’Neil into the Hall of Fame if it’s the last thing I do,” he said.

And Buck? For a while, he did interviews and talked about the decision. After a while, though, he saw no use in it. The people wanted him to be angry, to hate this committee, and he simply could not do that.
Think about this, son. What is my life all about?
He said the committee had voted with their hearts. He said that he felt worthy of the Hall of Fame, but there were excellent players not in the Hall and excellent men too. Of course, the better he took the rejection, the worse the committee looked. I suspect Buck knew that. That’s why, at some point, he decided not to talk about it anymore. He never turned down an interview, of course. But he shut down when they asked him about the Hall of Fame.

“You know why I wanted to get into the Hall of Fame?” he had said in the moments after the rejection. “Because if I got in, I could have fought for some of the people who still deserve to get in. Dick Lundy. Great shortstop. He should get in. Ted Strong should get in. Bill Wright should get in. But now I can’t fight for them, because if I do that, people will say, ‘Oh, Ol’ Buck is trying to get himself into the Hall of Fame.’”

Buck shook his head. A fierce pride burned in his face. Buck wanted to go to the Hall of Fame, sure he did, but he wanted to make this point clear: He would never campaign for himself. Not ever. And he did not talk about that again.

O
N A HOT
day in Cooperstown in July of 2006—the day sixteen men and one woman from the Negro Leagues were inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame—Buck O’Neil spoke. His voice sounded scratchy. He asked everyone in the crowd to hold hands. He asked them to sing with him. And he sang: “The greatest thing in all my life is loving you.”

I
WAS WALKING
through a bookstore, marveling at how proudly people buy books for idiots and dummies, when the cell phone rang. It was past 10
P.M.
It was Buck O’Neil.

“I want you to do me a favor,” he said.

“Sure, Buck.”

“I want you to thank all the people. All the people who have said nice things since the Hall of Fame thing happened.”

“Of course, Buck.”

“I want you to thank them for all their support. I want you to tell them that the greatest thing in all my life is their love for me and my love for them in return. Can you do that for me?”

“Of course. Absolutely.”

“I have never felt more loved. All my life. Tell them that.”

There was a pause then, and I figured Buck had finished talking. But the pause grew longer, and I asked Buck how he was doing. He said he was doing great. He said again that he wanted to go into the Hall of Fame, but he figured that God works in his ways, and that by not getting in, he found out just how beloved he was.

I said, “Buck, you’re about the only person I know who could feel that way.”

He laughed and said: “You might be right about that.” Another pause.

“You know,” he said, “a few weeks ago a guy asked me: ‘Who is that white boy who is following you around all the time?’”

“What did you say?”

“I told him, ‘Can’t you tell? That’s my son.’”

Buck laughed. There was another silence and I started to say something, but Buck cut me off fast. He said, “See you at the ballpark.” And he quietly hung up the phone.

O
NE NIGHT LATER,
Buck was given an honorary doctorate degree by William Jewell College in Kansas City. It was a big event. Ken Burns was there. All night, people charged Buck to tell him how unjust it was, him not getting into the Hall of Fame, and Buck just patted their shoulders and said, “It’s all right, really, it’s all right.” It was odd in a way, watching Buck comfort others over the injustices he endured. And then it hit me that it was not odd at all. This was exactly what Buck O’Neil had been doing all through our seasons together. And I remembered one of the first things Buck ever said to me. He said that people did not really listen to him talk about the Negro Leagues. Oh, they liked his stories. They liked him. But they already had it in their minds how it was—baseball clowning and bounced checks, men shouting racist slurs and white kids throwing rocks at their rickety buses. They needed to believe in something simple.

 

People used to tell me

How they thought it was

Way back then.

Used to tell me

How they imagined it.

And I tried to say

It wasn’t like that.

We were men

Flesh and blood

And we played baseball in the sunshine.

We hit doubles off the wall,

Slid hard into second base.

We had fights, and we made love.

We sang songs and prayed on Sundays.

Before games.

We were real. Yeah. We laughed and cried.

We felt pain. And we felt joy.

There was a lot wrong with the world.

But we weren’t sad, man.

We had the times of our lives.

I told them that for fifty years.

They heard. But they didn’t listen.

They listened. But they didn’t hear.

 

Now, though, people did listen. They heard. And in the end, he said, that was what mattered. That created the joy in his life. “Good black don’t crack,” he told the people as he was introduced to the crowd as Dr. Buck O’Neil. His friend Ken Burns talked about the possibilities of America. He spoke about the Civil War and the Brooklyn Bridge. He talked about the pain and joy found in jazz, and most of all, he talked about baseball and how it defines our troubles and our triumphs. In the middle of this, though, without warning, he veered away from his well-patterned words and turned toward Buck O’Neil. He said: “All we can say to him tonight is he belongs in our Hall of Fame.”

Everyone in the room stood and cheered for a very long time. They would not stop. Buck O’Neil sat in the middle of those cheers. He soaked them in. His eyes were closed and he raised his arms above his head as if waiting to catch a baseball from heaven.

M
y wife and I bought a piano at a sale held in a college chapel on October 6, 2006. It was black and so shiny you could see your face in the wood. I cannot say the purchase was inspired entirely by Buck O’Neil. But I can say I heard his voice in my mind when I hit the keys with one finger and listened to the tones.

“Son,” Buck had said in New York, “in this life, you never walk by a red dress.”

I think Buck meant that we should never pass up the opportunity to live life. We should not rush by the red dresses, the baseball games, the street musicians, or the sweet smell of dessert. We should not stifle or smother our craziest dreams. I had always wanted to play the piano, so we bought it, and they delivered it to the house that day. I was playing some sort of off-key jazz thing that night when the phone rang. I kept playing. The phone rang again and still I kept playing. The phone rang a third time, and I knew.

Buck had been in the hospital for a few weeks by then. When I saw him there, he had lost a lot of weight, and he did not have a lot of weight to lose. He had stayed trim through the years on the Buck O’Neil diet. “Two meals a day,” he used to say. “That’s all you need.” In the hospital, friends had to beg him to eat at all.

He had also lost his beautiful voice. Doctors could not explain why. His deep baritone had dissolved into a raspy whisper, and I think that bothered him more than the bone-aching fatigue that had overtaken him. Buck felt naked without his voice. When he saw me, he had to pull me close. He whispered in my ear: “You are my friend.”

“Of course, Buck.”

“I hear the book is done,” he whispered. “How is it?”

I promised him I would bring him a copy. We sat close and talked for a while. His memory was still sharp. He talked about how much he loved Cajun food, he remembered some great Negro Leagues players, he said that kids today face dangers that children of his time never knew. “I wish they would stop killing each other,” he said.

Buck also said he wasn’t quite ready to die yet. He still had things he wanted to do. Then he coughed something fierce. I didn’t know that that would be the last time I would see him. You never know.

“I’m going to bring that book by,” I told him as I was leaving.

“Anytime,” he said. “Anytime.”

Three days later his health took another bad turn. He stopped having visitors. “I don’t think Buck would want you to see him like this,” our friend Bob Kendrick said. “I think he would want you to remember him the way he was when we traveled around America.”

Buck lasted a week longer than friends and doctors expected. Buck O’Neil died that October night I was trying to play jazz on a shiny new black piano. Baseball and jazz, he had always said, were the two best things in the world. Of course, I was just plinking keys on the piano. I wasn’t really playing jazz.

“It’s all jazz,” Buck had said.

Buck was ninety-four years old, almost ninety-five. He had asked me not to cry when he died, but I did anyway.

T
he question people have asked me most often since
The Soul of Baseball
was published is this: Did your time with Buck O’Neil change you? At first, I would give a stock answer. Of course it changed me. After all, I had the chance to travel around America with the most positive, life-affirming person I have ever known. How could that not change a person?

The trouble came whenever someone asked: How did he change you?

Most people did not ask. Most people, instead, wanted to move on and tell me their own Buck O’Neil story. It is amazing that one man in his winter years could have personally touched so many people. He did. Everywhere I went, someone would tell me about the time Buck visited their classroom in Michigan, spoke to their group in San Francisco, or rode on a plane with them to Phoenix. As I was writing this book, I estimated that Buck must have told the “Nancy” story ten thousand times in his life, but I now will have to increase that estimate. I must have heard from at least that many people who insisted that Buck told them the story personally.

People I’ve met this year have wanted to talk about how their brief encounters with Buck O’Neil have changed them. He made them feel more positive about life. He made them love baseball again. He opened their eyes to the struggles and pride of those Negro Leagues baseball players who created their own league when the doors of the Major Leagues were slammed shut. He made them happier and more eager to count their own blessings, perhaps.

One of my favorite stories in the book is about the young woman, Swathy, who was standing sadly in an elevator in New York when Buck walked in. He talked to her. He hugged her. And in a thirty-floor descent, her sadness washed away. I heard from a woman who said she had been the one in the elevator. She said that it had been a rotten day—boyfriend troubles, work troubles, New York blues—and then this stately black man walked in. She had no idea who he was, she said, but she could tell there was something about him, something unique, and she repeated his name all the way to the subway so that she would not forget it. Then she looked up his story on the Internet and felt happy all over again.

It was so touching. Then, not long after, I heard from another woman who said she had been the one in the elevator. Buck, apparently, knew how to work those elevators.

I didn’t tell this story in the original version of the book because I didn’t think it belonged. The last time I saw Buck O’Neil, he was sitting in a hospital bed. His health was still touch and go then, but there was more than a flickering hope that he would recover enough to leave the hospital and perhaps take on a limited schedule.

“I just have to take it easy,” he said. “But I’ve still got things I want to do.”

One of those things he wanted to do was appear at his ninety-fifth birthday party. They had set it up so there would be baseball talk and jazz playing—his two favorite things—and then they added a third touch: Women would come wearing red dresses. Buck really was a sucker for a red dress.

“I hear the book is finished,” Buck said then. It was a little surprising to hear him ask about the book only because in the entire time we had spent together—almost two years in total—he had never once mentioned it. I had asked if I could follow him around America, and he said those three words—“Don’t be late”—and that was that. He never asked me how it was going. He never said there were things he wanted—or didn’t want—in it. He never asked me to leave the room or put away my notebook—he never even seemed to notice that I had a notebook. Buck had shown so little interest in the book itself that at times I wondered if he had forgotten I was actually writing one.

“Yes, it’s finished Buck,” I said.

“Good, good,” he said. “I’d like to read that.”

I told him I would come into the hospital and read it to him, and he smiled and said, “That would be nice. You promise me now.” I promised him. And then a doctor came in and said he had some personal information to tell Buck. I began to leave the room, and Buck said: “Stay.”

“This is very personal,” the doctor said. “I’m not sure a reporter should be in here.”

“He’s not a reporter,” Buck said. “He’s my friend.”

The next day, Buck’s health took a terrible turn for the worse and he was no longer able to see visitors. Doctors had discovered that Buck had bone marrow cancer. After a couple of days, close friends said he was no longer responsive. Two weeks later, on a Friday night in October, he was gone. When I heard that he had died, the very first thing I thought of was this moment, our last visit, and my unfulfilled promise. I had the aching regret that I didn’t realize that this was really good-bye.

Then I heard his voice in my head. And it said: “Quit feeling sorry for yourself.”

That’s one way Buck O’Neil changed me.

My favorite moment of the book tour happened in New York City, where I shared the stage with authors and friends Seth Mnookin and Sally Jenkins at a bar near Chinatown called the Happy Endings Lounge. There is no sign on the door of the Happy Endings Lounge—at least none in English—so my wife, Margo, and I must have walked by it four or five times, like we were Harry Potter characters walking by some invisible house again and again.

We finally managed to get inside; the place was very dark and crowded and cool; it looked like the setting for an early Martin Scorcese movie. The event was great, the people were great, and afterward a large group of us walked through Chinatown to get some dinner. As we reached the corner, we saw that someone from the bar was chasing us. It was a very pretty, young woman bartender—Margo would say she looked a little bit like a young Angelina Jolie. I have not often had young Angelina Jolie’s chasing me down New York streets.

“I had to find you before you left,” she said, and she put her hand on my shoulder and talked breathlessly about how much it had meant to hear about Buck O’Neil, how inspiring he was, how she would have worked that night for free just to hear about Buck.

As she walked away, I knew: Buck was somewhere up there smiling.

A few words about the Baseball Hall of Fame: On the day before Buck O’Neil’s funeral, the Hall of Fame released a statement honoring Buck. In it, Hall of Fame president Jane Forbes Clark announced that the Hall had a “very strong commitment to keeping Buck O’Neil’s legacy alive forever,” and that they were looking for ways to “recognize his lasting contributions to the game.”

Nobody was quite sure what this meant, but it sounded like a promise to right a wrong. I tried to downplay in this book the rancor and bitterness that many people felt about Buck’s exclusion from the Hall of Fame. Buck was very uncomfortable with it. Certainly, he had been disappointed to not get elected into the Hall of Fame. But whenever people said it had “broken his heart,” I would always disagree. Buck had a very strong heart. You couldn’t break it.

How did Buck change me? I’ve thought about that a lot…do people really change? I know that I watch baseball now with a different, more discerning, more focused eye. I have a strong dislike for radar guns in baseball—Buck said often that you couldn’t measure a pitcher by miles per hour. You have to look for the life in his fastball.

I do not walk by a woman in a red dress without at least nodding hello and remembering a Buck story that I did not include in the book: We were in Minnesota when a woman walked over to ask me a baseball question. It was probably the only time in the many years I knew Buck when a woman walked over to me instead of him. He didn’t like it one bit.

“Careful now,” Buck said to the woman. “He’s got eight kids.”

“You have eight kids?” she asked me.

“Two,” I said.

“Eight kids,” Buck said. “You stay away from him now.”

I hear his voice in my head sometimes. That’s probably the biggest change. One day in August, I figured it out. Our oldest daughter, Elizabeth, was starting her first day of kindergarten. Parents know that this is an emotional day—Buck always used to say that kids remember their first ballgame, but don’t remember their first day of school. I believe that’s right. It’s the parents who remember the first day of school.

Anyway, Elizabeth climbed on the bus, and she looked so tiny, of course, and she walked past the bus driver and sat in the first seat. Through the window, we could only see the top of her head—from her eyes up—and I can tell you what I would have thought before I met Buck. I would have thought about bullies, mean teachers, temptations, and a whole lot of other bad things.

Instead, I heard Buck’s voice in my head. It said: “The world is getting better all the time.”