The Soul of Baseball (3 page)

Fathers do that. My greatest day was not one day, I told Buck. It probably never happened just so. It was a composite. Lightning bugs sparked. Freshly cut grass. Lisa Gottlieb sat in our tree, her canvas Pumas dangling below a hanging branch. Ancient Mrs. Zepkin watered her already soaked garden next door. In the absurdity of memory, I remember not wearing shoes, which is ridiculous, a Mark Twain touch (as is the idea that Lisa Gottlieb sat in our tree and watched). I stood in the far corner of the yard, near the rusted swing set left behind by former homeowners. Night closed in around us. My father threw pop-ups higher and higher against the darkening sky, and he shouted, “Always take a step back first,” and I circled and spun, caught the ball, and fell into the soft, wet grass. He yelled, “Attaboy!” That was my greatest day in baseball. Buck’s face showed no emotion at all when I finished. His eyes were still closed.

“What was your best day?” I asked him. I’d heard him tell it a hundred times. I wanted to know if he was awake.

“Easter Sunday, 1943, Memphis, Tennessee,” he said immediately. He opened his eyes. “I was first baseman for the Kansas City Monarchs then. We were playing the Memphis Red Sox. First time up, I hit a double. Next time I hit a single. Third time up, I hit the ball over the left-field fence for a home run. Fourth time up, I hit a long fly ball to right field. As I ran to first, I yelled, ‘Hit the fence! Hit the fence!’ The…ball…hit…the…fence. It skipped past the outfielder. I ran around the bases. My third-base coach called me home. I could have had an inside-the-park home run. But I stopped at third. You know why?”

“Cycle,” I said.

“I got the cycle. Single, double, triple, home run. That night I was at the hotel relaxing. My friend Dizzy Dismukes comes up to my room and says, ‘Buck, there are some people downstairs I want you to meet.’ They were teachers from the local school. I walked downstairs and walked right up to one of those teachers. I said, ‘My name is Buck O’Neil, what’s yours?’ That was Ora. And we were married for fifty-one years.”

Buck smiled as he always did when the story ended. “That was my greatest day,” he said. “Easter Sunday, 1943. I hit for the cycle, and met my Ora.”

“Your day puts mine to shame,” I said.

“No it doesn’t,” he said. “Hang on to your day. If you hang on to that day, you’ll stay young. Keep it in your heart. And I will keep it in my heart.”

“You’ll keep my best day in your heart?”

“Of course, of course,” he said. “It’s already there. You and your father. All the best days are there.”

W
E WERE IN
New York in summertime. It was Friday afternoon—Buck calls that “the crazy time”—and the city was a frantic mess of car horns, jackhammers, and frustration. People just looked angry. You could see they anticipated the line to the tunnel, cars cutting them off, middle fingers, standstill traffic on a bridge as too many other people tried to escape the drone and drama of the city for the calm of New Jersey, Connecticut, or Long Island. Buck had finished the last of his press interviews. He walked into an elevator going down in the Time-Life Building. A sad young woman stood in the corner. She did not look sad by conventional standards. She had not been crying. No, she looked sad in that distinctively New York City way, the haggard sadness of someone who works in an office too big, pays too much for rent, sleeps in too small a bedroom, and spends too much time getting shoved in and out of a subway car. “There’s nothing like New York lonely,” Buck had told a reporter earlier that day, and that’s how she looked: New York lonely. When Buck O’Neil walked into the elevator, she stared at the ground and tried to make herself small.

He said: “I’m Buck O’Neil, what’s your name?”

She looked away and pretended not to hear, as if Buck had asked for change or promised salvation. Buck would not be ignored.
“I’m Buck O’Neil, what’s your name?”
She glanced up. She looked sadder than before. She spoke softly and said something that sounded like “Swathy.”

“Swathy,” Buck said, “you are a beautiful young lady.”

She met his eyes. The elevator beeped rhythmically as we dropped floor by floor. Buck talked.

“You’re a lucky woman to live in this big city,” he said. “I would have loved to live in New York when I was your age. I know you must be doing very well for yourself.” She stood up straighter and leaned closer to him as he spoke. When the elevator reached the bottom floor, it bucked for a second and Buck stumbled. She reached out to keep him from falling. Then he held out his arms. “Give it up,” he said. Swathy jumped into his arms. She hugged him tight for a long time. Then Swathy bounded out of the elevator and into the city’s rush hour. In a thirty-floor descent, her sad look had evaporated like a rain puddle in Central Park.

B
UCK ALWAYS SAID
the two greatest things in this world are baseball and jazz. Music followed us. Charlie Parker blew his saxophone on the radio. Lionel Hampton played the vibes over the airline headphones. “Listen!” Buck would insist. We listened to a Johnny Cash marathon in western Kansas and a street musician blowing “I Want to Hold Your Hand” in Oakland. Buck danced to 50 Cent in Atlanta, he sang with a gospel quartet in Gary, Indiana, and he sang again with a Hebrew-singing folk group in Kansas City. One warm Saturday afternoon, Buck signed autographs and tapped his toes to Billy Joel’s “My Life,” which played through static over a speaker nearby.

“I like this,” he said.

“Billy Joel isn’t exactly jazz,” I told him.

“It’s all jazz,” he said.

Everywhere we went Buck made people happy. In Minnesota, a woman touched Buck’s hand and cried. “You can’t know what this means to me.” In San Diego, a television cameraman stopped filming an interview and instead breathlessly told Buck stories about baseball games he had seen as a child. In Washington, the actress Lynda Carter—Wonder Woman herself—hugged Buck and told him baseball stories. She had never met him before, but she said: “I don’t know what it is, but there’s something wonderful about you.”

To which Buck said: “Good black don’t crack.” He always said that.

And then, sometimes, he improvised. It’s all jazz. Once, in the San Diego airport, while a Muzak version of “Hey Ya!” played, two young lovers kissed on the concourse. They locked together like it was V-J Day in Times Square. People rushed by. Some muttered. Some glanced. Buck walked right over to the couple, and he tapped the young man on the shoulder. Nothing. Buck tapped the shoulder again and the couple disengaged. The young man looked bewildered and dimly angry, as if he had been awoken from a dream. He saw an old man, and he gave Buck his fiercest look, and he prepared to be lectured.

“You must really like her,” Buck said.

The lovers looked stunned for a minute. They looked at each other. What did he say? What did he mean? They looked back at Buck, who waited for the words to sink in. Then they broke out laughing.

Buck, satisfied, walked to the exit.

“Who is that?” the woman asked. I told her it was Buck O’Neil. She watched him closely as he stepped on the escalator and dropped out of sight. “He’s a great man,” she said. “I can just tell.”

W
E WERE IN
Washington in autumn. This was close to the end of the trip. We were in a car again, and rain was falling. Buck talked about 1937, when he played baseball in a grass skirt. Buck played for a team called the Zulu Cannibal Giants. Buck almost never talked about the Zulus. He did not talk often about unhappy things like the owners of the Negro Leagues who didn’t have the money to pay their bills, or the stale sandwiches the players had to eat when restaurants refused to serve them, or the bumpy bus rides to little towns that did not want them.

This day, though, he remembered the Zulus. That was a novelty team in the Amos ’n’ Andy 1930s—it was half baseball team, half minstrel show. The players dressed in grass skirts, painted their faces, and used bats that were supposed to resemble clubs. Before the games, the players danced in a way the white crowd was supposed to accept as indigenous to Africa. Buck joined the team when he was twenty-five and money was tight. Even now, when he talked about the Zulus, he insisted that he did not dance. The team owner, Charlie Henry, did give Buck a vaguely African-sounding name he long ago shoved into the blank recesses of memory. Buck did play first base in a grass skirt. He remembered that. “We would do anything to play ball,” Buck said as the car splashed through the Washington streets. While he spoke, Buck looked out the window, through the rain. In the distance, he could see the top of the Capitol Building rise above the trees. This was why he was talking about the Zulus. This memory was about America.

“We had become conditioned to racism,” Buck said. “Hatred will steal your heart, man. You don’t have any fight left in you. You accept what’s around you. That’s what this country was like. We thought it would change someday. We just waited for it to change.”

Only he did not say it quite like that. He said it like this:

 

Hatred will steal your heart.

Don’t have any fight left.

Accept what’s around you.

That’s what this country was like.

Thought it would change someday.

Waited for it to change.

 

By then I knew what this book would be about. It would be about Buck O’Neil. It would not be a biography. He had written an autobiography already, a good one called
I Was Right on Time
. In it, Buck tells some of his wonderful stories about life, his childhood in Florida, his early days spent romping around America looking for a place where a black man could play ball. Then he talks about his baseball life, his days as a player, manager, coach, scout, spokesman, and all the rest.

But there’s something he did not put in the book, something he couldn’t. I traveled around America with Buck O’Neil, and after spending all that time with him, I understood better what he meant when he said: “Nobody has written a book about what the Negro Leagues were really like.” I think he meant: Nobody had written a book that saw the Negro Leagues and baseball and life through his eyes. When I looked at baseball as a middle-aged sportswriter, I could not help but see steroid hearings and high salaries and expensive tickets and mounting arrogance and an Ayn Rand sensibility that tilts the game to the rich and powerful and the Yankees and leaves the poorest teams, like Buck’s beloved Kansas City Royals, standing in the cold with their noses pressed against windows. I couldn’t help but believe that in some ways baseball and life used to be better.

We were in Oakland, or maybe it was Dallas or Phoenix, and it was winter. A television reporter asked Buck about the way things used to be. Only she did not exactly ask. No, more like: She told him how things used to be. The players cared more. The game had more heart. People had more passion. The reporter was no older than thirty-five, but she seemed quite certain that everything was better once, long ago, and especially baseball.

“The players used to play for the love of the game and not for money—you know, in your day,” she told him. Buck had an amused look on his face. There’s no guessing how many times, on our road trip, someone told Buck about “his day.” I wondered: What did they know about his day? They knew nothing about riding from one dot on the map to the next—one town named for a former president to one named for an old explorer—and playing baseball on dusty infields against furious dreamers on town teams. They were not there when Buck worked for the post office during the winters, and when he stepped outside for his five-minute break, he would smoke a cigarette, close his eyes against the chill, and think of sun and grass and spring training. And yet Buck never stopped them. He gently corrected them.

“Believe me, we could have used more money,” Buck told the reporter.

She did not seem to hear him. People rarely do. Instead she began to talk about her wonderful experience as a young baseball fan. She talked about the feeling of those days when her father took her to spring training games in Florida. She remembered every detail: a hint of orange drifted through the air. The uniforms glowed white. Bats cracked, baseballs skittered through the grass, people shouted, and it was magical.

“I remember catching batting-practice home runs,” she said. “That was when baseball was still baseball.”

“I don’t mean to interrupt,” Buck O’Neil said, “but baseball is still baseball.”

S
now melted into puddles on the sidewalks outside. The greatest living ballplayer stood in the darkened entry-way of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum on the corner of Eighteenth and Vine in Kansas City. Willie Mays wore a thick, shiny San Francisco Giants baseball coat, though it was warm inside, and his face glistened with sweat. He stared through chicken wire at a carpeted baseball field in the center of the museum. He would not go to the field. The lights were too bright. “My eyes,” Willie Mays said. “My eyes can’t take the glare.”

The greatest living ballplayer studied the field. There were bases and a scoreboard, and ten bronze statues appeared to be playing a game. Mays tried to guess the names of the statues. He suspected that Satchel Paige had to be pitching and Josh Gibson was the catcher. He guessed that Oscar Charleston’s statue roamed center field. Mays had heard all his life about Oscar Charleston. Some of the old-timers who had watched Negro Leagues baseball through the Jazz Age and the Depression said Oscar Charleston—“the Hoosier Comet,” they called him—was the best to ever play the game of baseball. When Willie Mays was young—years before he played center field in the Polo Grounds and stickball in Harlem, years before he made catches that appeared like optical illusions and hit 660 home runs in the Major Leagues—he played for the Birmingham Black Barons in the Negro Leagues. It was 1948. The old men in the stands watched him close. They argued among themselves. And they decided that Willie Mays could be the next Oscar Charleston.

“How good was Oscar Charleston, Buck?” Mays asked the old man standing next to him.

“He was you before you,” Buck O’Neil said.

Mays nodded as if he had heard that before, and he looked again through the chicken wire at the bronze statues of mostly forgotten men who had played baseball in the Negro Leagues. They had played in a time when black men were banned from the Major Leagues. Segregation was an unwritten rule and mostly unspoken. Every so often some group like the American Communist Party or some rogue reporter would inconveniently ask the question: Why are there no black men in the Major Leagues? At first, the answer went that black men were not good enough players. But these black players consistently beat teams made up of Major Leaguers in exhibition games, and the answer changed. Black players, in the revised explanation, were not smart enough to play in the big leagues or dedicated enough or disciplined enough. That held off the revolution until the Brooklyn Dodgers signed Jackie Robinson, and he broke through in 1947. Willie Mays reached the Major Leagues four years later.

Mays scanned the museum baseball field again and guessed that one of the outfielders had to be Cool Papa Bell. When Negro League players got together they always played the “Cool Papa Bell was so fast…” game. The game would start with someone saying something improbable like “Cool Papa Bell was so fast, he once scored from first base on a bunt.” The next player would top him. “Cool Papa Bell was so fast, he once hit a line drive over a pitcher’s head and got hit with the ball as he slid into second base.” And finally someone (usually Buck) would say: “Cool Papa Bell was so fast, he could turn out the lights, get undressed, and be under the covers before the room got dark.”

Mays pointed to first base. He guessed that was Buck Leonard. Buck nodded.

“You know what they used to say about Buck Leonard?” Buck asked. “Sneaking a fastball by him was like…”

“…sneaking sunrise past a rooster,” Mays said softly, as if repeating a nursery rhyme he had not heard in a long time.

Mays pointed to the statue at third base and said “Ray.” That was Ray Dandridge, the one player on the field Mays had played with. That was in 1951, for a Minor League team called the Minneapolis Millers. Mays was a twenty-year-old kid and by then people in the Major Leagues saw his greatness. Mays played for the Minneapolis Millers for only a few weeks. He hit .477 in that time. Mays was bought by the New York Giants. Mays had grown so popular in Minnesota that New York Giants owner Horace Stoneham bought advertisements in the local newspapers apologizing to baseball fans for taking Mays away.

Dandridge was popular in Minneapolis too, but for different reasons. He was an aging legend. He had played for years in the Negro Leagues and in Cuba and Mexico, and he hit the ball well, but people bought their tickets just to watch him field. They called him “Hooks” because he caught baseballs as if they had hooks on them. He played third base with the grace of a dancer—he lunged and leaped and dove for anything hit near him, and he always seemed to throw out the hitter by a half step. Hooks was thirty-eight when he played in Minneapolis, and he badly wanted his chance to play in the Major Leagues. He could still hit, and of course he could still field, but the Giants had no need for an ancient third baseman and they never bought his contract. The next year, Dandridge played baseball in Oakland, but by then the fastball had passed him by. Dandridge went home to Newark and became a bartender.

“Dandridge helped me become the player I became,” Mays said, and then his voice took on an uneasy edge. He had just remembered a television show he had seen. He did not know the name of the show, but on it people brought old stuff they had found around the house, and showed it to antiques experts who would give them a brief history and then estimate the value.
Antiques Roadshow,
Buck said. Mays nodded. He said that on the show some guy had brought in an old Minneapolis Millers jersey. He found it at a church bazaar and bought it for a few bucks. The guy discovered the jersey had once belonged to Willie Mays. The
Antiques Roadshow
appraiser estimated the jersey was worth a lot of money.

“My jersey is selling for eighty thousand dollars,” Mays said, biting off each word. That amount had special meaning—in 1959, the year after he had hit .347, won the Gold Glove for fielding excellence, and led the league in stolen bases and runs scored, Mays finally got a contract for $80,000. He had worked so hard just to reach that magical number. He had played Major League baseball like no man before him. He led the league in home runs, and he led the league in stolen bases. He also chased down fly balls nobody else could reach and threw out base runners from just about every spot in center field. In those days, though, owners had all the control; this was long before free agency and arbitration and all that. Owners decided how much to pay a player and there wasn’t much any player—not even Willie Mays—could do about it. The Giants paid Mays $80,000 in 1959, and they expected him to be happy about it.

Mays turned away from Buck, he turned away from the photographer who kept snapping pictures of him, he turned away from the field. Mays glared at the wall. His teeth clenched, and his fists jammed hard in his coat pockets. A few minutes before, when Mays was lecturing a photographer for taking too many pictures, Buck had whispered: “Careful around Willie, now. He has a lot of sadness and pain in him.”

“Why is that, Buck?”

“Hard being everybody’s hero, I suppose,” he said.

Willie Mays put on a different pair of glasses and turned back to the chicken wire and the field, but he had lost interest in the guessing game. He leaned on something hard and pointed at the statues. “They’re all dead,” he said, and it was difficult to tell if he meant this as a question or a eulogy. Buck said, “All are dead but the one you’re leaning on.”

Mays backed away and realized he had been leaning on a statue of Buck O’Neil. This was Buck as manager of the Kansas City Monarchs. The figure leaned in toward the field, his right hand resting on his hip, left arm folded across his knee. There was a stern look on the statue’s face, as if someone on his team had just done something stupid. It’s easy to imagine that a shortstop just let a ball go through his legs.

“Looks like you’re mad,” Mays said.

“I’d get like that sometimes,” Buck said.

“Funny, this is exactly how I remember you, Buck.”

“Yeah?” Buck said. “And I remember you in center field running like crazy after fly balls. Your hat would fly off. Yeah! Willie Mays running down a ball in center field, nothing in the world like it. That’s what I remember.”

“That was a long time ago, Buck.”

“It was all a long time ago, Willie.”

The tour group had made it all the way around the museum, and the people walked onto the field. They touched the statues. The tour group had been put together specifically for Willie Mays, but he had seen the bright lights and waved them on ahead. He watched them through the chicken wire. He talked about how much money baseball players made today—“What is it now, twenty million a year? Thirty million?”—and what? “I don’t have to say it, do I?” Mays said, and he did not have to say it—these players could not run with Mays or hit with him or catch with him or throw with him. Some of these players were great, but the mediocrities got paid a lot of money too, more money in a week than Mays had made in a year. Then Mays said he was not bitter about the money, exactly. It was something else.

“We had fun, Willie,” Buck said.

“Yeah, we had fun, I guess.”

Buck tried to get Mays to talk about some of the games, some of the players, but Willie Mays had the blues, and he did not speak much. Mays said his eyes hurt. “Glaucoma,” he explained. He changed glasses again. “I’d like to go around the museum, Buck,” he said, an apology, “but I’ve got to get my eyes right.”

Buck nodded. Mays leaned toward the exit. Buck would say in that moment he looked at Willie Mays and remembered watching a game long ago, Buck could not remember where. He saw a ball hit hard, a line drive into the gap between left field and center. He thought:
Well, there’s a double
. He looked down at his scorecard to mark it, and then he remembered that Willie Mays was playing center field. So his eyes flipped up and he watched Willie Mays run. Mays was not a graceful runner like Joe DiMaggio or Ken Griffey Jr. or Carlos Beltrán. No, Mays ran with energy and delight, all arms and legs, a child chugging through the sprinklers on a warm summer day. When he was right, Buck said, Mays could outrun his shadow. “There were men faster than Willie Mays,” Buck said. “But I never saw one faster with a fly ball in the air.”

In this memory, Buck watched Mays run after the ball, run and run, close the gap, his hat flew off, he dove, and then…the ball fell just out of the reach of his glove. It skipped away, to the fence, and it was a triple, and on that day Buck knew that winter had come for Willie Mays.

 

One day it happens

Can’t catch up with the fastball

Can’t run faster than fly balls

You might lie to yourself for a while

But you can’t lie forever

Gotta start a new life

No cheering

No crowds

No teammates patting you on the back

A little piece of you dies.

 

Mays stood by the door. He looked back on the field one more time. “You know I really don’t need to see the museum,” he told Buck. “I lived it.” Buck said, “Yes you did, Willie. You really lived.” And then Willie Mays walked out into the sleet and cold. Someone held an umbrella over his head until he stepped into the car. A few hours later, a close friend of Mays’s called and said Willie cried the entire ride back to the hotel. The friend said he rode the elevator up with Mays and walked him to his room, and when they said good-bye and the door closed, Willie Mays was still crying.