I’ve got a piece in the Scorecard section of Sports Illustrated this week on “21,” the fantastic new graphic biography of Roberto Clemente.

Deadspin has a cool excerpt…

This one is a keeper and the ideal companion to David Maraniss’ definitive biography, “Clemente.”

I don’t remember the first time I met Dayn Perry but it must have been about five years ago now. This was back when he was writing for Baseball Prospectus in addition to Fox Sports. We hit it off immediately and have remained pals ever since. Dayn’s got that easy Southern charm that makes for wonderful company. When he told me that he was writing a book about my boyhood hero Reggie Jackson I was more than somewhat eager to see what he’d come up with. We spoke about Reggie and the writing process often while he was working on the book and Dayn went so far as to mention me in the acknowledgements.

The book, Reggie Jackson: The Life and Thunderous Career of Baseball’s Mr. October, drops today. Dayn and I caught up recently to chat about all things Reggie and what it was like writing a biography.

Dig:

Bronx Banter: There are two big biographies out this spring, one of Willie Mays and the other on Hank Aaron. Both books are well over 500 pages and aim to be the definitive work on their subjects. Your book is leaner at 300 pages. What was behind your thinking in making this a trimmer rather than an exhaustive narrative?

Dayn Perry: Part of it was that the publisher wanted me to stay as close as possible to 100,000 words. The initial manuscript I submitted was about 20,000 words longer than the final product, so I undertook some heavy editing toward the end of the process. On another level, though, I wanted a brisk, readable book that included all the important events in Reggie’s life and aspects of his character. My hope is that we’ve achieved that.

BB: You wrote this book without Reggie’s participation. Was that because he didn’t want to talk with you?

DP: On a couple of occasions, I spoke with Reggie’s business manager and requested an interview, but I never received a response. My understanding is that he didn’t want his cooperation to detract from the book he was working on at the time with Bob Gibson and Lonnie Wheeler. That’s understandable, of course.

BB: What, if any, obstacles did it present?

DP: It made it easier because I much enjoy the solitary aspect of writing, and the more of that I’m allowed the better my work is going to be. I still conducted 50 or so interviews for the book, and they made it a better work, I think. But I think of myself more as a writer than a reporter, so the nuts-and-bolts writing–the craft aspect–is the most fulfilling part of the job. Also, I think cooperation with the subject can sometimes lead to a varnishing or leavening of the work, even if it happens unconsciously. Obviously, I had no such concerns. It’s an honest, fact-based account, but I didn’t have to worry about satisfying him at every turn.

BB: Did Reggie prevent anyone from speaking to you?

DP: Not to my knowledge. A number of former teammates of his declined to speak with me once they learned Reggie wasn’t cooperating with the project, but so far as I know he didn’t actively work to undermine my efforts.

BB: There has been so much written about Reggie, particularly during his years in New York. What does your book offer that is new?

DP: My book sheds new light on the Mets’ decision not to draft him and covers his Angels years and retirement for the first time. Some people are going to be familiar with his Oakland years, and even more people are going to be familiar with his New York years. But so much of that time is forgotten or neglected by history. I think the totality of his life–the scope of his life–is something most people haven’t grasped yet.

BB: Other than reading about Reggie were there any biographies–sports bios or any bios for that matter–that you read before you started writing? Were there any that had a particular impact on you?

DP: I love “Clemente” by David Maraniss, which captured what a complicated figure Clemente was. “The Power Broker” by Robert Caro, although it doesn’t deal with sports, remains one of the five or so best books I’ve ever read. It’s been just a few years since I read it, so it’s still with me. “Luckiest Man” was another recent bio that made an impression in its simple elegance and graceful treatment of its subject.

BB: How was Reggie different from the other black stars of the ‘60s like Jim Brown, Kareem and Bill Russell?

DP: I’d say his swagger on the field. All of those men were pioneers and intellects, and all were great at their chosen sports. But Reggie, with those home run trots and his unimaginable candor with the media, seems a breed apart in comparison. I’d attribute those differences to Brown’s and Russell’s being of a prior generation and Kareem’s being a more muted personality.

BB: The other thing that seems to be different from Reggie and those other ‘60s guys is that Reggie wasn’t a Black Power guy, or overtly political. And yet, his attitude on the field was a political thing in a way. I know he was raised in a predominantly white community. Can you talk about his relationship with race?

DP: Reggie had an incredibly complicated relationship with race, and in the full light of his early life that’s understandable. He grew up around whites, and it’s clear that he prefers to surround himself with whites to this day. Still, he made a difference in terms of race. I interviewed Dr. Harry Edwards early in the process, and he told me something to the effect of, “Reggie wasn’t a guy you’d call on to march on the front lines, but he had immense credibility in the black community because he didn’t take any shit. He was a bad dude.” That’s true, I think. Reggie was at times cynical when it came to race (i.e., he would wield it when it was beneficial to him), but he was uncompromising. That made him a powerful figure. He at once uplifted and liberated black ballplayers to be themselves and break from the old passive models, but Reggie wasn’t on a mission of conscience. He did it because that’s who he was.

BB: What it was like for you, a white southerner, to write about race?

DP: I was born and raised in Mississippi and lived there until I was 29 years old. Any white Southerner who’s honest and morally centered will admit there’s much to be ashamed of in the past. You can’t be from the South and read about Bull Connor or Ross Barnett or George Wallace or Strom Thurmond or Byron De LaBeckwith and not feel a sense of lacerating regret. As for how my upbringing informed my work in this book, it’s a bit painful for me to observe Reggie’s occasionally self-serving use of race. I’d ask myself: who the hell am I to be commenting upon this? But the facts demanded it, I think. It’s not a character judgment, though. My parents have been married more than 50 years, and I grew up in a stable middle-class home as part of the majority population. Give me an upbringing like Reggie’s–racially isolated, broken home, erratic male role models, money and fame at an early age–and I’m sure I’d be far more outrageous and maladjusted than he is even in his worst moments. I tell some uncomfortable truths about him in this book, but it’s not because I think I’m somehow a better man.

BB: Was there anything you learned about Reggie that surprised you?

DP: Going in, I didn’t remember much about his season in Baltimore. I also didn’t realize just how dysfunctional his time in Oakland and New York really was. On a more internal level, I was surprised that his need for acceptance so often conflicted with his tendency to cling to affronts. His personality was even more complicated than I realized.

BB: I know the Orioles fans gave Reggie a hard time because he held out for the start of the ’76 season and then had a slow start. But he played well one he got it going. What was the relationship like between Reggie and Earl Weaver?

DP: Strained, I’d say, but nothing like the relationship he’d have with Martin. Reggie obviously wasn’t in the proper state of mind when he arrived in Baltimore. He was mourning his departure from Oakland, and he envied those who had cashed in during the early days of free agency. A number of his new teammates–Jim Palmer, in particular–seemed to blame Reggie for not reporting on time. I think it was a lonely time for Reggie, and Weaver was never one to coddle and tend to emotions.

BB: Weaver was as volatile as Billy Martin in some ways, though he wasn’t as emotionally unstable in his personal life–at least from what I can tell. How were Weaver and Martin different in terms of how they treated Reggie?

DP: Weaver understood Reggie’s game better than Martin did. Weaver, of course, cherished the three-run homer and generally didn’t worry about bunting ability or high strikeout totals. In those ways, he was well suited to manage a player like Reggie. Martin, though, was tactically involved and didn’t always appreciate Reggie’s “feast or famine” approach. “Billy Ball” and all that. As well, Weaver wanted Reggie on his team, and Martin manifestly did not. In many ways, Martin resented Reggie before he even put on the Yankee uniform.

BB: Did you come away from this experience liking him? Or did your opinion change about him?

DP: It’s strange–like or dislike isn’t something I think about with regard to Reggie. I feel I understand him and recognize there are reasons for his outrageous moments. I admire many things about him and–I’ll use the word again–understand the things I don’t like about him.

BB: I could be wrong here, coming from New York, but it seems that Reggie is best remembered as a Yankee even though he spent less than half of his career here. Can you think of any other athlete that is associated with a team that he didn’t spend that much time with?

DP: I think you’re right, and that’s an interesting question. Mark McGwire with the Cardinals comes immediately to mind. Patrick Roy and the Avalanche? Fred McGriff as a Brave? Moses Malone as a 76er? Maybe Garnett as a Celtic by the time he’s done?

BB: When Reggie got to New York, he wasn’t a great fielder, and Billy Martin hated him for his flaws. Talk about Reggie’s game when he was on the A’s. What was he like as a younger player?

DP: I think a lot of people our age remember Reggie as the fairly one-dimensional guy he was in New York and beyond. But in his Oakland days he was a true five-tool player who spent a lot of time in center field, ran the bases well, and threw like a cannon. That’s of course to say nothing of his hitting. He’s not a Matt Stairs. Reggie was an athlete. He was a heavily recruited high school football player (despite once breaking his neck on the field), and a number of big-time schools in the South were willing to integrate their programs for him.

BB: You mentioned the classic Welch encounter. Was there any star of this time–or even of any other eras–that was equally as thrilling in defeat as he was when he succeeded?

DP: This is a great question. For some reason, pitchers are coming to mind. Juan Marichal in Reggie’s day? The crazy leg kick, the fastball, his willingness to brush back hitters. In Reggie you had those violent swings and corkscrew strikeouts. In terms of personality during failure, maybe Pedro? Remember when Pedro cracked that smile after getting knocked out against the Yankees last World Series? That’s the kind of bravado and zeal, even in failure, that Reggie had. In other sports, maybe Brett Favre?

BB: What have been Reggie’s post-career highlights for you? I think it’s amusing that he’s become this elder statesman of calm and reason, especially counseling Alex Rodriguez.

DP: I’d say his dogged pursuit of ownership. This is the guy who tried to buy the A’s while he still played for them, so it’s impressive that he adhered to that goal for so long. It’s also telling that his relationship with Steinbrenner, even in retirement, remained so complicated. As for his “voice of reason” role, that’s in part why the A’s brought him back for the ’87 season, so it’s natural that he would go on to counsel players who seemed uncomfortable with the glare.

BB: This is your second book but your first biography. How different was this book from your first one?

DP: First and foremost, I actually like this book. My first book was a “get your foot in the door” sort of project that was brought to me. It was statistically oriented, and while I’m a bit of stat geek at heart I was out of my element to an extent. This project was much more gratifying, and I think the book reflects that. This is the kind of project I always wanted to undertake.

BB: You mentioned that the book was significantly longer in your first draft. What did you cut? Or, more to the point, did you ever find in your research that you had too much information? Did you ever feel a prisoner of the research?

DP: A lot of what I cut was the “throat clearing” kind of prose that tends to pop up in chapter beginnings while I’m in the early drafting process. Basically, I made sure I got straight to the point when I started a new chapter. My editor also wanted me to get to his baseball career as quickly as possible, so I cut a number of scenes from his early life and college years that turned out to be not so illuminating. Cutting can be painful for a writer–I certainly don’t need to tell you this–but it’s always good to make a work leaner and a bit less gilded. “Kill your darlings,” as Faulkner once said. As for overload, yes, when you’re poring through years and years of game stories it’s easy to get caught up in the mindset of wanting to include every single cool or striking thing that happened on the field. At same time, you want a balance of the familiar–Game 6 of the ’77 World Series and the ’71 All-Star Game, for instance–and the games that, while they typified him in some way, aren’t as widely remembered. That was a challenge, but for a baseball fan it was also a hell of a lot of fun.

BB: By the time you got to the editing stage, did you feel any sense of remove from your earlier drafts, which made it easier to kill your darlings? I mean, did you get to a point where you weren’t necessarily attached to stuff and just focused on doing whatever you could do to tell the story?

DP: Yeah, definitely. You’re a writer, and you know how important it is to have some kind of remove from your work. Let it sit for a while, re-read it, and things will jump out at you that didn’t in previous readings. Give yourself enough time, and you’ll realize what belongs and what doesn’t. That’s what I believe, anyway. That break between early draft and serious revision is essential to the writing process. It’s almost as though you grow a new pair of eyes and ears during that time. Things need to strike the ear as though you’ve never heard them before.

BB: Are you going to continue writing biographies?

DP: This book, since it’s driven by a narrative, was much more enjoyable for me to write than the first one. I have no interest in doing anything of a statistical nature again, at least as book-length projects go. I’d love to explore an individual season and how the teams in question overlay changes in society at large. That’s a vague summary of what I hope turns out to be my next project. Otherwise, I’ve had an urge to start writing bad poetry again, but I won’t inflict that upon anyone.

BB: Are there any other sports that you’d like to write about or do you see yourself mostly attracted to baseball?

DP: Baseball is far and away my favorite sport–my favorite human endeavor, in many ways–so nothing will engage me like writing about baseball. With that said, I’m open to exploring other sports through a historical scrim. I’m fascinated by the 1972 summer Olympics and by Mississippi high-school football, for instance. For me, though, there’s nothing like baseball. I don’t know what I’d do without it.

BB: Other than bad poetry, has there been anything outside of baseball that you’d like to write about?

DP: If I had the talent and standing, I’d imitate Mark Kurlansky’s career and write books about almost anything that struck me. Dogs, Chicago, a bio of Robert Pollard, gang culture, stories of people suffering from ALS … it’s a long list. Chances are, though, anything I write will at least be tinged with baseball.

BB: Ever thought about writing a memoir?

DP: I have not. I haven’t had anything like a traumatic existence. There’d be too little conflict. I really don’t know what anyone would learn from reading about my life. I would, however, like to write something about my paternal grandparents. My grandfather was a bootlegger in Etowah County, Alabama, and the local draft board thought him such a bad seed that they conscripted him into WWII at the age of 30 and with six young children at home. He saw a lot of combat in the Pacific Theater. My grandmother, meanwhile, was one of the toughest women I’ve ever known. She was bitten by rattlesnake once, she punched out a rich lady who lived down the road from her, she took up smoking in her 60s after her teeth rotted out from too much snuff. Things like that. It took a certain kind of woman to marry a bootlegger, after all. Their lives were much more interesting than mine.

BB: Coming from the South, are you self-conscious of the great literary tradition and style down there? Especially being from Mississippi, home of the great Faulkner and all.

DP: Definitely. It’s said that more people in Mississippi can write than read. It’s a point of pride for a state that doesn’t have much else going for it. I was never much of a Faulkner devotee–he’s too florid for me–but I certainly appreciate his importance. Barry Hannah, who died recently, went to my alma mater and served as something of a model during my college years. Richard Ford remains a favorite. James Whitehead’s poem titles are the greatest ever. Eudora Welty lived a few streets north of me when I lived for years in the Belhaven neighborhood of Jackson, Mississippi. She was a bit of a recluse and later an invalid, so I never saw her in person.

BB: You once told me about knowing Willie Morris a little bit. What was it like rubbing elbows with him?

DP: I also worked at a great Indy bookstore in Jackson called Lemuria, and all kinds of writers would drop by. Willie Morris was one of those. He was full of life. One night, some of us ended up back at his house drinking and listening to all these different versions of “Danny Boy” on his stereo. He was a very nice, very grounded man in person and a fool for a good time. Another time, I dropped some books off at his house to sign, and his wife showed me his workspace. It was, as I recall, two picnic tables placed end to end and all these handwritten pages spread all over the place. She told me it was for a “Vanity Fair” piece. It seemed a very chaotic way to work, but there’s no doubting his final products. My aunt, who was from Willie’s hometown of Yazoo City and knew his family, once told me, “Willie was a good boy, but he broke his mama’s heart when he went off to New York.” Anyhow, the Mississippi literary tradition means a lot to me, and I’m honored to be a microscopically small part of it.

Good long piece by Hillel Italie in the Huffington Post on Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, and cooperative biogrpahies:

“Before I got to Aaron, the best advice I got was from David Halberstam, who wrote a book on Michael Jordan without getting Jordan and a book about Bill Clinton without getting Clinton,” [Howard] Bryant said of the late Pulitzer Prize-winning author and journalist.

“He said to me, `The strategy was very simple – for every day they didn’t talk to me, make three phone calls to other people.’ You have to work around obstacles. It was the best piece of advice anyone’s given me.”

After Bonds overtook Aaron, in 2007, Aaron opened up to Bryant.

“When Henry and I finally spoke, he was tremendous, he was unbelievably gracious,” Bryant said. “He was even somewhat embarrassed someone was taking an interest. He didn’t ask for any money. He didn’t ask for any review copy of the book. He could have made the one phone call that every author dreads – which is to call all of his people and say, `Hey, this guy is writing a book about me. Don’t talk to him.’”

Earlier this week, Allen Barra gave his take on Bryant’s book:

Just when it seemed as if all the great baseball subjects had been done, Howard Bryant checks in with this biography of Henry Aaron, which, amazingly, Mr. Aaron had to wait 34 years to get.

Mr. Bryant, author of “Shutout,” the definitive study of race in baseball, and “Juicing the Game: Drugs, Power and the Fight for the Soul of Major League Baseball,” is a great writer for a great subject. Mr. Aaron’s story is the epic baseball tale of the second half of the 20th century, in many ways the equal to Jackie Robinson’s.

And in the Village Voice, Barra praises Bryant’s frank handling of the relationship between Aaron and Mays:

Bryant argues that “so much of the relationship between Mays and Aaron was perceived, often rightly, as tense if not acrimonious, stemmed from their personalities — the self-centered Mays and the diplomatic Aaron.”

There’s no doubt, says Bryant, that “Mays exemplified the rare combination of physical, athletic genius, and a showman’s gift for timing. What went less reported and, as the years passed, became an uncomfortable, common lament was just how cruel and self-absorbed Mays could be.”

…Bryant cites a first-hand account from 1957, a United Press/Movietone News reporter named Reese Schoenfeld, that Mays ragged on Aaron from the sidelines while Henry was being interviewed in front of a TV camera: “How much they paying you, Hank? They ain’t payin’ you at all, Hank? Don’t you know we all get paid for this? You ruin it for the rest of us, Hank! You just fall off the turnip truck?”

While Aaron became more and more agitated, Mays laid it on thick: “You showin’ ‘em how you swing? We get paid three to four hundred dollars for this. You one dumb nigger!”

According to Bryant, “Henry’s reaction for the next fifty years — to diffuse, while not forgetting, the original offense — would be consistent with the shrewd but stern way Henry Aaron dealt with uncomfortable issues. The world did not need to know Henry’s feelings towards Mays, but Henry was not fooled by his adversary. Mays committed one of the great offenses against a person as proud as Henry: he insulted him, embarrassed him in front of other people, and did not treat him with respect.”

Say Hey: fight, fight!

One last thing about the Aaron book that’s interesting to me is that it was written by a black man. So many sports biographies of black and Latin players, from David Maraniss and Larry Tye, to James Hirsch and Brad Snyder, are written by white guys. That’s not a knock just a fact. And it’s not to say that race is enough to judge the merit of the final product. Reporting and writing is what makes a great book no matter if the author is white or black, man or woman. Bryant wasn’t magically granted access to Aaron’s inner circle because he’s black, he did so because he’s an ace reporter who has paid his dues.

Still, I can’t help but wonder what kind of sensitivity and empathy he brings to the subject that a white writer might not. For instance, when I was writing about Curt Flood, I had to imagine what it was like to be a black kid playing ball in the deep south in the mid-1950s. I was earnest, no doubt, but it was largely an intellectual excercise, one where, through reporting and research, I attempted to intuite something beyond my experience. That’s a distance Bryant doesn’t have to cover. It doesn’t necessarily mean his writing will be better, but it’s sure to be palpably different.

Moreover, I think great biographies often tell the story of the subject and in some way, even if it is largely subconscious, the story of the author as well. My Flood book was no great biography, it was a first book, but when I look back on it, I see that I was drawn to it for several personal reasons too. The first was to learn more about Flood (and to learn how to write a book) and share his story with a YA audience.  But I think my attraction to him had everything to do with my relationship with my father. Flood was talented and troubled, alcoholic. My need to find out more about him, to appreciate his accomplishments, and forgive his failings, was directly related to how I felt about my Old Man.

[The Tortoise and the Hare picture by Esoule]

“Clemente,” the new book by pulitizer prize-winning author, David Maraniss, hits the shelves today. It is a fine appreciation of Roberto Clemente, who is undoubtedly one of the most charasmatic players of the post-War era. Although Clemente was a key member of two World Championship teams, he played in relative obscurity in Pittsburgh during the 1950s and ’60s, and was overlooked for his much of his career. Until, of course, his monumental performance in the 1971 Serious, and his untimely death in December of 1972. His legend and reputation have grown ever since.

As my pal Steve Treder put it to me in an e-mail recently:

Clemente was actually slightly underrated until the late ’60s, and especially during the 1971 World Series when he suddenly got noticed by the national media. At that point they all suddenly seemed to think he was better than he actually was, after years of being overlooked. His early tragic death soon afterward froze his image in time. Had he lived, and had a few years of decline phase at the end of his career, his reputation probably would have balanced out about right. As it is, many casual fans seem to think he was the equal of Mays/Aaron/Robinson/Mantle, when in fact he wasn’t nearly as good as any of them.

It is no insult to say that Clemente wasn’t as great as Mays, Aaron, Robinson or Mantle. They are all legends. Fortunately for Maraniss, off-the-field, Clemente was more interesting than most. And between the lines, Maraniss points out, Clemente had a terrific, inimitable style.

There was something about Clemente that surpassed statistics, then and always. Some baseball mavens love the sport precisely because of its numbers. They can take the mathematics of a box score and of a year’s worth of statistics and calculate the case for players they consider underrated or overrated and declare who has the most real value to a team. To some skilled practitioners of this science, Clemente comes out very good but not the greatest; he walks too seldom, has too few home runs, steals too few bases. Their perspective is legitimate, but to people who appreciate Clemente this is like chemists trying to explain Van Gogh by analyzing the ingredients of his paint. Clemente was art, not science. Every time he strolled slowly to the batter’s box or trotted out to right field, he seized the scene like a great actor. It was hard to take one’s eyes off him, because he could do anything on a baseball field and carried himself with such nobility. “The rest of us were just players,” Steve Blass would say. “Clemente was a prince.”

Thanks to Mr. Maraniss and the good people at Simon and Schuster, here is an excerpt from “Clemente.” This section is less about Clemente specifically and more about the conditions that Black and latin players encountered in the early 1960s. But it establishes the backdrop that is essential to understanding Clemente’s story. Enjoy!

BOOK EXCERPT: From “Clemente”

By David Maraniss

“Pride and Prejudice”

[Clemente] arrived at Pirates camp to train for the 1961 season on March 2, a day late. He and Tite Arroyo had been delayed entry from Puerto Rico to Florida until tests came back proving they did not have the bubonic plague, a few cases of which had broken out in Venezuela during the tournament.

On the day he reached Fort Myers, free from the plague, a story ran on the front page of the New York Times under the headline: NEGROES SAY CONDITIONS IN U.S. EXPLAIN NATIONALIST’S MILITANCY. One of the key figures quoted in the story was Malcolm X, the Black Muslim leader, who in the Times account was referred to as Minister Malcolm. Interviewed at a Muslim-run restaurant on Lenox Avenue in Harlem, Malcolm X said the only answer to America’s racial dilemma was for blacks to segregate themselves, by their own choice, with their own land and financial reparations due them from centuries of slavery. He dismissed the tactics of the civil rights movement as humiliating, especially the lunch-counter sit-ins that were taking place throughout the South. “To beg a white man to let you into his restaurant feeds his ego,” Minister Malcolm told the newspaper.

This was fourteen years after Jackie Robinson broke the major league color line, seven years after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the separate-but-equal doctrine of segregated schools, five years after Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. led the bus boycott in Montgomery, four years after the Little Rock Nine desegregated Central High School in the capital of Arkansas, one year after the first lunch-counter sit-in in Greensboro. Year by year, the issue of race was becoming more urgent. The momentum was on the side of change, but the questions were how and how fast. In baseball, where once there had been no black ballplayers, now there were a hundred competing for major league jobs, and along with numbers came enormous talent, with ten past and future most valuable players among them. Yet every black player who reported to training camp in Florida that spring of 1961 still had to confront Jim Crow segregation. Even if their private emotions were sympathetic to Malcolm X’s rage at having to beg a white man to let you into his restaurant, the issue in baseball was necessarily shaped by its own history. Having moved away from the professional Negro Leagues and busted through the twentieth century’s racial barrier, black players did not view voluntary resegregation as an option, and separate and unequal off the field was no longer tolerable.

Wendell Smith, the influential black sportswriter who still had a column in the weekly Pittsburgh Courier but wrote daily now for the white-owned newspaper Chicago’s American, began a concerted campaign against training camp segregation that year. On January 23, a month before the spring camps opened, Smith wrote a seminal article that appeared on the top of the front page of Chicago’s American headlined negro ball players want rights in south. “Beneath the apparently tranquil surface of baseball there is a growing feeling of resentment among Negro major leaguers who still experience embarrassment, humiliation, and even indignities during spring training in the south,” Smith wrote. “The Negro player who is accepted as a first class citizen in the regular season is tired of being a second class citizen in spring training.” Smith added that leading black players were “moving cautiously and were anxious to avert becoming engulfed in fiery debate over civil rights,” but nonetheless were preparing to meet with club owners and league executives to talk about the problem and make it a front-burner issue for the players association.

In a drumbeat of stories for Chicago’s American and columns for the Courier, Smith documented the life of black players in Florida. While his scope was national and his campaign was for all of baseball, he often focused on the travails of black players on Chicago’s American League team, the White Sox, who trained in Sarasota. Those players included Minnie Minoso, Al Smith, and Juan Pizarro, Clemente’s friend and sometimes teammate in Puerto Rico, who had been traded from the Braves. “If you are Minoso, Smith or Pizarro . . . you are a man of great pride and perseverance . . . Otherwise you would not be where you are today, training with a major league team in Sarasota, Fla.,” Smith wrote in a Courier column. “Yet despite all your achievements and fame, the vicious system of racial segregation in Florida’s hick towns condemns you to a life of humiliation and ostracism.” Among the indignities, he wrote:

You cannot live with your teammates.

You cannot eat the type of food that your athletic body requires.

You cannot get a cab in the mornings to take you to the ball park, unless it happens to be Negro-driven.

You cannot enter the hotel in which your manager lives without first receiving special permission.

You cannot go to a movie or night club in the heart of town, nor enjoy any of the other normal recreational facilities your white teammates enjoy so matter of factly.

You cannot bring your wife and children to the town where you are training because accommodations are not available where you are imprisoned.

You cannot, even if there are facilities, take them to the town’s sprawling beaches or parks, unless, of course, they are designated as “Negro.”

You cannot do anything that you would normally do in any of the major league cities where you make your living during the summer.

You are quartered in a neighborhood that ordinarily you would be ashamed to be seen in.

You are horribly embarrassed each day when the bus returning the players from the ball park stops on “this side of the railroad tracks” and deposits you in “Colored Town,” and then proceeds on to the plush hotel where your white teammates live in splendor and luxury.

You suffered a bruised leg sliding into second base, but you cannot receive immediate treatment from the club trainer because he is living in the “white” hotel. If he can get away during the night and come to your segregated quarters, he will, of course; but for obvious reasons, he prefers to wait until daylight.

Your wife cannot call you in case of emergency from your home because the place where you are incarcerated does not have phone facilities available at all times.

That is what it is like to be a Negro big leaguer in Florida during spring training . . . And the story has been only half told.

The spring training headquarters for the White Sox was the Sarasota Terrace Hotel, which banned journalist Smith and the black players. When Smith pressed the owner, a building contractor named James Ewell, to explain his policy, Ewell said he was following the social practices of the Sarasota community. Also, he claimed that if he opened his establishment to blacks he would lose contracting work: “My clients throughout Florida and other sections of the south would reject my business, I believe.” The White Sox situation was made more interesting by the fact that the team’s president, Bill Veeck, had been in the forefront of integrating baseball and was not oblivious to the plight of his black players. Veeck had found another place for them, the DeSoto Motel, which was run by Edward Wachtel and his wife, Lillian, a white Jewish couple from New York, who had retired to Florida and wanted in their own “quiet” way to break the segregation policies of their new home. For this gesture, the Wachtels received anonymous bomb threats, hate mail, and late-night telephone calls warning that crosses would be burned on their lawn. Their modest green-and-white one-story motel was located in a white neighborhood on Route 301 a mile or so from the rest of the team. The DeSoto was clean but modest, with far fewer services than the Sarasota Terrace. The neon sign out front boasted Heated * Air Conditioned * Overnites * Efficiences.

Veeck had tried to balance the conditions by hiring a cook, maid service, and transportation to and from the ball park. On the road, he had made the bold stand of pulling the White Sox from a hotel in Miami because it rejected his black players. Still, it wasn’t until Wendell Smith began his incessant campaign that the White Sox took the final step of leasing their own hotel in Sarasota so the entire team could stay together.
Down at the Pirates training camp in Fort Myers, where conditions were worse, Courier sports editor Bill Nunn Jr., a journalistic disciple of Smith, was determined to lend his voice to the integration campaign. From his first day in town, Nunn began interviewing players and club executives for a full-page story. There had been few advances since 1955, the first Pirates camp in Fort Myers, when young Clemente was sent off to a rooming house in the Dunbar Heights section of town where he had to eat and sleep apart from his teammates. Including top minor leaguers, there were now fifteen black players in the Pirates camp, led by Clemente and Gene Baker, a veteran infielder. In interviews with Nunn, both expressed their disgust. “We live in a world apart down here,” Baker told Nunn. “We don’t like it and we’ve voiced our objections. We only hope we get action.” At the ball park during the day, Baker said, he enjoyed talking to teammates Don Hoak and Gino Cimoli about their shared passion, greyhound racing. But when they went to the dog track at night, Baker had to go through the entrance marked “Colored” and sit apart from them.

Clemente was described as “bitter” about the situation. Here he was, a star player on the world champions of baseball, a reservist in the U.S. Marine Corps, still treated like a second-class citizen. “There is nothing for us to do down here,” he told Nunn. “We go to the ball park, play cards, and watch television. In a way it’s like being in prison. Everybody else on the team has fun during spring training. They swim, play golf, and go to the beaches. The only thing we can do is put in time until we head North. It’s no fun.”

Later, when asked to list his heroes, Clemente would place Martin Luther King Jr. at the top of the list. He supported integration, the norm in Puerto Rico, and believed in King’s philosophy of nonviolence. Yet in some ways his sensibility brought him closer to Malcolm X. He detested any response to Jim Crow segregation that made him seem to beg. In his early years with the Pirates, whenever the team stopped at a roadside restaurant on the way to or from a spring training away game, the black players would remain on the bus, waiting for white teammates to bring out food for them. Clemente put a stop to it by telling his black teammates that anyone who begged for food would have to fight him to get it. As he recalled the scene later, he went to Joe L. Brown, the Pirates general manager, and said the situation was demeaning. “So I say to Joe Brown, ‘We won’t travel anymore with the bus. If we can’t eat where the white players eat I don’t want to go with the bus.’ So Joe Brown said, ‘Well, we’re going to get a station wagon for you fellows to travel in.’ And [now] we’re traveling in a station wagon.” That still left a long way to go to reach equality.

During the first week of exhibition games, Nunn interviewed Brown and asked him why he allowed the team to be divided by segregation. The general manager said that he had met with the Fort Myers town fathers, who told him local law prohibited the mingling of races in hotels or motels, but that he felt he was making progress in getting them to change their practices. “I talked to all of the city officials about this situation of separate quarters for our players this year. I didn’t go to these men to make demands,” Brown said. “I explained our problem to them and told them we wanted integration at all levels for our players. I was pleased with the reception I received. The city officials listened to my complaints and appeared receptive. They didn’t make any promises but I believe they are just as eager to have this problem solved as we are.” Integration would take time, Brown told Nunn. He considered it a step forward that city officials even agreed to talk about it. Brown was a Californian who had no use for segregation, but he also was a businessman who did not want to alienate the Fort Myers establishment. “Frankly, we have no real complaints against the city of Fort Myers,” he concluded. “We have been treated wonderfully since coming here. The facilities are good and I’ve heard no objections from the Negro members of our club on the segregation issue.”

That last comment reflected a common attitude among baseball executives, and many sportswriters, who were so lulled by their own comfortable situations and the lazy ease of their sport in springtime that it was difficult for them to see the reality. When the Fort Myers Boosters Club held a Pirates Welcome Luncheon at the Hideaway, the guest list included Brown and manager Danny Murtaugh, Pennsylvania Governor David Lawrence, Ford Frick, the baseball commissioner, Warren Giles, the president of the National League, and several heroes of the World Series, but not Clemente, who could not get into the building unless he worked as a waiter or dishwasher. That same day, at ten in the morning, a forty-three-minute highlight film of the World Series was shown at the Edison Theater downtown, and notices announced there was no charge and “the public is invited—men, women and children.” As long as they were white. When the Fort Myers Country Club sponsored its annual Pirates Golf Tourney, the News-Press listed the foursomes, comprised of players, coaches, businessmen, and sportswriters. Brown and Murtaugh played, along with Groat and Friend and Schofield and Stuart and twenty more members of the Pirates organization. The Pirates were described as acting “like boys let out of school.” When the golfing was done, they were all served “a bountiful buffet dinner.” Clemente and his black teammates were back in Dunbar Heights.

In the bonhomie of the occasion, no one noticed who wasn’t there. Ducky Schofield, the utility infielder, was perhaps typical of white Pirates who were not racist but also did not seem to take into account how social conditions might have deeper effects on black teammates. When asked later whether Clemente was disliked by some of the Pirates of the late 1950s and early 1960s, Schofield said: “I’m sure there were some who didn’t like him. . . . Maybe it was because he didn’t put forth a whole lot of energy as far as being one of the guys. I think he pretty much stuck to himself quite a bit. In those days, guys ran in groups. Guys would eat together, have a couple of beers. Not that he had to do it, but I never saw him do it.”

Exclusive events like the Fort Myers welcome luncheon and golf outing were held in spring-training towns throughout Florida. But unlike previous springs, this time they were loudly criticized. The most attention was drawn to St. Petersburg, which called itself the capital of the Grapefruit League as home to the Yankees and Cardinals. Both teams had been staying at segregated hotels, the Cardinals at the Vinoy Park and the Yankees at the Soreno, but under pressure from the local NAACP and black players, the system was finally being cracked. When Soreno’s management refused to change its policy, the Yankees picked up and moved across the state to Fort Lauderdale, and in the aftermath, St. Pete officials were so worried about losing baseball entirely that the Cardinals were finally allowed to house their entire team in the same hotel. Small victories of that sort were being won here and there, rivulets in the mighty stream of civil rights. On March 13, in Miami Beach, Floyd Patterson defended his heavyweight boxing crown in a title match with Ingemar Johansson, and along with Patterson’s victory the most newsworthy aspect of the fight was that, at the champ’s insistence, the color bar was lifted in the Convention Hall. “Negroes were spotted freely among the predominantly white crowd in all sections,” the New York Times reported, and “so far as could be noted, no incidents arose from the integrated set-up.” It was an off-day for the Pirates, and third-baseman Don Hoak, who had been a decent amateur boxer, covered the event for a Pittsburgh newspaper. Yet in Sarasota and other spring-training cities, black ballplayers wanting to watch Patterson were not allowed into the whites-only theaters.

Change was slow, and did not occur unprovoked. One of the pivotal events that spring came when the chamber of commerce held a Salute to Baseball at the St. Petersburg Yacht Club. Bill White, the Cardinals first baseman, blasted the lily-white event as a symbol of baseball’s capitulation to Southern racism. His words echoed across the state and nation. “I think about this every minute of the day,” White told Joe Reichler of United Press International. “This thing keeps gnawing at my heart. When will we be made to feel human?”

“Clemente” can be ordered here and here. Mr. Maraniss has just kicked-off a promotional tour. He’ll be at the Barnes and Noble near Lincoln Center tomorrow, Wednesday, April 26th at 7:00 p.m.