October 1964 (21 page)

With that Buck O’Neil decided that he would be a baseball player, even if it meant playing within a segregated world. At first he spent several years in the rough and scruffy substratum of black baseball that existed just beneath the Negro leagues, then he finally made the famed Kansas City Monarchs, one of the great teams in the leagues. He became manager of the Monarchs just as Jackie Robinson was breaking into organized baseball. O’Neil had been an eyewitness to the historic process in which the Monarchs had gone from being a great baseball team that played within a segregated world before segregated audiences, their players’ exploits written about only in Negro newspapers, to a team that had become a de facto Triple A farm club for the all-white teams of major-league baseball. By the early fifties, many of the older players were gone, replaced by younger players, who were playing not for the thrill of beating a rival black team before a crowd of black fans but rather for the chance to play in the big leagues. That was brought home to Buck O’Neil in 1953 when he watched the Chicago Cubs sign one of the sweetest young players he had ever handled, a young shortstop named Ernie Banks. Banks had wondrously soft hands, extraordinarily quick wrists, a quick bat, the rare ability to drive a low pitch, plus a wonderful disposition. He had come to the Monarchs in 1950, on the recommendation of one of the greatest black players of all time, Cool Papa Bell, who was running the Monarch’s B team that year. (After Jackie Robinson had played for the Monarchs and gone to the Dodgers, Buck O’Neil’s phone started ringing off the hook—every black high school, college, and recreational coach in the country was calling to tell him of some great player he had just seen. Because of that—because they were so overloaded with young talent—the Monarchs had created the B team.) When Cool called and said that he had just seen a great-looking young shortstop, Buck O’Neil immediately signed him, because Cool always knew what he was talking about. Banks had played for the Monarchs in 1950, and then gone into the service for two years. It was clear in 1953, when he returned, that his future was in the big leagues. The Cubs were pursuing him, along with the White Sox, the Reds, and, much less ardently, the Yankees. Near the end of that season O’Neil was told by Tom Baird, the Monarchs’ owner, to bring Banks and an eighteen-year-old pitcher named Bill Dickey to Wrigley Field for a try-out. He arrived to find Wendell Smith, the prominent black sportswriter, and Wid Matthews, a Cubs executive, waiting for him and his young players. Matthews had told O’Neil that Baird was going to sell Banks to the Cubs that day, and that since Buck O’Neil had signed Banks to the original Monarchs contract, why didn’t he participate in the signing?

O’Neil had said nothing beforehand to Ernie Banks about signing with the Cubs because he did not want to put any additional pressure on the talented young player. Of course, there had been rumors that scouts were interested in Banks. The day before, when the Monarchs happened to have finished their season, Banks and Dickey talked about what they were going to do in the off-season. Dickey thought he would go back to Shreveport, Louisiana, and work in a grocery store, and Banks thought he would go back to Dallas and work at the Adolphus Hotel as a busboy. Just then the phone rang and it was Buck O’Neil, who told them to meet him in the lobby the next morning at 7:00
A.M.
He did not say why, nor did they question him. They simply showed up in the lobby at 6:45 so that they would be on time. O’Neil hailed a cab, and they got in. They did not ask where they were going, and Buck O’Neil did not tell them. Eventually they arrived at a ball park where a huge sign announced in giant red letters that it was Wrigley Field, the home of the Chicago Cubs. There they both signed contracts with the Cubs. Then Wid Matthews took O’Neil aside. “Buck,” he said, “your kind of baseball is just about finished. Right now we’re still getting these young players from you, but it won’t be long before we go out and get them out of the high schools and colleges ourselves and put them right in our farm system. And it isn’t going to be very long before Tom is going to sell the team, and then you might be out of a job. So why don’t you go to work for us as a scout when that happens.” So in a way it had been a double signing—Banks went to the Cubs as a shortstop and O’Neil agreed to sign on later as a scout; in 1955, Tom Baird sold the Monarchs, and the year after that, Buck O’Neil went to work for the Cubs for six thousand dollars a year plus expenses to scout young black ballplayers.

So O’Neil devoted the rest of his life to gaining for younger, more fortunate black men the opportunity that had been denied to him: to play major-league baseball. That did not bother him greatly, for Buck O’Neil was a man who felt he was rich within his own life. He knew that the world was changing and he believed the changes were, by and large, for the better. Ernie Banks thought O’Neil was not merely a great baseball man, but that he could have been successful at
anything
he undertook—medicine, law, or politics. Banks believed that O’Neil could spend an hour with you, and, thanks to a lifetime of his wide experience, he would not only know who you were at that moment but who you had been, what had formed you, and, even more important, who you were going to become. O’Neil was determined not to be bitter because he had played in a segregated age, for he knew that bitterness was a problem with some of the black players of his generation. Bitterness could easily lead to drinking, and then you would be undone by the forces arrayed against you—when they got inside you like that. He had decided long ago to live by an ethic of hard work and he taught his younger players to do the same. Things were going to change in America, he said, for someday soon, baseball, like many other aspects of American life, was going to open up. When that happened, you had to be ready, and the only way to be ready was to work harder than anyone else. According to Buck O’Neil’s code, if you had a headache, you went to work and got rid of the headache through hard work; if you had personal problems, you went to work and tried to lift yourself above your problems, and in time the success you achieved would solve them. He believed that there was almost nothing in life that could not be solved by hard work.

Buck O’Neil did not think of himself as a victim. He had been a star player in black baseball, a celebrity of no small proportions in his own world. Even if white people had not known about it, and even if his name had not made the pages of the white newspapers, the people who counted in his world knew how good he was. For the men who played in the Negro leagues were true black celebrities, as important and prominent among their own people, though less well known to whites as the black entertainers of the period. There was a black world in Kansas City that white people knew almost nothing about. It was centered at Eighteenth and Vine, where the famed Streets Hotel, a grand hotel where all the best people stayed, was located. It was a beacon to the celebrities, politicians, and entertainers of black America who came through Kansas City in those days, and it was where the Monarch players who did not have their families with them stayed. On a Sunday morning Buck O’Neil would wake up in his room at the Streets and go down to have a late breakfast. There would be Duke Ellington or Count Basie or Louis Armstrong, and he might join them for breakfast. He could remember years later the Duke teasing him, “Hey, Foots, you going to go easy on our New York team today?” It was a curious, bittersweet life, he thought, to be denied so much and yet to have so much. The booking agents tended to bring in the great black musical artists to Kansas City when the Monarchs were at home, so that the black upper class would come in from all the surrounding towns, like Wichita and St. Joe, to make a weekend of it: baseball during the day and music at night at a place called the Subway, which did not open until midnight, when the rest of the city was closing down.

The black players had a strong loyalty to each other because they had all been subjected to the same discrimination and the same indignities. They even had their own slang, the language of Negro baseball, designed, at least in part, to give their world some distance and some privacy from that of the whites. There were words like
hog cutter
(to cut a hog meant to embarrass yourself publicly, to participate in conduct dramatically unbecoming, such as cursing in front of a woman, particularly the owner’s or manager’s wife);
mullion
(a player who always seemed to be taking out unattractive women);
monty
(an ugly-looking ballplayer);
drinker
(a fielder so good that he seemed to drink in every ball hit to him); and
foxy
(a sharp-looking woman). Buck O’Neil was too much the gentleman to cut very many hogs, but he was a drinker, for sure, an exceptional fielder who always seemed to inhale the balls hit to him.

When he was serving in the Pacific at the end of World War II, O’Neil had been thrilled to hear that the Dodgers had signed Jackie Robinson. O’Neil became a great Robinson fan, and he hated it, then and later on, when he heard people say that Jackie had not even been the best player in the Negro leagues, that there were others who were better. It did not matter whether Jackie was the best baseball player in the Negro leagues, O’Neil knew; what mattered was that he was the best
man
for the job. Jackie was younger, stronger, tougher, and better educated than the others, and even if some of the older players had been to college, the colleges had been such black colleges as Grambling, where young men were taught, among other things, to swallow their anger. Jackie had been to UCLA, where black people had a more modern outlook. Even in his brief time in the Negro leagues, he had been different and had impressed his teammates with his courage and independence; he had brought with him new and better ways, and he had represented the dawning of a new day. When Robinson joined the Monarchs, O’Neil believed, the Monarchs started learning from him very quickly. Previously, they had always traveled by bus, and as they swung through the South, there were certain places they always stopped for gas and food. There was a place in Muskogee, Oklahoma, where they had always gassed up, but where the owner never let them use the rest rooms. Robinson had not known that, so when the bus pulled in, ready to fill up its twin fifty-gallon tanks, he got out to go to the men’s room. “Where you going, boy?” the owner said, and Robinson answered that he was going to the men’s room. “No, you’re not,” the owner said. “You boys know that.” Robinson never even hesitated. “Take the hose out of the tank!” he said immediately, and that was no idle threat, for one hundred gallons of gas was a big sale, a fair percentage of the amount of money the man might make on a given day. The man looked at Robinson and saw the anger and the strength in his face. He was not the first, and certainly not the last, white man to see that conviction, and he immediately backed down. “You boys can use the rest rooms,” he said. “Just don’t stay there too long.”

It would have been nice, Buck O’Neil thought sometimes, if times had changed a little more quickly. He knew he was good enough to play in the majors with white boys because he had done it often enough barnstorming with their best players at the end of the regular season. He would have played first base, he thought, and would have hit around .290 to .300, with 20 home runs and 90 runs batted in. Not only a good big-league player, but a consistent one, right at the All-Star level. He saw himself honestly, he believed: as good a hitter as the famous Hank Greenberg, but certainly with less power, though just as certainly, a better fielder. He always had wonderful feet. But that was all in the past; it was important now to find young men who had talent, inner strength, and the conviction to excel in the majors, the ones who would not waste this most precious opportunity.

For a time he was the only full-time black scout working the region, the others being white scouts aided by black bird-dog scouts, both black and white. The white scouts who worked the area might, if they even bothered to come over to Southern, stay two or three hours, then head over to LSU, and from there go to New Orleans, where they were more comfortable. If O’Neil had always felt somewhat uncomfortable in a world that was largely white, now the white scouts were having to work in a world where they were the outsiders, a world that was predominantly black. Buck O’Neil had his own itinerary: he would start in Florida when it was still cold and then move north and west as the weather changed. He would, more often than not, stay at the home of the president of the university or the school’s baseball coach or its athletic director. As a celebrity in the black athletic world, he was almost never allowed to stay at a hotel, or to eat in a restaurant. He was
always
in someone’s home, the food was better, and he would learn a good deal more. Often he was asked to give a motivational speech to the school’s baseball team and sometimes to the other teams. If, for the first forty-five years of his life, he had lived in a world where white people had always had all the advantages, he was astonished now to find that he had the inside track.

In the spring of 1958, two years after O’Neil joined the Cubs, he arrived in Baton Rouge and saw a young freshman playing baseball for Southern named Lou Brock. No one had ever mentioned the name before, and there had been no hint that Southern had a hot young prospect, for in fact Brock was not a hot young prospect—he was a green kid out of a backwoods Louisiana high school. Brock had been born in El Dorado, Arkansas (Arkansas, Brock liked to say later, billed itself in those days as the land of opportunity, and at the very first opportunity he had gotten the hell out of there). The child of sharecroppers, he never knew his father. His mother moved to Louisiana, and as a child he watched the annual exploitation of his family by the plantation owners: year after year, despite their hard physical labor in the cotton fields, and whether the crop was excellent or terrible, his family always seemed to end up owing the plantation owner three hundred dollars. Because of that, when he was lucky enough to get a scholarship to Southern, Brock chose math as his major so that he would never be duped in the future. It seemed to him the most basic of subjects, and if he mastered it, he at least could stop the cheating each year when his people came to settle up their bills. He came to Southern not on an athletic scholarship but on an academic scholarship, and in order to stay in school, he held a number of term-time jobs. He went out for baseball, he later said, not so much to be a baseball star, but simply to stay in school, and an athletic scholarship made that a great deal easier. Brock also wanted an athletic scholarship for another reason: without one, he wasn’t a real athlete in his own eyes and in those of others.