The Soul of Baseball (11 page)

“What advice would you give to children?” they asked him.

“I’d tell them, ‘You can be anything you want to be,’” he said.

Buck then did an interview with WHCR, the Voice of Harlem.

“Why is baseball the national pastime?” the interviewer asked him.

“Because it’s for everyone. Baseball is for the pastor. And baseball is for the pimp.”

He talked with a reporter from
Source
magazine. She was an intern, and Buck liked her immediately. He told her the full Nancy Story, all three minutes fifty seconds’ worth. He also told her about the first traveling team he ever played for. It was called the New York Tigers, though the team was based in Miami and not one person on it had ever actually been to New York. Buck said they traveled through small towns in the South, and people would ask them about jazz and food and Billie Holiday and the poet Langston Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance.

“What did you do?” the reporter asked.

“We’d tell them like we knew,” Buck said.

“You mean—”

“We lied.”

After that, Buck did another radio interview, this one was based in Atlanta, and then he did another interview for a New York radio station, and then he did another magazine interview, and after that he was no longer sure if the Bronx was up and the Battery down.

“What did you drink?” he was asked by a reporter for the
New York Daily News
.

“Funny you should ask that,” Buck said. “I always told people my drink was a gin and tonic. But I’d have the bartender fill it up with water. And then I’d act the fool so people wouldn’t know.”

“Why didn’t you want to drink?”

“I don’t know,” Buck said. “I always wanted a clear head. I guess I thought that was the best way to survive in this crazy world. I sure could use a drink now, though.”

A
FTER ALL THE
interviews and a day in the city, Buck talked about getting back to his beloved golf course in Kansas City. That was Swope Park. Every clear day, you could find Buck at Swope. He would hit golf balls and chase them around in his golf cart. He was a pretty good player and he was an excellent golf cart driver. But he played golf for another reason. He said:

 

I gotta get back

To Swope Park,

Put my tee in the ground,

Hear Swope say,

“Where you been, Buck?”

I say, “Been all over.”

And Swope will tell me,

“You know better than that.

Come on home.”

 

I had grown used to seeing Buck tired at the ends of days. Buck was wearier than usual. He had been sucker-punched by the Star interview and then pounded relentlessly by so many interviews and requests. His head spun. He was hungry. He was surrounded by a Friday evening in New York—the construction sounds, the blaring horns, the fast walkers, the street hustlers, the Broadway lights, the hole in the sky. Buck loved New York. He was ready to get home.

“I’m going to sleep,” he announced when the car pulled up to the Marriott. As we stepped out of the car, I noticed a woman standing outside, near a concrete bench. She was wearing a red dress. It’s not quite right to say I noticed her, as if this took some doing. She was noticeable. Her dress blazed candy-apple red. You could see it from Brooklyn. The woman who wore it looked nothing at all like Marilyn Monroe, and yet that was the name that came to mind. Marilyn. It was that kind of dress. We walked into the hotel, and I turned back to mention something to Buck about the woman and her red dress. He was gone. I looked back to see if he had stayed in the car. But the car was gone too. I looked down the hall. Empty. Bathroom? Empty.

Then I looked outside. There was Buck talking to the woman in the red dress. Buck talked and she laughed, she talked and he laughed. They hugged. She kissed him. A young man walked over, and Buck talked to him, they hugged, they all laughed. The three of them stayed together for a long time, Buck and the woman and the young man. Finally Buck hugged them both and walked in looking fresh as morning. Star was a long way back in his memory. Buck said, “Let’s go get something to eat.”

As we walked to the restaurant, he asked: “Did you see the woman in the red dress?”

“Yes.”

Buck shook his head and looked me in the eyes. And very slowly, with a teacher’s edge in his voice, Buck said this: “Son, in this life, you don’t ever walk by a red dress.”

I
n every city in America, at least five times a day, someone asked Buck O’Neil to tell the Nancy Story. Satchel Paige used to call Buck “Nancy.” Why? That was the story. Most people who asked for the Nancy Story already knew it. They wanted to hear Buck tell it, because people never tired of it. It was classic. No matter how many times he sang it, Frank Sinatra fans always wanted to hear “Summer Wind” once more.

“Buck, can you tell the Nancy Story for my daughter?”

“Buck, I’ve heard it before, but can you tell the Nancy Story again?”

“Buck, someone told me to ask: Why did Satchel Paige call you Nancy?”

The atmosphere had to be just right. The Nancy Story had many variations, but in its purest form it was long, a full four minutes when told in loving detail, and Buck had reached the age when he was not often willing to give up that much time for one story. Robert Plant, when asked to sing Led Zeppelin’s interminable classic “Stairway to Heaven,” would say, “I’m not singing that bloody wedding song.” Buck, when asked for Nancy, would sometimes decline by saying, “I’m not sure I’d live all the way to the end.”

Every so often, though, the mood struck Buck, listeners were rapt, and the summer wind came blowing in from across the sea. In New York City, across the street from Rockefeller Center, Buck got that look in his eye. He was ready to do the Full Nancy.

“We were playing a baseball game near an Indian reservation in North Dakota,” he began.

Buck and his teammates felt different when they arrived in North Dakota. Restaurants served black men in the Dakotas. All of the hotels let them sleep there. Some of the baseball teams in North Dakota had black and white men playing together. “Maybe it was because there were hardly any black people in North Dakota,” Buck would say. “Maybe they didn’t feel threatened. I don’t know.” Whatever it was, the Negro Leaguers felt more American in the isolation of Anamoose, Fargo, and Turtle Lake. They were men. Buck often remembered a white boy staring at him across a quiet street in North Dakota. Suddenly, without betraying any emotion, the boy shouted out the word Buck hated more than any other. The boy did not shout it out with malice or anger in his voice, but with a peculiar playfulness, the way children at swimming pools, when prompted by the command “Marco,” shouted back “Polo!” The boy looked at Buck with a curious expression. He wanted to know what would happen next.

“Come here, boy,” Buck said.

The boy walked over. Buck looked him hard in the eye.

“Why did you say that word?”

“I don’t know,” the boy said.

“That’s a hurtful word.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry. Don’t say it no more.”

“Okay.”

Then Buck remembered smiling and giving the boy tickets for the baseball game that afternoon. He remembered that the boy’s eyes lit up, and he looked up at Buck, and across the years Buck never forgot that gaze of spirit and awe. “He came to the game that night and waved to me,” Buck would say. “That boy had probably never seen a black man in all his life. He had just heard someone say that word, and he thought he would say it too. He was a good boy. I’ll bet he grew up to be a good man.”

That day—or maybe it was another, days do blend together in Buck’s stories—a woman came to watch the baseball game in Sioux Falls. In the story, Buck always called her a beautiful Indian maiden. Her name, of course, was Nancy. He never gave details of what Nancy looked like; he expected everybody could see Nancy in their minds.

Satchel Paige was pitching that day, as always. Paige would say he won more than two thousand baseball games in his career, and nobody ever could or would prove different. He won those games with a blazing fastball that catcher Biz Mackey used to say could pound steak into hamburger. He kicked his left leg high when he pitched; Satchel used to claim he kicked so high that his foot blocked the sun. He named his pitches—Bee Ball, Trouble Ball, Midnight Rider, Long Tom, Jump Ball—though they were all variations of the hamburger-pounding fastball theme. Every so often he would stop in the middle of his windup, stand frozen for an instant, and then pitch the ball. This was his hesitation pitch, and it left hitters swinging their bats at shadows. The crowds loved Satchel Paige.

That day Nancy, like everyone else in the stands, watched Satchel Paige. She sat behind the dugout. “Now why did she sit there?” Buck asked. “It was because she knew that Satchel would talk to a dead tree!” Nancy was no dead tree. He asked her to dinner. Nancy said she was babysitting. He told her to bring the kids along.

“We had a good time that night with those kids,” Buck said. “We took care of them, me and some of my teammates. I don’t think Satchel even knew there were any kids there. He was talking to Nancy.”

“You know we’re going to Chicago next week,” Satchel told Nancy. “You should come along.”

“I do have family in Chicago,” Nancy said. Satchel gave her the train fare and said he would meet her at the Evans Hotel on the South Side of Chicago. She promised to be there.

Buck said the key to telling the Nancy Story, or any good story, was to tell it slow. Linger. He said people always got in too big a hurry. Don’t rush, he said. Savor the details. Follow the turns. Go with the wind. Come to think of it, he said, there is something about life in that wisdom. Buck liked long car rides. He liked plane rides. He always liked getting places.

 

I never minded

Riding the bus

Back in the old days.

Other guys hated those rides.

Complained the whole way.

Said: “We ever going to get there?”

I’d read the paper

Or talk with somebody

Or just look out the window,

Watch the trees.

We’ll get there.

We always get there.

 

Satchel and Buck sat in the Evans Hotel lobby in Chicago. They sipped tea and looked out the window. It was a bright summer afternoon. They talked about nothing at all. Buck said these are the moments ballplayers miss most. “Isn’t that funny?” Buck asked. He said ballplayers, when they think back to their playing days, they don’t hold on to the sensation of the big moments, the home runs, the strikeouts, the spraying champagne, the curtain calls, the adoring women, the money. Instead they will remember that a beer never tasted as good as it did in the clubhouse. They will think about those hot afternoons in the bullpen, pitchers spitting sunflower seeds and laughing about some awful little town that smelled like a paper mill. Buck often thought back to that afternoon in Chicago, lemonade, taxicabs, a woman walking by with a pink hat and a big white purse, a man swinging his pocket watch, a warm wind, and that big bay window in the Evans Hotel where Buck and Satch watched the world go by.

A taxi pulled up. Out stepped Nancy. “Pretty as a picture,” Buck said. Satch jumped up, rushed outside, and took her arm. He led her inside. “You remember Nancy, don’t you, Buck?” Satchel said. The way Buck remembered it, this would be the last time Satchel called him Buck.

“Nice to see you again, Nancy.”

Together, Satch and Nancy climbed the stairs. Buck had his tea to finish, and he sat in front of that window for a while. He watched another taxicab pull up to the Evans Hotel. Out stepped Lahoma. This is the time in the story when Buck pointed out that Lahoma was Satchel Paige’s fiancée.

Buck jumped up and rushed outside. He took Lahoma by the arm and said, “Lahoma, it is so great to see you, Satchel has gone off with some reporters, but he will be back presently, why don’t you sit here with me, and we will sip some tea until he returns. I will go over and have the bellman take your bags up to the room.”

Buck carried Lahoma’s bags to the bellman. He whispered, “Hey, man, you better get upstairs and tell Satchel that Lahoma is here. You go ahead and put Nancy and her bags in the empty room next to mine. You got it? And you give me the signal when it’s all clear.” He stuffed a dollar bill in the bellman’s hand—a dollar, naturally, being a lot of money in those days—and Buck returned to Lahoma.

Bellmen in those days, Buck explained, knew what to do.

A few minutes later the bellman walked by and nodded to Buck. That was the signal. After a few more minutes, Satchel walked by the hotel. He saw Lahoma and Buck through the big bay window, and he waved. It was a nice touch. Satchel ran through the front door and gave Lahoma a hug. He said, “Lahoma, it’s such a pleasant surprise to see you. I am so happy to have you here in Chicago.” Buck wondered how he had gotten outside without being seen. Later, Satchel would explain that he had climbed down the fire escape.

“We had a good time that night. Joe Louis stopped by to say hello. He was great friends with Satchel. Jesse Owens was in town that night, and he came by to say hello too.

“Everything was always happening around Satchel. It was never dull with him. People just wanted to be around him. He might have been the most famous black man in America then. We loved Joe Louis, of course, and he was more famous among white folks. You had black writers like Langston Hughes, yeah. And you had the musicians, you had Count Basie, yeah, you had Duke Ellington, yeah, Marian Anderson, but I do believe that in that time the biggest hero in the black communities was Satchel Paige.”

That night Buck listened through his hotel door at the Evans Hotel. He had not seen Nancy all night, but he knew Satchel would have to come by her room and give her train money to get home. That was ballplayer etiquette. So Buck could not sleep. He was dying to hear what Satchel Paige would say. He listened through the closed door, and at some hour past midnight he heard Satchel’s door creak open.
Uhhuh,
Buck thought,
it’s going down now
.

Buck heard footsteps tap past his room. He heard Satchel knock softly on the door.

“Nancy,” Satch whispered.

No answer. He knocked a little louder.

“Nancy,” he said in a plain voice.

No answer still. A louder knock.

“Nancy!” he snapped. And then:
“Nancy!”

With that last
“Nancy!”
Buck heard Satchel’s door creak open again. He knew: That had to be Lahoma. In an instant, Buck found himself racing to his front door. He didn’t know what he was going to do, but he knew he would do something. He opened the door.

He said: “Satch, did you want me?”

And Satchel, hitting the beat as always, said: “Yes, Nancy, what time does the game start tomorrow?”

“And,” Buck said, “I’ve been Nancy ever since.”