The Soul of Baseball (19 page)

“Yeah, I thought you probably did,” Irvin said.

Stoneham then told a story. It turned out that Irvin’s high school teachers had called Stoneham personally and said: “We’ve got a player here you would not believe.” Stoneham did not intend to integrate baseball then. It was 1938—more than fifteen years before Rosa Parks refused to go to the back of the bus—and he knew as well as anyone that baseball had no stomach for integration. Stoneham was no pioneer. But he did feel curious. He had to know about this kid. He sent out a scout, and then another, and then another to see Monte Irvin play.

“What did they tell you?” Irvin asked Stoneham.

“They told me you were the next DiMaggio,” Stoneham said.

Irvin had spoken about this conversation many times before. He did not get much joy out of telling it. Words are only words. Yes, he played like DiMaggio in those dark years before Jackie, but people did not see him. There are no surviving films. The
Baseball Encyclopedia
does not show his statistics from 1941, when he played his best baseball. And it never will.

“He told me it was too soon,” Irvin said. He shrugged. He said Stoneham felt regret. The old man said he wished he had shown more courage as a young man.

“Those scouts told Stoneham I could have been one of the best ever,” Irvin said.

“You
are
one of the best ever,” Buck O’Neil said.

B
uck O’Neil showed up at the airport early as always. He wore a dark blue suit with matching blue shoes. He announced while boarding the plane that this would not be a sad day, no sir. He would not allow any sadness on this day. Early-morning sunlight poured through a small round window and hit Buck’s eyes. The sun had just come out, but the weather was warm and the plane was hot. Passengers wrestled with the air-conditioner vents above their seats. They could not get cool air to blow no matter how much they twisted.

“Double Duty’s funeral,” Buck said softly as the plane took off. “Yes sir, this will be a good day.”

The writer Damon Runyon gave Ted Radcliffe the name “Double Duty.” Runyon was a sportswriter then, and he watched Radcliffe catch one day and pitch the next. That happened during the 1932 Negro Leagues World Series. Runyon said “Double Duty” was worth two admissions. Radcliffe loved that nickname. He carried it with him for more than seventy years. It was, in many ways, his most prized possession.

Double Duty used to say he was the greatest player who ever lived. In his younger days he said it with a sly grin, as if he expected everyone was in on the joke. In his last years, the grin was more or less gone. As a catcher, he once threw out Ty Cobb trying to steal. This infuriated Cobb, who was well known for being a racist. Cobb glared hard at the catcher, and only then did he see that, across Duty’s chest protector, Duty had scribbled the words “Thou Shalt Not Steal.” As a pitcher, Duty threw every illegal pitch imaginable: he spit on the ball, cut it, rubbed shoe polish on it—anything to get people out. He was, by most accounts, effective. Most Negro Leaguers remembered him being a fair hitter. Double Duty, of course, remembered being great.

As a talker, though, everyone agreed: Double Duty was king. He played for more than thirty teams—Duty never had much faith in contracts—and he managed to irritate and amuse just about every player who ever put on a Negro Leagues uniform. All game long, Duty jabbered and insulted and encouraged, he told stories and jokes, he bragged to the point where other players longed to hit him in the head with a bat. No one who played baseball with Double Duty Radcliffe forgot him.

Double Duty disappeared for many years after his playing days. He and his wife scraped by on the South Side of Chicago until 1990, when they were attacked and robbed in their small home. The story made the news. Double Duty was rediscovered. He began to appear at games and functions, and he told stories, he worked on a book, he signed autographs. Double Duty could talk. The year he turned one hundred, Duty threw out the first pitch at a Chicago White Sox game. Two weeks before he died, he threw out the first pitch before a game at Rickwood Field in Birmingham, the oldest ballpark in America. The cancer had seared through him by then.

“There’s nothing sad about a man living one hundred and three years,” Buck said as the plane bounced in the hot air above Chicago. “And Double Duty lived, no doubt about that.”

The car skimmed over the potholes and raced through yellow lights. There was no hurry, but this was the South Side of Chicago, and the driver figured there was no reason to linger. Pawnshops. Liquor stores. Check cashing. Out the window, two men staggered along as if they were tightrope-walking on the sidewalk. Broken glass. A woman sat on a blanket in front of a porch. Buck watched close.

Buck talked about his old friend Willie Spooner, who ran a series of camps for young baseball players in Baton Rouge. Buck traveled down every year, and so would his players—Ernie Banks, Lou Brock, Billy Williams, George Altman, and the rest. The camp was supposed to teach kids about life through baseball.

 

Nothing better

Than baseball. For kids.

Teach them all the lessons.

How to be a teammate.

How to be a man.

Nobody does it for you.

Gotta stand up.

I remember Willie

Used to tell those kids in Baton Rouge

It’s better to steal second

Than to steal an apple.

 

We arrived early at the Apostolic Church of God on Sixty-third and Dorchester. A woman stood outside, a woman Buck did not know, but she shrieked “Buck!” and rushed over with tears in her eyes. She gave Buck a big hug. Buck, for once, did not seem in the hugging mood.

“It’s so sad,” she said between sobs.

“It’s not that sad,” Buck said. “The man lived a good life.”

Al Spearman sat in a pew in the Apostolic Church of God when Buck arrived. He clutched several manila folders. Spearman played in the Negro Leagues for a short while before getting lost in the Minor Leagues in the 1950s. He had been a good player, even if he did not reach the Major Leagues. Lately, though, Spearman had not talked much about his own career. He had grown obsessed with a gentle-looking, white-haired man named Johnny Washington who was going around Chicago telling everyone about his own days as a Negro Leagues player. Al Spearman had grown convinced this Johnny Washington was a fraud. Buck had heard the charge many times.

“There was a Johnny Washington,” Al Spearman said, plunging right in. “I remember him, played in the 1930s and ’40s, but this isn’t him, Buck. It isn’t him. This Johnny Washington doesn’t exist.” His eyes pleaded. His voice grew louder. People turned around.

“This is not the time, Al,” Buck said softly.

“Look here,” Spearman said, and he pulled out a photograph—it was of Al, Buck, and Double Duty standing at Comiskey Park in Chicago before a game. Johnny Washington stood there too. Unlike the others, he was not wearing the red credential needed to get on the field.

“You see!” Spearman shouted. “He’s not wearing the red tag! He hopped the fence! Look at this photograph. This is proof, Buck. Living proof. This man is a fraud. He didn’t play. He’s going around telling people all the suffering he went through…. He didn’t play, Buck. He didn’t play.”

Buck put his hand on Al’s shoulder and looked toward the photograph, but he did not focus on it. Buck appeared to be looking through the picture at the distant wall. Buck looked toward the photograph only to avoid seeing the tears in Al Spearman’s eyes.

A
CERTAIN KIND
of man will try to take control at a funeral, especially at the funeral of famous men. This was one of the reasons Buck stopped going to funerals. People he did not know pushed him and pulled him, took him over to the cameras, introduced him to famous players as if they had never met before. He did not like being handled. This day was no different. A man Buck did not know walked over with Billy Williams. The man said: “Buck, I don’t know if you’ve ever had the pleasure of meeting Billy Williams.” Billy and Buck smiled at each other.

“Yeah, we’ve met,” Buck said.

“This man saved my career,” Billy said.

“Oh,” the man said, and he did not look the slightest bit embarrassed. The man stepped away and walked over a few minutes later with another Chicago baseball legend, Minnie Minoso. “Buck, I don’t know if you’ve had the chance—”

“We’ve met,” Buck said with slight annoyance in his voice now. “How are you, Minnie?”

“Good, Buck, good.”

“We need to go to Cuba together again, Minnie.”

“We will. It will open up, Buck. We will go.”

This went on for a while. The man wandered the church, ordering people around, introducing people who had already met, promising the reporters and cameramen that he would bring the players to them, and acting as if he were running things, though nobody seemed to know exactly who he was or what connection he had to Double Duty. At the same time, another man walked quietly through the church and everyone knew him. He was a character named Cleve Walker. Cleve was one of Double Duty’s best friends. Being a friend seemed to be Cleve Walker’s occupation. He tried baseball years ago, though nothing much came of it. Cleve first met Buck when he tried out for the Chicago Cubs. He never did play much ball, but he came to know the ballplayers, and then he knew other celebrities. He traveled with Muhammad Ali. He knew most of Chicago’s biggest men. He seemed to be in the background of many photographs.

“Nobody knows exactly what Cleve does,” Buck said in wonderment, “but he is beloved by everybody.” As if on cue, Cleve walked over to Buck, they embraced, and it became clear why everyone liked him so much. Cleve listened. He looked interested. While other men around him told their own stories and glanced around the room to see if there was someone more famous nearby, Cleve laughed and nodded and acted as if no one else mattered. He never interrupted. He waited for silences.

“I suppose I was just about the last one to see Duty alive,” he said in one of those silences.

Everyone stopped and looked at Cleve.

“Yeah, he was not doing well. All those years, we always did the same thing. Duty would come up to me and say, ‘I’m taking you deep today, Cleve.’ You know, like he was going to hit a home run off me. And I would always say, ‘No way, Duty, not today.’ “So I go up to him on his last day, and I’m not even sure he knew who I was. He was in bed. He looked bad, you know. It looked like the end. And I said to him, ‘No way you’re taking me deep today, Duty,’ and I pretended to pitch. He tried to say something, you know, but he couldn’t talk. So then, I see his arm go like this—”

Cleve pushed his arm out, the same motion Ralph Kramden used to make when he talked about sending Alice to the moon on
The Honeymooners
.

“And Duty mouthed the words
I’m taking you deep
. That was the last time I saw him.”

J
OHNNY
W
ASHINGTON SHOWED
up. If a casting director needed someone to play the role of a former Negro Leagues player, Johnny Washington would have fit nicely. He looked distinguished, with a crisp black suit contrasting with his white hair. He walked up and down the aisles, and he shook hands with everybody. He introduced himself as “Johnny Washington, former Negro Leagues player” to those few people who did not know him. Al Spearman walked three or four steps behind him. Spearman looked like a man who had lost faith in the world.

“Hi, Al,” Johnny Washington said with a smile.

“I’m not talking to you,” Al Spearman said.

“Yes, this man’s going around telling people that I didn’t play in the Negro Leagues,” Washington said to those surrounding him. He said this in an untroubled voice, as if he believed his accuser was clinically insane but quite harmless. This set off Spearman to a new level of rage.

“You didn’t play!” Spearman shouted. “You didn’t! You’re a fraud! You’re a disgrace to all of us who really did play!”

Washington smiled again. He showed no anger at all. His eyes were filled with wonderment—as if this man were shouting in another language. Buck watched all this for a second and then stood up and took Spearman’s arm. “This is not the place, Al,” Buck said. The reverend walked behind Double Duty’s casket. There was a red fedora on top. The funeral was about to begin.

A
FRIEND OF
Double Duty’s played “Amazing Grace” on the trombone. He remembered that Duty used to say to him, “Get Jesus and play that jazz, you’ll be all right.”

Sean Gibson then stepped on the stage, and Buck’s eyes opened wide. Sean was the grandson of Josh Gibson, probably the greatest slugger ever to play in the Negro Leagues. Sean explained that Double Duty would tell him things because he looked so much like his grandfather. “He thought I was an angel,” Sean said, and four rows back, Buck O’Neil nodded. “He does look just like Josh,” Buck whispered. “It’s scary. He looks more like Josh than Josh did.”

“Duty told me so many stories,” Sean said. “Some of those stories, though, I can’t tell in church.”

Hymns were sung. Acknowledgments were read. The governor of Illinois had sent his condolences and so did the owner of the Billy Goat Tavern in downtown Chicago. Kyle McNary, a middle-aged man from South Dakota, spoke a few words about Double Duty. Kyle worked in construction, but his passion was the Negro Leagues. When he met Double Duty and listened to just a few stories, Kyle fell in love. He wrote a book about Double Duty. “He was my hero,” Kyle said.

The reverend spoke again. “None of us are here because Double Duty died,” he said. “We’re here because he lived.”

Buck was called to the stage. Nobody had told Buck that he would be asked to speak, but he had expected it. He had practiced in the car on the way over. He had said:

 

This is not

A sad occasion.

No sorrow when a man

Lives a full life.

Don’t cry.

Save your sadness

When they’re taken young,

Before their time.

Man lives to one hundred and three,

Rejoice.

Got to do everything,

Feel everything

There is to feel in this world.

Don’t want to live forever.

 

Buck said some of those things at the microphone. More, though, he talked about what it meant to play baseball in the Negro Leagues. It was about changing the world. An organ played, the tones climbing and cascading in rhythm with his words. There were flowers on the casket and blue and red sunlight poured through a stained-glass window. Buck began to preach.