Sports Biblio Digest, 11.25.18: The Baseball Lives of Leo Durocher and Henry Aaron

News, Views and Reviews About Sports Books, History and Culture

Also In This Issue: British Sports Books of the Year; The Death of Australian Sports Books; Oakland Raiders Fans; Soccer in Atlanta; An NFL Owner in the English Premier League; A New Chess Grandmaster; Women Coaching Men; George H.W. Bush and Baseball

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Two complicated, deeply contrasting men who had little in common except the sport they mastered have in recent years have had their lives richly illuminated by biographies that live up to their legacies.

While Leo Durocher was like a moth to the public spotlight, eagerly courting controversy and conflict, Henry Aaron flinched under the same glare long before he closed in on Babe Ruth’s home run record. Both men bore lifelong burdens of their upbringings: Durocher’s combative boyhood in blue-collar New England, and Aaron’s internalized endurance of Jim Crow Alabama.

What authors Paul Dickson and Howard Bryant achieve in their books is to cast their subjects not merely in the context of baseball, but against the larger grain of the society that worshipped, and occasionally scorned, their presences.

In “Leo Durocher: Baseball’s Prodigal Son” (Bloomsbury, 2017), the prolific Dickson addresses myths of Durocher peddled in his own autobiography, “Nice Guys Finish Last,” and Gerald Eskenazi’s 1993 biography, “The Lip.”

In fully fleshing out “an American original,” Dickson argues that:

“At the heart of Durocher’s story is the conflict between reality and stagecraft, drama and dramatics—and this provides a way of looking at who he really was.”

The familiar tales of Durocher’s fiery persona are recounted—especially his banishment before the landmark 1947 season as Brooklyn Dodgers manager for gambling, the result of his friendship with actor George Raft, who frequented the company of racketeering mob figures Bugsey Siegel and Meyer Lansky—and his notorious feuds with the Gotham press. This was, as Dickson writes, “the New York of Damon Runyon, and Durocher played it like a character from the second act of Guys and Dolls."

Durocher’s cocky flamboyance was in contrast to his unwavering advocacy for racial integration. Sidelined as Jackie Robinson broke the color line, Durocher had a mixed relationship with Willie Mays during his New York Giants years in the 1950s, and scoffed at Ernie Banks, whom he managed in Chicago a decade later: “Mr. Cub, my ass,” the Lip snorted.

That was classic Durocher, blunt and unapologetic regardless of a man’s race, or stature. The collapse of the Cubs in 1969—one of the most epic in baseball history—came as American society, and a younger generation of players, was dramatically changing. Of Durocher, Dickson recounts how Ron Santo tried to choked him, how players’ union boss Marvin Miller despised him and later, in his final skipper’s role with the Astros, Larry Dierker refused to heed to his barking: “Whatever happened to ‘Sit down, shut up and listen?’”

Even in retirement, Durocher was bombastic, irate that Roger Kahn wrote that the real reason for his suspension was an accusation (never proven but reportedly floated by Bill Veeck) that he fixed the 1946 National League pennant race won by the Cardinals. This complicated Durocher's candidacy for the Baseball Hall of Fame, which inducted him posthumously.

Late in his life, those closest to Durocher, and his most attentive observers, never could sort out his enigmatic ways, or motivations. Dickson writes that for all the hatred The Lip generated, he “thrived on bad press and the use of incivility as a means of getting his way."

Most helpfully, Dickson provides a bibliography, drawing from a generous supply of material to shape a fresh and vibrant profile of one of baseball’s “all-time characters."

Bryant’s task in “The Last Hero: The Life of Henry Aaron” (Pantheon, 2010) was challenging in different ways, because of his subject’s understated personality. He details Aaron’s young life in rural Wilcox County, Ala., and his family’s move to nearby Mobile to escape the clutches of sharecropping. In the wartime South of his youth, Aaron learned early on, in Bryant’s words, that “if you were black and did not upset the social order, it was not necessary to live in fear.”

That informed much of Aaron’s rise to the majors, and also why he “saw value in not being limited by baseball.” Bryant points to a 1956 profile in The Saturday Evening Post, a year before the Milwaukee Braves’ only World Series title, as “the most influential and devastating piece of journalism ever written about Henry Aaron.”

Titled “Born to Play Ball,” the story was written by Furman Bisher, the Atlanta journalist Aaron would later encounter on a regular basis, and whom Bryant said presented the slugger as:

“ . . . nothing more than a country simpleton. . . . Bisher wrote of him in the most condescending of terms, portraying a kind of hitting savant unaware of the larger, sophisticated world around him and without a passable IQ.”

This claim guides Bryant’s narrative of Aaron, who read James Baldwin and who “may not have considered himself an agitator, but certainly in private he adopted a position to the left of the black mainstream.”

The Braves’ move South in 1965, at the crest of the Civil Rights movement, caused Aaron initial trepidation, but the early years in Atlanta were uneventful in baseball terms. He was financially wiped out by some swindlers and had begun to rebuild his private life with a second marriage as the Ruth mark approached in 1974. After getting death threats and other abusive treatment, Aaron couldn’t celebrate the historic moment: “I just thank God it’s all over with.”

Aaron’s years after retirement were quite different from Durocher’s, as he became a successful businessman and respected elder statesman in his sport and the gradually integrating Sunbelt. Bryant does well to observe that “it was pragmatism that made him different from his idol Jackie Robinson. . . . He made the money men comfortable.”

Where Bryant missteps is with his tiresome preaching about steroids as Barry Bonds neared Aaron’s home run record. That Aaron didn’t think much of Bonds isn’t a revelation here, but Bryant goes on too long of an anti-steroids tangent that mars an otherwise solid book.

It got in the way of the essential understanding of what had become Aaron’s life and, in his later years, of recovering from “blows to his humanity that had been exacted during the chase.” As Bryant quotes Aaron’s attorney:

“There is no question he lost something he could never get back, a piece of himself.”

Sports Book News

For the first time in its 30-year history, the William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award in Britain is being shared by two winners. “A Boy in the Water” and “The Lost Soul of Eamonn Magee” are examples of what Sean Ingle, writing in The Guardian, claims has been the result of the betting service’s influence on fostering and nourishing a better grade of longform sports storytelling. He cites another critic’s praise of Nick Hornby’s “Fever Pitch” as setting off the trend, having created a “whole new liturgy for the literati … suddenly it was compulsory for every city’s ‘top end Hampstead’ intellectuals to gather around dinner tables and talk with rapt studiousness, not about Pinter, Amis or Truffaut, but Robson and Seaman and Gazza.” Ingle is reserving judgment about that, but says the William Hill award is “a hallmark of quality that ranks alongside any master craftsman.”

On the other hand, author Geoff Armstrong, since 2014 the publisher of Stoke Hill Press near Sydney, has proclaimed “The Death of Australian Sports Books.” Sales numbers and readership figures have him discouraged, as do the aging demographics of frequent book readers.

Armstrong’s been a ghostwriter of many sports memoirs and other popular sports book subjects, so it could be argued to a degree that he’s part of what he’s decrying. He writes that the situation can be salvaged “only if the sports industry gets behind sports publishing — not by injecting funds but by helping to create a conversation about sports books.” That includes more “genuine” reviews of good books as opposed to a “free plug.” While sports book awards abound in Australia, there’s nothing with the prestige of the William Hill awards:

“Maybe what’s happening is just natural attrition, and out of the ashes a smaller yet somehow stronger business model will emerge. But I still remember certain sports books I read when I was a kid, and important books that spurred my love of sport as a teenager and helped shape and provoke my thinking as an adult. Simply put, sports books are important. We can ill afford to lose them.”

In the United States, university presses (especially Nebraska and Illinois) have been most generous with historical- and cultural-based sports books, many of which are readily accessible to general readers. Commercial publishers need big and compelling names (Durocher and Aaron cited above), or riveting stories, to sell at a higher volume. My bookshelves are lined with examples of both, and also those that run against that trend, so I realize I’m making a very general and anecdotal statement.

As Russell Jackson, a former sportswriter now with a Melbourne publishing house noted to me in passing along the Armstrong link, “The 'industry' certainly needs to be more proactive in creating a culture around quality sportswriting, and being agents of culture, not just of commerce."

Is chess a sport? That’s a question Jonathan Eig (most recently, author of a prize-winning Muhammad Ali biography) tries to answer in his review for The New York Times of Brin-Jonathan Butler’s latest: “The Grandmaster.” It’s an inside account of the 2016 World Chess Championships between Magnus Carlsen and Sergey Karjakin. (A week or so ago, the precocious Carlsen, now just 28 and regarded in some corners as the best chessmaster ever, repeated his title.)

Butler was urged to follow Norman Mailer’s treatment of Ali vs. Foreman in “The Fight” and John McPhee’s coverage of Arthur Ashe vs. Clark Graebner in “Levels of the Game.” Eig comes away dissatisfied, not with the book but mostly because of the nature of the endeavor:

“Chess is intensely cerebral. It drives men mad, as Butler documents in vivid detail. But by remaining so deep in thought, Carlsen and Karjakin shut out their fans, shut out the author and shut out the reader.”

A Few Good Reads

An excerpt from Joshua Robinson and Jonathan Clegg’s “The Club” (to be published on Tuesday) delves into former Cleveland Browns owner Randy Lerner’s disastrous purchase of Aston Villa, and in particular his presumption that the business-like framework he understood in the NFL would apply to the English Premier League:

“English soccer remains a maddening, ill-regulated business world where hucksters and charlatans roam free and bad teams face perhaps the most draconian punishment in sports: being kicked out of the league entirely in a process known as relegation, which sends the bottom three teams in the standings every season down to a lower division. And this is how a billionaire investor who arrived with the best intentions ended up leaving English soccer a decade later—humbled, disgusted and some $250 million in the hole."

My hometown is bracing for one of the biggest soccer spectacles in American history, and that it’s happening here is only part of the astonishment. The MLS Cup will be held in Atlanta next Saturday at a packed Mercedes-Benz Stadium, which has been filled much of the two seasons of existence for Atlanta United FC. When I covered minor-league soccer here a decade or two ago, any notion of selling out an NFL stadium on a regular basis was unimaginable. I often covered games at a crumbling high school stadium with several hundred people on hand. Atlanta has had a checkered history as a sports town, to put it charitably, but what fans seemed to want above all was a top-flight franchise.
It's got that, thanks to the deep pockets and even deeper commitment of Atlanta Falcons owner Arthur Blank, who's enabled a young, talented and stylish team with many young fans to generate a phenomenon and the kind of excitement that many North American markets haven’t been able to capture. Some of those stars and their Mexico national team-bound coach Tata Martino will be on the move, so Atlanta's long-term staying power, on the field and in the stands, remains to be seen.

My only regret is that the late Phil Woosnam, who coached the Atlanta Chiefs to the first North American Soccer League title in 1968 and was the league’s commissioner, isn’t around to absorb this. What’s happened here is a testament to his eternal optimism that soccer in America, and even in gridiron country, had a future. What used to be the butt of a lot of sportswriter jokes that “soccer is the sport of the future and always will be” (echoed by some of my former colleagues) has firmly arrived to stay.

Even the most hard-bitten Oakland Raiders fans (and they really do define that term, perhaps like no others in the NFL) aren’t giving up on their team, even though it appears the players gave up early in the season on first-year head coach Jon Gruden, and as the franchise prepares to leave town again, this time to Las Vegas, for the 2020 season.

Here’s Brin-Jonathan Butler again, writing for The Undefeated about Deontay Wilder, the new face of American heavyweight boxing in a declining sport.

At SB Nation, Tim Struby goes long on women coaching men, talking not only to those females trying to shatter the “glass sideline” but also to skeptics (an NBA coach: “You can’t have a hot woman in the NBA. Guys will be trying to f— her every day.”) and male coaches, athletes and executives whose views are more enlightened than might be imagined. As I mentioned last week in this newsletter, working one’s way up via the grind that men have always understood is necessary and doesn’t lend itself to a quick increase in numbers. As former NFL coach Rex Ryan is quoted in this piece, there are no shortcuts.

Passings

George H.W. Bush, 94, like so many men who have been President of the United States, had a complex biography that went far beyond politics and public service. While his long years in Washington and World War II heroics were remembered after his death on Friday, his devotion to baseball, both as a player at Yale and a fan in Texas, offers reminders of the shaping force of sports in a young person, especially of his generation.

Notably, when he arrived at Yale in 1946, the coach was 1930s New York Yankees third baseman Red Rolfe, who had succeeded ex-Red Sox star Smoky Joe Wood. While at Yale, Bush played in two College World Series, and once faced future Dodgers radio legend Vin Scully, a Fordham centerfielder.

In his political and post-presidential years, Bush and his wife Barbara, who died eight months ago, frequently attended Houston Astros games, as he never was far from his favorite sport. On Saturday, the current Yale team paid tribute.

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The Sports Biblio Digest is an e-mail newsletter delivered each Sunday. You can subscribe here and search the archives.

This is Digest issue No. 145, published Dec. 2, 2018.

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