Sports Biblio Digest 8.20.17: Boston’s Disquieting History of Baseball and Race
News, Views and Reviews About Sports Books, History and Culture
Also In This Issue: Tampa Sports Teams and a Confederate Memorial; The Last Negro League World Series; An Indiana Softball ‘Field of Dreams;’ 'Country Dan' Bids Farewell; Remembering Frank Broyles
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This is Digest issue No. 93, published Aug. 20, 2017. The Digest is a companion to the Sports Biblio website. To view this newsletter in a browser, click here.
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Boston’s checkered history involving baseball and race cropped up again this week, just as the Red Sox were poised to pull away in their American League divisional race in a home series against the New York Yankees.
In the wake of last week’s racially-charged violence in Charlottesville, Va., current Red Sox owner John Henry publicly stated he wanted to change the name of Yawkey Way, a short street adjoining Fenway Park, and named after the man whose stewardship of the franchise was known as much for his racist attitudes as its futility on the field.
The issue of race is never far from the surface in Boston. Earlier this year, an ugly fan incident at Fenway Park involving Adam Jones of the Baltimore Orioles, prompted familiar calls that Boston is “a racist city.”
On Saturday, a small band of white supremacist demonstrators in Boston was met by an estimated 40,000 counter-protestors, with a couple dozen arrests, in one of several cities holding post-Charlottesville events.
Henry bought the Red Sox from the Yawkey Trust in 2002 and presided over the development of a team that ended an 86-year World Series drought in 2004, and has won two more crowns since.
However, Henry said he is “haunted” by the legacy of Yawkey, the team’s owner from 1933-1976, and the last major league owner to integrate his team, in 1959 (a new Yawkey biography is due out in early 2018).
Yawkey could have been the first, giving Jackie Robinson a tryout in 1945 that never materialized. The Red Sox also passed on a chance to sign Willie Mays. But as Glenn Stout also wrote in 2009, sorting through claims that Yawkey’s racial views didn’t cloud his ability to form the best team possible, “you can still detect the stench” of his insistence that no blacks were signed because “we wanted ballplayers.”
But should this be grounds for scrubbing his name from the environs of his old club’s ball park? The Yawkey Foundation expressed surprise and anger at Henry’s proposed move, pointing to the many charitable causes it has benefitted in the Boston area over many decades.
Despite Henry’s adamant request, and other calls to rename Yawkey Way that have come from younger generations of fans and media, it’s a problematic issue.
ESPN writer Howard Bryant, an African-American whose 2003 book “Shut Out” explored baseball and race in Boston, admits to having conflicted feelings.
“You can’t make it seem like Tom Yawkey never existed. His name is all over the city of Boston,” Bryant said in a radio interview Saturday. “You can’t escape the question of racism when you mention Tom Yawkey’s name. Therefore the Red Sox can’t escape it. At the same time, I wished they had handled it a bit differently.”
He said the Red Sox would have been better to do it quietly, to go to city officials and ask for it to be considered formally by the Boston City Council.
Writing at Yahoo! Sports, New England native Dan Wetzel said any decision to change the name of Yawkey Way ought to be left up to the public:
“Is it fair to rename the street? There should be a hesitation in applying 2017 standards to historical figures. History doesn’t fit into a perfect box. It’s complicated, messy and gray. People are capable of doing both great things and terrible things, having clear vision and blind spots.”
Memoria in Aeterna
Tampa’s three professional sports teams have made donations, at the behest of former Buccaneers coach Tony Dungy, to relocate a Confederate monument in front of the Hillsborough County Courthouse to a private cemetery.
Memoria in Aeterna, a marble sculpture built in 1911 and funded by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, was moved to the courthouse when it opened in 1952.
Local authorities say if the $140,000 cost of moving the memorial can’t be raised in 30 days, it will stay where it is. Thus far, less than $12,000 has been raised, and the issue has been a heated one in Tampa long before Charlottesville.
It’s not that these matters aren’t important. They are. As someone who grew up in the emerging Sunbelt South—with parents hailing from both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line—in the Civil Rights era, I appreciate the sentiments of those who have been pushing for more progress and those who believe it’s important to learn from history. I don’t think they are mutually exclusive, despite how they're being framed in the media.
(For anyone wishing to better understand the resilience of die-hard attitudes from the old Confederacy, I highly recommend “Away Down South: A History of Southern Identity,” by James C. Cobb, history professor emeritus at the University of Georgia.)
However, the obsessions with monuments, memorials and street names are essentially symbolic. By all means, anyone should call out what they don’t like, engage in argument, discussion and debate. This is what changes things, not shutting down conversation or removing objects. This approach has been vital to the racial progress that’s been made in America over the last half-century.
Recent events have been unnerving, and promise to continue, but we have reached a point of absurdity on a number of levels. Some students at the University of Southern California this week pointed out that the name of the school’s sports mascot, the Trojan horse Traveler, is the same as Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee’s horse. According to the Los Angeles Times, a speaker at a campus rally asserted that “white supremacy hits close to home” in making a reference to the mascot. No, seriously.
I live in a town in suburban Atlanta that has the largest Confederate cemetery south of Richmond. My high school is named after a Confederate general, later readmitted to the U.S. Army, and who later rode up San Juan Hill with Teddy Roosevelt.
Should my alma mater, which has produced a number of talented black basketball players who’ve made it to the NBA, undergo a name change? Yes, old Joe Wheeler was a traitor to a nation that gave him his military education at West Point, but that same nation also welcomed him back and had him buried at Arlington National Cemetery.
My point here isn’t to excuse or rationalize the actions of the past, or to endorse the stubborn insistence of a memorialization rooted in bigotry and racial supremacy.
Instead, it’s to suggest that there’s so much deep history that we as a people haven’t even begun to plumb—myself included, and I have a history degree—and that we need to ponder and discuss. We need to sort this out with these symbols in front of us, visually and otherwise. Stashing them away is to ignore them forever, and what lessons they still yield for an American nation roiling in the worst racial distrust since the 1960s.
That’s why I liked this statement issued this week by the National Trust for Historic Preservation:
“These Confederate monuments are historically significant and essential to understanding a critical period of our nation’s history. Just as many of them do not reflect, and are in fact abhorrent to, our values as a diverse and inclusive nation. We cannot and should not erase our history. But we also want our public monuments, on public land and supported by public funding, to uphold our public values.
“We should always remember the past, but we do not necessarily need to revere it.”
Sports Book News
The last Negro League World Series took place in 1948, the year after Jackie Robinson integrated the major leagues. The Society for Baseball Research has just published the collection “Bittersweet Goodbye,” articles and profiles of the teams and players taking part in that piece of history, the Homestead Grays and the Birmingham Barons. The Negro National League folded right after that as the Grays became a mostly barnstorming team. The Negro American League played until around 1960, also in something of a barnstorming fashion.
A Few Good Reads
An Indiana farmer’s field of dreams is somewhat different than the book and film version of the Iowa-based baseball fable, as he plowed cornfields for two softball fields that became real-life venues for softball tournaments that are now municipally-run;
To mark the occasion of what would have been Roberto Clemente’s 83rd birthday, Latin baseball author and scholar Adrian Burgos writes about why he does what he does;
Brooks Robinson’s glove is being donated to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History;
The skunk in the outfield, or how the most epic triple play in history broke baseball—in a high school game in Rhode Island;
At the dawn of the Internet age, a young sportswriter at a small-town Tennessee newspaper libeled a high school athlete seemingly for kicks, and all sorts of legal and other hell broke loose, destroying lives and reputations along the way. As Jeff Pearlman writes, it was a situation in which “basically kids were supervising kids;”
In Kansas City, a sellout streak reaches 100 consecutive games, but it’s not the Royals or Chiefs; instead, it’s Sporting KC of Major League Soccer at its European-style stadium (capacity 18,500 plus standing room) that opened in 2011 and where the club hasn’t lost in more than a year;
Coach K has mastered the art of the one-and-done better than John Calipari, the most vocal proponent of college basketball’s enhanced NBA apprenticeship program;
Patrick Ewing once embodied Georgetown basketball. Can the newly-named head coach of the Hoyas revive it to what it once was?;
“Country Dan” Collins wrote and blogged about sports for newspapers in North Carolina for 45 years and pens this farewell column (“I’m a sportswriter—beats working”); he’s been called “one of the great ACC raconteurs” by a rival columnist in Raleigh;
Mark Purdy says goodbye to the San Jose Mercury-News and a newspaper business that employed him for 33 years, grateful for a long run but wistful about the state of his industry and the events he’s long covered:
“The media climate has become more about what’s happening RIGHT NOW rather than stepping back to assess events in a broader context. . . . Sports is regularly scheduled unpredictable drama. It is not performance theater with links to twitter feeds. Sports is about people, not revenue streams. . . .
“. . . fans should fight through the promotional drumbeat weeds to enjoy the heart and grit of what they’re seeing.”
Passings
Frank Broyles, 92, twice had the chance to return to coach college football at his alma mater, Georgia Tech, a seemingly more high-profile job than where he was at Arkansas, even after winning a national championship in 1964. But it was Bobby Dodd, his former college coach, who convinced him stay put, and Broyles helped put Arkansas sports on the map. Razorbacks teams won 40 NCAA titles in his 32 years as athletic director, and he guided the program into the SEC, signalling a new wave of conference movement that continues today.
The move helped put the death knell in the Southwest Conference, but Broyles was adamant about repositioning his athletic program at the dawn of a lucrative new television age for college football, and as compliance for Title IX regulations for women’s sports that he once fought was taking shape.
Broyles was remembered for all that and more at a public memorial service in Fayetteville on Saturday, including his years as a television analyst and as an advocate in the battle against Alzheimer’s from which he died on Monday.