Buck O'Neil

I forgot to post this yesterday morning. I will always be bitter about the fact that some idiots on the Hall of Fame committee denied us of what would have easily been the best Hall of Fame induction speech of all-time by deciding that Buck O'Neil, Negro League first baseman, scout and coach for many famous black baseball players, and the best spokesman for baseball in the history of the game, was somehow undeserving of being a Hall of Famer. Actually, not bitter...angry. Very angry. He died Friday, roughly 2.5 months after he should have been inducted.

That said, there are too many wonderful stories about him for me to stay angry for too long. Here is Joe Posnanski's wonderful column about the Kansas City legend.

The lesson of Buck’s story is that there is always something better — but he had to go out and get it. And he did. He played baseball. He was tall and had good reflexes. So he played first base, first for some semi-professional teams and then for the Kansas City Monarchs of the Negro Leagues. That, he said, was the time of his life.

It was a time when black players were not welcome to play in the major leagues, a bitter time for many. But Buck O’Neil did not know anything about bitterness. That was his gift. When others remembered Negro Leagues checks that bounced or playing fields with rocks on them, Buck O’Neil remembered listening to hot jazz on Saturday nights — “Charlie Parker, Count Basie, Duke Ellington,” he used to say, as if there was magic in the names.

And more, he remembered playing baseball on warm Sunday afternoons with some of the best players who ever lived. He remembered playing with his friend Satchel Paige, the best pitcher he ever saw. Paige used to call him Nancy, and there’s a long story that goes along with that, a story Buck O’Neil would tell 10,000 times in his long life. Suffice it to say, Satchel had a woman named Nancy, and he also had a fiancee named Lahoma, and once Lahoma heard Satchel knocking on another hotel door shouting, “Nancy! Nancy!”

Lahoma opened her door. And at that very same instant Buck opened his.

“Did you want something, Satchel?” Buck asked.

“Yes, Nancy,” Satchel said. “What time is the game tomorrow?”

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

...

Those baseball playing days burned brightly in Buck O’Neil’s memory for the rest of his life. Buck was a pretty good player himself, a slick fielder and a fine hitter who once led the Negro Leagues in hitting. Toward the end of his playing days, he managed the Monarchs too. There, he ran across a shy young player from Texas who would sit in the back of the bus on those road trips and not say a word. Buck started to talk to him.

“Son,” he told Ernie Banks, “you’ve got to love this game to play it.”

Ernie Banks would become perhaps the most joyful player in the major leagues. They called him “Mr. Cub” in Chicago. He hit 500 home runs. He was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. He was famous for saying, “It’s a beautiful day. Let’s play two.”

“I learned that from Buck O’Neil,” Banks said.

By the time Buck O’Neil managed in the Negro Leagues, things had changed. Jackie Robinson had broken through the color barrier, and many of the best African-American players were going to play in the minor leagues rather than the Negro Leagues. In 1955, the Chicago Cubs hired Buck to become a scout.

He became the first prominent black scout in the major leagues. His territory was the American South, and he spent most of his days around the historically black colleges. On those campuses, Buck O’Neil was bigger than life. “Everybody knew Buck O’Neil,” said Lou Brock, a Hall of Famer Buck signed. “You could see everybody on the bench pointing and whispering, ‘There’s Mr. O’Neil. There he is.'"

...

Buck loved telling Negro Leagues stories. For many years, he said, people didn’t want to listen. People seemed offended somehow when he told them that Negro Leaguer Oscar Charleston was as good as Ty Cobb or his friend Hilton Smith might have been as good as Bob Feller. He kept telling the stories because he thought it was important.

“Sometimes,” he said, “I think God may have kept me on this earth for a long time so I could bear witness to the Negro Leagues.”

In 1994, he broke through. He was discovered — at age 83 — by director Ken Burns, who gave him a starring role in his documentary “Baseball.” In it, Buck told the same stories he had been telling for more than 40 years, but now people listened. People laughed. People cried. And Buck became a celebrity. He appeared on television talk shows, and wrote an autobiography (“I Was Right on Time”) and traveled the country to tell his story.

Two years later, he had the second-greatest day of his life. The new and expanded Negro Leagues Baseball Museum opened up on the famous corner of 18th and Vine — the same corner where on those long ago Saturday nights, Buck would listen to that great jazz and talk about the baseball games to come. He had spent many of his later years trying to make the museum a reality. The opening touched his heart.

“We spend so much of our lives honoring the people who crossed the bridge,” Buck said. “Today we honor the people who built the bridge.”

One day later, Buck lost his wife of 51 years, Ora. He would lose many friends in the last 10 years of his life. But he did not allow that to stop him from loving life. He traveled America, and kept bearing witness for those Negro Leaguers who had been forgotten or ignored. I know. I traveled with him. Buck appeared at every charity function he could fit into his schedule. He signed every autograph. He hugged every woman and tossed baseballs to every kid he saw wearing a baseball glove. This year, at 94 years old, he played in the Northern League All-Star Game. He would not stop. He could not.

“Moving,” he said, “is the opposite of dying.”

He started to feel tired in August, shortly after returning home from the Baseball Hall of Fame. Buck had not been elected to the Hall of Fame — he fell one or two votes short in a special election — and this set off something of a national firestorm. But Buck said he would not let it get him down. Nothing got him down. And he went to Cooperstown and led everyone in song. A few days later, he checked into the hospital for a short stay. He got out and said that he would have to slow down. A couple of weeks later, he checked back in.

The last time I saw him, he sat in a hospital bed, and he looked thin, his beautiful voice was a rasp. His memory was still sharp, and he grabbed my hand, and he whispered: “You are my friend.” He deteriorated from there. Two weeks later he was gone.

But even though it’s late at night and I can hardly see the keyboard because of the tears, I know Buck would not have wanted any of us to cry. So, instead, I will relive once more his greatest day. I heard him tell it a hundred times. It was Easter Sunday, 1943, Memphis, Tenn. The Monarchs were playing the Memphis Red Sox. First time up, Buck hit a double. Second time, he hit a single. Third time, he hit it over the right-field fence. Fourth time up, he hit the ball to left field, it bounced off the wall, and Buck rounded the bases. He could have had an inside-the-park home run, but he stopped at third.

“You know why?” he always asked.

“You wanted the cycle,” I always said.

That night, he was in his room when a friend called him down to meet some schoolteachers who were in the hotel. Buck went down, saw a pretty young woman, and walked right up to her and said, “My name is Buck O’Neil. What’s yours?” It was Ora. They would be married for 51 years.

“That was my best day,” he said. “I hit for the cycle and I met my Ora.”

“It was a good day,” I said.

“It’s been a good life,” he said.

I never got to meet him, but a friend of mine did a few different times. Here's what he said this morning.

Buck was simply amazing. Having attended his birthday, the annual "Buck's Bash", they had folks onhand to do something of a roast on the man. Rick Sutcliffe was the MC, and a number of former Negro Leaguers and Major Leaguers were on hand, including the great Ernie Banks.

About halfway through the proceedings, someone was making a speech and said, "You know, this is supposed to be a roast...but how can you possibly roast a man like Buck O'Neil? You just can't"

A couple of years ago, I was returning into KCI airport, riding the shuttle bus around to get back to my car. At the last stop, Buck saunters onto the bus, returning from somewhere. I rose to offer him my seat, and at 92 years old, the man recognized me and we talked. The entire bus was a buzz about him, and we stood there and talked about what I had been doing...not what he was up to, but what I had been doing since last I saw him.

I could have heard him tell me that Nancy story every day for the rest of my life. The man did so much for baseball and the players of that era, and I will honestly believe that his not making the hall (while living anyway) is one of the all time injustices in the world on that level. The man did not deserve to make the hall, the man deserved to have a damn wing named after him there.

To a life VERY well lived....