Former Kansas City Star (and current Sports Illustrated) scribe Joe Posnanski wrote the following column October 7, 2006 — the day after his friend (and frequent subject) Buck O’Neil passed away at 94.
I share it with you today because I shared it with some morons college students this morning and the resulting non-reaction hurt more than it had any business doing. Every group of young people before today’s class of subhuman species had loved learning about Buck and the Negro Leagues. Just because these mental midgets students weren’t impressed doesn’t mean they don’t have hearts or souls. Maybe they just weren’t using them.
Anyway. A friend told me long ago that I should share this with 3Ders. Today feels like the day.
In a Lincoln Town Car on the way home from a funeral, Buck O’Neil said: “I don’t want people to be sad when I die. I’ve lived a full life. Be sad for the kids who die.”
So this will not be a sad column, I hope.
Buck O’Neil died Friday after a prolonged stay in a Kansas City hospital. He was 94 years old, almost 95. He lived a life for the ages. Buck used to say he had done it all — he hit the home run, he hit for the cycle, he traveled the world, he testified before Congress, he sang at the Baseball Hall of Fame, he made a hole-in-one in golf, he married the woman he loved, he shook hands with American presidents.
“And,” he always reminded people, “I hugged Hillary.”
Buck was the grandson of a slave. He grew up in Sarasota, Fla. — so far south, he used to say, that if he stepped backward he would have been a foreigner. He shined shoes. He worked in the celery fields. He could not attend Sarasota High because he was black.
“Damn,” he said on one particularly hot Florida day in those celery fields, “there’s got to be something better than this.”
“That may have been the first time I ever swore,” he would tell school kids across America. “But it was hot that day, children.”
My favorite is one of the stories Buck told on Satchel Paige:
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.”
Here’s the whole column.
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Thanks for sharing, Wanks. The world, not just the baseball one, need(ed) more like Buck. They won’t lose sleep, but I’ll never forgive the Hall of Fame voters, sports writers AND veterans’ committee, for not inducting the man while he was alive. Regardless of whether or not he cared, some things are just right, and they were wrong.
Awesome post about an awesome article, about an awesome human being! Thanks, Wanks. More! I wish Ted Williams would have mentioned him along with Gibson and Paige in his induction speech, since those two made it. But just his pointing out the folly of the Fame was big back then.
Some day please link or post that speech.
http://www.nlbpa.com/ted_williams.html
- Ted Williams’ Hall of Fame speech, 1966
I heard Karl Rove talking with Rush Limbaugh t’other day, telling about a White House usher who’d started during the JFK administration, when people his color effectively lacked the right to vote in a sizable portion of the country and who is now retiring from service to our first (well, if you count Billy Jeff, second) black president. To presume to judge the present without knowing the past is to demonstrate callowness beyond description. To know where we’re going requires first to understand where we’ve come from.
A-yeah, ah knows that war a preposition ah ended thet sentence with. Not the first. Won’t be the last.
Don’t sweat it. Remember Orwell said, Break any of these rules [of writing effectively] rather than say something barbarous.
)
(Like, “Ending a sentence with a preposition is an outrage, up with which I will not put.”
Reminds me of one of my favorite old jokes… Texan is visiting Harvard. He stops an upperclassman and asks, “Excuse me. Can you tell me where the library is at?” The Harvard man replies, “Sir, at Harvard we do not end our sentences with prepositions.” The Texan, “I’m sorry! Can you tell me where the library is at, asshole?”
Here’s that joke’s (which is modified to accommodate any college rivalry) bookend:
[Flyover country school guy]: How’d you know I was from ____?
[Snotty East Coast school guy](sniffs delicately): I smelled the cow dung on your boots when you walked in. How did YOU know I was from ______?
[Flyover country school guy]: I saw your class ring when you picked your nose.
A Texan admitted to Harvard?! You’re right Floyd, that is a great joke!
Time after time, I’m humbled by the grace shown by men like O’Neil, who would seem to have a damn good reason to be bitter.
Kriskey, too right, and a reminder that Buck would have not taken the offense *I* took on his behalf (and on my own, let’s face it) today.