Well-deserved honor for an honorable man
Lifetime achievement award long overdue, but Buck would have been proud
Charlie Riedel / AP fileBuck O'Neil stands with a statue of himself in February 2005 at the Negro League Baseball Museum in Kansas City, Mo. O'Neil, who died Oct. 6, 2006, at 94, will be honored next summer with the creation of the Buck O'Neil Lifetime Achievement Award.
The party will be in Kansas City, Mo., on the evening of Nov. 10, a fund-raising affair meant to help generate funds for the $15 million Buck O’Neil Education and Research Center. The project is intended to help save the birthplace of the Negro Leagues, the Paseo YMCA. Through grassroots fund-raising, Kendrick and the rest of the Negro Leagues museum folks have already collected $5 million.
Now comes the push for the corporate funding that will restore the YMCA to its former glory and fulfill Buck O’Neil’s dream of a place that will serve the urban community of Kansas City. “There will be a research library, a technology center, expanded exhibit space for the museum and class rooms which will allow us to operate and create new programs,” said Kendrick.
But the pearl of the project will be an indoor baseball facility that will truly fulfill O’Neil’s dream. “He wanted a place where urban kids could come and learn the game he loved,” said Kendrick. “He wanted a place that would get black kids to return to baseball.”
The last time I saw Buck, I remember telling him how I wanted him to be angry. I wanted him to be as angry as I was that they had done him wrong. But he wouldn't go there. He didn’t have time to be angry about this slight in his life.
"If I was going to be angry about something in my life, I would have been angry 'cause they didn't let me attend Sarasota High School or the University of Florida when I was growing up in the segregated South,” he told me. “I would have been angry because back then, I didn't have a chance. But on this (Hall of Fame) vote, I had a chance. Someone just didn't see fit to vote for me, that's all."
Well, thankfully, some good people have made amends, and now there will be a Buck O’Neil statue inside Cooperstown’s hallowed walls. There are still questions about what that statue ought to look like and what stage of O’Neil’s life it should represent. It could certainly be a bronzed image of O’Neil as a young man, a baseball player stretching out with those enormous hands to scoop up a baseball. Or they could opt for a pose of the middle-aged wise guy standing on the top of dugout steps, the studious manager looking like “The Thinker” pondering critical in-game strategy.
In my mind’s eye, though, if you want to capture the full joy and definitive essence of John Jordan “Buck” O’Neil, there’s no doubt what the statue ought to be.
It must be something that captures the true essence of ol’ Buck, the elegant raconteur whose timeless tales and colorful recreations could make nearly a century’s worth of baseball history vividly come alive.
He taught me about Babe Ruth’s old bats and Satchel Paige’s young loves. He told me about a youthful Lou Brock and Bob Feller in his prime. He recounted the greatness of Josh Gibson’s home-run swing, the simple pleasure of a breezy summer night under the lights and the wonder of discovering the news on a Navy war ship that Jackie Robinson had broken baseball’s color barrier.
So the statue has to be the aging, graceful, homespun baseball poet laureate forever frozen in bronze.
It ought to be the old guy sitting on a bench surrounded by wide-eyed baseball apostles of all ages, everyone spellbound as ol’ Buck preached another one of his divine baseball sermons.
The last time we talked, Buck the baseball preacher man was telling me more stories about life in the Negro Leagues. Buck used to hate the way Hollywood characterized the Negro Leagues as light-hearted minstrel shows and the life of the players as a hardscrabble road of segregated rooming houses and bounced checks on payday.
"It was nothin' like that, son," O'Neil told me. "At least not with the Kansas City Monarchs. We were the New York Yankees of the Negro Leagues. We stayed in the finest hotels. We ate at the grandest restaurants. We rode in a custom-made bus. They all just happened to be all black-owned, but they were the best places to be."
He spent his free days and nights in hotel lobbies talking jazz with Count Basie, Duke Ellington and Sarah Vaughn. The musicians would spend their days watching Buck and Satchel and Josh Gibson play baseball, then the players would spend their nights sitting in smoky after-hours joints listening to the musicians do their thing. All the great baseball players would be there, and so, too, would the likes of Joe Louis, Ray Robinson and Jesse Owens.
"It was nothin' like the movies," Buck would say.
"It was a wonderful life," he would say. "A wonderful life. Mmmm hmmmm."
That is Buck to me. That was Buck O’Neil to all of us.
Bryan Burwell writes regularly for msnbc.com and is a columnist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
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