Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, September 17, 1994 TAG: 9410270023
SECTION: SPECTATOR PAGE: S-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: LYNN ELBER ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: LOS ANGELES LENGTH: Long
The discovery in Burns' new 181/2-hour, nine-part film "Baseball" may well be John "Buck" O'Neil, a Negro League veteran and the first black coach in major league baseball.
O'Neil, who experienced racism's cruelty as a citizen and a ballplayer, comes across in "Baseball" as a cleareyed realist of gentle, dignified demeanor, a man with spirit and good will intact.
The 82-year-old O'Neil, who lives with his wife, Ora, in Kansas City, Mo., has seen life change for him even before the film's broadcast. It debuts Sunday on PBS stations. (WBRA-Channel 15 will air Parts 1-5 Sunday through Thursday at 8 p.m. and Parts 6-9 Sunday, Oct. 2, from 12:30-10:30 p.m. The station's ``Great TV Auction,'' Sept. 25-Oct. 1, was scheduled before PBS dates for ``Baseball'' were announced).
A week of filming interviews with "Baseball" co-producer Lynn Novick was just the start. A coast-to-coast promotional tour is testing the stamina of the still-fit O'Neil: "6-foot-2, 190," he says with a touch of pride.
At a Kansas City Royals game this summer, Burns threw out the first ball; O'Neil was behind the plate.
"He threw a strike and I was lucky enough to have caught it," O'Neil recounted in a telephone interview from his home. "I'm in shape, but I'm not in shape for catching."
A bigger thrill was seeing the Royals take the field against the Texas Rangers in uniforms emblazoned with the name of the Kansas City Monarchs, a black team which O'Neil played for and managed.
"It was outstanding," O'Neil said of that August day when other Negro League veterans lined up to take the crowd's applause.
His 60 years in baseball included play on nine championship teams and a Negro National League batting title. His first exposure to the sport came in his native Florida, where his father was a mill worker.
"My father played baseball, he played with the sawmill team," recalls O'Neil, who grew up in Sarasota, Fla. "All of the towns had a baseball team. Everybody played baseball."
His earliest hero was Alonzo Johnson.
"We called him Red Fox. He came out of Alabama and played on the local team. I never saw anybody play as well as he played."
O'Neil's black baseball experience spanned the years 1936-1954, when he rubbed shoulders with such stellar players as Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson, and when Louis Armstrong and other famed black entertainers owned teams.
The injustice of major league baseball's long-standing exclusion of blacks was eased by the joy of playing with the finest, O'Neil says.
"I just might have been playing in some of the best ball that was played in the United States," O'Neil says. "It's just I wasn't making as much money, but I was playing with and against some of the best athletes there were. They were the Michael Jordans and Bo Jacksons."
But the specter of segregation remained. "It was a bittersweet time," he says.
The fifth episode - or "inning" - of "Baseball" focuses on the Negro Leagues in the 1930s. Narrator John Chancellor notes that black and white players met in at least 438 off-season exhibition games. Whites won 129; black players claimed 309 victories.
O'Neil, whose comments are included throughout the film, also is seen in a 17-minute interview at the conclusion of the fifth episode.
O'Neil always felt confident that baseball would eventually bend to the logic of integration, claiming the best of the Negro League ballplayers.
"I knew it would happen," he says. "I knew it would happen some day because I lived long enough to have seen the changes that's happened in this wonderful country. We always figured that it would happen. And, thank God, it did."
O'Neil himself was far from the United States and the world of baseball when he heard of the breakthrough first-signing of a black player by a major-league owner. It was 1945, and O'Neil was serving with an all-black platoon on a Navy ship at Subic Bay in the Philippines.
"The commanding officer said, `John O'Neil, come to my office immediately.' I said, `Oh hell. What did I do now?' Anyway, I go to his office and he said, `You know what has happened? Branch Rickey has signed Jackie Robinson to an organized baseball contract.'
"I said, `Thank God,' " and then asked for the microphone to announce the news.
"Everybody sounded out. They started shooting their guns and everything up in the air and everybody was so elated that this had happened."
O'Neil himself eventually joined the big leagues, first in 1956 as a Chicago Cubs scout bringing young black players in from high schools and colleges and then, in 1962, as a Cubs coach.
There were many black players unable to make the transition, however. Too old to start a major league career, they were forced to search out teams in Cuba, South America or elsewhere, O'Neil says.
Integration "knocked them out of jobs. These are the guys I really want to get the recognition" that "Baseball" could bring, he says.
O'Neil has remained active in the sport, as chairman of the board for the Negro League Baseball Museum in Kansas City and with the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y.
The regret he harbors, he says, isn't over baseball. It is the other doors segregation closed to him he finds haunting.
"It crippled you," he says. "Had I been able to matriculate at Sarasota High School, or the University of Florida, I don't know what I might have turned out to be."
by CNB