When I was growing up, my brother Josh would rent a big van and carry our little neighborhood team to small towns in Nebraska and Iowa, where the people would make fun of us. Bear in mind, this was the late 1940s. I’m sure we were a sight to those country folks, all these skinny black kids crowded into that van just having a ball.
I was always on my best behavior in those places, because I didn’t want anybody laughing at me. One particular time—I must have been twelve or thirteen—we pulled up to this town square somewhere in Iowa and they had watermelon for everybody. I’m sure they got a big kick out of seeing us tear into that watermelon, and I wanted some in the worst way. But I wouldn’t eat it, because we had to sit there on the curb before we went to the ballgame and I refused to have people riding by laughing at me. I guess my pride just took over.
When you’re going along in your career, trying to make your mark, trying to win ballgames and take care of business, you don’t think a lot about what it is that drives you. You don’t do a lot of self-analysis. At least I didn’t. But when I look back at times like that, I can see that the pride was there from the beginning. I’m sure that that pride had a lot to do with the makeup I took to the big leagues. Inside, I was the same person at a hundred and ninety-five pounds in St. Louis that I was at ninety-five in Omaha.
A reporter once asked me what sets apart the great player, the Hall of Famer, from everybody else. I said it was pride. Pride is what makes a man believe that he’s the best at what he does. It’s what makes him confident, makes him intense; what makes him great.
Pride is the will to succeed. That’s what sets the great player apart.
Well, you can have all the pride in the world, but if you don’t have the talent to go with it, it doesn’t matter much. Just the pride itself is not going to make you successful.
But it’s what you start with. You can be a great ballplayer without a rifle arm or blazing speed, but you can’t be a great player without a tremendous amount of will.
Think about Robinson, Aaron, Gibson, Palmer, Seaver, Mays, Banks, Rose, Munson, Ripken, Brett, Gwynn, Clemens, Maddux, Jeter, A-Rod, Pujols, Bonds … Those guys are the embodiments of determination, which grows out of pride. You can sense the greatness when they walk onto the field. You can see the pride. The will to succeed oozes out of them.
Think about Jackie Robinson. About the legacy of pride that he left behind.
In our day, if you succeeded as a black player there was a certain pride that went along with it, because, first off, you needed it just to endure; but also because you knew you had to be better to get there. Sometimes even that wasn’t good enough.
When I was a senior at Omaha Tech High School, our coach started five black players in the state semifinal basketball game. The other team was small and scrappy and had to stall to keep the game close. Somehow, four of our starters fouled out in the first half, and I followed them a few minutes into the second half. And this was in a slowdown game! We lost by a point, and afterwards I cried. It affected me. It taught me something about our society. It hardened me.
When I got to college, it became clear to me that I could not get where I wanted to go by being average. I was the first black player on Creighton’s baseball and basketball teams, and I understood that, if I wanted to win a position and be treated as an equal, I had to be better than the other guys.
All the black players from my generation came to feel the same way, no matter where they were from.
I was told by my father that I needed to clearly outdistance the field. Don’t let it be a photo finish. You’re black, so you’re not going to have the same opportunities. You must clearly be better than whites. Let there be no dispute on that point.
My dad also told me, “If you don’t make the first team, son, you can’t sit on the bench; you’ve got to come home and work. You’ve got to help around the house. There’ll be no sitting on the bench. There’s nothing going on there. You need to be on the first team.” That wasn’t pressure; that was life. My father, whose heritage was Latin American, white, black, and who knows what else—and I’m proud of all of it!—ran his own tailoring and laundry business. He worked all day and bought groceries on the way home. There was nothing in the refrigerator. I’d go over to my white friends’ houses and they’d have milk waiting for them on the porch in the morning, delivered right to the front step. You’d go in the garage and they’d have a case of Coke sitting out there in a wooden box with “Coca-Cola” written on the side. Man, that was living!
The part that made me angry was that my father worked so much harder than my friends’ fathers and had so much less to show for it. It made me hungry to reap the rewards of my labors. My dad propelled me toward doing something with my life, trying to excel, making something of myself. He’d been a ballplayer—he played some with the Newark Eagles of the old Negro Leagues—and he saw sports, either football or baseball, as my opportunity.
If I had to play ball better than the white boys, I accepted that part of it. I could handle that. There was plenty of other stuff to be angry about.
I wasn’t on a mission to prove anything on behalf of the black player. I was on a mission for me. I had to prove that I was better.
In some ways—if you could get through the doors—the realities worked to the benefit of the black players. It wasn’t hard to motivate yourself for what you had to do. I was at Creighton because Indiana University told me they’d already met their quota. They had to have one black guy on the team. I watched them play and just shook my head. I knew they had the wrong one, and I had some interest in proving that.
Out of high school, I had more football offers than baseball. I might have been one of the few black players at Oklahoma, but the deal was that I had to be in by ten o’clock at night. If you were black, they wanted you off the streets for the sake of safety. I could have gone to Duke or a few other Southern schools, but I was afraid to take that step.
In 1967, before I came up with the A’s, I was playing in Birmingham, and Bear Bryant’s son was the general manager there. Bear was a close friend of Charlie Finley, and he came to a lot of our games. One night he walked into the clubhouse and was talking to his son and a writer named Alf Van Hoose and a few other people. I had my shirt off. I weighed about 205 pounds and could run like a deer in those days. Bear Bryant put his arm around me and said, “You know, this is just the kind of nigger boy we need down here. If not, we’re not going to be able to continue to compete, because Southern California and the teams out west are going to go by us.” When he said “nigger boy,” it somehow sounded like a compliment. Understanding where I was, I really wasn’t offended. It was awkward, but what was I to do? I was barely twenty-one years old. I was in Birmingham, Alabama. Bear Bryant, in his own way, was complimenting me.
That wouldn’t have worked with me.
It hurt when I heard it, but I knew he didn’t mean it as a slight. It was just the way it was in 1967. Sad!
Even in baseball, even back east, blacks weren’t yet on equal footing. In 1965, after my freshman year at Arizona State, I tried out for Walter Youse’s famous amateur team in Baltimore. Walter was a legend in amateur baseball. He also scouted for the Orioles, and ultimately rated me higher than any other prospect he ever looked at. But when I tried out for Leone’s, he’d never had a black player on the team. A long time after that, Walter told me, kiddingly, that the more he saw of me that day of the tryout, the whiter I got.
When I was eligible for the draft in 1966, there was a lot of talk that I would be the first player chosen in the country. Then, when the draft was close, our coach at ASU, Bobby Winkles, called me into his office to tell me that it wasn’t going to happen that way, even though it should. I didn’t understand. He said it was because the Mets, who had the first pick, found out I was dating a white girl—actually, she was Mexican—and thought it might cause problems in baseball and society. So they drafted Steve Chilcott with the first pick. Charlie Finley’s A’s took me next and sent me to Lewiston, Idaho.
While I was in Lewiston, I got beaned. The local hospital refused to admit me. The next day I was in Modesto, California, and the next year it was Birmingham, where I slept on couches. Dave Duncan, Joe Rudi, and Rollie Fingers were all married, and I rotated between their apartments. Those guys really stuck up for me.
You deal with those things, and you get over them, but you don’t forget them. It all becomes part of your makeup. I’ll remember Duncan, Rudi, and Fingers for the rest of my life, and not just as ballplayers.
Over the years, a lot of black athletes have been characterized as playing with a chip on their shoulder. Well, a chip is usually put there by somebody else. It’s put there by the way you’re treated.
My chip on the shoulder, which some people might have viewed as being terse or having an attitude, came from how you approached me, or my interpretation of how society was treating me. When I was young, it came out as anger. I was from a broken home. My father was a man I greatly admired, and he was incarcerated when I was a junior in high school for driving on a suspended license. My mother was living in Baltimore. I was at home with my brother, James. My upbringing was odd.
I missed my father and I was angry that he couldn’t be with us, couldn’t provide for us. I got suspended twice from school. I was mean. It made me a tough and nasty football player, but it didn’t help me in anything else. I once threw a guy up against a wall and threatened to kill him for eating a couple of my pretzels. I had a ’55 Chevy and would sit in a church parking lot with my buddies, who also had ’55 Chevies, and we’d drink a beer, then go crash a party, strong-arm the rich kids, and take their coats. Then wear the coats to school. The rich kids didn’t say anything, because we’d beat them up if they did. My girlfriend was white, and they used to tease her about how crazy I was. Her father didn’t like me because I was black, so I’d send a friend over to pick her up.
And people say I was mean. Damn.
Everybody’s a product of their experience. I was bitter about mine. When I was little, I was playing ball one day with some friends in a place called Glenside. It was about two miles from our house in Wyncote, and I needed to be home on time for dinner, so my buddy loaned me his bicycle. His mother had married a fireman who was a big fat guy, and as I was riding home he drove up in his ’57 yellow Chevrolet convertible with a Continental spare and twin antennas. I was about halfway home at the time. He stopped, made me get off the bicycle and walk it back to his house. He said, “I don’t want you riding my son’s bicycle.” Things like that stick with you.
When I was in Little League, maybe eleven years old, I was on an all-star team from Pennsylvania and we were playing a series against an all-star team from Florida, which was kind of a big deal. I was the youngest kid on the team and the best player, but the only black player. I could not play in that series. The reasoning was, if I slid hard into second base or whatever, there might be a fight. So I sat on the bench for the whole five-game series except to pinch-hit at the very end. I never moved the bat off my shoulder. Afterwards, I walked home in my number eighteen Glenside jersey and my shower shoes, with my spikes hanging over my shoulder, crying all the way. I’d go from telephone pole to telephone pole, walking to one and then running to the next one. I don’t know why I did that, but I remember it, and I vividly remember what I was saying to myself the whole time. I just repeated, over and over, “I’m gonna be a big-leaguer, I’m gonna be a big-leaguer,” for as long as it took me to get home.
We all have these stories about things that happened when we were kids, and when we were in school, and when we were in the minor leagues, but it didn’t stop there. Reggie makes a good point about pride, because if you didn’t have it as a black player, you wouldn’t get to the big leagues in the first place; and if somehow you did, you wouldn’t last. You’d be run off by guys like Solly Hemus.
When I came up with the Cardinals in 1959, Hemus let me know, right away, that I wasn’t smart enough to be much of a pitcher. In meetings, he’d tell me I didn’t have to worry about the scouting reports, that I should just throw the ball over the plate. At one point, he recommended that I quit and go play basketball. Of course, he was also the guy who had Stan Musial playing hit-and-run.
Solly Hemus couldn’t play, could he?
No. Couldn’t manage, couldn’t play. And he was a racist.
That’s probably what it was.
I know that’s what it was. I was in the dugout, almost standing next to him, when we were playing the Pirates and he was calling their pitcher, Bennie Daniels, a black bastard. It was all I could do to restrain myself. But what can you do? You hit him, and you’re out of baseball. So I had to take it. I had to swallow it. I was twenty-three years old. If he’d called me that, I probably would have been out of baseball. I see Hemus from time to time, and after fifty years he has never told me he was sorry about that incident or any other.
When I got to New York in 1977, Billy Martin would not hit me cleanup. For the record, I ultimately batted fourth for nine different division champions; but it didn’t happen in New York until Munson and Lou Piniella went to Billy in August of 1977 and said, “You need to put that man at cleanup.”
What was his reason for that?
I can only say what I believe it to be. He came from the days of Mickey Mantle and Yogi Berra, and he didn’t want to give me the honor of hitting cleanup for the New York Yankees. The Yankees were Ruth, Gehrig, DiMaggio, and his friends Mickey and Whitey Ford.
After Munson and Piniella went to him in August, when we were struggling, I started hitting cleanup and we won thirty-nine of the next forty-nine games. Within two weeks, we had overtaken the Orioles and Red Sox and were on our way to winning the American League East. And ultimately, the World Series.
When you start putting money in their pockets like that, people tend to change their opinions of you.
That was the hardest year of my life, and it wasn’t just Billy Martin’s doing. For a long period, I had a tough time fitting in with my teammates. I had signed for a lot of money, had called a lot of attention to myself, and they considered me an uppity you-know-what. I was an outsider on my own team, and it sent me into a horrible funk. I was miserable. I wasn’t the kind of guy who could not care what anybody thought. I cared a lot.
In the end, it was pride and support from friends and family that pulled me out of it—along with my prayerful thoughts of God.
That’s all well and good, but if you’d have put that pride inside of Mickey Rivers, the result would not have been four straight home runs in the World Series.
Ted Simmons, who was one of my catchers, said once that the best thing I had going for me as a pitcher was the force of my personality—the will to win, I guess—and that you can’t separate the physical from the emotional. That’s probably right.
To get to the top in baseball, and most other things, you’ve got to have that tenacity, that win-at-all-costs mentality, to go along with the ability. They go hand in hand. In my case, I think that was just my makeup. Tell me I can’t do it, I’m gonna do it.
Reggie would call it pride. Yeah, there’s a lot of that. But for me, it all comes back to confidence. Confidence gives you courage, and courage gives you encouragement.
I had the courage to work a corner because I was confident I wouldn’t miss it by too much in the wrong direction. I was encouraged to challenge a good hitter with a high fastball because I was confident that my fastball was better than his bat.
To be a fierce competitor, you need to be fiercely confident.
A lot of people thought I was too confident. Another word for that is cocky.
I came up alongside a lot of the players on the A’s, and they just shrugged it off when I’d go into a hot-dog mode. They knew they could count on me as a teammate. They knew I was harmless and respectful of them. But I was also respectful of myself.
I wrote an autobiography when I was still with the A’s. The first line was “My name is Reggie Jackson and I am the best in baseball.” I used to tell my teammates that if I played in New York they’d name a candy bar after me—which they did. (When the Reggie bar came out, Catfish Hunter said that when you unwrap it, it tells you how good it is. I’ve got to admit—that’s a great line.)
In Oakland, we were all free spirits and strong individuals. Maybe more than any other team in baseball history, our A’s teams of the seventies proved that players can have their differences socially—they can all express their own personal styles—as long as they have a collective pride in their jobs and are willing to come together every night for nine innings. The A’s weren’t bothered by my razzmatazz. At the least, they appreciated the fact that I got the reporters out of their faces.
When I arrived in New York, though, the Yankees were already established as the American League champions. It didn’t go over so well when I was quoted in Sport magazine—rather, misquoted—calling myself “the straw that stirs the drink.” I didn’t say that. But on the other hand, I didn’t hesitate to tell anybody who asked, or anybody who didn’t, that I was a star before I got there.
Was that a lie? We had won three World Series in Oakland. Some of my new teammates might not have appreciated me saying it, but I was a star before I got to New York. That’s why George Steinbrenner gave me the big contract (although $600,000 a year is ashtray change for a good ballplayer nowadays). With free agency, we had finally reached the age when players could go to the highest bidder, and it was in my best interest to market myself. I was out in front with that—and Steinbrenner was smarter than I was to understand that if I marketed myself in New York, I’d be marketing the Yankees at the same time.
So I was confident—cocky, if you must. I was likened to Muhammad Ali in that respect. Ali was cocky because he knew how good he was, and he knew that knowing it only made him better. His talent made him confident. I could relate to that.
Cockiness is just confidence worn on the outside. And winking about it.
Solly Hemus did all he could to alienate me and destroy my confidence. Fortunately, his replacement, Johnny Keane, did all he could to embrace me and restore my confidence. When he took over as manager, Keane called me into his office and said, “Bob, I’ve think you’ve got good enough stuff to be one of the best pitchers in baseball. You’re going to be out there every five days for me. I don’t want you to have to worry about whether you’re going to pitch or not going to pitch.” Those good vibes turned everything around for me.
Some of the best teammates are the ones who, in their own way, restore your confidence when you’re down. I was never down as low as I was that first year with the Yankees, and I had Fran Healy to thank for being an ally. He tried his best to keep my spirits up. That’s what being a teammate is all about; and being a friend.
Well, Dick Allen didn’t give me any pep talks, but I thought he was a pretty good teammate when he drove in 101 runs. I thought Curt Flood was a pretty good teammate when he was tracking down every fly ball hit in the direction of center field. I thought I was a pretty good teammate in 1968, when I had that 1.12 earned run average and threw forty-seven straight scoreless innings.
In 1968, I felt I could throw the ball anywhere I wanted anytime I wanted to. If I wanted to be up and in, that’s where it was gonna be. The thing I had that year was control, and confidence in my control, which led to better control. Confidence feeds the beast. When you’re confident as a pitcher, you feel like you can put a ball on a corner without even looking. Bam! There it is. If you want to miss by just a little, you miss by just a little. It’s like magic.
Of course, there are other times when you can’t get the ball where you want it to save your soul. I don’t know that there’s an explanation for that. I’m sure that mechanics have something to do with it, but why are your mechanics different from one day to the next, or one inning to the next, or one pitch to the next? The days you’ve got it going, they describe it as being in a zone. I don’t really know what that is.
Maybe it’s just a heightened state of confidence.
As important as confidence is, you’d think that players—and managers, for that matter—would work on it more. A lot of it was just my makeup, but I was constantly exercising the confidence muscle.
Writers were surprised when they’d ask me if I’d intended to hit that home run that won the game and I’d say yeah, sure I had. I guess I was supposed to tell them that I was just trying to make good contact and was fortunate that the ball came in where I was looking for it; but I saw no reason to cover up my confidence. When I was in Oakland, I told at least one writer that I was going to be great and wanted to be the greatest ever. I told another that after Jackie Robinson, I was the most important black player in baseball history.
I guess that was over-the-top, but let me explain what I meant. There were black players before me who spoke their minds when asked, but there weren’t many. There weren’t any who did it as freely and frankly as I did. I had a reputation for seeking out the media, and it was attributed to self-publicity, but it was more than that. I truly felt that I was raising the profile of the black ballplayer. That’s how I got the reputation for speaking out so much.
Troublemaker.
Yes, I was sometimes labeled a troublemaker. When a white player would speak out, he’d be described as a coach on the field, or on the floor. When a black player spoke out, he was a troublemaker.
I was a troublemaker all my life. I read in the paper just the other day that I was outspoken. You don’t say?
A guy like Hank Aaron spoke his mind, ultimately—when he was chasing Babe Ruth’s home-run record and had a platform—but for most of his career, Hank was very quiet. It was just his nature. He felt strongly about certain things, particularly when it came to discrimination or racial matters, but he wouldn’t make a fuss about it. I was more like Fred Sanford: Hey, man, don’t step out of line with me or else we might have to fight. That was my way of dealing with it. I didn’t know any other way.
Especially when I got to New York and we were all over the papers every day, I felt very much like a … well, I’m reluctant to say celebrity, but a highly visible public figure. That was difficult, and it was crazy, but it was also good in a lot of ways. It was good for the Yankees, it was good for me financially, and for the most part it was good for my ego. What was good for my ego was good for my confidence and good for my game.
I reveled in the attention. I know it sounds a little over-the-top again, but I was proud to be a superstar—a superduperstar, as Sports Illustrated once called me.
And then, every so often, I’d be brought back down to earth. A company I worked with in Arizona, headed by my friend Gary Walker, did a lot with the Hopi Indians. I went to their reservation one year, late in my career—it was way out in the desert—and spoke to some of the Hopi kids about staying away from drugs and drink. Alcoholism was a problem there, and I thought I had a good, strong message for the young people. Then I called for questions and one of the parents raised his hand. I said, “Yes?”
“Some of the children,” he said, “would like to know who you are.”
Hmmm … That’ll check you! I guess a little humility never hurt anybody.
It’s rare that a star player doesn’t run out a ball or give his best effort on the field. They don’t know any other way. Think of Derek Jeter. Think of Albert Pujols. Okay, don’t think of Manny Ramirez, but even Manny can win a game with a hustle play.
How do you say this without a double negative? Great players do not not play hard. They do not take it easy, ever. It’s the same thing whether it’s Charles Barkley, Jack Nicklaus, Jimmy Brown, Frank Robinson, or Joe Montana.
I didn’t have to make sure I played hard. I just did.
It’s not a plan. It’s natural.
In terms of style and stuff, there’s a huge difference between Randy Johnson on the mound and Greg Maddux on the mound. But the thing they have in common is that you’re going to get everything they have. Just because one of them is only throwing eighty-eight miles an hour, that doesn’t mean he’s not pouring it all out there. Greg Maddux is giving you not only all of his arm, but all of his legs, all of his heart, and all of his brain. When they say a guy “leaves it all out there,” that’s the definition.
There were some days when I wasn’t very good, even to the point where I got booed. But that didn’t mean I gave less than everything I had on that particular day. I don’t know that there was ever, ever, a day that I went out there and didn’t give it every single thing I had.
When you play hard every time out, you don’t have a problem gaining the respect of the guys in the clubhouse or the writers who follow the team. I made sure I covered that base. Nobody could ever leave the park saying that I jaked it. They could say I was horse spit, and I might have been, but that was the worst of it.
I credit Bobby Winkles for instilling the hustle ethic in me. Winkles wanted the game played his way, and he got what he wanted.
I tried out for the Arizona State team during the spring of my freshman year. Did it for a five-dollar bet with a guy in my dorm. There had been only one fair-skinned black player on the ASU baseball team, and Joe Paulsen bet me I couldn’t make it. My plan was to make the team, collect my five dollars, and not play. So one day after spring football practice, I ran over to the baseball field with all my gear still on. Winkles agreed to watch me bat. I took off my helmet and shoulder pads, stepped up to the plate, and swung and missed a pitch or two. Fouled a few off. Then I hit a couple out of the park.
I made the team and didn’t quit. You couldn’t quit on Bobby Winkles. He was a tremendous teacher and motivator who demanded that you gave maximum effort at all times. Before long, he had me running back to the dugout after a strikeout—which was a lot of running, actually. After playing for Winkles, I never thought about taking it easy on a baseball field.
That’s why I was so upset in 1977 when Billy Martin yanked me out of a game in Boston, in the middle of an inning, on national television. It was after I’d allowed a batter to get a double out of a bloop hit that fell in front of me. He sent Paul Blair out to right field to take my place, right on the spot. I might have been tentative on the play, and it might have looked bad, but I would never loaf after a ball. My manager should have known that. My teammates did—even the ones I wasn’t getting along with.
I always ran hard to first base, which a lot of pitchers don’t do. A reporter asked me one time, “Why do you run so hard on a ground ball?”
I said, “You know, I run three times a game from home to first, less than twice a week. Why can’t I run hard?”
It takes no ability to run hard. It takes ability to run fast. If you can run hard and fast, that’s what you should do, every time.
Somebody might drop the ball. Strange things happen when you hustle. Everything you do, do it hard.
Now, with all that said, if there was a guy who could hit like Reggie and didn’t run hard all the time, I’d still like to have him on my side.
I would, too. But that would never be the case with me.
I saw Jimmy Leyland a while back and he introduced me to his family as a guy who played the game the way it should be played. I pride myself on comments like that—more than I do the long home runs I hit, or the three home runs in a World Series game. I even ran hard to first when I hit a ground ball back to the pitcher. Every time.
Hustle should be a habit. It should be a reflex, like shielding your eyes when you’re looking into the sun. Hustle doesn’t absolve you of your sins, but it helps. When I was in slumps, they didn’t look so bad because I played hard, every play.
Sometimes, though, it can be prudent for a player to hold back a bit. I can understand a guy like Ken Griffey Jr. not running all-out on an easy ground ball, because he had three or four years when he just walked onto the field and got hurt. He’d swing and miss and break his toe. He’d jog to first on a base on balls and blow a hamstring. That guy would’ve had a shot at eight hundred home runs if his body hadn’t broken down. I mean, he tore a hamstring off the bone. After a while, you’re going to check yourself. You don’t want to end your career on a tap back to the pitcher. But if you watch Griffey closely, you’ll notice that he never goes half-speed after a fly ball or when he’s trying to take an extra base. He hustles. It’s just that, after the problems he’s had with injuries, he hustles smart.
That’s what a manager wants. I had hamstring issues, and I never let up because of them; but there are times when the good of the ball club has to outweigh your own personal pride. Dick Howser talked to me about that when he was managing the Yankees. I ran into a wall one day and he said, “Look, I want that shillelagh of yours to get to the plate.” A shillelagh is like a wooden club, an Irish thing.
You’ve got to wear a kilt to swing one of those, don’t you? I’d like to see that.
We played hurt all the time. That was one of the first lessons I learned from Frank Robinson and Billy Williams. They both told me, “You don’t get hurt. You realize that, right? You play every day.” Hank Aaron used to tell his younger teammates that they needed to play 150 games a year.
When he advised me to be careful out there, Howser also said that if he had to mention something to the press about me not diving after a ball or some such, he’d be happy to do so. I appreciated that, but I couldn’t change my style of play. I was going to slide, dive, fall, get hit by pitches, and I was not going to get hurt. My hamstrings didn’t always understand that, but my heart did.
I owed that much to myself, the team, the owner, the fans, my family, and God. I was given the talent. It was my job to use it every day.
Of course, that was back then. There are still guys who play hurt and crash into fences and dive on their faces, but it’s going out of style. With the agents and big investments and guaranteed contracts and medical staffs they have today, players are generally less inclined to put their bodies on the line.
And that’s not all bad. It’s less likely that you’ll have somebody pitching on a broken leg, which is what I did until it popped in half. It was when Roberto Clemente hit me right above the ankle with a line drive. Of course, I didn’t know it was broken at first. Our trainer, Bob Bauman, sprayed it with ethyl chloride and I told him he was spraying the wrong spot because that wasn’t where it hurt. He told me to take a look, and there was a dent in my skin the shape of a baseball. Then he put a little tape on it and I threw a couple soft pitches and thought, all right, it’s okay, let’s go. I walked Willie Stargell, got Bill Mazeroski to pop up, and on a three-two pitch to Donn Clendenon I was trying to open up on a fastball and, pow, the fibula bone snapped in two. Today, I wouldn’t have been out there after the line drive hit me. I’d have been taken somewhere for an X-ray. You don’t even have to limp around; they just take you.
Anyway, for a few years afterwards, every young pitcher who came to the Cardinals heard that story. We didn’t have many guys missing games with stiff necks or blisters on their feet.
There are times when your body just can’t handle it; but there’s no question that players have different levels of tolerance. If a guy always has an excuse why he can’t play, he probably doesn’t have the heart to be great. He’s too easily defeated. Give me the guy who will do whatever it takes to succeed, whatever the circumstances. Jeter comes to mind. When he’s hurt, he won’t tell anyone.
That was how my dad taught me. When he gave me a job, he didn’t want to hear why I couldn’t get it done. He was awfully proud when I became a big-league all-star, but I don’t know if that made him any prouder than he was the day he sent me to the store for some Neapolitan ice cream.
We lived about half a block from an intersection with two grocery stores, a gas station and Fleischer’s Drug Store, where you could get a cherry Coke or chocolate soda at the soda fountain. One evening my father sent me out for a pint of Neapolitan ice cream, which was about twenty-five cents at the time. I had a quarter, but Fleischer’s didn’t have any Neapolitan that day, so I went across the street to Kelso’s Market and borrowed another quarter from Bob Kelso. Then I went to Bob Bradshaw, who owned the Mobil gas station—the big, red, flying Pegasus—and borrowed a quarter from him. With seventy-five cents now, I walked back across the street to Fleischer’s and bought a pint of chocolate, a pint of vanilla, and a pint of strawberry. Then I ran back home and told my father, “Dad, they didn’t have a pint of Neapolitan, but I got one of each. You owe Uncle Bob Kelso a quarter and you owe Mr. Bradshaw a quarter, too, because I had to borrow money from them.”
He looked at me and said, “Good job, son. You did what you had to do.”
That was the mentality that pervaded our household. I have an older brother who, now that we’re grown up, is about half my size. But when I was ten or twelve and he was twenty, he’d whup my butt if I didn’t get in the kitchen and do the dishes or take out the trash or whatever chores I was supposed to do.
Sometimes a little cuff behind the head really helps you focus.
If he caught me not doing my job, my dad would instruct my oldest brother or my sister to get the strap and tell Reggie—or he called me Boone; that was a nickname I got from a guy who worked for him—to get on up the stairs and take his clothes off, get ready for “a lickin’.” I’d be up in my bed, waiting, sniffling and crying. About two hours later he might have forgotten, but I’d still be crying in the bed, waiting for him.
It was the same way with playing ball. I had a job to do and I had to figure out how to get it done. I couldn’t let anything stand in my way. My dad always said, “I don’t want to hear any air-ay-boo.”
What’s that?
That meant no stammering around, no making excuses. Old-school for “BS.”
Sounds a lot like my brother bloodying my face and sending me back out there with a Band-Aid.
Same thing. It’s why a guy named Bob Gibson pitches to three batters on a broken leg! It’s why I played through I don’t know how many hamstring pulls. It’s the culture we grew up with.
Now, a guy gets a hamstring and he’s out two months. We were out a week or ten days, they’d wrap it, and there you go. I’d say that, by July, most players in the big leagues have something wrong with them. More than half your lineup has a ding somewhere that they’re playing with, or sometimes—particularly these days, it seems—not playing with.
Today, technology finds more that’s wrong with you. There are more ways of treating your aches, tweaks, and injuries, and more understanding of how much time you should take off. The technology we had was a guy who was someone’s buddy who gave you a rubdown with analgesic balm, they called it, slapped a hot pack on you, and gave you some aspirin, or something like that. “All right, go get ’em!” We had a team doctor who came by a couple days a week, and that was pretty much it. Now the Yankees have a hand specialist, a shoulder specialist, a knee specialist, a general practitioner, a special-meds doctor, an eye doctor, a dentist … It’s the Mayo Clinic. You name it, we’ve got it.
When I was a bullpen coach, the kids would complain about their sore arms and I’d say, “You know, I can tell you what causes that.”
They’d say, “Yeah? Tell me, what is it?”
And I’d say, “Pitching. If you don’t pitch, you don’t have that.”
I didn’t worry about a little soreness when I played. It would go away after two or three days. Today you get a sore arm and they call it tendonitis. I guess I pitched with tendonitis. I don’t know. All I can tell you is that I’ve been retired for more than thirty years and my arm still hurts.
One year, seventeen times in a row, I had my knee drained before I pitched that day. It would fill up with fluid, they’d drain it, I’d pitch, and after the game it would fill up again. But I wouldn’t have it drained until the next time I pitched. You think they’d do that today?
That would probably be an operation.
I did need one. It was cartilage, and I finally snapped it. I had the operation and pitched two more years on a knee without any cartilage to speak of.
But I’m not saying we were heroes or tough guys or anything like that. That’s just the way it was. After a game I pitched—that night—everything was sore. I’d drag my right foot through that hole that you always dig out in front of the rubber, and it would be bloody by the time I got back to the clubhouse. I’ve still got a knot in the joint between my big toe and my foot. My knee was sore from bone crunching on bone. After I got into the season, my legs didn’t bother me much—at least not when my knees were young. Arm-wise, I had more trouble with my elbow than my shoulder. My shoulder was always sore, but my elbow was sorer. Invariably, there’d be some guy who’d meet you and want to show you how strong he was by shaking your hand and grabbing you by the elbow. Man, that would hurt. It got to the point where guys would come to shake my hand and I’d put out my left and give them kind of a backhand shake. I’m sure my elbow wasn’t as bad as Sandy Koufax’s, but there were a lot of times when it was so sore I didn’t want to brush my teeth. I should have learned to do it with my left.
The point is, playing through pain was a big part of the game. Don’t get me wrong, though. If I were pitching today, I’m sure I’d welcome all the precautions they take.
But even today, it’s important for a superstar to suck it up and play through minor injuries, because all the young players take their cue from him. Leadership is more about what you do than what you say: the Jeter way.
In thirteen seasons, Derek Jeter has only once played fewer than 149 games. You see Albert Pujols limping around out there and playing Gold Glove first base with a messed-up arm, and he’s never been in fewer than 143 games. And that’s not to mention Cal Ripken.
With Ripken, you could always say never. He was never too sick, never too sore, never too tired, never had an excuse, never had a day off …
Leadership is wonderful and everything, but it’s hard to demonstrate it from the disabled list.
When I was near the end of my career and Barney Schultz was our pitching coach, he wanted me to go out to the outfield and run with the rest of the guys. He said it would set a good example. I told him I’m sure it would, but I’m not helping the ball club if I’m out there pounding what’s left of my knees to the extent that they won’t get me through the next game. I’m thirty-nine years old and you want me out there running when my legs hurt? No, I’m not going to do that. It’s the same thing that a player like Ken Griffey Jr. has gone through. No matter how much of a gamer a guy is, you need to make some concessions at that age.
But then there’s this: Sometimes when a black player doesn’t answer the bell he’s considered a malingerer, as if he isn’t actually hurt or can’t deal with little aches and pains. There has always been an undercurrent to that effect, and at times it’s been joked about. White guys, kiddingly, have said, “Come on, man, you’re black, you know you can’t be hurt.”
It may be intended as humor, and even sympathetic, but there’s something there beneath the surface. There’s something they’re referring to. It’s the underlying notion that white guys play with more heart and character; black guys get by on natural ability.
I only wish I’d have realized that when I was a kid back in Omaha. I’d have mentioned it to Josh when he was bouncing ground balls off my face.
It’s hard for me to explain how I was able to thrive under pressure. It was just in my makeup. It just happened.
It wasn’t only in baseball; it was in basketball or anything I played or did. The bigger the game or moment, the more I was on top of it. When there was a pressure situation, I just always seemed to excel. It’s like it was expected of me. At least, I expected it of me.
When there’s pressure, usually, there’s also an unusual amount of attention from the outside. Everybody in the park—and sometimes, everybody in the country—is watching. That was a good scenario for me. I liked that. I needed that. It helped me focus.
I called those Reggie Moments.
We’re both known for what we did in the World Series, and you’d think, because of that, that there must be something similar in our makeup. I’m sure there is, in terms of concentration and confidence and all that. But I don’t think my feeling about those situations was much like Reggie’s.
He thrived when all eyes were on him. I’ve heard people say that he’s the best hitter there ever was when everybody was watching. That worked for him. I had success in the same types of situations, but for me that part of it was only incidental. It wasn’t where I was coming from.
For me, the World Series was all on the field, and in the dugout with my teammates. It was us against them, for everything. It was the height of competition. That’s what brought out the best in me.
The World Series put you on a stage, and that was where I liked to be. I wanted to bring the crowd to its feet. I wanted to bring the country to its feet. Sometimes I did, sometimes I didn’t. But I never ran from it. I ran to it.
There were moments like that during the regular season, too, when the game would heighten, grow to a crescendo, would come get me, but … I’m not proud to say it, but during the season I got bored sometimes. In the postseason, I understood what it meant to win the game. I always yearned to somehow, some way, be a part of the victory. The postseason was do or die. I died sometimes, but I did a lot, too, because everything around me—all the trappings, all the intensity—forced me to focus and get my faculties gathered up for the moment.
Everybody reacts differently to pressure. I saw plenty of players who absolutely couldn’t perform under it.
The Cardinals had an outfielder who, when he found out he was going to start Game Five of the 1968 World Series, went and sat in his locker facing the inside, scared to death. Everybody saw it. We all thought, what the hell is wrong with this guy? He had the chance of a lifetime to start in a World Series game. The World Series is the time to show what you can do, the greatest opportunity a ballplayer can have, it’s where we’ve always hoped to be someday—our Carnegie Hall—and his ship comes in and he’s scared. I couldn’t understand that. To me, it just didn’t compute.
I was nervous, too, in situations like that, but never scared. Hell no. And as soon as the game started, the nervousness left me. I might have played with more adrenaline than usual, but that’s different than being nervous. A lot different.
I didn’t get nervous. I got intense. My sensitivities were enhanced. I had the ability to take the adrenaline, the focus, the intensity, and let it drive me.
All those feelings and emotions can hurt you if you don’t get them in check. That’s why I sometimes felt that I survived pressure situations more than I thrived in them. Once you acknowledge the pressure, it’s something you have to deal with. I thrived in the spotlight, but I survived the pressure.
Pressure sort of felt right to me. I got accustomed to it by playing for Josh when I was a kid. I grew up under it. It wasn’t World Series pressure, but I’m not sure it was any easier, either.
Josh absolutely wouldn’t accept any kind of failure on my part, or anything less than mental toughness. He imposed that toughness. He demanded it; and when my big brother demanded something of me, I did everything in my power to come through. It wasn’t that he would beat me or criticize me if I didn’t. He was just somebody I wanted badly to please, and when he told me to get the job done, I made damn sure I got the job done.
And the main job was being better than everyone else. Winning, in other words.