Strangely enough the first friends I made in New Jersey were because of my auntie Salley. I was on a playground near our apartment in Vauxhall, and there were these two guys who jumped me. They were both hitting me. I grabbed a rock and put it in my hand, and I just started hitting one of the guys. Then all of a sudden I couldn’t feel the other guy hitting me from behind anymore.
I turned around and Betty Ann Hill had him on the ground and “Boom! Boom! Boom!” she was just beating the crap out of this guy. I was like, “Wow.” So we became friends. It turns out when we moved to Summit, her cousins lived right down the street from us. So I would see her pretty often even after we moved to Summit. She was the first friend I had in Jersey, and we were close for a while.
Then when we moved to Summit within two days I was in another scrap. This was with Anthony Zachary and his sister, Wendy. I don’t remember why it started, but I didn’t want to hit Wendy. So every time she would swing, I would turn her away from me like a karate move, then I would wheel back around and hit him. Later Zach and I became pretty good friends. We were on the football and basketball teams together when we got to high school.
My senior photo.
Then school started, and that was a shock, as well. We had moved to Summit because the school system was better. What I wasn’t prepared for was that it was almost all white. Every school in Summit was integrated.
In Montgomery, I was in an all black school. My first experience of even being around white people was on the bus and in the bus station when we came to New Jersey. But when I got to Lincoln Elementary School, all the teachers were white. Everybody was white. Our classes, starting in elementary school averaged two, maybe three black kids.
I had this really thick Southern accent, and because of that they told me they would be giving me speech lessons. I think you were considered kind of dumb or “slow” if you had that Southern accent, and all that. So I had speech lessons for almost two years because the school was so rich. After my first year I had a C average, but my mom didn’t think it was good enough so she told them to hold me back. She said, “Keep him until he gets A’s and B’s.” This is the mother I’ve only known for a few months, and she’s telling them to hold me back.
So, I stayed back in the third grade, and that’s when I met the twins, Bobby and Sammy Gregory. These two guys would become my two best friends. I don’t know why, but the twins hooked on to me, and I hooked on to them. They were just so easygoing. I’m trying to think of some way to explain how the whole family was. They had a lot of money, but they were one of those families that you never knew had money. They came to school in jeans and T-shirts just like everyone else. Mrs. Gregory made them do everything normal. They weren’t that “richy-rich” kind of family.
Their family looked like the Kennedy’s, I’m telling you, man. If you were to look at Sam and Bobby, that’s what you would have thought. Sam is a lawyer now, Bobby runs the family business. They kind of adopted me, and another kid named Kenny Shamblee. Kenny stole something from their house, and they disowned him. But their house was almost like a second home for me from that time all the way through high school. Color was never mentioned in their house. They never talked about black and white, and Mrs. Gregory treated me with the utmost respect. When you were at their house, you were family.
They were the kind of people who were in my life from the time I got to Summit until I left. I got to know people who just looked at you as a person, not whether you were black or because you were white. I think that’s why even to this day I don’t judge anyone by whether they are black or white. I judge people by how they treat me.
My high school football coach, Howie Anderson was the same way. He was a man of honor. Mr. (Dominick) Guida, who was the first one to get me to play baseball, he was a man of honor. He was a man of integrity. All the coaches I had were that way. If you could play, they didn’t care if you were black, white or indifferent. Every man that was in my life at that point was a positive influence, a good human being. Those guys are positive guys, and it was really great to deal with that.
I thought, you know, once I got into this game (baseball) that I would run into the same kind of people. It didn’t work out that way. This game is a business. But here’s what I don’t understand. The good ones don’t treat it like a business, and they get the very best out of their players. The ones who treat it as a business are the ones who don’t get the best out of their players because the players begin treating it like a business. I would learn that later when Tony LaRussa was my manager with the A’s.
I started playing organized sports about the fifth grade in the Pop Warner League. It was football, not baseball. I needed to buy a uniform ... here’s an example of what I’m telling you about the Gregorys. Mrs. Gregory bought my first football uniform for me. I don’t know what happened. I don’t know who talked to who. But one day, Mrs. Gregory just said, “Here. Here’s a uniform.” We all played – Sammy, Bobby, me. Later, in high school Sammy was a wrestler. Bobby was a wrestler, too, but he was more of a football player.
Football was THE sport in Summit. This was my senior-year team. I’m wearing No. 21 in the middle of the second row.
I signed a letter to play football at Maryland where I hoped they would give me the same No. 21 I wore at Summit.
I was the quarterback on our youth teams. And everybody was happy around us. There was this running back named Mike Montgomery. He was happy, and his dad was happy. I just played quarterback. This is when I first learned about jealousy and how it affects people.
When we got to high school, the coach already had a junior and senior who were first and second quarterback. Coach thought I could be a better running back. That’s when the Montgomerys got mad because I beat him out for running back. He quit. His father never really forgave me.
Summit is a small town. I attended three schools: Lincoln Elementary School, Summit Junior High and Summit High School. Because it was a small town, there were these little cliques. I don’t know what it was, but I seemed to get more flack from the black people than I did from the white people. I don’t know whether it was jealousy or not ... that’s what I think.
I didn’t start playing baseball until the summer after my 8th grade year. That was the first summer I didn’t go back down to Alabama. That was when I met Mr. Guida down at the recreation center. He had seen me playing football, and for some reason he must have seen something in me. He was always preaching the positive. I was hanging around the recreation center, and he said, “Why don’t you get off that bike you are riding and go do something constructive.” Being a smartass, I said, “What would you have me do, Mr. Guida?”
He said, “Why don’t you go play baseball?” So I said I would go over and give it a shot. It was a summer league, and it was first come, first serve. If you played last summer at a certain position, you played that position. If someone was better than you, it didn’t matter. If you were there first, you got to play. The only position that was open was catcher. So I started off being a catcher ... well, I didn’t play. I sat on the bench and was a pinch runner that summer. But it was so cool to have something to go do in the summertime instead of just riding your bike around.
I always thought I had a weird body. I didn’t have a chest. But they knew I was quick. We had our T-shirts, the baggy baseball pants and our socks. The shoes were given to us. So I would sit on the bench and pinch run. Then, the next year, I made the 9th grade team, and I was the catcher. The next summer I was the starting catcher.
I loved it. If you want to know how to play baseball you should become a catcher. Fortunately for me, one of our coaches in high school had played Triple-A for the Philadelphia Phillies and he was a catcher. So he taught me how to be a catcher.
Memorial Field in Summit didn’t have any fences. All the home runs I hit were “inside the park.”
I was a catcher until I turned professional. I loved catching, man. My idol was Manny Sanguillen. You know, (cocking his leg out to the side) he had that leg out there, and he would have that one hand tucked behind his back. Elston Howard was with the Yankees, but I hated the Yankees. At the time, Pittsburgh was winning, and we would occasionally get some Pirates games – you know you only got so many games back in those days because there were only three channels. I fell in love with Manny Sanguillen because he was the only other black catcher I could see. And also because of the way he batted. That’s why I loved him, for real (laughing). You throw, one right down the middle, and it was a strike. He would just look at it. You throw, one up here by his eyes and he would go, “A-ha!” I liked that guy. He swung at everything. That’s what I did. I swung at everything. So, Manny was my guy. In football it was the Kansas Comet, Gale Sayers. I didn’t even know he was from Kansas at the time. He was already with the Bears.
I played sports all the time. I played football. I played basketball and I played baseball. In high school they ran into each other, and you just went from one right into the other. At that particular time baseball was the No. 3 sport. Football was the No. 1 sport. As it turned out, in football I was a two-time All-America and in baseball, I was a two-time All-America. But basketball was my second favorite sport.
I didn’t know I was a really good athlete in the beginning. I knew I was OK, and everything came to me pretty easily, but then when I was in the 11th grade and we went undefeated in football it was cool. I kind of knew I was pretty good at basketball with the older guys around the playground. There was this guy named Brent Cromwell, who played for Winston Salem. He was the sixth man on the team with Earl “The Pearl” Monroe. He was left-handed and tall. I would play with them starting in 9th grade, and he was the one who said I was pretty good, so I kind of had an idea.
My second favorite sport after football was basketball when I was in high school.
Our football team won the championship when I was a junior, I was All-American. I think I was on the All-America second team. I was All America in football and baseball my senior year, and an all-state basketball player.
I had an idea that I might be drafted in baseball because my basketball coach was one of the summer league baseball coaches, Eddie Lyons. Eddie had told me a lot of scouts said I was going to be the No. 1 draft choice in America. Philadelphia had the No. 1 draft choice. But I didn’t really want to play baseball. I was a football player in my brain. I wanted to go to school.
I was going to get a free ride, study business, carry a briefcase and wear a tie. That is what I wanted because I saw all the rich people in Summit carrying briefcases and wearing a tie. They were the ones with pretty big houses. So, I wanted to do what they were doing.
In high school was also the first time I ever felt the pressure of expectations. After we won the state championship in my junior year I felt like I had the pressure of not letting anybody down.
Can’t let my mom down.
Can’t let my high school coach down.
Can’t let the kids down.
Can’t let the teachers down.
Can’t let anybody down.
When you feel like you can’t let anybody down, you take everything so hard. I took losses really hard. Because of the coaches I had, I never flaunted it when we won. I wasn’t one of those guys strutting around saying, “We won! We won!” But if we lost I really took it hard. I didn’t know how ... I don’t think anybody who is really a winner in high school ever takes losing easy. You might accept it a little better as you get older. But when I was in high school I didn’t want to accept losing. I didn’t like losing. I took it to the point where I never wanted to feel that way again.
I didn’t wear a baseball cap too often because I was a catcher. I wore what would keep me warm. Spring baseball in New Jersey could be cold.
When I was a senior we won the Suburban Conference championship.
When I got to be a baseball player, you play 162 games. You’re going to lose 70 or 80 games. So you learn. But I’m telling you, it’s a learning process. It was hard for me to learn that. So I was mad every day we lost for about the first five or six years of my baseball career. You know how hard it is to be angry every day. It is really hard, man.
I was a B student in high school. I could have been an A student, but I didn’t want to be. It seems like sometimes the more successful I was the more flack you got. I needed a B average to get into Maryland, and my mom wanted me to have Bs, so when I got a B or above, I was good. She would go crazy if I got a C. But I wanted the B’s because of Maryland.
