Starting from Robert Redford 

In 2000, I met Robert Redford. 

Well, to say I “met” Redford is perhaps too strong a term. I spent some time with him in an elevator and later I was in a hotel room on the Upper East Side of New York City with five or six other junketing journalists who were there to ask him questions about The Legend of Bagger Vance, a movie about a popular golf fable he had directed and was contractually obligated to promote.

I don’t like these sort of interviews. I’m embarrassed I ever participated in them. A would-be film critic who worked in a tertiary market in the American South in the last year of the 20th century had limited options. Attending a junket was one of the few ways to see a major motion picture like The Legend of Bagger Vance in advance. This timing was needed to get a review in a pre-printed newspaper feature section on the day of the movie’s release.

And my wife Karen had just started a an ambitious new feature section for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette that was film review-centric; every Friday we were determined to try to review every film that opened in Arkansas. We were trying to establish relationships with studio publicists and film festival directors. We were trying to basically to do grown-up film criticism from Little Rock, Arkansas. So when we were offered a chance to fly to New York or Los Angeles to see a movie on the condition that we sit through a series of brief but usually painless round table interviews with actors and filmmakers, we usually played ball with the studios. 

For years, Karen and I and occasionally other members of our staff checked in with publicists and sat in rooms with members of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association and entertainment writers from medium-size newspapers (and stringers from larger newspapers) and put up with the sometimes inane and almost always harmless questions they asked. While these sessions, in which the “talent” would invariably stay on message and deliver exactly the sort of soundbite they wanted the American public to consume, rarely yielded anything of value, I always got some sort of story out of the experience, even if I was reduced to writing about what the great sportswriter Dan Jenkins referred to as the “rally-killers and the point-misses,” the junket journalists who simply had to know what sort of cat Sandy Bullock would be were she a cat or how great was it for Ewan McGregor to get to work with Josh Hartnett?

(“You know why I like you?” Billy Bob Thornton once told me. “You never once asked me if I was a vampire.”) 

On that day in October 2000, in the interview itself, Redford was very good at acting personable and exuding a sort of movie star nobless oblige; he was very good at playing Robert Redford for what was frankly a star-struck room that was more interested in pushing photographs and DVD cases toward him than finding out the secrets behind the production of The Legend of Bagger Vance. Impressively, Redford signed these items without looking, without breaking eye contact with whichever earnest questioner now held his attention. 

Still, Redford looked very tired at the junket and I felt bad for him. I could imagine that this was not the sort of thing he had in mind when he signed onto the dream-making business. When my turn came, I think I asked him a harmless question about golf, whether he played or not. I think he said he didn’t play at all. Or maybe he had played once or twice a long time ago. It didn’t matter. 

This was arguably a point-missing question but it was all I really had. 

I wasn’t there to write a feature story about the making of the film. Unlike most of the ilk gathered in the room, I was principally interested in practicing criticism on it. (I didn’t care much for the movie, which, as the great Paul Greenberg once said of Charleston, South Carolina, was a “little too birthday cake” for my tastes.) They needed quotes and color; all I wanted was a little inside baseball for my accompanying column. 

Redford seemed resigned to the fact that everybody in the room was going to write whatever they wanted to write about his movie anyway. And I believed I’d got my story about thirty minutes earlier, when I’d stepped onto the hotel elevator and magically found myself alone with Robert Redford.

I am not by nature a person who lights up around celebrity. I am not inclined to fawn — I may be inclined a little too much to reserve. I generally do not say anything to famous people who I encounter randomly. I may nod. I asked LeBron James, “S’up, King?” I just smiled at Kris Kristofferson when he literally bumped into me on a Toronto Street. I sort of shadowed Nick Lowe for half-a-block in Denver once, but he didn’t notice me at all.

But in the elevator it seemed stupid to pretend I didn’t know who and what he was. So I told Robert Redford that Ted Williams was “my favorite baseball player too,” even though my favorite baseball player was actually Hank Aaron. And I said Redford had the best baseball swing of any actor I’d ever seen and that Barry Levinson’s The Natural, the film adaptation of the Bernard Malamud novel that Redford had starred in in 1984, was my favorite baseball movie of all-time. 

This might have been true. (I go back and forth between Ron Shelton’s Bull Durham and The Natural. )

I also told him The Natural was the last movie my father, who had played a little minor league ball and later on the Air Force’s traveling baseball team, went to see in a theater before he died. I told him my father loved it and it was an important movie to me too. 

Redford grinned and nodded. And told me he had seen Williams hit his last home run in Yankee Stadium. He was in the right field bleachers; he said he almost caught it.

Then the elevator opened, and we went our separate ways. Redford might have guessed that I was in the hotel for the junket for his film but I like to think he thought I was just another prosperous guest, someone who was self-possessed enough not to freak out because they were in close proximity to a movie star. Later, when I saw him in the hotel room, he gave no indication he  recognized me. 

I did not tell Robert Redford but I was at that game too. I was a 22-month-old toddler at his first game. This was part of my family’s lore, a story my father had told me many times — the last time a month or so after he’d watched The Natural in a Shreveport, Louisiana movie theater, as he lay dying in a semi-private hospital room that smelled of antiseptic and hot water. 

•••

My father had got sick just after I graduated high school; throughout my college years his cancer would flare up and fade. He would get sick and he would fight it off. He would get strong enough to go to movies or to play softball — I do not have many trophies in my house but I have a game ball his teammates awarded him after he came back to play shortstop for them after a round of chemotherapy — and then the lymphoma would pull him back down.

It is only recently that I have realized that I have been telling myself a lie about my own life; I did not leave law school a couple of semesters shy of my juris doctor because I was simply tired of school. I left because I was exhausted by my father’s illness and I felt, in some fundamental way, that I had to at least begin to try to make my way in the world. I probably felt some financial pressure too, though I do not remember every being too worried about money in those days. My father’s illness was the salient fact of my young adulthood. A lot of what I did in this days I did because I was trying to be a good son. 

I don’t regret any of that. I ended up in a good place I would not have found by any other route. I only regret that it took me a long time to understand what happened to us. 

•••

I also regret I didn’t go to see The Natural with my dad. 

But I was a young man; I went to movies at night, with my friends, or with a date.  We would go on Tuesday nights, dollar night. I worked during the week. I was only vaguely aware that toward the end of his life, during those times when he was well enough to be out of the hospital but not well enough to work, my father would sometimes go to movies alone, often in the afternoon. 

The Natural came out in May 1984; my father went into the hospital a few weeks later and died on July 27, at 8:27 in the morning. Somewhere in there he went to see The Natural. 

I was not there when he died — it was a Friday, which would normally been one of my days off but for some reason I’d been called in to work.

I’d seen him the afternoon before, and it might have been then or earlier that week, I’d dropped by his hospital room in the early afternoon after I’d finished my cop shop rounds, to bring him a strawberry milkshake strawberry milkshake and a copy of  book called Balls, a behind-the-scenes account of the New York Yankees’ 1983 season ostensibly written by their erstwhile third baseman Graig Nettles. (Nettles had help from Peter Golenbock, who had written two previous books about the Yankees.)

Technically, I was smuggling the shake to him — he wasn’t supposed to have outside food while he was in the hospital — but everyone understood he was dying. They were just keeping him comfortable, with morphine or something like it dripping into his arm. They looked the other way if I brought milkshakes, or if some of his younger co-workers — he worked for a company that manufactured devices that measured the flow of liquid through gas pipelines after he retired from the Air Force — rolled joints for him to blow out the cracked window of his semi-private room.

My father was an admirer of Nettles, who he thought was — aside from the incomparable Brooks Robinson — the best two-way third baseman of his era. And I thought he’d enjoy the book, which was written in the same bawdy, jocular vein as Jim Bouton’s Ball Four. But the real reason I brought him the book was to advertise that I had recently graduated to writing about books — to practicing literary criticism. Gary West, a former college English professor who’d taken to writing about horse racing for the Journal and who also served as the newspaper’s de facto book editor had noticed me and given me a small stack of review copies.

“Write about these if you want to,” West told me. Balls was on the top of the stack. It became the first book I ever wrote about as a professional writer. (Though I should stress I didn’t get paid anything extra for writing these reviews; it was volunteer work I did off the clock.)

I didn’t mind. Writing reviews gave me reason to talk to, and to be edited by West, who was the newspaper’s subtlest and most erudite writer. (West, who’s still active as a prominent turf writer today, would go on to write Razoo at the Races: Diary of a Horseplayer, which is possibly the funniest books ever written about horse racing and its enthusiasts.) 

My father told me he was proud of me — as proud as he would have been had I told him I was “playing third for the Red Sox,” a dream I’d considered plausible a few years before.  It was a good thing for him to say. I was an unsettled young man, after I’d left law school I’d taken a job as a sports editor for a small weekly newspaper in Jennings, Louisiana, because that was the kind of job I could get. I’d left that job after a year to come back to Shreveport but I was not convinced I was suited to a newspaper career. 

I’d had some success as a songwriter — I’d won a national songwriting competition with my college buddy Gary Bolyer and performed on The Merv Griffin Show. I played guitar and sang a little in a punk pop band and occasionally played my guitar and sang my songs in fern bars — but I lacked the confidence to commit to chasing a career in music. I hadn’t begun to think of myself as a writer. At that point in my life, I might have said my biggest accomplishment was having been able to introduce my dad to a glassy-eyed, pilled-up Jerry Reed backstage at Hirsch Memorial Coliseum before a concert. ( I was there as a guest of Stella Parton, Dolly’s younger sister, who was opening for Reed and performing our prize-winning song in her set.)

I brought my father a milkshake and Balls, and he told me was proud of me and that, sometime during a brief respite between hospital stays, he had seen The Natural. 

“That Redford, he was a ballplayer,” he said. “That swing would work — he’s got some bat speed. He’s fluid.”

This was unusual; my father always hated when actors played ballplayers. He hated William Bendix in The Babe Ruth Story, which came out in 1948, when he was eleven  years old and still believed  in magic. He liked Gary Cooper as Lou Gehrig in The Pride of the Yankees, Sam Wood’s 1942 hymn to strong, silent masculinity, but he wished they had cut out all the baseball action. 

The commonly held notion is that Cooper, who reportedly had no interest in baseball and had never swung a bat before being cast as Gehrig, was, as a natural right-hander, unable to master a reasonable looking left-handed swing. To remedy this problem, the filmmakers dressed him in a mirror-image Yankees uniform and had him swing from the right side of the plate. Cooper then ran to third base instead of first, with technicians flipping the print to make it appear Cooper was left-handed and running to first.

This sounds in like something that might have happened and the story is commonly repeated as fact today but like a lot of old legends we take as history, it probably isn’t true. 

The “flopped footage” story may have started with a column the Washington Post sportswriter Shirley Povich wrote days before the movie opened. Povich noted that while Lefty O’Doul — a remarkable figure who was, a various times in his career a star pitcher, batting champion, successful manager, innovative batting coach, and instrumental in popularizing baseball in Japan — had signed on to coach Cooper to bat, catch and throw left-handed on screen, he had been unable to coach a credible performance out of Cooper. So Povich wrote “everything  you see Cooper doing left-handed in the picture, he’s actually doing right-handed.”

Everyone accepted Povich’s assertions as fact, and it may have suited director Wood and producer Samuel Goldwyn to have the public think they’d achieved the effect through camera trickery. I suspect that Povich was told that the footage was flopped, either by a misinformed publicist or by someone who wanted to showcase the ingenuity of the Hollywood technicians. Even in though days, most newspaper columnists — H.L. Mencken excepted — tended not to make things up. 

So the legend was printed as fact until 2013, when Tom Shieber, the Senior Curator at the National Baseball Hall of Fame, published a long and convincing article on his Baseball Researcher blog that pointed out how difficult it would have been to convincingly carry out this kind of practical effect.

While the mirror-image uniform “[s]eems like a plausible way to solve the problem,” Shieber writes, in actuality it’s more like “a complicated conspiracy theory” where “every aspect of the plan would have to have been carefully planned out and perfectly executed.”

Consider that “every other player in the shot would also have to don backwards uniforms,” and that “the second baseman, third baseman, and shortstop would all have to be left-handers and wear gloves on their right hand.” The producers would have to track down both a left-handed catcher, and a left-handed catcher’s mitt for him to wear. 

And every shot would “have to be carefully set up so that, when reversed, there would be nothing to belie the trickery: no outfield advertising, no ballpark features that are non-symmetrical, etc.”

Shieber points out that he was only able to examine the final cut of the film, and he didn’t have access to any material that was cut, where the filmmakers might have tried flipping the image. And there is one scene, a brief sequence where the footage is flipped to make Cooper appear to be throwing left-handed. (“[Cooper] threw the ball like an old woman tossing a hot biscuit,” O’Doul admitted.)

But most of the scenes where Cooper was required to throw were filmed using his stand-in, the left-handed Babe Herman (who, like O’Doul, is one of the great forgotten characters of the game.) 

And personally, looking at Gary Cooper’s left-handed swing today, I’d say it’s not that bad. It’s not Gehrig’s swing, but I’ve seen worse. But then I’m not the baseball critic my father was. 

Cooper’s swing in The Pride of the Yankees offended my father in a way that Robert Redford’s swing in The Natural did not. Redford actually impressed my father, and I wish I’d had some way to convey the gravity of that to him during our brief meeting in the elevator. 

I don’t know that it would have meant anything to him, but it should have.

••• 

Redford, who was in his forties at the time, actually just a few months older than my father, plays Roy Hobbs, a once-promising baseball player who has his career derailed when, as a 19-year-old rookie, he’s shot by a deranged woman who lures him to her hotel room after she ascertains that he has a chance to be in a hotel room, an echo of what happened to Eddie Waitkus, the first baseman for the Chicago Cubs who, in the midst of the 1949 season, was shot by a nineteen -year-old female stalker who lured him to her hotel room.

In The Natural, it takes Hobbs sixteen years to make it back to the majors. In real life, Waitkus played the next season and was named Comeback Player of the Year, though he apparently developed PTSD and underwent a severe personality change; where he was once warm and outgoing, he became paranoid and withdrawn.

Waitkus continued playing, albeit with diminished strength and confidence, ultimately finishing his career with the Philadelphia Phillies and Baltimore Orioles. He retired from baseball in 1955, and as the years went on, his personal struggles worsened. He had difficulty holding onto jobs and maintaining relationships. Alcohol became a source of solace, exacerbating his emotional struggles.

In his later years, he struggled with declining health and battled cancer. He spent his final days in a veteran’s hospital, largely forgotten by the world that had once celebrated him. He passed away on September 16, 1972, at the age of fifty-three.

In Malmud’s book, Roy Hobbs fails to find redemption. After a career of poor choices and moments of greed, he is bribed to throw the final game by striking out intentionally. He struggles with his decision but ultimately agrees. Then he decides to try to play honestly, but ends up striking out anyway.

The morally ambiguous sports columnist Max Mercy publishes a column that insinuates Hobbs threw the game and a young boy confronts Hobbs on the street and accuses him of betraying the team and its fans. 

“Say it isn’t true,” the kid demands, mirroring the probably apocryphal scene where a young fan asked the Black Sox’s Shoeless Joe Jackson to “say it  isn’t so.”

Hobbs can’t do that — he can’t explain or offer the reassurance or denial the boy requires. While the public at large doesn’t know the full story of Hobbs’s decision to throw the game — or his last minute decision to give his best effort— the boy’s question cystallizes Hobbs’s profound guilt and shame for the choices he’s made, particularly his decision to get involved in throwing the game, whether or not he fully followed through.

There is an unsettling ambiguity in Malamud’s ending that might alienate a popcorn crowd. The Natural is a book about moral failure and broken faith, about wasted potential and the consequences of bad choices. You can understand why some might feel it’s a little too heavy for a popcorn crowd.

So Levinson’s film version offers a completely different ending. In the movie, Hobbs’s story is one of redemption and triumph. Facing the same critical final at-bat, he refuses to throw the game and instead hits a dramatic, game-winning home run. The scene is charged with symbolism and heightened by cinematic effects: Hobbs hits the ball so powerfully that it shatters the stadium lights, causing sparks to rain down as he rounds the bases in slow motion. This ending gives Hobbs a heroic victory, transforming him into a mythic figure and fulfilling the “American dream” of redemption and triumph over adversity.

Levinson’s change remakes The Natural into a classic Hollywood tale of resilience and success, veering away from Malamud’s sobering message about human flaws. This change has made the film memorable for its iconic ending but also shifts the story’s tone, turning a tragic narrative into a celebration of hope and heroism.

Still, I like The Natural as a movie. 

It ends with Roy Hobbs, healed and redeemed, playing catch with his young son in a golden, sunlit field, with his wife watching nearby. The “fathers-playing-catch-with sons” is a powerful and recurring motif in baseball films, symbolizing not only a connection to the sport but also the bond between generations, the transfer of values, and the resolution of complex family dynamics.

Talking with my father about it was like having a final game of catch. 

•••

One of the most interesting things about Robert Redford was born Robert Redford.

By that I mean, the name on his birth certificate is “Charles Robert Redford Jr.” “Robert Redford” is not a stage name, contrived by some agent or student executive. He was not born Marion Morrison or Leonard Slye or Archie Leach. Robert Redford was always Robert Redford, even when he was drinking himself out of school in Boulder, Colorado or attending the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris or working in an oil field or as a forest ranger. 

I was surprised to learn this; for Robert Redford sounds like a made-up name, the sort of name that a golden-haired Hollywood actor would take for himself. Redford sounds more than a little like “Redwood,” the giant species of sequoia that can grow to a height of more than three hundre-fifty feet, live for three thousand years, and are specific to the western slopes of the Californian Sierra Nevada. 

Only California could produce these trees — relatives of which have been around since the Jurassic Era. And it’s difficult to imagine Redford as coming from anywhere but California. 

But maybe it sounds like that because we associate the name with the movie star who played the Sundance Kid. 

If you read a biography of Redford, or even his Wikipedia page, you might get a sense that he just sort of fell into acting. He was a kind of lost kid, the son of a milk man who became an accountant for Standard Oil and a housewife who died when he was 18 years old. He’s told stories about being involved in Rebel Without a Cause-style petty crime as a a teenager; he’s said he didn’t consider himself terribly attractive and that he never got a lot of that “gee, he’s cute” stuff from the girls in his high school. He had freckles. He was shy. 

But at other times he has said he was popular with girls. 

He was an athlete; it’s often asserted that he played high school baseball with Don Drysdale. This used to be taken as settled fact; Drysdale once told the famous St. Louis sportswriter Bob Broeg that Redford was a “pretty good ball player.” Or at least Broeg quoted Drysdale as saying that.

But in 2011, the Los Angeles Times, while doing interviews for the Sundance Kid obituary they will one day run, discovered that Redford most likely didn’t play high school baseball — or at least that he wasn’t on the Van Nuys High team with Drysdale. Both Redford and Drysdale attended Van Nuys High from 1952 to 1954; the yearbooks show that Redford was on the tennis team but make no mention of him playing baseball.

He might still have been a baseball teammate of Drysdale’s — they could have played together on an American Legion team or just in the sandlots. Drysdale’s recollection of Redford as a pretty good player might not be a wishful misremembrance. But it seems more likely than not that Redford was not on his high school’s baseball team.

Still, it’s said he was a good enough baseball player to be offered an athletic scholarship to the University of Colorado. Actually, this appears to be semi-true — Redford might have been offered a partial scholarship, he might have essentially walked on the University of Colorado baseball team.  As we’ll see, not playing organized high school baseball was not a deal breaker for some professional scouts in the 1950s; and going by the evidence of Redford’s sweet swing in his 1984 film The Natural, he might have possessed talent enough to impress a college coach. 

But once he got there, he apparently lost interest in sports and school and began drinking heavily. If he was on the team, he was apparently kicked off the team. He  left school (which he would later say he had come to despised), became interested in art and moved to Europe to study, got married, eventually drifted into theater and eventually became Robert Redford.

Whatever his level of organized experience, my father was right: Redford had been a ballplayer. You could tell, watching The Natural, that he had patterned his swing after that of Ted Williams, who had been his boyhood idol. 

•••

The Legend of Bagger Vance is based on the novel of the same name by Steve Pressfield, an interesting man who, before he became a very successful writer of novels, non-fiction books and screenplays, was a U.S. Marine, advertising copywriter, schoolteacher, tractor-trailer driver, bartender, oilfield roustabout, mental hospital orderly and transient fruit-picker. 

Apparently Pressfield was homeless for a while, and while I haven’t read his 2002 book The War of Art, people I trust cite it as an important source for anyone who wants to be a writer, especially a writer who deals with Hollywood people. 

 In my mind, I am morally aligned with Pressfield because (I think) that his best advice to would-be writers is to actually do the work. In (over)preparation for reviewing the film, I read the novel and while it was a silly story that drew from a lot of familiar golf lore (such as the story of Francis Ouimet’s U.S. Open win and “the Match” between amateurs Ken Venturi and Harvie Ward and professionals Ben Hogan and Byron Nelson) with some pretensions to philosophic profundity, I thought it was well-constructed and in some ways ingenious. It was clever. I enjoyed it. 

That said, I didn’t care too much for the movie version of The Legend of Bagger Vance, which was a golf story based on the  sacred Hindu text the Bhagavad Gita. In the movie, Matt Damon — who still wasn’t quite Matt Damon at the time, but was in the process of becoming Matt Damon (Redford told me he cast him specifically because he hadn’t been “too touched up” by the world), plays a character named Rannulph Junuh, a wealthy young amateur golfer from Savannah, Georgia. 

Junuh is a golden boy, the youngest ever to win the Georgia Amateur, engaged to the beautiful and rich belle Adele Invergordon (Charlize Theron, who was not yet Charlize Theron). Yet, across the ocean, Europe is convulsing. A Great War is begun. 

Junuh — whose name is an allusion to the reluctant Warrior Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita and also sounds like how the name of someone from Savannah might be pronounced —  volunteers. He goes off to fight and learns war is messy and depressing. An officer, he leads his men into a slaughter and is decorated.

It is a dozen years before he returns home and when he does he shuns his former friends and his beloved, who has waited for him. He lives alone in a dilapidated mansion in the woods, drinks bourbon and plays poker with poor black sharecroppers.

He is still a kind of legend to some, most particularly little Hardy Greaves (J. Michael Moncrief, who allegedly beat out two thousand other boys who auditioned for the role; his Internet Movie Database page shows he hasn’t acted since though he keeps his hand in as a film editor and second unit director), the obligatory ten-year-old who grows up to become the narrator of the story (an uncredited Jack Lemmon in what would be his final role). Like a young Tom T. Hall to Clayton Delaney, Hardy seems to stalk Junuh, who haunts his old hometown like a dissipated ghost. 

As the Depression falls across the country, things are not at all well with Miss Invergordon. Her father takes the easy way out, leaving her with a dream of a golf resort and crushing debt. Soon the opportunists are swarming, offering to take the resort — a place called  Krewe Island — in exchange for what they’re owed. But Adele Invergordon is steely. On the spur of the moment she comes up with a plan to save the place: Krewe Island will host a match between the greatest golfers of the age, the gentleman amateur Bobby Jones and the flamboyant professional Walter Hagen. As an afterthought, it’s decided that Savannah must have a champion in the match as well. And though he hasn’t touched a club in years, the damaged, alcoholic Junuh is nominated as the local champion.

Now, let’s stop here just for a moment. Maybe you’re thinking this all seems patently ridiculous. You’re right, it is. Yet we must remember that there is nothing in this movie that is the least bit gritty or naturalistic  — even the gory war scenes are filtered through dreamy smoke. Bagger Vance is most decidedly a fantasy.

And the rules for fantasy are that the controlling intelligence behind the fantasy gets to change the rules at any time. The test of whether it succeeds is whether it entertains us or not.

And Bagger Vance meant to be a very entertaining film, filled with corny dialogue and implausible — magical  — occurrences perhaps, but satisfying in the same guilty pleasure way as Will Smith shows up as the title character, a holy man/caddie with an inauthentic accent who directs Junuh in his quest for his “authentic swing.”

OK, let’s stop again. 

There have been times in man life when I have been a pretty serious golfer. I was probably playing the best golf of my life around the time Bagger Vance was released. I was serious about the game, and like a lot of people I was (and remain) highly skeptical of the notion of golf as dharma. I probably paid too much attention to whether the actors had credible golf swings; at the time it mattered to me as much as whether the actors who played baseball players looked right mattered to my father. 

In the review I wrote of the movie for  the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, I compared Bagger’s “philosophy” to the ironic “be the ball” gibberish spouted by Chevy Chase’s Ty Webb character in Caddyshack. 

The difference was that Ty Webb was a conceived as a kind of satire of a certain kind of country clubber. Will Smith’s Bagger Vance was earnest. 

These days, the character Bagger Vance is widely regarded these days as a prime example of what Spike Lee calls the “Magical Negro,” a saintly Black character who serves as mentor/servant to a questing white hero. At the time, I didn’t have access to the “Magical Negro” because Lee didn’t start using the phrase until a tour of college campuses he marked on in 2001.

But I will give myself credit for noting that I found Smith’s part somewhat problematic: 

“… at times he seems to be doing a Morgan Freeman impression (and one can imagine that he’ll take some of the same type of criticism for this politically incorrect role that Freeman received for his turn in Driving Miss Daisy). He’s playing a spirit, a supernatural stereotype teaching with folk aphorisms and reverse psychology. His Blackness seems not to matter as much as it should in Depression-era south Georgia.”

On the other hand, Smith had a good golf swing. (So did Joel Gretsch, the actor who played Bobby Jones in the movie. Gretsch had played high school golf, but he was presented to us as a former college golfer, Which meant, I suppose that he had played golf while he was in college.) 

Smith is an engaging performer, and the sort of movie star who you couldn’t help but like when he turned his attention to you. I felt this way even after watching him berate an assistant in the hotel hallway. Apparently the young man had been sent on a mission to collect a particular silk head scarf and had mistakenly fetched the wrong one.

Another thing I remember about the movie is that I felt forgiving toward Theron’s unreliable Southern accent — I thought she came across like a Southerner from the Scott Fitzgerald story  “The Ice Palace,” albeit one with an unusual amount of energy. 

It surprised me that Redford seemed so unafraid of sentimentality or prettiness. Bagger Vance is a straightforwardly sentimental, pretty fairy tale. It doesn’t stand up to any kind of scrutiny. But it doesn’t have to.

But my main interest wasn’t the movie. 

I only attended The Legend of Bagger Vance junket because it promised an opportunity to talk to Redford. He did not often make himself available to the press, at least not to movie critics writing for daily newspapers in tertiary markets like Arkansas. He had been one of the actors I’d paid attention to when I first began watching movies critically; he was an actor I enjoyed watching in All The President’s Men and The Candidate and Three Days of the Condor. I wanted to talk to him; even though I understood the conventions of the press junket made it unlikely that anything especially interesting would be said by anyone on either side of the conference table. 

I came home from that junket thinking that I would write something about how Robert Redford was at the very first baseball game I ever attended. But then, when I actually sat down to write about the movie and the junket, I didn’t feel like the coincidence was anything more than that. It was just one of those quirky things that sometimes happen when you talk to people — you find out you have experiences in common. It was just one of those “huh” moments we all sometimes experience, when the universe feels playful. 

 So I filed the incident away and wrote a more or less stock story about the junket. My review was critical, but not damning — some critics think The Legend of Bagger Vance is pretty bad. “Pretentious piffle,” the BBC said. 

On the Rotten Tomatoes aggregation site, my review is counted as positive, in the forty-three percent minority. I’m not sure that I agree with that assessment — Rotten Tomatoes decides whether a review is positive, not the critic whose work is being aggregated — but I’m not the sort of critic who cares much about the verdict being delivered. I’ve never liked the sort of thumbs up/thumbs down way of thinking about the movies that some people think is what film criticism is about. I’m just not that comfortable as a consumer advocate; I’m more interested in why people are trying to tell the stories they’re trying to tell.

And I don’t know how to tell this story without talking about the ball game that I have in common with Robert Redford and Ted Williams (and Mickey Mantle and my father).

•••

I have no memory of September 6, 1960. 

I only know what I have been told, and what I’ve discovered through my research, most of which was conducted right here at this desk. Somewhere, perhaps, there is a pitch-by-pitch account of the game in question, but I haven’t found it. (I thought I found it, but what the kindly researcher in Boston provided was a play-by-play account, not a pitch-by-pitch.)

 Somewhere they may even be film clips. 

If there are, I’m not sure they matter, because the game that I don’t remember now exists only in the memories of the dwindling few who were in attendance. It happened a few years before it would have been routinely recorded and filed away as part of the permanent record of our times. There are limits to what we can know about it, there are only certain facts that can be checked. I will take Robert Redford’s word that he was at that game; I will take my father’s word that we were at that game, but I understand that any or all of us might be mistaken. 

What I can say for certain is that my father was twenty-three years old on September 6, 1960.  (Robert Redford had just turned twenty-four.) He was in the Air Force and his main job was playing shortstop for an all-star team made up of active duty personnel. He’d been an outstanding athlete in high school in North Carolina, an American Legion teammate of Jimmy Hall and Jim (older brother of Gaylord) Perry, and briefly a minor leaguer, but he’d enlisted after being recruited by a master sergeant who suggested he could play ball and see the world if he signed on the dotted line. 

They weren’t lying; he played games in the shadows of the pyramids and in the Canary Islands while being based at Griffiss Air Force Base in upstate New York, where his day job had something to do with the development of the guidance system for the AGM-28 Hound Dog, a supersonic, turbojet-propelled, air-launched cruise missile. 

I vaguely remember the Hound Dog missile; until I began working on this book I thought one of the first photographs of me ran in the Air Force Times in 1959; that I was in a bassinet perched on top of a Hound Dog, flanked by my parents. I remember that photo from my childhood, it was one of only a relative few photographs that found its way into a leather-covered scrapbook my mother maintained.

But when I was working on this essay, I went on the Internet to try to find a copy of the photograph. I couldn’t find it. So I asked my mother about it.

She remembered it; she remembered posing for the photograph at some sort of base function and then forgetting about it. Then her sister Edith, who was also, married to an Air Force NCO, sent her a letter from Guam to say she had seen it in the Air Force Times. It was only then that my parents sought to get a copy of the photograph.

But it wasn’t me in the photograph; it was my younger sister — born in 1961 —  in the bassinet balanced on top of the missile.

I still haven’t been able to find the photograph; though my mother believes she still has it somewhere, tucked away with my father’s medals and the “DT-60,” a round black plastic case an inch and a half in diameter and  three-eights of an inch thick that he wore on a chain around his neck with his dog tags.

The DT-60 is a primitive personal dosimeter — a device designed to measure and monitor an individual’s exposure to doses of radiation, such as X-rays or gamma rays. Military personnel who worked in proximity to nuclear devices or participated in atomic tests were required to wear them. My father’s was manufactured by Bausch and Lomb Optical Company. 

I have seen an Associated Press photo from October 1961 which featured a smiling woman holding a DT-60 pendant like the one my father wore. The caption reads: “Nuclear Neckwear. Linda Bromley of New Rochelle, N.Y., holds in her left hand a personal radiation detector whose maker says could be the next thing in ladies neckwear should the threat of nuclear fallout increase.” 

I remember, as a child, playing with this fashion accessory — it unscrewed, revealing a small glass block in the center of the device that could be removed so it could be read under ultraviolet radiation. The minimum sensitivity of these dosimeters was approximately 10 Roentgen — a unit of measurement for exposure to gamma and X-rays named after the German physicist Wilhem  Röntgen, who was awarded the first Nobel Prize in Physics for his discovery of X-rays.

The minimum dose the device registered is about twice the current exposure limit for occupationally-exposed workers. Anyone exposed to four hundred Roentgen could expect to suffer radiation sickness and die. 

These devices offered their wearers no clue as to what their exposure level had been. It wasn’t supposed to be easily unscrewed; it was supposed to require a special tool to open the device. But I did it, just using my fingers, when I was seven or eight years old. 

I thought about that DT-60 sometimes when my father was dying of lymphoma. He was also a smoker, at least a pack and often more of Pall Mall cigarettes everyday. 

That’s what men of his generation — the so-called Silent Generation — did. They smoked cigarettes and they volunteered to watch atomic tests and they took their toddler sons to baseball games the boys would never remember, except as a myth of their childhood, as something they were told they had experienced. 

Something these fathers and sons could reminisce about as one or the other lay dying. 

•••

While I am sure I do not remember September 6, 1960, I am not sure what my first memory may be, and I can’t really understand how some people can definitively speak of their “earliest” memory. I have a small set of them, blurry and shifty, a box of flash cards I can’t arrange them into any discernible order.  

They’re just images: a grease-streaked porthole window in a downtown pub or restaurant in maybe Buffalo or Syracuse;  the heavy steel wheels of a locomotive sliding slowly to a stop as I walk hand-in-hand with my mother alongside the rails in some station, a friendly German Shepherd confusedly chasing me through several backyards in the family housing of Griffiss Air Force Base. 

I have a strong mental image of a visit to Cooperstown, New York, and the Baseball Hall of Fame. It is clearer than the other memories I’ve just described. I remember the leafy streets, the dappled sunlight, the entrance, the plaques. I remember reaching for Ted Williams’ jersey, feeling the nap of the flannel. I remember a Kodachrome snapshot of me standing by Stan Musial’s plaque.

This trip took place; I confirmed this with my parents. We went to Cooperstown in 1962 or 1963. But the memory is impossible. Musial was still an active player in 1963, he had no plaque in the museum. It’s highly doubtful Williams’ jersey was there either; he had yet to be enshrined. And even if the jersey were there — as part as a special exhibit, for instance — it’s doubtful it would have been available for grubby four-year-olds to handle. 

Yet that memory is as real as anything that can be said to have happened in the past. They say your mind does not distinguish between what is actual and what is pretend. Experience does not privilege the verifiable over the misremembered. 

Mnemosyne was the goddess of memory and mother of the nine muses. The ancient Greeks would call upon her when they undertook to recite an epic poem, asking her to  guide their account to accuracy, or maybe truth.

She’s called out in both the Iliad and the Odyssey. And Vladimir Nabokov initially intended on calling his 1951 autobiographic memoir Speak, Mnemosyne. It was only after his publisher, Sir Victor Gollancz, informed him that little old ladies would not ask a bookseller for a title they could not pronounce that Nabokov agreed to call the book Speak, Memory.

(I want to leave that last paragraph in although it’s not quite right. As I was fact-checking it, I was confronted by incontrovertible evidence that Nabokov’s first title for the book was  actually Conclusive Evidence. Some number of books were printed with it. But, Nabokov writes in his introduction, the first title led too many people to believe that it was a mystery novel. So Speak, Mnemosyne was proposed as the second title and rejected. I believe I used to know that.)

Playfully, I suspect, Nabokov brought out a revised version of Speak, Memory in 1966, ostensibly to correct the record, to put straight the many things he had mis-remembered. But what he does is point up the mutability of our memory, the ways wishfulness and private legend encroach on actual experience. 

I don’t intend on correcting anything I write in this book, though I imagine there is much I will get wrong. Some things I have no doubt misapprehended, there are other things I think I know that I do not know. Everything is focused through my perception, and will appear at least slightly distorted to the fictive objective reader with perfect knowledge of the events and personalities I try to describe. I am sure I will be self-serving and I know there is much I will omit. 

I will, as the newspaper editor Carleton Young advised in John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, endeavor to “print the legend.” 

Not because I have any interest in promulgating a lie, but because the legend is simply the beat that I can do.

•••

I do not remember it but the best obtainable information holds that at two minutes after two p.m. on September 6, 1960, Eli Grba, the twenty-six year-old son of a Serbian immigrant single mother who raised her son on Chicago’s South Side, in a steel mill neighborhood known as “Slag Hill,” threw the first Major League pitch I ever witnessed.

Grba, like most men who reach the Major Leagues, was a natural athlete whose talent flashed early, and might have saved him from a rougher life in the mills or in jail.  

He knew his father, a first generation immigrant and an at least second generation alcoholic, and witnessed him do terrible things, like drag his mother down a flight of stairs by her hair. His mother and father separated when he was young, but for a while his father lived nearby, in a room at the YMCA. He remembers his father taking him to Comiskey Park in 1946 to see the Red Sox play the White Sox, but mostly to see “one of the best to ever played the game” Ted Williams. 

After batting practice Grba handed a scrap of paper over the wall, “holding [his] breath as if [he] were about to receive the Pope’s blessing.” Williams signed it.

“That was the day that Ted Williams became my baseball idol,” Grba writes in his 2016 book, Baseball’s Fallen Angel: A Major Leaguer’s Life Story of High Expectations, Hidden Pitfalls, and His Ongoing Fight In Recovery, which we’ll get to in a few moments. 

Grba was pitching for the New York Yankees, who were in the midst of cruising to their fifth straight pennant, which they would win by eight games over the Baltimore Orioles. 

At that point in the season they had won 77 games and lost 54. Back in June, they’d played the Kansas City A’s to an anomalous 7-7 tie, when the game was called because of rain after twelve innings.

The day before, the Yankees had won both ends of a double-header against the struggling Boston Red Sox, who would finish 16 games under .500. That they were not in those days perceived as rivals to the dominant Yankees might account for there having been only about 17,000 fans at the game.

Despite it being the day after a double-header, all the everyday Yankee stars played. Roger Maris, acquired in the off-season, batted lead-off and played right field. Centerfielder Mickey Mantle was the clean-up hitter. Tony Kubek was at short, Clete Boyer at third, Bobby Richardson at second and Moose Skowron at first. Yogi Berra was the starting catcher that day, though Elston Howard would come in after seven innings.

In those days, the regulars were the regulars. Grba was not a regular but a spot starter and long reliever, though still at that time a highly regarded prospect. They say he was known as “The Serbian Strongman,” but I have a hard time believing anyone other than a sportswriter or broadcaster would have called him that.  They might have called him “BoHunk” or “Meat” but “The Serbian Strongman” is the sort of nickname relegated to media guides and the back of baseball cards. (Actually, none of the Eli Grba cards I’ve seen actually mentions that nickname.)

Grba is remembered today primarily because he was the first player selected in the 1960 Major League Baseball expansion draft, which was held to fill the rosters of two new American League teams, the Los Angeles Angels and the Washington Senators. He’s a trivia answer, but to become that he had to have been considered a pretty good prospect.

In Baseball’s Fallen Angel, written with baseball scholar Douglas Williams, Grba explains he received notice that the Yankees wouldn’t be protecting him “[j]ust a day or  so before the draft.”

“None of this came as a surprise, especially after the way they had put me on the shelf at the end of the 1960 season,” Grba writes. “ … I knew there was no future for me in the Yankee organization.”

Maybe so, but there’s at least a chance that the Yankees making him eligible for the draft was a calculated risk. It’s true Yankee manager Casey Stengel had kept Grba and fellow pitcher Duke Maas out of the 1960 World Series against the Pittsburgh Pirates — instead they were assigned the task of simulating Pirates’ pitchers in batting practice — and Grba thought Stengel, who could never manage to pronounce his name correctly (it’s “Ger—BAH”) had it in for him. 

But Stengel was instrumental in the Angels’ selecting Grba as the first player in the draft. (Maas, by the way, was the second player the Angels took in the draft.) 

On October 18, 1960, a few days after the Yankees lost the seventh game of the World Series to the Pittsburgh Pirates, the Yankees held a bizarre press conference in the Le Salon Bleu of New York’s Savoy Hilton Hotel in which they fired — or didn’t exactly fire — the seventy-year-old Stengel.

“Mr. Webb and Mr. Topping,” Stengel said, referring to the Yankees’ principal owners, Del Webb and Dan Topping, “have started a program for the Yankees. They needed a solution as to when to discharge a man on account of age…. My services are not desired any longer by this club. I told them if this was their idea not to worry about me.” 

When reporters asked Stengel if he’d been “fired,” the old warhorse at first objected, saying he’d been “paid in full.” The Yankees were paying him his $160,000 salary, to do whatever he pleased. 

“Write anything you want,” he told reporter. “Quit, fired, whatever you please. I don’t care.” 

But if the Yankees thought that paying Stengel for an extra year without giving him any duties would buy his loyalty, he was mistaken. Within weeks Stengel had been contacted by Gene Autry, the former cowboy star who was now principal owner of the brand-new Los Angeles Angels. Autry wanted to hire Stengel as manager of the new team, but Stengel had sold the rights to his life story to the Saturday Evening Post and the agreement required that he sit out the 1961 baseball season. So Stengel repaired to Glendale, California, where he worked as a vice president of a bank owned by his wife’s relatives. (He would, of course, return to baseball in 1962, as manager of the hapless New York Mets.)  

But when he met with Autry and Angels’ general manager Fred Haney, he gave them some advice. He told them to draft Grba and outfielder Bob Cerv off the Yankees.  

Autry listened. On December 14, he won a coin toss that secured theAngels the first pick in the expansion draft. He took Grba. The brand-new Washington Senators (created to take the place of the franchise that had moved to Minneapolis-St. Paul after the 1960), then took another Yankees’ pitcher, the veteran Bobby Shantz, who’d been the America League’s Most Valuable Player as a member of the Philadelphia Athletics in 1952. The Angels then selected Maas. Autry also got Cerv with his 18th pick and Yankees’ centerfielder Ken Hunt, a high school rival of Roger Maris’s who’d impressed Stengel with his power and his arm, with his 19th.

Grba doesn’t recognize the role Stengel played in drafting him (and the other Yankees) in his book, but it seems clear that Stengel was Autry’s chief draft advisor. He knew American League personnel, and the Angels had only about a week to prepare for the draft. So while Grab lamented that he never had a chance to play for Stengel’s successor Ralph Houk — who Grba describes as a “father figure” — he probably had Casey Stengel to thank for his becoming an important footnote in baseball history.

•••

But on September 6, 1960, he was still a New York Yankee. 

•••

I find it curious that this specific game isn’t mentioned in Grba’s book; maybe it means more to me and Robert Redford than it did to him. But, like most baseball games, it had its memorable moment.

Records exist, but I’ve never been able to determine how many pitches Grba threw to the Boston Red Sox lead-off hitter Elijah Jerry “Pumpsie” Green before Green, a switch-hitter batting lefty off the right-handed Grba sliced a pitch just over the glove of a leaping Tony Kubek. The ball squirted into foul ground where it was overrun by left-fielder Hector Lopez. The ball caromed off the wall in the corner, ending g up in left-center field while Green — a high school track star — sprinted around the bases and slid into home ahead of  a throw from cut-off man Kubek for an inside-the-park home run. (Green’s hit remains one of two instances when a Red Sox player led off a game with an inside-the-park home run; the only other player to do it was Hall of Famer Harry Hooper, who played for the Sox from 1909 to 1920.) 

Pumpsie Green is best remembered as the first Black player for Boston, which was the last organization in big league baseball to field a Black player, a dozen years after Jackie Robinson’s debut for the Brooklyn Dodgers. The Red Sox acquired a reputation as a racist organization that plagues them to this day for allegedly passed on talents like Henry Aaron, Frank Robinson, Willie Mays, Roberto Clemente and Ernie Banks.

On the other hand, according to the Yawkey Foundation, which is “committed to continuing the legacy” of  Tom Yawkey, whom owned the team from 1933 until his death in 1980, the Red Sox attempted to trade fan favorite Dom DiMaggio to the Cleveland Indians for center-fielder Larry Doby, the first Black player in the American League, before the 1950 season.

Doby was twenty-six years old and arguably the best center-fielder in the game in 1950, a year in which he hit .326 and drove in 102 runs. DiMaggio was thirty-three years old, but had his best offensive season in 1950, hitting .328. On the surface the trade seems plausible, but only if you accept that the Red Sox were not, as legend has it, a racist organization. (In 1967, Jackie Robinson called Yawkey one of the most bigoted” men in baseball.)

Let’s allow for the possibility that the Red Sox just had a bad front office, and possibly an undeserved reputation that made Black players reluctant to sign with them. They were, in the 1950s and early ’60s, a bad team, despite the presence of Williams, who I’d argue is the best hitter I ever saw even though I have no real memory of having seen him. But in his 1973 book, What’s the Matter with the Red Sox? Sportswriter Al Hirshberg quoted Pinky Higgins, Boston manager from 1956 to 1962 as saying “there will be no niggers on this team as long as I have anything to say about it.” 

It’s heartening to know Green told several interviewers that Williams went out his way to play catch with him when he joined the team as a rookie, though few of the other Red Sox players would socialize with him. 

Unlike most of the players who integrated Major League teams, Pumpsie Green was never a star. He probably wasn’t even the best athlete in his house growing up — his youngest brother Cornell played safety for the Dallas Cowboys for thirteen seasons. (A third brother, Credell, just a year younger than Pumpsie, was a running back at the University of Washington who was drafted by the Green Bay Packers.) 

Then there’s this bizarre story about Pumpsie and his teammate Gene Conley — the 6-foot-8 inch Red Sox pitcher who spent his off-season backing up Bill Russell on the Boston Celtics. Or at least that’s what Celtic coach Red Auerbach used to say — Russell didn’t come out of the game often and Conley, who remains the only man to ever win both a World Series and an NBA championship, was usually spelling forward Tommy Heinsohn. During the 1962 season, Green and Conley got off the Red Sox team bus to look for a rest room while it was stuck in traffic near the George Washington Bridge  after a 13-3 loss to the Yankees.

“We got off this bus and went into a bar,” Conley told Boston Globe sportswriter Dan Shaughnessy in 2004. “And when we came back out, Pumpsie said, ‘Hey, that bus is gone,’ and I said, ‘We are too.’”

Conley and Green checked into there Waldorf Astoria, and the next day Green caught a flight to catch up with the team in Washington. But Conley, who’d been the losing pitcher in the previous day’s game, went on a bender. He was spotted drinking at several Manhattan bars where he rather loudly announced his intention to fly to Jerusalem. When he presented himself at Idlewild airport, at least a couple of reporters were there. He was turned away because he didn’t have his passport.

After four days, Conley returned to the team. Red Sox owner Yawkey fined him $1,500 but promised to refund the fine at the end of the season if Conley rededicated himself to the team. He did  — and Yawkey kept his promise. Three years later Conley quit drinking. 

Years later, Conley would tell Boston baseball historian Herb Crehan that his desire to go to Jerusalem stemmed from his desire to “have a better understanding of what religion” meant to his wife Katie, who was a devoted member of the Seventh Day Adventist Church. (Katie, who was married to Conley for 66 years, until his death in 2017, wrote a book — One of a Kind — about her life with Gene, one that might be profitably turned into a wacky bio-pic.)

•••

After Green’s home run, Grba settled down and retired three straight Yankees. But he gave up another run in the top of the second, and, after walking Red Sox centerfielder Carroll Hardy with two outs in the top of the fifth, allowed a  home run to right field by Williams. It was Williams’ 26th home run of the season, the 508th of his career and the last one he’d ever hit in Yankee Stadium. 

You’d think Eli Grba might have remembered that in his book, but there’s no mention of the game. 

Grba got Vic Wertz to ground out to end the inning, but in the bottom of the fifth Stengel sent his future Angel teammate Cerv up to hit for him. Maas, the Angels’ No. 2 draft pick, would pitch the next three innings and Ryne Duren — who’d also end up on the Angels with Grba, Cerv and Maas — pitched the top of the ninth. 

Boston starter Billy Muffett pitched a complete game three-hitter, giving up a harmless solo home run to Mickey Mantle in the bottom of the ninth. 

So I can say that, along with Robert Redford, I witnessed both Williams and Mantle hit home runs on Tuesday afternoon in the Bronx in a mythical place that no longer exists. The house that Babe Ruth built. The past.