DARRYL STRAWBERRY CRACK

The play part is as important as the serious part but the play seems to have drained out of Darryl Strawberry. What I couldn’t explain to them about my love for Mays and baseball was something that I caught a glimpse of when I read the remark by the great German baseball writer, Fred Nietzsche, that “a man’s maturity consists in having found again the seriousness one had as a child, at play.” Later, in college, some of my black friends scorned my idolization of Mays, just as they turned their faces in disgust at my blues records Muhammad Ali and John Coltrane fit in more with their lifestyle, and in truth, mine too. I realize now that I idolized Mays partly because he offered me a comforting, unconflicted view of race relations in the U.S. He stayed everyone’s hero because he ran out from under his cap when he stole second base and on days off he played stickball with kids on the streets of Harlem. Willie Mays was my hero and New York’s first black sports hero, because he could catch flies he couldn’t see, because he could hit baseballs 450 feet, and because you could watch him do these things without the overriding tension of racial politics.

DARRYL STRAWBERRY CRACK

“I don’t want to be a leader,” he shrugged.ĭoesn’t want to be a leader? Isn’t that tantamount to saying he doesn’t want to be a hero? How could any baseball player not want to be a hero? How could any black ballplayer who can accelerate like a Porsche and crack baseballs 450 feet not want to be my hero (even if he is 10 years younger than me)? “Do you think,” I asked Darryl Strawberry as he stepped from the cage after hitting three consecutive rainbows into the right-field bullpen, “that this is the year you’ll finally be accepted as a leader?” I don’t think he was being rude, but it was clear as he turned away that he didn’t want to look me in the eye. I never realized how many of my boyhood illusions survived intact into adulthood until the enduring ones were shattered at the Shea Stadium batting cage during the first week of this season. Baseball, which had been my introduction to history, drama, and class distinction (people that rooted for the Yankees were different from you and me), also became my introduction to race. I raced to my scrapbooks, astonished that I’d not noticed before that all my heroes from the ’20s, ’30s and ’40s were white, and that, except for Mickey Mantle, and the tragic Herb Score, virtually all my favorite ’50s players - Jackie Robinson, Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, Ernie Banks, Frank Robinson, Don Newcombe, Larry Doby, Monte Irwin, Junior Gilliam, Roy Campanella, Elston Howard - were black. For my 10th birthday my father gave me a book on the history of baseball, and I still remember the jolt I got when I read that Jackie Robinson was the first black player in the major leagues. As a kid, I’d collected four scrapbooks of baseball pictures, one for each decade from 1920 to 1959.

I understood at least part of his reaction. He ran home and flipped open his scrapbook, stunned to realize that all of his heroes were white.

It couldn’t happen, his high school coach told him one day - you’re black. Black, who grew up in the comparatively race-tension-less Far West, saved pictures of his favorite players in a scrapbook and dreamed of someday playing in the majors. Years ago, reading the Joe Black chapter in The Boys of Summer, I got a double shock of recognition. My heroes have always been black men, usually baseball players.

Darryl strawberry