Family Witnesses 60 Years of Change in Sports, America

Listen to the grandfather: “I remember my first baseball glove. Cost me $2.9 -- and I saved more than four months to get it.” Imagine him back then, a black and poor teenager in Tennessee during the early 1930s, having fallen in love with academics and athletics but knowing neither would be possible beyond high school.

Listen to the son: “I was a high school all-American halfback (in 1960). Had about 75 or 80 scholarship offers. Yet I could not go to college in the southeastern or southwestern portions of this country.” See him now, prosperous from sport, a member of three National Football League championship teams and in the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

Listen to the grandson: “My dream is to play baseball professionally.” An infielder, like his grandfather, he can climb as high as his abilities allow on the field. Off it, will he be able to run the team for whom he ran?

So often the evolution of America’s playground gets explained only in weighty and complicated ways. Franchise movement. Race relations. Free agency. Salary escalation. Proposition 48.

What if we could examine most of those issues and concepts through some flesh-and-blood humans who experienced them? What if we got lucky and found three generations of a single family that could tie 60-some years of sport together simply by talking about themselves?

Spend some time with the Warfields of central and northeastern Ohio and the abstract comes alive. Sadness for 74-year-old Dryden Warfield and hope for 17-year-old Malcolm Warfield. Denial, opportunity and glory for the link, Paul Warfield, a son and a father at 47.

As the Warfield story unfolds, from Dryden to Paul and to Malcolm, so do the attitudes Americans have about sports -- and about ourselves.

Six decades ago, major league baseball was a small triangular slice of the United States, extending from Boston to St. Louis, back to Washington, D.C., and up the East Coast. The National Football League was a loose collection of teams that included the Milwaukee Badgers and Staten Island Stapletons. Pro basketball was even less stable. Worse for Dryden Warfield, the chalky lines on his field of dreams might as well have been barricades.

In the den of a home in Columbus that would be elegant in all but a few neighborhoods nationwide, Paul Warfield used his wide receiver’s hands to illustrate progress from generation to generation to generation.

My father’s chances were this limited, he said, one palm almost touching the other. My chances had improved this much, he went on, spreading his hands perhaps two feet apart. Malcolm’s chances are this grand, he was pleased to acknowledge by throwing his hands almost as far apart as they would go. Only upper management positions in corporations, and corporate sport, still are limited for blacks.

“I was one of the first players in the National Football League paid enough not to have to work in the offseason,” Paul Warfield said, adding with a smile that the rookie salary, in 1964, that made leisure an option was $20,000. This season, 27 major league baseball players will earn at least $2 million.

Guthrie in the 1930s was a town of about 1,500 split both by race and the Kentucky-Tennessee border. Dryden Warfield was born and raised on the Tennessee side. Anticipating a girl, his parents had decided on the name Lena Dryden weeks before his birth and stuck with it, Dryden being the first name of the doctor who delivered his mother.

“We were baseball crazy,” Dryden said. “Played baseball on Christmas if the weather was nice. Baseball. Baseball. I didn’t think I could love anything more than baseball, until I got into football.”

That came later, in high school.

“Everything was segregated,” Dryden said. “But, really and truthfully, where we were from, whites and blacks got along. Never diehard segregation like in the Deep South. Everything amiable as long as you took care of your own affairs. You knew your road; you took that.”

At age 12 or 13, Dryden knew he had to have the baseball glove that all but crooked a leather finger at him from the window of a store offering things both practical and dreamy. To a youngster, a glove is a necessity of life; to Ed Warfield, trying to support a wife and 10 children on a railroad yardman’s pay, it might as well have been the Hope Diamond.

“I saw it a little before Christmas,” Dryden said. “Think I finally bought it early in April. If you wanted something, well, you put the money back and waited until you got enough. I worked at real little jobs. White people wanted you to do this, that and the other.”

With that glove, Dryden and his buddies occasionally played white teams. Twice a year at least. So even then some barriers in sport were stretched, if nowhere close to broken. Never was Dryden at shortstop able to look to his right and see a white third baseman.

Harder to deal with than baseball and race for Dryden was baseball and religion. That was a black-and-white issue on which most blacks and whites agreed: no sport on Sunday.

Keep in mind that in the mid ‘20s and early ‘30s much of America was rural and small town, connected in large part by the railroad and the Bible.

Until he left for work in Warren, Ohio, in early October 1936, Dryden never ventured more than 20 miles from Guthrie. His daily routine as a youngster was nearly as confined, weekdays being for school and baseball and Sundays for morning and evening worship.

“You know how boys are,” said Dryden, about to explain small devilment. “Sundays (after noon) were our free day. One time, I might have been 12 or so, six or seven of us went down Kentucky.”

He laughed. The experience, still vivid, might only have been three quarters of a mile from home, but that’s what youngsters from the Tennessee side called it. Down Kentucky.

Anyway, Dryden and his buddies this Sunday afternoon came upon some other boys playing baseball -- and everyone was having a fine time. His friends wondered: Can anything so pure and pleasurable as baseball ever be a sin? They decided no and, with some coaxing, Dryden shortly joined them.

Dryden was a fine player, a right-handed-hitting shortstop with power, something on the order of a shorter and slightly more compact Ernie Banks. Quietly, he offered a comparison with his son, considered a major league prospect 30 years later before choosing pro football: “Paul never could hit a ball as far as I could.”

That Sunday, Dryden was powerless in every way you could imagine. Powerless against temptation; powerless at bat.

“Popup, groundout,” he said, mystified to this day. “That wasn’t my nature. It looked like something was in the way. I couldn’t concentrate. Just something about Sunday ball. It was bred in me.”

Boys being boys even when they officially are young men, Dryden gave Sunday baseball another go several years later, at about age 18. He fared fairly well in two games, but had run out on his duties with the church choir to play in them. Ed Warfield talked with his son one evening and said a decision had to be made: quit the church or quit baseball. The choice being so rigidly either-or, Dryden said: “I never played any more baseball on Sunday.” Which mostly explains why Paul Warfield has no memories of Dryden Warfield at play.

When he went to high school, he became infatuated with a new game called football. “I fell in love with it,” he said. “Because of the contact. Boy against boy; muscle against muscle.”

Football was 12 miles from home, that being the distance to the closest black high school in Tennessee, Burt, named for the man who financed its construction. Monday through Friday, Dryden would ride a Louisville & Nashville train to and from the Clarksville school.

During three years with the Burt varsity, Dryden played left guard on offense, then stayed along the line of scrimmage and played left guard on defense. Bursts of the kind of speed Paul would flash for the Cleveland Browns and Miami Dolphins during a dozen seasons in the NFL were frequent enough for Dryden to drop off into pass coverage now and then.

“All that was wrong with football was that the season was too short,” he said. “After Thanksgiving, it was over. I just hated to see Thanksgiving come.”

Much more upsetting was the end of high school, in 1934, for it ended not only sports for Dryden but also the education he had taken to with almost as much enthusiasm. His father had been retired two years earlier; his seven older brothers and sisters had left home. Still, Ed’s railroad pension was not nearly enough to keep the dwindling family going without help. No way was college an option, although Dryden did take time to talk with his high school principal about finding one.

“Let’s face it,” he said. “We were too poor. Just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t go.” Had the times not been so tough, Dryden would have followed the rail line to Nashville and attended Tennessee State or Fisk. Football? Dryden Warfield didn’t even own one.

“After high school,” he said, “there was no work. Period. It was just a matter of trying to exist, really. If something didn’t happen to pass through, or some job was created, well, you just didn’t have it.”

An older brother, William, had gone to Warren and gotten a job with Republic Steel. In the summer of 1936, home on vacation, he told Dryden steadier work in the mill at far better pay was available.

A couple of months later, two years out of high school, Dryden and his new wife, Omelia, took the train about 550 miles and joined William in the Ohio mill town near the Pennsylvania border. Twenty-four years in the future, Dryden’s son would bring a small measure of lasting fame to Warren.

Looking back at Guthrie, Dryden said: “My life doesn’t sound exciting. But I had a great time. I had a great childhood. There just wasn’t the money.”

Half a generation before Jackie Robinson broke the color line in the major leagues, there was opportunity for young blacks in pro baseball. And many a fan in Guthrie pegged Dryden Warfield as a future star in the Negro league.

“But those teams were far away,” he said. “And I don’t think I would have liked the lifestyle. Eating and sleeping on buses. Up all night and playing the next day (including Sunday). I was comfortable at home. That way of living wouldn’t have suited me at all.”

Dryden chooses to look more kindly on Guthrie and its ways than Paul. The son recalled his first time there, in the early ‘50s, when he was about 11. Inside a movie theater, striding toward front row center, he had his arm gently tugged by a cousin. We must go this way, he was told. Upstairs.

The father shook his head and said, as that memory and another flashed into his mind: “I used to clean up that theater.” It was one of the ways he stayed alive.

In the fall of of 1959 and the winter of 1960, Woody Hayes and lots of coaches only slightly less famous made their way east on Park Street in Warren, Ohio, turned right on Federal and immediately into a double-car driveway. Inside a small house, they all but begged Paul Warfield to accept their offer of a college scholarship -- courtesy of football. What sweet irony that was to Dryden, for whom structured sport and formal education had not been possible after high school.

By happy coincidence, the area that provided steady work and decent wages in the mid ‘30s for the father had, a quarter-century later, given the son maximum athletic exposure in high school. Elite Ohioans in football, baseball and track and field also crack the national who’s who lists -- and Paul Warfield was exceptional in all three.

“He got the love of the games from me,” Dryden said. “His mother didn’t care for sports. And my father had no athletic ability at all. Never thought of sports. Too busy trying to support his family.”

Major league baseball and football in the late ‘50s were becoming coast-to-coast businesses. Advances in airline travel were such that even Southern Cal felt there was a chance Paul would accept its offer of a football scholarship.

“But there was not the ghost of a chance I could consider schools like the University of Alabama,” Paul Warfield said. “I recall very vividly Governor Wallace standing on the schoolhouse steps, defying a U.S. marshal (to admit black students). I was pretty much restricted, in big-time college football, to the area of the Big Ten.”

Dryden remembers a handwritten letter from Darrell Royal pitching the University of Texas, so the Deep South was not totally off-limits. But Paul felt most comfortable near home, with Woody Hayes and Ohio State. The Warfields turned down tempting offers from the Tigers, Indians and White Sox out of high school; Paul walked away from baseball his second spring in college.

“I told the coach one of the reasons I wouldn’t be playing baseball was because of a 14-day swing the team took each season through the Deep South,” Paul said. “I said there’s no way you can guarantee me I won’t face an embarrassing situation. Or a threatening situation. As a youngster, I was terrified of the prospect of going into the Deep South.”

Paul’s offseason sport at Ohio State was track and field, specifically the long jump. In 1962 he and a black sprinter from Purdue stayed in a dorm at the University of Houston while taking part in a meet prior to the NCAA outdoor championships. They thought little of it, until students at Texas Southern, with whom they visited while in town, made such a fuss.

Warfield and his wife were denied an apartment that caught their fancy his first year as a professional football player, in Cleveland in 1964. He and three Browns teammates could not get their shoes shined in Birmingham two years later, even though the men who would be doing the job also were black. That and some other reasons were why his son would be named in honor of Malcolm X.

Paul got his degree from Ohio State, but not until four years after he left. Dryden pushed him to earn the few remaining credits; the main motivation came from Hayes, who greeted his former star so similarly for Paul to think his name had been changed to Did You Graduate Yet.

There was competition between the American and National leagues when Paul turned professional, although the big money started a year later, in 1965, when Joe Namath bestrode Broadway. Paul did hit football’s lottery, about a decade later, when he, Larry Csonka and Jim Kiick bolted the Dolphins for a fling with Memphis of the quickly deflated World Football League.

“My base salary was four times what I’d been getting” with the Dolphins after winning back-to-back Super Bowls, he said. “Here we were, three top players on the best team in the NFL and none of us was making six figures. And our bonuses were astronomical. We were in disbelief.”

So in addition to playing better than all but a benchful of players in the history of pro football, Warfield was among the few who had control, however briefly, of his career. But he also was traded, in 1970, from the Browns to a team that didn’t exist when he turned pro, the Dolphins. And Miami “isn’t exactly the Deep South.”

Since retiring in 1977, Warfield has worked in television and in personnel with the Browns and currently does commentary on Ohio State football. He owns a temporary-employment services business, which means he has an easier time attending Malcolm’s games than Dryden had breaking free for his.

Malcolm began to fully appreciate his father when he watched him being inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1983. Only 11, he had not realized Paul’s immense impact on the NFL and it made being “son of” much easier to tolerate. But his sport of choice was baseball.

Paul cannot recall his father in an athletic moment, mainly because Dryden often worked the night and overnight shifts at Republic. Saturday was for keeping up the house, Sunday devoted to church. Even if there had been time for, say, bowling, Paul recalls, they probably would not have been comfortable in many alleys. Also, fathers of Dryden’s generation are not inclined to brag about themselves. Paul’s exploits are as close to Malcolm as a tape popped into a VCR.

For an 11th-grade speech required for graduation, Malcolm a few weeks ago chose life with a former NFL player and executive. The bright side was obvious, being around famous players, fooling around with the computer on Paul’s desk that stored every salary in the league.

“I also talked about Don Rogers,” the Browns safety whose death by drug-related causes came not long after Len Bias’s in 1986, Malcolm said. “I was a big fan of his; my father and he were close. When he died, that showed me athletes really aren’t immortal. I’d always thought of them as being superior to everyone else ... I really grew up after that.”

Growing up as an infielder majoring in third base just now, Malcolm is almost certain to be recruited heavily by college baseball teams. Only football and basketball scholarships were prevalent when Paul was a teenager; college baseball more and more is becoming an accepted path toward the majors -- and Deep South colleges unwilling to recruit Paul may be anxious to woo Malcolm.

Malcolm will be eligible to play as a freshman, the restrictive academic hurdle called Proposition 48 almost surely easy for him to leap over. In his college era, Paul could not play varsity sports as a freshman -- and is grateful for it.

For Dryden Warfield, Paul’s induction into the Pro Football Hall of Fame was a proud day made more emotional because Omelia had passed away almost exactly seven years earlier. Still, fathers never strut quite so airily as when their sons excel in high school.

“It’s all new then,” he said.

Dryden recalled walking through the parking lot after the Warren G. Harding Panthers of Warren had gone across the nearby Pennsylvania line and beaten a team from Sharon. To a Harding woman who did not know him, Dryden could not help teasing: “That Warfield isn’t so great. He had a terrible game.”

Well, the woman all but went for his throat. How dare you say anything bad about Paul Warfield? She was white.

Paul’s middle name is Dryden, same as his father’s; serious consideration is being given to changing Malcolm’s middle name from Joseph to Dryden. Still firmly ensconced about 130 miles away in Warren, the grandfather stretches on an easy chair in his den and declares: “I am 74. My father was 99 years and 6 months when he died. I hope to top him.”

That offers the chance for another Warfield generation, the fourth, to grow and mature. Who knows what wonders Dryden might find available for a great-grandchild.