The Black Shadow : Satchel Paige’s Legendary Showmanship Obscured the Man : DON’T LOOK BACK: Satchel Paige in the Shadows of Baseball, <i> By Mark Ribowsky (Simon & Schuster: $23; 351 pp.)</i>

It isn’t easy for athletes to be legends anymore. Over-analyzed by cranky sportswriters, noisily critiqued by moronic sports talk-radio callers, their gravity-defying feats have been reduced to ESPN highlight-reel fodder. Just ask Barry Bonds, whose most enduring media moment remains his nasty on-the-field shouting match with then-manager Jim Leyland. Sports legend derives from larger-than-life feats, created away from the glare of the spotlight. It belongs to the oral tradition, tales told and retold, till they take on an appropriately mythic stature. Who knows if Babe Ruth really pointed to the right-field bleachers and called his shot in the 1932 World Series? Who actually saw Pete Gray, the St. Louis Browns’ one-armed outfielder, in action, throwing a runner out at home plate? How many people got to watch Johnny Vander Meer pitch a no-hitter--in two consecutive games?

In baseball, the murkiest of all legends have sprung from the mythic twilight of the Negro Leagues. Thrown together during the sorry days of segregated sport, they showcased the young black gods of baseball, performing in the same cities--often in the same ballparks--as major-league players, sometimes even wearing the big-leaguers’ discarded uniforms.

That’s where you’d find Leroy (Satchel) Paige, barnstorming across the country in wheezing buses, sleeping in fleabag hotels, playing in ramshackle bandboxes across town from the storied major-league ballparks. Of all the mythic stars of Negro baseball, Satchel was mythic-squared. Unhittable in his prime, he once struck out 22 men in a game, beat Bob Feller 1-0 in a 13-inning exhibition game and was so indomitable he threw a no-hitter in the first game of a double-header and then pitched relief in the nightcap.

After hitting .398 in the Pacific Coast League in 1935, Joe DiMaggio prepared for his rookie season with the New York Yankees by facing Paige in a much-ballyhooed exhibition game. The future Hall of Famer managed a measly infield hit in four trips to the plate, moving a Yankee scout to wire home: “DiMaggio all we hoped he’d be: hit Satch one for four.”

The legend simmered, soaking up its rich flavor in obscurity. As far as the white press was concerned, Paige (who was as celebrated in ‘30s-era black circles as Cab Calloway or Louis Armstrong) might as well have been pitching in Outer Mongolia. When Time magazine finally discovered Paige in 1940--15 years into his career--it offered some legendry of its own. Attributing Satchel’s arm strength to his boyhood shouldering of 200-pound blocks of ice, the news magazine quoted Paige’s old ice-wagon employer as saying: “That boy et mo’ than the hosses.”

Until now, that’s been the Satch story: Print the caricature. But judging from “Don’t Look Back,” Mark Ribowsky’s meticulously researched biography, there is another, considerably starker--and less sentimental--side to Paige. Raised in the rough-and-tumble ghetto area of Mobile, Ala., Paige was a restless, lonely man, a black shadow in a white-only world, his soul shriveled by a lack of acceptance, both from his family and the realm of big-time sport.

Before he was 20, Paige had hit the road, learning his pitching craft on baseball’s chitlins circuit. Though Ribowsky is more successful at sketching the Negro League milieu than fleshing out Paige’s character, the scrawny, rawboned pitcher emerges as a man of few loyalties, either to friend or team, indifferent to family ties, easily seduced by a pretty woman or a fat paycheck.

Take away his wonderful wit and legendary showmanship and--dare we say it--Satchel might be almost as hard to love as Barry Bonds. Resolutely unfaithful to every woman in his life, Paige was jealous of teammates’ success, a hard-drinking carouser, habitually late to even the most important games and disdainful of anything resembling a training regime.

Paige was at least 42 (some say 44 or even 48) when Cleveland Indians owner Bill Veeck finally brought him to the big leagues in 1948, a year after Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier. Making his first appearance in relief on July 9, he was the man who brought black vaudeville style to white sport, decades before the high five, the monster jam and the end-zone dance.

Paige mystified batters with a carnival assortment of trick pitches. Using a double or even triple windup with a huge leg kick, he’d throw what he called a Step’n Pitch-it, a Bat Dodger and finally, his mind-boggling Hesitation Pitch, where he held back his right arm even as his front leg swept his body forward, releasing the ball almost as an afterthought. The first major-leaguer who tried to hit the Hesitation Pitch lunged and swung before the pitch was half-way to the plate, his bat flying 40 feet up the third-base line. Satch was a sensation. By the time he started his first major-league game on Aug. 3, 72,562 fans were at Cleveland’s Municipal Stadium, a new attendance record for a major-league night game.

Though well past his prime, Paige played parts of six seasons in the majors and was good enough to be named to the 1952 All-Star team. Never a friend to Robinson--he had given him the cold shoulder in the Negro Leagues--he displayed little of Robinson’s credit-to-his-race good citizenry. Paige missed trains, broke curfew and carried around a gun a foot and a half long.

His eccentricities won him huge play in the white press, which viewed him as post-integration baseball’s answer to Louie Armstrong--Satchmo meet Satch--a happy-go-lucky old coot who rubbed mystery potions on his pitching arm, dozed in the bullpen grass and issued such maxims as, “If your stomach disputes you, lie down and pacify it with cool thoughts” and the immortal phrase (which Ribowsky borrows for his book title), “Don’t look back. Something might be gaining on you.”

These nostrums were strictly for media consumption. In real life, the string-bean pitcher burned the candle at every end. As Ribowsky recounts in vivid detail, Paige was far from the only model of impropriety in the 1930s-era Negro Leagues. Many of the most prominent teams were owned by gangsters such as Gasoline Gus Greenlee, who ran the Pittsburgh Crawfords, using the team as a legit cover for his numbers racket.

Paige was hardly intimidated by Greenlee’s mob ties. When a promoter offered him more money to barnstorm through the Dakotas, Paige abruptly walked out on his new contract with the Crawfords.

Later, when a bagman for Generalissimo Rafael Trujillo emptied $30,000 in cash on Satchel’s hotel-room bed, Paige left for the Dominican Republic, where he played a season for the dictator’s beloved Los Dragones. (Paige never pitched well down there, unnerved by the sight of Trujillo’s armed henchmen, who ringed the diamond during games, firing their rifles in the air, bellowing, “El Presidente doesn’t lose!”)

A free agent long before free agency, Paige took the money and ran every time. Between 1935 and 1940, at the height of his career, he was off barnstorming so much he only managed to pitch in 13 official Negro League games. What made Satch such a draw was his theatrical instincts. Like Barry Bonds, who’s taking acting lessons, or Shaquille O’Neal, who already has a movie and a rap album under his belt, Paige saw the diamond as his stage.

In Puerto Rico, Satch pitched his way into a bases-loaded jam and then deliberately walked in a run, grandly announcing: “Now that’s all you fellas are gonna get today.” (That’s all they did.) Booed by opposing fans, he’d call in his outfielders and have them hunker down in the infield as he worked his way out of a jam. On the mound, preparing for an epic showdown with slugger Josh Gibson, Satch summoned a clubhouse boy with a cup of Alka-Seltzer, drank it down and then struck Gibson out on three pitches.

Unfortunately, Ribowsky never gives us a sure sense of why Paige opted for showmanship. Was he a natural-born ham? A shrewd practitioner of crowd-pleasing jive? Were his antics a cry for the attention he never got as a child?

Perhaps they were simply a response to the Negro League’s ragtag vaudeville atmosphere, where teams suddenly added “ringers” for key World Series games and clubs like the Ethiopian Clowns forced players to perform under such monikers as Tarzan and Monkee (the team’s 1952 teen-age sensation, Hank Aaron, began his baseball career known as Pork Chops).

The real problem with “Don’t Look Back” is that its legend has a hole at its center--Satch himself. Faced with a man who was as good at self-mythologizing as at pitching, Ribowsky has trouble sorting out the real Satchel Paige from the exaggerated folk tales he spun for media consumption.

Aloof and enigmatic all the way to his grave, Paige seems to have defeated his biographer’s best efforts to penetrate his inscrutable mask. None of Paige’s offspring would talk to Ribowsky, while the dim memories of his ball-playing peers offer little in the way of insight.

Eager to provide Paige’s exploits with some heft, Ribowsky sometimes aims too high, using quotes from Henry Miller, William Faulkner and (!) Daniel Defoe to open various chapters. Satchel surely would have loved rubbing elbows with such glittering literati. But the lofty sentiments don’t get Ribowsky any closer to this flesh-and-blood folk character.

Describing his long and lean physique, Satch once said: “There was a lot to me, but it was all up and down.” Whatever was inside seems to have wafted away, like an unhittable Paige curveball, rising and swooping in the dim light of an extra-inning game.

The book’s evocative subtitle, “Satchel Paige in the Shadows of Baseball,” is all too apt. For all Ribowsky’s good efforts, the real shadow here is Satchel himself.