COMMENTARY : It’s a Shame So Few Knew the ‘Special’ Buck O’Neil

All he ever wanted to do was play ball and he got to do plenty of that, even if it paid him nothing for a long time before he worked up to $700 a month in the Negro American League.

So Buck O’Neil was a happy man in the 1930s, and he is a happy man all these years later. This fall he will become a star when the Ken Burns documentary on baseball gives him room to tell us what the game was like, for black players and black fans, in a time when Americans lived in separated worlds under separate laws.

John Jordan (Buck) O’Neil is 82 years old. Ask him why baseball means so much to so many people and he says, “Baseball is the American sport. Really, everybody knows baseball. There’s just something there that belongs to us.

“You can tell because, I don’t care how good a player is, there are people up in the bleachers watching him and saying, ‘I could do that.’ They’re not saying that about 7-foot basketball players dunking balls, and they’re not saying that about 300-pound football players. But baseball, they say, ‘That sucker do that, I can do that.’ ”

Buck O’Neil was laughing out loud, his laughter a wonderful sound in these miserable days for major league baseball. These days are this miserable: What Hitler couldn’t do, the men and women who own today’s teams are about to do--stop the World Series. If the owners do that, they prove beyond doubt they are fools beyond repair.

Yes, what a joy in this dead summer of 1994 to hear Buck O’Neil remember a glorious summer day in 1946 when he came to bat needing a triple to do something he had never seen anyone do.

“First time up, I had the single,” he says. “Then the home run over the left-field fence. We were playing in Memphis, the Memphis Red Sox. After that, the double.

“The last time up, I wanted that triple. I hit the ball with a good swing and it was headed toward left-center field where the power alley was 375 feet. I was running saying, ‘Don’t go out, don’t go out, don’t go out.’ ”

A half-century later, Buck O’Neil still sees that ball flying to left center. He laughed again as he spoke across time to the distant baseball, Don’t go out, don’t go. . . .

“It hit off the top of that fence and bounced back between the center fielder and left fielder. I wanted that triple, so I was running to third no matter what happened.

“Got to third easy. Got there standing up, if you want to know. I could have probably gone on around to home. But I stopped there. I wanted to hit for the cycle because I had never even known anybody who did it.”

Because he was black, Buck O’Neil never played in what white America knows as baseball’s major leagues. He worked in the Negro American League for 17 seasons as a first baseman and later as manager for the Kansas City Monarchs, the league’s royalty. By the time the white folks of America decided to allow African Americans in their baseball leagues, Buck O’Neil was too old.

He would have liked to have been there with Jackie Robinson and Larry Doby and Monte Irvin. But his time as a player had come and gone. Even leading the Negro A.L. in hitting in 1946 did him no good; he hit .353 at age 34. His only regret, all these years later, is that integration of major league baseball killed the Negro Leagues.

“First, what’s important for people to know is that Negro League baseball wasn’t ‘The Bingo Long Traveling All-Star and Motor Kings,’ ” says O’Neil, naming a 1976 movie about barnstormers in broken-down buses.

“There were 16 Negro League ballclubs, each with at least 15 players--the Monarchs had 18 players. There were all those people putting on the games, booking agents, traveling secretaries, trainers. Baseball was black entertainment and was important to black communities.

“We were very happy that integration happened, but it killed our business. Thing is, it could have been done a different way. Clubs like the Monarchs could have been used as farm clubs for the major leagues. But our businesses were taken away from us and there was nothing we could do about it. Nothing we could do against corporate America. So integration was a bittersweet thing.”

Though he said it again, slowly, “Bitter . . . sweet,” Buck O’Neil asks to be understood: He enjoyed every day of his baseball life. He left Sarasota, Fla., to play in the Negro minor leagues at Shreveport, La., where, on some nights, if any tickets were sold, he was paid 50 cents a game.

“The happiest day of my life was coming to play with the Kansas City Monarchs,” he says. “It would be like a white boy going to play for the New York Yankees.”

He dreamed of becoming a manager because, in his boyhood around Florida spring training camps, Buck O’Neil had seen John McGraw managing the New York Giants and Connie Mack waving his scorecard from the Philadelphia Athletics’ dugout.

“The idea of managing fascinated me,” says O’Neil, who in time won five Negro league championships and two World Series managing players named Ernie Banks, Elston Howard and Hank Thompson. In 1962, O’Neil was hired by the Chicago Cubs, the first black coach in the big leagues. He now is active in building a Negro Leagues museum in Kansas City.

A baseball life 82 years in the making, and one night not long ago, all these years after Sarasota, after Jim Crow, after lives in parallel universes, John Jordan “Buck” O’Neil came to stand on a stage with Ted Williams and Mickey Mantle, heroes talking baseball. O’Neil stood there proudly and told anyone who would listen that the old days weren’t hurtful. He said, “It was the time of our lives. All we wanted to do was play. We loved baseball.”