A Big Hit on Small Screen : ‘Baseball’ Brings O’Neil Notoriety

As first baseman with the Negro Leagues’ Kansas City Monarchs, John Jordan (Buck) O’Neil was a teammate of legendary pitcher Satchel Paige and competed against Homestead Gray home run great Josh Gibson and even Babe Ruth. “I was friends with Duke Ellington, Bill (Bojangles) Robinson and Joe Lewis,” O’Neil says. “It was an exciting time.”

Life is still pretty exciting for the charming 83-year-old, thanks to his scene-stealing appearance in Ken Burns’ 18-hour miniseries “Baseball,” which PBS is replaying in weekly installments starting tonight.

O’Neil won the hearts of baseball fans when Burns’ miniseries first aired in September, with his firsthand eloquent, passionate recollections of the game, most notably in the fifth episode, “Shadow Ball,” which recalls the heyday of the Negro Leagues in the 1930s.

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O’Neil, who is board chairman of the Negro League Museum in Kansas City, Mo., and works as a scout for the Kansas City Royals, is now in demand to talk at schools, churches and businesses about his life on the mound and the Negro Leagues.

“I am very busy,” he said over the phone from his Kansas City home. “Traveling quite a bit more than I want to, I think.”

He believes viewers embraced him because “everyone else (in the series) was talking about what someone told them.” “I was there. I was actually there. I lived it.”

Burns said of O’Neil in a recent statement: “I have had the great good fortune to literally interview hundreds of people over the course of 20 years that I have been making films. They range from great scientists and great artists to remarkable writers, and no one has come close to the humanity of Buck O’Neil.”

When he was growing up in Carabelle, Fla., he was nicknamed Buck after Buck O’Neal, the co-owner of the black baseball team Miami Giants. O’Neil joined the Kansas City Monarchs in 1938 and was named player-manager in 1948 and continued to manage the team through 1955.

O’Neil joined Paige during the barnstorming days of the ‘30s and ‘40s, when players from the Negro Leagues traveled the country playing exhibition games against major leaguers.

In 1956, O’Neil was hired by the Chicago Cubs as a scout and, in 1962, became the first black coach in the major leagues when the Cubs promoted him to that role. He started scouting for the Kansas City Royals in 1989.

“I just work the American League for the Royals,” said O’Neil, who is happy to be back to work after the major league players’ strike. “The only reason I took it is so I don’t have to travel. I just see every game the Royals play here and I can scout the teams.”

People are always asking him if he’s bitter that he never got the opportunity to play in the major leagues.

“I’m not because who is to say I wasn’t playing the best baseball being played in this country at the time,” he said. “It just could have been. It is just a shame that the only reason I didn’t play major league baseball was because I was black.”

O’Neil is still relishing two unforgettable events that happened last month in the county where he grew up. Sarasota renamed part of its Twin Lakes Park, which includes four baseball diamonds and a clubhouse, the Buck O’Neil Complex. Two days later, he donned a cap and gown to “graduate” from Sarasota High School, which had denied him entrance some six decades ago because at the time it was all-white.

“Actually, there were only probably four high schools in the state of Florida for black kids at that time--Miami, Jacksonville, Tampa and Pensacola,” said O’Neil, who later graduated from high school in Jacksonville and attended Edward Waters College in Jacksonville for two years.

Though O’Neil harbors no resentment that it took him more than 60 years to graduate from Sarasota High, he acknowledges “it was a terrible thing to have done to any child.” “They thought we didn’t need the education for what we were going to do--work on the farm or work in hotels. We were just going to be bellboys and busboys and porters. These were the things you were going to do, so they didn’t think you needed an education.”

* “Baseball” airs at 9 p.m. Mondays on KCET and KPBS; it will be shown at 9 p.m. Sundays on KOCE beginning April 23. (The show will be preempted May 8 on KCET and KPBS by “The Way West,” a documentary by Ken Burns’ brother Ric.)